Go Free Range Blog

week-227

2013-05-24T16:00:00+01:00

Friday 24th May

by James Mead

Week 227

This week we’re back up to full strength for the first time in a while. We welcomed Tom back from paternity leave and this has meant that for the first time we’ve been able to do some rotation on the FutureLearn project and spend a little more time at GFR HQ.

Client work

Those who’ve worked with us in the past will know that we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into client work. We aim to provide a ready-made team that is more than the sum of its parts and I know that our level of engagement is far higher than that provided by employees at consultancies where I’ve worked in the past.

This full-on, live-and-breath-the-project approach is something that I personally value and would not want to change, but it is important to recognise that it is in tension with trying to achieve some of our wider GFR goals.

It’s clear that we still haven’t yet worked out how to solve this particular conundrum, but I’m hopeful we can come up with some constructive ideas for how to improve the situation. We really do need to work out a way to find the time, space & energy to make progress on the longer-term GFR goals.

Praise

Something else I’ve been thinking about this week is how we’re not always very good at giving each other praise or thanking each other e.g. for doing something really well or doing something above and beyond the call of duty. I also think we’re not very good at celebrating our successes internally.

We’re all fairly critical thinkers and I think this sometimes means we unconsciously end up sounding negative about internal company issues. I’m certain this isn’t how we all genuinely feel, but rather a sort of emergent effect of our personalities and/or the process of trying to achieve consensus.

In my book, one of the marks of a good manager is one who notices when someone does a Good Thing™ and rewards them appropriately. Perhaps this is something we miss by being a collective and not having a manager of our own.

Computation

Talking of books, an exciting development this week was the publication of a new O’Reilly book, Understanding Computation, by our very own author-in-residence and plant-waterer-in-chief, Tom Stuart:

It’s a book about old, deep ideas from theoretical computer science, deconstructed and explained in an engaging, practical way for an audience of working programmers.

Given that I did my degree in Electronic-(ish) Engineering and not Computer Science, I’m hoping this book will fill in some big gaps in my knowledge. I’ve purchased a copy, but not yet found time to read any of it. However, if Tom’s Programming with Nothing talk at Ruby Manor 3 is anything to go by, I reckon it’s going to be well worth the money.

Harmonia

James found time this week to chat to the good folks at Poetica about their experiences with Harmonia. I’ve not yet had a chance to catch up with their feedback, but I think we’re incredibly fortunate to have some people using the product just around the corner. So I’d like to say a big thank you on behalf of Go Free Range to James Weiner for sparing some of his valuable time.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

– James

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2013-05-20T10:00:00+01:00

Monday 20th May

by James Adam

Monday Links - 227

Meetings at Medium

“Holacracy” describes, among other things, a technique for running meetings and managing “tensions” within teams. There’s a lot more at holacracy.org, if you can penetrate the slick presentation. Perhaps this interview with Ev Williams (who runs Medium) is a simpler introduction. This quote also jumped out at me:

People think “freedom, no job description, everybody does everything, it’s totally flat, and that’s cool because we’re all down with those rules”. But actually that creates tons of anxiety and inefficiency, and various modes of dysfunction, whether we have to build consensus around every decision, or I’m gonna do a land grab for power… People romanticize startup cultures, but I know it’s fairly rare that people in startups say “this is it, it is amazing and everybody is super-productive and going along”

One aspect that seems to be emphasised is the idea of an organisation’s purpose, which is something I think that we struggle with – “what is the purpose of GFR?”. As I said, there’s a lot of slick presentation to penetrate here, but I’m hoping to find a kernel of insight that might help our company. — JA

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

See also this summary of his talk about the purpose-driven organisation; again, there’s a level of… presentation that you might need to look beyond here, but fundamental message is that it’s the organisation’s purpose, and communicating what we believe, that drives not only the way people work within it, but also why people buy it’s products or services. I’m reminded of my time at Reevoo, where I bored my colleagues and superiors by decrying that “we needed a Manifesto!” to explain what we did and why anyone should care. It’s only now that I fully realise that the “anyone” included we developers as much as the public. Anyway, this and the link above are undigested raw material for some further thinking about how we run GFR. I hope I get the chance to digest them. — JA

