tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78464962012-01-19T12:10:17.957ZDrawing the owl, circles not included.Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site.tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-49317888874029503032011-08-24T23:15:00.001+01:002011-08-24T23:15:19.144+01:002011-08-24T23:15:19.144+01:00

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time, and have never got around to as it’s just too big a thing to get straight in my head. I’m writing something now (and it’s little more than the title) just because I think I should lay down a marker. Apologies in advance to anyone who was looking for something more insightful. The summary is this: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is the

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com1http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/08/our-economy-is-based-on-wealth-of.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-39548708996964286892011-07-07T20:43:00.001+01:002011-07-07T20:43:02.861+01:002011-07-07T20:43:02.861+01:00

Another day, another article about Facebook's global takeover. Yes, I know that FB now has 750m members, which is clearly a lot of people. However, the obsession with registered users feels very like the rush for pixels in the digital camera business a few back, or the stampede for ever larger app stores amongst the mobile vendors. I don't care if FB has 1bn members (anecdotal evidence suggests

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/07/yes-facebook-has-lots-of-users-so-what.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-52756416204754661362011-06-05T20:33:00.001+01:002011-06-07T06:38:06.323+01:002011-06-07T06:38:06.323+01:00

[Update: in response to some of the comments here and on HN, I thought it might be worth updating with a note on my personal experience with Agile, which appears at the bottom of the post.] Agile (with a big 'A') has become so mainstream now that it has started to become the problem. An alarming number of people who espouse the virtues of Agile, and who quote the Agile Manifesto believe that

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com18http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/06/what-agile-means-to-me.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-68154698579766768942011-06-05T19:59:00.001+01:002011-06-05T19:59:54.146+01:002011-06-05T19:59:54.146+01:00

If you were travelling from A-B, and planning the journey yourself, you might look it up on Google Maps. GM would give you a route, and an estimated time for the journey - let's say it's one hour for our mythical trip. Now let's assume that the destination for our journey is the airport, as we have a plane to catch - i.e. we absolutely have to be there on time. In this scenario, would you leave

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com1http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/06/driving-to-airport-agile-style.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-34339474493934490902011-05-16T00:49:00.000+01:002011-05-17T17:33:40.375+01:002011-05-17T17:33:40.375+01:00

[Update: a couple of people have called me out on this post, and suggested that it would only work from the bottom up if you hire good developers. This is true. This entire blog is based on the philosophy that the cheapest and most efficient way to achieve any given goal in software is to hire a smaller number of better developers. If you have a different philosophy, then you may find this site

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/05/application-lifecycle-management.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-91399524045137520662011-05-09T14:42:00.001+01:002011-05-09T14:42:27.718+01:002011-05-09T14:42:27.718+01:00

When the iPhone launched, one of the major gripes was the lack of support for native apps. Steve Jobs launched the web-apps-look-like-native-apps program, was roundly criticised for the lack of a native SDK, and sure enough it turned out it was already in the pipeline. The App-Age was born. (Not long after, Palm released webOS, a web-app platform from inception, and it was roundly praised for

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/05/web-app-or-native-looks-like-html-is.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-68929442507608401092011-04-14T14:28:00.001+01:002011-04-14T14:28:28.143+01:002011-04-14T14:28:28.143+01:00

I’ve been using Dropbox for about 18 months, and before that I was a Mesh fan, and in the dim and distant past I spent many, many hours fighting with Plaxo and ActiveSync (see here for a post from 2004 on my frustrations at the time) - so I like to think I know a thing or two about file syncing issues. I have a separate work Dropbox account, which for the past couple of months has been so far

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/04/ode-to-dropbox.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-23304335578470790482011-03-31T23:53:00.001+01:002011-04-05T21:43:19.385+01:002011-04-05T21:43:19.385+01:00

Something came up in conversation today that struck a chord with the (my) favourite topic of the moment – why is MSFT not responding to everything going on around it? I don’t really know anything at all about MSFT’s business – I’m a .net guy, I’ve been to Redmond, I’ve seen the inside of the machine, but I don’t know all the ins-and-outs. But I do know what they do – and more importantly, how

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/google-lives-in-perpetual-beta-whilst.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-78424593499814059972011-03-30T23:25:00.001+01:002011-03-30T23:25:10.544+01:002011-03-30T23:25:10.544+01:00

