I have it set up to so that “ssh server username” will connect to server as username. If you don’t put it a username it will default to “default”.

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on alfred_script(q)
	set tmp to splitString(q, " ")
 
	set server to item 1 of tmp
 
	if length of tmp is 2 then set login to item 2 of tmp
	if length of tmp is 1 then set login to "default"
 
	set command to "ssh " & server & " -l " & login
 
	tell application "Terminal"
		do script command
	end tell
end alfred_script
 
to splitString(aString, delimiter)
	set retVal to {}
	set prevDelimiter to AppleScript's text item delimiters
	log delimiter
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {delimiter}
	set retVal to every text item of aString
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to prevDelimiter
	return retVal
end splitString

I joined the Hut Group because I was getting bored at Atos Origin. I was working on a project for a large government department and although some of the things we were doing were interesting, it felt like I was destined to work on the project for the long term. A former colleague, Tim, was at the Hut at Head of IT and he asked me to come over and help him sort things out. I turned down the initial offer, but eventually decided to take the opportunity. The main reasons were that I knew Tim, and I wanted to try my hand at web development.

I joined the Hut Group as a Senior Developer and worked on mostly back-end projects. I integrated with a flowers supplier (not a great success), wrote a backup payment system and made lots and lots of changes to our back office system. I also made a good few changes to the website, including replacing the password reminder system.

At Atos Origin I had a number of roles as a configuration manager and it seemed natural that I would attempt to sort things out in this area at the Hut as well. We use subversion and I used to police the developers to make sure that they were using it correctly.

During all of this the development team grew pretty quickly. We I started we had 10 people in the IT department, including the TA, Head of IT and support team. A new CTO joined us, and we went on a recruitment drive that hasn’t really stopped.

As the team got bigger I moved into a TA role so that we could provide some technical leadership to the developers. I worked alongside the Chief Technical Architect (James) and helped get some pretty major changes to the platform in. I also spent a lot of time improving our monitoring so we could tell when the platform was having problems.

About 2 years ago Tim decided to take a new role, so I became the Development Manager and later the Head of Development. Our current CIO (Gareth) joined shortly afterwards and under his leadership we started to introduce agile development.

Our original process for getting work into the team was for a business stakeholder to fill in a work request form which one of the team would look at and estimate the effort involve. We would group a few of these together and form a project to be delivered. This was the theory in any case. What actually happened is that the work request forms sat in one of several large folders on my desk and pretty much got ignored. What the team actually worked on was whatever a few senior people in the group decided was important. The process wasn’t very transparent and we had a tendency to start work and not finish it. Things were not great, and nobody was satisfied with performance of the team.

The first thing we did to more towards an agile methodology was to get control of the work coming in to the team. I went round all the business to talk to them about what work they wanted to be delivered over the next twelve months. These were all written on index cards and James, Gareth and I gave t-shirt size estimates to them all (S, M, L, XL) and fitted them on to a rough plan. We moved away from 15 developers meaning 15 projects on the go, and organised everybody into small teams. We recruited a number of tech leads to lead the teams and they worked with the teams to get the agile practices we want embedded into the team.

Things began to improve pretty quickly, but it became clear that the Tech Leads were struggling to balance the management side of their role with the technical leadership of the team. We already had a business analyst working with us, and he moved into a project management role and we recruited two more PMs. The PMs work closely with the business to understand their requirements and act as Scrum Master for the project teams. They basically make sure that the developers can concentrate on developing and they remove any impediments that stop them.

I think the best change we made was decreasing the number of teams. We ended up with 7 teams with a couple of people in them, and this caused a few problems. There was a limit to who people could pair with, and limited the amount of work a team could do. If anybody was on holiday, work basically stopped until they came back. Worst of all it was difficult to get the team to self organise and engender any sort of team spirit. We cut the number of teams down to 3, each with 6 or 7 people in them. We’ve kept these pretty constant for about six months and they are now very productive. The teams organise themselves (to a certain extent), and we’ve got a good spirit in all of them.

The final change we’ve made is to create a “Rapid Response” team. This team handles all the day-to-day requests that come in to the development team. These range from fixing defects, to delivering new pieces of functionality. We aim for a piece of work delivered by the team in 3 days or less. We manage the work of the team using a kanban board, with the business prioritising all the outstanding requests twice a week. The prioritisation meetings take about 15 minutes and we have some really good discussions about what is important to the business. We’re delivering on average 5 tasks a week and the business like it as they have very clear visibility of what the team is working on now and next. The best thing is that they can see things being delivered.