Introducing CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim

In my continuing quest for a code editor that works well in a remote pair-programming context, this vim plugin which makes use of Python & Twisted looks as if it might offer a useful low-bandwidth collaborative development environment. — JM

Docker – an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers

I hadn’t heard of Linux Containers before, but they sound pretty useful. This could be interesting for creating project-specific developer sandboxes and for packaging up an application’s dependencies so it can be easily deployed to a production server. — JM

INVESTing In User Stories Is Hard

I think this is a great description of what makes a good user story and how some of the “properties” of a good user story are in tension with each other. Via Neil Williams. — JM

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week-226

2013-05-17T16:00:00+01:00

Friday 17th May

by Chris Roos

Week 226

Good afternoon my friends.

FutureLearn

We’ve had another busy week with FutureLearn and are continuing to make good progress. Today marks the end of the third two week sprint and hopefully the business will be suitably impressed at the show and tell this afternoon.

Project Los Roques

Tom’s been off all week looking after mini me so it was just James A and I that met our friends from Project Los Roques for a coffee. They recently applied for Techstars London and were lucky enough to get shortlisted. That’s great news and we wish them the best of luck with the rest of the process.

Printers and bidness

James A met with a couple of people who have a business idea that could utilise the GFR Printer. We’ve lent them one of our printer kits (remember that you too can buy or borrow a printer kit if you’re interested) and will have to wait to see what they come up with. The Printer infrastructure is really just a set of prototypes, so some investment to make it more robust would be required before we could recommend anybody builds a business on it. That said, it would be interesting work, and we’d be very happy to collaborate with partners to work on that.

Training and workshops

We’ve talked before, although maybe only internally, about the possibility of us running some kind of training/teaching programmes. It’s something I think we all share an interest in, but haven’t done anything more than just think and talk about. Given that, it was a pleasant surprise to hear from a friend of ours today enquiring if we’d consider helping them with some training. The first step will be to chat to them to understand exactly what they’re after but maybe this is the little prod we needed to make progress with this endeavour?

And that just about wraps things up this week. I hope you all have great weekends.

Until next time.

– Chris

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2013-05-13T10:00:00+01:00

Monday 13th May

by James Mead

Monday Links - 226

How we used email as a customer support system at mySociety

Initially we used an email address as the support mechanism for Harmonia, but after a while we decided to use Intercom. I found it interesting to read how mySociety used email filters and human discipline to tackle some of the same problems that Intercom and other similar products solve. This also plays into our internal discussion about using Google Groups as a Collaborative Inbox to handle incoming company email. — JM

A Woman’s Place

I enjoyed reading this story about a company, “F International”, which in the 1960s recognized the potential of mothers with young children to be remote freelance programmers. It’s rather sad that the company gradually lost it’s original very healthy culture as it grew, but as far as I can see this tends to be the almost inevitable outcome of rapid growth. And as the author notes, “it seems remarkable that the same industry is still fumbling with the issue of gender equality”. — JM

Functional Programming Principles in Scala

With our current work on FutureLearn, I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting MOOCs. A former colleague, Ivan Moore, and a recent acquaintance, Rob Chatley, have both been working their way through Martin Odersky’s Coursera MOOC. Given their positive comments and the fact that Martin designed the Scala programming language, it sounds like a very worthwhile challenge. — JM

Contextinator – dividing your browsing into projects

This might be useful for anyone who has a million tabs open, but my main reason for including it is that it reminds me a little of one of the goals I recall Chris talking about with respect to roosmarks. Roughly put, it was about managing research, and returning to sites/pages with the context of that research (and any conclusions you came to) available. Perhaps he’ll try it out and get some more ideas? (Also, it’s a Google Chrome extension, and he loves those¹) — JA

Heyli.st for Scottish Ruby Conference

Built and maintained by Heylist, a service we wrote and I recently “relaunched”. I felt it really shone on Saturday night, as people were arriving in Edinburgh or Crieff and trying to coordinate meeting for drinks using twitter, but without any hashtag. It’s just a shame that Twitter Lists are so unloved by twitter clients. — JA