I’ve just come back from the HP webOS “Connect” meeting in London, where a bar full of eager mobile web developers were being courted (with free* beer no less) by the worldwide VP of Developer Relations, Richard Kerris. I didn’t stay the full distance, leaving after about an hour and a half, and that in itself is not a good sign. Kerris himself gave a great, and sincere, introduction to the

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com2http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/webos-developer-connect-london-notes.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-36234889668020557012011-03-27T11:13:00.001+01:002011-03-27T11:13:03.179+01:002011-03-27T11:13:03.179+01:00

I was at an event on Thursday evening at @TechHub and the host for the evening invited everyone there to install Color and at least give it a go before wading in to the “$41m for what?” debate. His teaser was quite an interesting one – by firing up Color on his phone he was able to see photos coming in from the party upstairs, and by commenting on the photos (i.e. socialising) he got himself

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/color-may-have-something-to-it-after.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-33093179516711566672011-03-26T14:54:00.001Z2011-03-26T14:54:41.086Z2011-03-26T14:54:41.086Z

Today I applied online for a new driving licence – and as part of the process I was warned that the photo they had on record for me was only valid for a further six months. However, when I put in my passport number it found the photo I had scanned in when I got my new passport a few weeks previously. I was asked if I would like to use that instead – as it was valid for the next ten years. Aside

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/government-is-joining-up-be-afraid.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-91220575859464359162011-03-23T12:15:00.001Z2011-03-23T12:17:32.385Z2011-03-23T12:17:32.385Z

I have spent the morning trying to test a new website that is currently available to me in Ukranian and Swedish – neither of which I speak. I have a basic understanding of the site, having seen it in its original english some time ago, and I know the functional requirements. Not being able to speak Swedish meant that when filling in a form I had to make educated guesses based on the pure UX

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com2http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/using-foreign-language-to-challenge-ux.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-26031621312230981942011-03-18T09:36:00.001Z2011-03-18T09:36:38.291Z2011-03-18T09:36:38.291Z

Inspired by a blog post (many years ago) by the 37Signals team on their use of Campfire, their own chat application, I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to wean the development team off Windows Live Messenger, Skype, et al. for team chat. I had been looking for a long, long time for something that would allow us to maintain long-lived (and searchable) chat archives, but that would also allow us

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/how-we-use-hipchat.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-42272253410828785862011-03-14T16:56:00.000Z2011-03-14T17:51:17.951Z2011-03-14T17:51:17.951Z

I’ve done a quick round-up day-by-day, but here are my overall thoughts on QCon 2011. The conference as a whole seemed slightly subdued after last year – it was sold out, so I guess it had the same number of attendees, but many of the sessions were half-full, and there was often an uncomfortable silence at the end of presentations when they were opened up for questions. There was no stand-out

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Day three went a bit more webby – and technical, and frankly, a bit flat. It seemed slightly lacklustre. Keynote: Things I Wish I’d Known (Rod Johnson) 7/10: Co-founder of SpringSource, Rod is a successful entrepeneur, and entertaining speaker. He gave us a very personal take on the lessons learned, although I’m not sure I personally took anything away from it. I didn’t take any notes, so can’t

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/qcon-2011-london-day-three.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-90263153594319088472011-03-13T23:03:00.001Z2011-04-05T21:44:02.975+01:002011-04-05T21:44:02.975+01:00

Day two was (for me) primarily about the big guys – Google, Twitter, Netflix & Best Buy all made appearances, so this was less about the Special Forces of day one, and more about how that theory scales. Keynote: Innovation at Google (Patrick Copeland) 8/10: Great talk from Patrick Copeland on Google culture. Hard to summarise in short-form, but essentially the emphasis is on innovators (people)

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/qcon-2011-london-day-two.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-61003892727438152392011-03-13T20:53:00.001Z2011-04-05T21:44:02.975+01:002011-04-05T21:44:02.975+01:00

Great opening day to QCon, with quite a consistent theme – we appear to have moved beyond Agile to a new post-Agile “lean development” model. This was echoed from the keynote through three of the five talks. This is the anti-offshore, anti-project-management, “let us get on with it” model – which may not work for many companies, but does appear to pay huge dividends to those brave enough to

