Inspired by the short video by Mads Kristensen (part of a series conceived by Microsoft’s Misty Madonna)… I was inspired to update my Visual Studio layout for the first time in over ten years. What?! Ten years? Yes, for ten years I have installed Visual Studio, selected “Dark Theme”, and used it without adjustments. This […]
As today’s Cloudflare outage rages on, with a multitude of services that depend on Cloudflare being knocked out of operation simultaneously, we are all reminded about resilience. In particular, it’s a good time to think again about edge workers. Cloudflare is quite amazing. It handles huge amounts of traffic using just a small number of […]
This is the latest in my flurry of articles on analytics, which have all come from various questions and misconceptions about what analytics are, what they are for, and how they work. Today, I’m going to explain that analytics are lossy, what that means, and why it’s okay. Let’s define what we mean by “lossy”. […]
Full disclosure. I’m about to discuss Microsoft browsers and I’m a Microsoft MVP. More importantly, I’ve been using web browsers since before either Firefox or Chrome existed, and for ten years I haven’t used a Microsoft browser as my default. So, read on and let’s talk about browsers! Browser History If I go back a […]
Whenever I implement cycle-time as a metric, I have to explain that there is a slightly disheartening early phase to the collection of this information. Over the first couple of days, your cycle time will look awesome, but then it gets progressively worse. This can sometimes shock a team, because staring at a graph sometimes […]
There is a general pop-psychology perception that people have a personality type. This has been embedded into the collective mindset over the years thanks to companies using psychometric testing, DISC models, Myers-Briggs types, and Belbin tests to categorise and manage these different personality types. I have been subjected to many of these tests over the […]
I recently attended an event in Manchester, organised by BJSS and Microsoft, on the subject of AI and ML. The schedule was jam packed with interesting insights and useful case studies that got my head buzzing. Having had some time to reflect on everything I absorbed on the day, I have realised that we are […]
When you are using The Pomodoro Technique® there is always a bit of a choice to make about your timer. I started out with a proper mechanical Tomato timer, I tried a phone app for Pomodoro, and I tried just the standard clock app. The mechanical timer had a couple of benefits… one of the […]
This is a quick note about checking trends over time, and why you probably ought to check both a rolling comparison over time and a fixed baseline comparison. Quite often you’ll find a dashboard with a comparison over time shown as a percentage, in either green (good) or red (bad) – or orange if you’re […]
We all know that BizOps is gaining momemntum and that we need to think about how we take care of it in our own organisations. Not just because it’s yet another buzzword ending in “Ops”, but because of what we’ve been piecing together for many years. If you’ve read Start With Why, or The Lean […]