CSS Architecture

This is long but I found it an interesting insight into the motivation behind some of the CSS approaches we’re seeing these days, particularly with things like bootstrap gaining popularity. I definitely have some reservations to this approach, but don’t have enough experience to suggest any alternatives. One particular thing that I’m uncomfortable with in this post is the assertion that you should use “classes for styling and styling only”. I tend to use classes to add meaning to the page to make it more easily machine readable (trying to scrape websites that don’t do this can be a real pain), irrespective of whether those classes are then used for styling. — CR

Chris, let us know if our characterisation of your love for all things Google ever becomes annoying…↩

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week-225

2013-05-10T16:00:00+01:00

Friday 10th May

by James Mead

Week 225

I’m afraid this week’s notes are going to be short and sweet, because I haven’t been anywhere near as organised as I was last week.

We’re continuing to beaver away on FutureLearn. We had a good “show-and-tell” at the end of last week – it was good to get positive feedback from the project stakeholders.

We’re working on two-week sprints for this project and this week is the 1st half of a new sprint. We’re more used to working on one-week iterations and so it’s been interesting to try a different approach. With the two-week sprints it’s possible to spend more time doing things like the planning game and a thorough “show-and-tell”, but I do wonder whether the extra “ceremony” is as efficient in the longer term.

The perennial question of how to organise our tests, particularly Cucumber acceptance tests, has reared its head again this week. I know I struggle with the lack of constraints when writing Cucumber scenarios. I feel that the lack of constraints means that it’s all too easy for each developer in a team to take different approaches and to end up with a real muddle.

I may have remembered this incorrectly, but I’m pretty sure James has previously told me that it’s this very lack of constraints that he likes, because it tends to ensure that his test is not coupled to the implementation. Although I do agree, I’d still like to find a good set of patterns/rules for writing & organising scenarios. I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about it this week, so I probably ought to try to write up my thoughts in a bit more detail at some point.

Anyway, our most important bit of news is that Tom became a father over the bank holiday weekend. Many, many congratulations to him and his other half, and welcome to Frederick!

Have a great weekend, everyone.

– James.

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2013-05-06T14:30:00+01:00

Monday 06th May

by James Mead

Monday Links - 225

Fargo

I’ve been after a good outliner for a while, after continuously switching between Google Tasks (the keyboard shortcuts make it really easy to re-organise things, even if they’re not necessarily tasks), Workflowy and Markdown in plain old text files. I’ve only just started using it but Fargo (co-created by Dave Winer) seems to have the right mix of openness (it stores OPML files in Dropbox) and an outline-specific mode of operation. — CR

Rubocop

We’ve agreed to abide by the Ruby style guide on our current project. While it’s great to have a set of agreed upon guidelines, it’s not always easy to remember what they are while you’re in the middle of coding; particularly if you have a slightly different individual style. Personally, I’d rather have a computer tell me that I’ve violated any given guideline than have to keep on top of it myself, and it looks like we might be able to use Rubocop to do just that. — CR

Quick Javascript Switcher

I’ve been looking for a Chrome extension to do this (toggle Javascript on/off) on and off forever, so was really very pleased to come across this last week. It sits in your toolbar and allows you to toggle Javascript on and off without having to go through the pain of finding the setting in Chrome preferences and then reloading the page. — CR

Zero Waste Home

At GFR we’ve tried to minimise the amount of paper we use, and I like to think that we’re quite conscious about waste and other environmental issues like this, but an extreme (in a good way) example is producing literally a couple of handfuls of waste over an entire year. — JA

Hooting Printer

Andrew Nicolaou of BBC R&D has been making Raspberry Pi play nicely with the Printer backend for a while, but it was fun to see his latest code making a “hooting noise” when a print is ready. — JA

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week-224

2013-05-03T16:00:00+01:00

Friday 03rd May

by James Mead

Week 224

It’s been another busy week in the FutureLearn “submarine”¹ deep below the streets of sunny Camden. Today marks the end of our first full two-week sprint on the project and it feels as if the application is really starting to take shape.

As Tom mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there’s no shortage of ideas for this project - indeed I’ve just discovered a whole bunch of ideas, user stories and educator stories which I didn’t know about! - the challenge is to identify the functionality that will provide the most value and to focus on delivering that functionality as rapidly as possible, while maintaining a high level of quality.