So what will the future hold? I personally think we will move away from delivering “projects” to delivering features. These will be smaller pieces of work that we can deliver constantly. There will always be projects to deliver, but a lot of what we do is already feature based and a lot of the time we use scrum and sprints to mark time.

The biggest change on the horizon is that we are recruiting a number of test engineers. These will work with the development teams to promote best practice and help us automate our testing process. We’ve done some work in this area, but we have a long way to go. I’m quite excited about some of the things we can do with tools like Cucumber to aid automated acceptance testing.

What about me? It looks like I am going to get more involved on the technology side of things. We have a number of interesting challenges coming up to make the platform scale to support the continued growth of the business. The good thing about the Hut is we can react quickly to new opportunities and making the IT do this is good fun.

Anyway, the “BAU” name is pretty dull and undersells both the value of the work that the team does and it’s complexity so we’ve decided to rename them the Rapid Response Team. I have even done a logo!

Apologies in advance to our entire Design team and anybody with a modicum of taste for the abomination that am I about to release on the world. I did maths at Uni and I absolutely hated art having realised at an early age that I completely suck at it.

Anyway…

I’m going to quote from the last paragraph:

To be honest, if someone wrote to me with a nice covering letter and spoke about open source projects that he or she liked, pointed me at a Twitter feed where they were intelligently engaged in the problem domain, and sent me some code that they’d written, they’d be more or less hired at this point. No one wants to see a list of technologies with some random skill level or years experience.

If you’re interested in joining the Hut Group, check out our careers page and get in touch. I can be reached directly via my twitter account @typingincolor.

As I’ve mentioned here, I’m the Development Manager at the Hut Group. We are one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies, and the third largest online retailer in the UK.

Our goal is to be the largest online retailer in Europe over the next couple of years. We have an excellent development team already but we need to grow to deliver the systems the business needs to support this level of growth.

We’ve successfully changed the way we work as a team. We’ve introduced Agile development to help us work more closely with the business and to enable us to deliver higher quality software more quickly; and it’s worked really well.

We develop all of our systems in house, from our websites, through buying, content and finance, to our warehousing systems. As you can imagine, there is a huge breadth of systems we use. We are also building a retail platform that we can offer to our customers to enable them to power their systems.

It’s an exciting time to be working at the Hut. We’ve grown massively over the last few years, and this growth is accelerating. We’re looking for expert developers to work with us to deliver this growth. We develop in Java, but getting the right person is more important. Whilst we are looking for strong developers, equally important is the ability to communicate effectively.

Find out more!

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there,another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have a C monkey please.” The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey. He fitted a collar and leash, handed to the customer,saying, “That’ll be $5,000.”

The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled,the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said,”That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred pounds. Why did it cost so much? “The shopkeeper answered, “Ah,that monkey can program in C – very fast,tight code,no bugs,well worth the money.”

The tourist looked at a monkey in another cage. “Hey,that one’s even more expensive! $10,000! What does it do?”

“Oh,that one’s a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming,Visual C++, even some Java All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper.

The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000.The tourist gasped to the shopkeeper, “That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?”

The shopkeeper replied, “Well, I haven’t actually seen it do anything, but it says it’s a project manager”.

 

The first half has been pretty eventful. I’ve been married for the best part of 14 years to the girl I met at university, and despite what I may say, I don’t regret any of it.

I have two lovely boys who drive me insane but who I wouldn’t be without.

I’ve been pretty successful at work, despite some interesting career choices. I’ve even ended up managing a team of 30, which I am sure will amuse a number of my former colleagues. I’ve worked in Belgium for a year, worked for the UK’s biggest bank, the largest IT company in the world and even the Guernsey Government. I’ve worked with some brilliant people and written some pretty code.

It’s not all been fun. Number 1 son was born four 3 months early, weighing 1lb 9oz. I wouldn’t want to repeat the night he was born, stressful doesn’t begin to cover it. I can only guess how much the NHS spent looking after him, but I am eternally grateful to everybody who did. I find it amazing that he shows absolutely no signs of what he want through.

So the last 35 years have been pretty good on the whole. What to do now?