DEV Community: Conrad Jackson 🇬🇧🇹🇭

What are some ways for non-programmers to get started in our industry?

Conrad Jackson 🇬🇧🇹🇭 — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 07:00:50 +0000

I know a lot of bright tech literate people outside of software development who are bored of their line of work. They work in education, hr, accounting etc.

What are some ways they can get into tech without learning to code? Bonus if they can do it remotely!

Agile is like Thai street food

Conrad Jackson 🇬🇧🇹🇭 — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 21:02:45 +0000

Originally published at https://blog.conradj.co.uk.

This was going to be a comment on Agile is Literally Meaningless by Theodore Bendixson, until it got too long. You should read his one first.

Much like Thai street food, most people have tried Agile and formed an opinion of it. And also, as with Thai food, Agile has been co-opted and messed around with, sometimes with good intentions, and sometimes not.

Sadly, wherever there is a great, simple, elegant idea, there is money to be made, and Agile is no different. Much like you can spend a fortune eating an approximation of Thai food, you can spend fortunes learning the secret ways of Agile.

Experts, coaches, consultants, trainers & speakers have created ceremonies, then certifications, books and courses.

Next, conferences, frameworks, Institutes and Alliances were constructed around this magic word. "Agile" is an industry now, and so the meaning was lost, forgotten by the very people it was going to save - software developers, and their users.

But there is meaning. Some people intentionally got together and came up with it, way back in 2001. It's called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. I'm going to repeat it here, because it is short:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Working software over comprehensive documentation.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

Responding to change over following a plan.

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

That's it. That is the beautiful, simple meaning of Agile ².

So. Agile with an A does have meaning, and it's at that website.

Now. You people in the corner of the office standing up awkwardly for 15 minutes every morning to "talk". Go and sit down and just try talking to each other normally, whenever you need to.

You other team, see if you can do without sending every new starter on a £1000 per day "Scaled Agile Scrum Alliance Institute of Mastery" course. See if you need sprints or a kanban board. Burn your burn down chart.

Start with the manifesto and go from there. Adapt it, through experimentation, iteration and regular introspection. Read up on some of the practices, and adapt the ones that sound useful, to work for you.

One more thing. Every time someone talks about "Agile" with pomp and ceremony, gently remind of those beautiful and simple four lines of common sense.

Also you just have to go to Thailand and eat the food.

Photo by Peter Hershey on Unsplash

To meet the Manifesto copyright obligations I need to say that although my mum is the creator of the best Thai food, she did not write the Manifesto. It was these people: Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland, and Dave Thomas ↩
OK, there are also 12 principles, which take minutes to read, but are really useful. ↩

A FinTech keeps copying my ideas and I feel fine

Conrad Jackson 🇬🇧🇹🇭 — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 12:36:55 +0000

Originally published at https://blog.conradj.co.uk.

You know when you get that feeling you’re being watched 👀? Recently I’ve had the suspicion that the darling of the FinTech world, Monzo, has been…well, following me around. And then pilfering my stuff. My digital stuff that is, not my money or anything, although they do have my money but that's because they're my bank.

Anyway, you might be asking what a bank, flush with £211 million in crowdfunding and VC money, valued at a cool £2 billion, could want with little old me?

Read on for a thrilling story of money, intrigue, and pointless pettiness (by me).

Rewind to June 6th. Take a look at this blog post from them; a lovely little article on an easy way to save pennies a day, where before you know it you’ve saved £667.67, and look, you can entirely automate it thanks to their amazing integration with IFTTT.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a way non developers can glue different web applications and web enabled things together using things called 'applets'. IFTTT is great for doing things like posting your instagram pics to Twitter, or turning on your internet enabled lights once you have walked 12357 steps. It’s geeky, weird and amazing, and Monzo, a bank, has IFTTT integration. This is incredible and one of the reasons I love them. I was so enamoured of this partnering that a year ago over a few evenings, I worked out the byzantine labyrinth that is the IFTTT developer platform, to develop my own IFTTT Monzo applet for other users. Now let’s look at the IFTTT screen shot on that blog post again:

Zoom. Enhance! Look! IT ME!

WOW, they posted a link to my applet! How cool!

I know what you’re thinking. “Conrad, you’re reading a bit much into it. They just posted a link to a little IFTTT applet you wrote, so what?”

Maybe. Honestly, I was quite excited, and also a little sad they didn’t credit me - just a link to my Twitter account or some kind of shout out. I’ve only got 200 followers, and they’ve got loads!

(Told you I was petty)

Anyway, my spideysenses were tingling. Something was up, and 8 days later, I saw Monzo tweet this to their 91K followers (91K!):

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1138745394329001984-731'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1138745394329001984&theme=dark" }

(@1pSaving is a Monzo account btw)

“Wait a second!”, I hear you say, “by jove this looks like a very similar tweet to those sent out by the popular* account @365Saving!”

* not that popular

Let’s take a look shall we:

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1138704419971903490-562'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1138704419971903490&theme=dark" }

OK, well let's kindly brush over them using the exact same name (plus an "s"), and I dunno what’s going on with the weird currency symbols (I’ve fixed that now), but yeah, they’ve got the same loose emoji loving vibe. But so what?

Well reader, how’s this for a plot twist that I may have sign-posted a bit in the previous paragraph...

I WROTE THE @365SAVING bot! Yep, the mastermind behind the reverse 1p saving challenge IFTTT applet also wrote an automatic saving challenge twitter bot! And look closer, this bot is SMART. OK, not book smart, or street smart, or smart like a fancy dressed person. Not machine learning smart either.

OK now I can barely bring myself to call it a bot.

But loooook, adorable little piggy! Also, every day it works out the amount people should save, AND it automagically generates inspiring ideas for things they could be saving for in emoji form. Yesterday it suggested 🎅🏖🐶. The day before 🖥👒💍! Relevant. Actionable. Fun. Like me!

So WTAF? Monzo have copied my Twitter account. No warning, no “hey CJ just FYI we really like your twitter bot but your emoji usage is a little…much, so we’re gonna do our own”.

They couldn’t even claim ignorance. I told them about it when I first started it in 2018, and they replied with cheerful social media positivity. They follow the account. I’ve posted details in their forum!

So it’s settled. Monzo have used my stuff twice in 8 days and they’ll keep doing it till I’m dead, because if they don’t then I might eventually start my own bank which would be better than theirs and then I would win.

Or maybe because they just like the things I’ve done, whatever.

Anyway, I reached out to them about their latest transgression and sent them details about how to automate their @1pSavings tweets (and you can do it too!) They’ve been awesome (damn them, they’re so nice) - they’ve credited me on their @1pChallenge account and they are sending me some swag 🚀

More than that, finally I’ve got some validation that some of the little hobby projects I tinker on are actually quite useful to people 🤓 I’m going to go back through my half finished, abandoned and never started ideas & projects with renewed optimism and vigour. And if Monzo come looking for any more of my stuff, I’ve got a good idea which one they’ll wrap their grubby little mitts round next!

And maybe there’s another thing I should learn from this. If I want Monzo (or any other massive company) to stop nicking my stuff, I’m going to have to do more than write a little bit of nifty code and stick a cute pig on it. Nifty code is just a feature. Nifty code isn’t defensible. It’s not a moat. Users can be a moat. Community. Content. Stuff that needs perseverance, repetition, graft. Hustle. Annoyingly it can’t be automated. It’s almost the opposite of coding really.

Piggy out 🐷

tl;dr:
Monzo linked to a thing I did and copied my twitter bot - I got swag and a chance to write a blog post and everyone did alright out of it.

How about you? Have you written something that got “adopted” by a bigger company? How did you feel?