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2011/03/qcon-2011-london-day-one.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-86477087209344995432010-12-08T10:50:00.001Z2010-12-08T10:50:52.480Z2010-12-08T10:50:52.480Z

I’m a bit late on this one, but when I read about this on holiday - http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/04/david-cameron-silicon-roundabout – I thought I was dreaming. Silicon roundabout has apparently become mainstream, but this is very, very old news (even in real, i.e. not-internet, time). I went to my first Old Street rooftop digital / web collective launch party in 1999 –

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/12/shoreditch-partying-like-its-1999.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-44641594695257363892010-11-05T12:54:00.001Z2010-11-05T12:54:51.268Z2010-11-05T12:54:51.268Z

This post is more of a note-to-self than anything. Part one of a two-parter, concentrating on web form processing – first from a server-side point of view, and then later, from a user-centric client-side point of view. The aim is to document a pattern for forms processing that is consistent and repeatable for any website. Think PRG (Post-Redirect-Get), with some server-side detail added in for

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/11/web-forms-1-validation.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-8241058219297750022010-10-20T00:45:00.001+01:002010-10-20T00:45:48.139+01:002010-10-20T00:45:48.139+01:00

Earlier this week I attended the Enterprise Search Meetup that was held at the Guardian’s office, and entitled “Search at the Guardian”. It was a great event, lots of interesting details and a good insight into the Guardian, who, through their Open Platform initiative, seem to running away from the rest of Fleet Street in terms of innovation and open data. Who knows, perhaps they even “get”

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/10/guardian-open-platform-it-or-innovation.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-70063979974035037922010-10-19T23:33:00.001+01:002010-10-19T23:34:01.953+01:002010-10-19T23:34:01.953+01:00

We all tell clients that DNS changes take 24-48 hours to propagate, but we very rarely get to see any evidence of this. Well, now I have a nice chart showing just this. A website that I am, ahem, involved with, went offline for a period of time earlier this week on account of a ‘miscommunication’ with the company hosting the DNS name servers. As a result, they removed the DNS record from their

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/10/dns-propagation.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-83841698766506265132010-09-30T21:53:00.001+01:002010-09-30T21:53:48.252+01:002010-09-30T21:53:48.252+01:00

In a follow-up to my previous post on admin interfaces, I thought I’d post on something that happened the other day on the current project. As part of the ecommerce site we’re building we have a dedicated service for managing email notifications (registration, order confirmation, lost password etc. – about 50 in total), and during development we’ve been using Google’s SMTP service to do the

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/09/user-centred-design.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-22561053640159699892010-09-26T20:02:00.001+01:002010-09-26T20:02:10.693+01:002010-09-26T20:02:10.693+01:00

HTTP is all around us – it has become the de facto transport protocol of choice; web servers may be the primary source, but routers / access points have used it for a  long time, databases have begun to use it (e.g. CouchDB, RavenDB), and now even console apps have taken to its user-friendly interface. We’ve been using Mercurial on our latest project, which is a fantastic application in its own

Hugo Rodger-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12695583613011940337noreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/09/http-self-service.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-91496127765079845912010-09-13T18:28:00.001+01:002010-09-13T18:28:23.049+01:002010-09-13T18:28:23.049+01:00

Many, many years ago I built a website that used XHTML/XSLT to render all of the pages (this was back in the old-school ASP days). It worked a treat, and I’ve had a certain regard for XSLT ever since. Which is why I was curious when some colleagues were tasked with building an email template system for an ecommerce system (large ecommerce systems can have dozens of email templates covering

Hugo Rodger-Brownnoreply@blogger.com0http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/09/whatever-happened-to-xslt.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7846496.post-35732691324628490522010-08-22T21:24:00.003+01:002011-04-05T21:43:19.385+01:002011-04-05T21:43:19.385+01:00

[Update] I stand corrected - I do now have billing enabled on my Apps account, and can confirm that images are served with all the correct response headers set. The URLs do indeed support 304 conditional GETs on the production infrastructure, which makes this a very attractive image hosting solution. Well done Google, apologies for the mis-representation. (NB – this article is based on the

Hugo Rodger-Brownnoreply@blogger.com2http://blog.rodger-brown.com/2010/08/googles-high-performance-image-serving.html