For obvious reasons, the FutureLearn project isn’t developing quite as publicly as Inside Government, so we’re probably not going to be able to give you such a blow-by-blow account of development, but hopefully more stuff will be in the public domain in the not too distant future. I’m certainly finding it interesting learning about the likes of MOOCs, constructivist learning, and flipped classrooms.

Building products

Given we’re pretty flat out on FutureLearn, nothing much has been happening with our various internal projects. However, over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about how we should approach building some products of our own. One thing I want to explore a bit with my colleagues is whether we should be using what I’m calling the “build it and they will come” approach or the Lean Startup-esque “hypothesis-driven experimental” approach.

I think we (and probably most developers) are naturally drawn to the former - build something to solve a problem that you or your family or friends are having; then hope that other people find out about it and start using it in droves. It all sounds well and good, but I think the latter stage is a lot harder than one might think. Should you give up on a project just because not many people are using it? Or should you work more proactively to attract people to it via advertising or other promotional tactics?

For me the latter approach is less natural, but very logical. The idea of trying to generate hypotheses and then testing them by writing as little code as possible seems eminently sensible. But I think this approach requires us to think of ourselves less as developers and more as business types, which I know we find difficult. Anyway, I’m definitely up for trying more of this kind approach. Hopefully my colleagues are too!

Consultancy?

On a related note, I think we’ve tended to market² ourselves as a ready-made software development team - greater than the sum of its parts - but a development team none-the-less. However, I think we actually do a lot more than just development. I can’t come up with a better word for this other than “consultancy”, but unfortunately that word has so many negative connotations. Naturally, we just do the good bits ;-)

I know that collectively we won’t want to talk about ourselves as consultants, but I do think we need to find a better way to explain that we do a lot more than just software development. Does anyone have a better word for what we do?!

Inside Government

At the beginning of the week, our GDS colleagues were marking a major milestone - 10 Downing Street, the Deputy PM’s office, all 24 of the UK’s central government departments and its embassies around the world are now sharing a single, joined-up presence on the web at www.gov.uk/government.

And Neil Williams eloquently explained its significance:

From now on, citizens (and the professionals and intermediaries who operate between them and the state) can easily see the entirety of what this and any future government is doing, on all issues at home and around the world, in one place and in consistent, structured, easily comprehensible formats. Some of the content is also available in one or more other languages (49 languages in total).

Tom & Chris were able to meet up with the team on Tuesday evening for a few deserved celebratory drinks and it sounds as if a good time was had by all. And some people even made it to work the next day!

Although Go Free Range hasn’t been so involved over the last few months of the project, Pete Herlihey’s graph³ put the project as a whole into perspective for me. And I’m pleased to see that James & I are still up there on the leaderboard ;-)

The Inside Government project was definitely a great project to work on and a great team to work with. I think I can speak for the rest of GFR in saying that it’s something we’re really proud of.

Until next time.

– James.

The basement room at The Open University↩
In the loosest possible sense of the word↩
The number of times code has been committed to the project over time↩

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2013-04-29T10:00:00+01:00

Monday 29th April

by James Mead

Monday Links - 224

The First Federated #Indieweb Comment Thread

Posting content on my own site (or using my preferred service) and having that content notify/appear on the site I’m mentioning is something I’ve been thinking about for years. Way back when, I even spent some time modifying the delicious firefox plugin to send trackbacks to the sites I was bookmarking. Hopefully I’ll find some time to add similar functionality to Roosmarks in the near future. — CR

BERG - Week 408

In this week’s All Hands, we discussed Weeknotes. What are Weeknotes? Why do we do them,? Who reads them? Should they continue? Well, apparently Neil’s Mum reads them and this is as good a reason to continue as any, so here’s what’s happening this week…

Given some of our own internal discussions about the purpose of our weeknotes, it was interesting to read that others share some of our concerns, even if they don’t seem to have come to any real conclusions. — JM

Improve Your Ruby Workflow by Integrating vim/tmux/pry

I’m still looking to improve my vim setup, particularly with regard to the efficient running of tests. And so I was intrigued to read about Nicolas Viennot’s approach which neatly side-steps the pre-loading problem solved by the likes of spork, zeus & spring.

