Archive for the ‘business’ Category
Customer Satisfaction – Instant Feedback #geolocation
Last year I was so happy to see this instant feedback for the toilets at Schiphol I thought about the ways in which I give instant feedback for a job done. I send the occasional Thank You card, and on occasion hand deliver them to the person in question. This is not instant. How can I give somebody instant feedback?
In a food service establishment, such as a café or restaurant it is customary to leave a tip, for shops this is not as customary and it still only allows the employee to see the appreciation for the service performed. Location based recommendations with a geolocation service, such as foursquare, is ideal although this is unlike a tip that it only promotes the establishment and there is no feedback loop within the establishment. Service cards or books, a mainstay of hotels and small catering services also don’t entirely cover it. And naturally this example has price as the prohibiting factor.
How would you get instant on- and offline?
Image source: me
Painful Facts For Developers #programming #foss
I recently saw a note from the Tech Journalist Russell Holly who calls on the Scumbags of the Internet to stop making demands of developers from whom they get their free software:
You don’t demand ETA’s on shit you aren’t paying for. You don’t get angry when something doesn’t work quite right on an Alpha or Beta build of something you didn’t pay for. You don’t start shooting off at the mouth about how you are going to move to someone else’s free software if this developer doesn’t fix the software you didn’t pay for.
I was naturally in agreement with the spirit of what he said. And I think that he and these developers miss a number of simple facts: Read the rest of this entry »
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FourSquare Tips containing Adverts #gps #geolocation #jobs
I recently started noticing that certain locations that I check into had tips which were usually for companies close to that location. An example it the ING Bank advertising their career site when you are in the discount electronics shop across the road or in the mall. Or Heineken informing you that you can link your FourSquare profile to your Heineken profile.
Image source: me
Bakery Risk Management Failure – UPDATED
Just reading the Telegraph article Groupon demand almost finishes cupcake-maker:
A businesswoman has accused Groupon of almost ruining her bakery company after she was forced to make 102,000 cupcakes at a loss when too many people took up her cut-price offer.
I was thinking about what went wrong. She underestimated the popularity, under priced an already cheap product, and rather than break a bad contract she chose to fulfil with what she herself called a second rate product – damaging her brand.
What she did right is contacting the newspapers and getting herself on Slashdot.
Posted with WordPress for CrackBerry.
Discriminating Against Breaks is Counter Productive #productivity
Some weeks ago I read an interview with a Dutch Internet Entrepreneur who was launching a book on how to create a start up. I haven’t read the book so I can judge that, however what surprised me was his tip to give smokers only 23 days holiday rather than 26 days as they are 1.5 hours less productive every day. I think that he’s missed the point when it comes to productivity, and I’ll tell you why:
On the Border of the Internet #risk
The age old lie told by ISP support desks: ” The Internet is down,” was briefly reality again yesterday.
The past couple of days I’d been seeing and hearing comments that there was a disturbance in the force of the Internet. Initially a NANOG message was posted about a general malaise or instability in the Internet, some humorous quips were posted in response and the matter was soon forgotten.
A network operator looking with hindsight said that they had been able to see more than normal numbers of updates coming on BGP which is normally an indicator of network instability being solved by rerouting round the problem. That is all part of the normal operation of the Internet. And sometime yesterday morning as the east coast of the US was getting to work the looming disaster struck.
Juniper network devices started core dumping and restarting due to a bug in the code which handled the BGP UPDATE messages as another large updated was arriving. The self healing properties of the Internet broke and the Internet went with it. The Great Juniper Outage of 2011 was born.
Avoidable?
Almost certainly. The reliance on the hardware of one specific vendor on the part of large ISPs – backbone carriers – creates a single point of failure which is bad – mkay. A fail over situation should always be in place, not just at the ISPs. Companies who rely on the Internet for business should take this into account too. A recent outages at some of companies I consulted said that by placing their faith in one specific vendor they had created a single point of failure which had caused some high profile repercussions.
Do you have a single point of failure?
Code Review in SCRUM? #xp #agile #mathematics
Recently I was asked by a client to make some estimations regarding a review of a code review for a programming project. The aim of the project is to refactor the existing code for efficiency, check the security and add new functionality. Having done code reviews in the past I had an idea on how it should be done, and little idea on how to quantify the work into an estimate.
How a code review estimate is done now?
The Original No NoSQL – Springboard to the Future #database
Having worked without RDBMS for much of the beginning of my carrier I have always been confused by people’s love of relational databases, in my mind they are merely a collection of CSV files with relationships, with some of extended capabilities that all other databases have such as indices and caching. I love that the concept of something that is not a Relational Database, or a complicated Key-Value store, has found it’s place in the world and it’s called NoSQL.
And didn’t we already have a solution which matched the requirements: scalable, ordered, hierarchical, sharded, consistent, atomic, distributed and object? And wasn’t it a key-value and document database with graph capabilities? An engineer wisely said: “Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS.” What system doesn’t force you to twist your object data and still allows you to maintain the objects in the way you desire?
When we faced this issue we were having much trouble with a traditional database vendor and the mail software they were producing, we wanted to extend the capabilities of this software and not be reliant on the on-disk mailstores they provided. Mail should be stored distributed and be approachable from different angles, whether it is with a traditional POP3 client – the norm; a HTTP browser – emerging; or a IMAP4 client – which in those days was hideously complicated as the RFC had some features which were almost impossible to implement easily. We also wanted to be able to add USENET – which had the same format which we also wanted to be able to store, and even chat – be it IRC or private messaging. And while we were at it we might as well add FTP in the mix.
The external connections would be implemented in an Enterprise Service Bus design pattern, and the storage part was what posed the real problem. All of the data would need to be secure, distributed and/or sharded over multiple locations for efficiency and security. And with security as our first demand we thought of an open standard which we and almost the whole planet used and uses for their internal authentication. A database which has a key-value store at the core, based on a protocol extension written in round about 1993 and optimized in 1996. A database idea so SMART that every huge large software company in the world sells it: LDAP.
“LDAP?” I hear you cry, “That’s No NoSQL!” And you’d be right!
Image source: LinkedIn NoSQL Group
Testers in SCRUM? #agile #xp #qa
Testers are very important in SCRUM, before the sprint they help the Product Owner to refine the User Stories are help with “How to Demo” and “Definition of Done”. Doing this during backlog grooming or analysis meetings allows the Testers to suggest User Stories for testing such as in the sidebar, and allows them to product examples which can be used for automated testing, help with sprint planning, among others.
“As a Tester, I want to read a log, so that I can verify that payments have been processed”
During the sprint, while programmers will be implementing the functionality, the testers will be implementing manual test scripts, automated tests and acceptance tests associated with the user story. In some places they develop the automated tests paired with a programmer, and in others they script the tests themselves. The testers would deliver “Running Tested Features”, preferably together with the programmer, which comply with the Definition of Done which the Product Owner, Testers and Team have defined.
Read more articles on Agile, SCRUM or XP…
You can see that Testers are a vital part of any SCRUM team.
Image source: Wikipedia
Sources: Lance Walton, Henrik Kniberg
Kings of Code Conference #kingsofcode
This week I went to the Kings of Code Conference, to “explore and discuss the latest trends, developments and best practices in web and mobile development technologies.” It included a hackbattle, lots of presentations and free beer.