Instead he adds pry commands to make it possible to run tests (amongst other things) from within an interactive ruby session. The video in his blog post is definitely a bit of an eye-opener in terms of developer productivity. I’m not yet convinced I want to go down exactly the same road, but it’s definitely given me some food for thought. — JM

Iconic design through user needs

I liked this quote Mark Hurrell pulled out of an interview with Scott McGuire. It’s not that long, go and read it. If it sparks your interest the whole article is worth reading too. — TW

Damn Excel! How the ‘most important software application of all time’ is ruining the world

I’m constantly amazed by how many business processes are entirely dependent on Microsoft Excel. Clearly it’s a very accessible piece of software, but its simplicity is deceptive and it’s incredibly easy to get in a real mess.

I only recently became aware of the role of Excel (and copying & pasting!) in JPMorgan’s “London Whale” fiasco. Given the pervasiveness of Excel, I also found it sobering to read about the lack of accuracy of statistical procedures in Excel:

Excel 2007, like its predecessors, fails a standard set of intermediate-level accuracy tests in three areas: statistical distributions, random number generation, and estimation. Additional errors in specific Excel procedures are discussed. Microsoft’s continuing inability to correctly fix errors is discussed.

You have been warned! — JM

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week-223

2013-04-26T17:30:00+01:00

Friday 26th April

by Chris Roos

Week 223 - Hello Autumn

Good afternoon everybody peeps. I hope you all enjoyed the summer. I certainly gave my shorts and flip flops a good two day airing before packing them safely back in the cupboard until next year.

I’m going to keep these very short and sweet as we’re all continuing to beaver away on Futurelearn this week.

Speaking of which, it feels as though we’re really starting to find our stride in the project. We’ve been discussing and evolving our development approach with our Unboxed compadres and should have a good product to show at the end of the sprint next week.

Printer

Giles Booth has written up his experiences of getting his Raspberry Pi hooked up to the GFR Printer platform, and earned a mention on the Adafruit blog. Good work, Giles!

If you’re interested in getting involved with the GFR Printer project, you can buy your very own kit or register your interest to borrow one.

Inside Government

It feels as though not a week goes by without us mentioning GDS and/or Inside Government in these notes; and I’m not about to break that tradition now as we congratulate the team for getting everything ready to remove the progress bar from the site now that all ministerial departments have been moved over. Great work, team!

Until next Summer.

Chris

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2013-04-22T10:31:00+01:00

Monday 22nd April

by James Adam

Monday Links - 223

BERG Cloud DevKit

BERG are making a ‘shield’ board for connecting Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and mbed boards to their ‘cloud’. It looks like ‘BERG Cloud’ performs the same role as my Printer server (which is: taking the all of the hard but boring part of turning a web page into a physical thing), but extends it beyond printing, to any kind of interaction driven by a backend server.

It raises questions for me personally about the future of my Printer project, since a) part of the motivation for me to release it was because it wasn’t clear to what extent BERG would be opening up access to their service for ‘hacking’, and b) the architectures of BERG Cloud and Printer seem very similar. I guess we’ll see. — JA

whytheluckystiff.net is back up…

… and it’s gone again.

You can read some discussion on Hacker News here, but more significantly you can get a PDF of all of the PCL SPOOL files in a collection aptly-titled ‘CLOSURE’. _Why was in the middle of writing his Poignant Guide when I discovered Ruby, and I suspect I will always be nostaglic for the time when he was still writing. — JA

Developing on a Chromebook

Something for Chris here: one strategy for using a Chromebook to do real work (i.e. software development). — JA

Short’s Not Always Sweet: The Case for Long Test Names

Kent Beck gives some interesting insight into why he uses long names for test methods and shorter ones for other methods. — JM

Working with Ruby Threads

I read Working with Unix Processes by Jesse Storimer a while ago and found the explanations very clear. I read Working with Ruby Threads on my train on Friday and had a similar positive experience. — JM

dispatch.vim

In my continuing quest to perfect my vim development environment, I’m really impressed with Tim Pope’s latest offering. I can now run a test and see the full output appear temporarily in a tmux pane, but then have any failures appear in a vim quickfix window which take me to the relevant lines in the file. — JM

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