Innovation

In this post, I wanted to walk through an approach I used when building a calendar view in Swift for an iOS app I’m working on. The requirements were as follows: Should start from the current day, and then scroll backwards through time Each month is it’s own section, with corresponding header Days should be a selectable square cell, and we should have 3 days on each row The grid should take up as much screen real estate as possible It should be memory efficient And with any luck, it will look something like this… ...

Following in the same vein as The Hard Thing About Hard Things , I am going to discuss The Lean Startup by Eric Ries . Devised in 2008 by Ries, the Lean methodology aims to put science around becoming an entrepreneur along with fostering an innovation environment. Ries demonstrates his model predominantly through examples of the company he helped to build, IMVU . One of the core tenants of Lean is maximising the value delivered to customers. By achieving maximum value, Lean states you will cut out wastage and ultimately thrive against competition. In order to achieve this, the concept of Validated Learning is introduced. Validated Learning is a process whereby you make assumptions, test and then measure their impact. This process allows you to obtain empirical evidence that your assumptions were indeed correct. ...

We’ve all heard the term Hackathon and some of us have likely been to one. They are the stuff of legend – 48 hour coding sessions fuelled by pizza and energy drinks. Events which have spawned long lists of multi-million dollar success stories such as Carousell and GroupME . But what are they, and how do you get your manager to agree to running one? Let’s think about Jeff Jeff? Let me introduce you to Jeff. Jeff has been working at BigCorp now for several years. He’s a talented mid-level engineer working on a long running piece of enterprise software. You know the kind of software we’re talking about here. The kind of software that was designed by a plethora of contractors who have long since left. The kind of software that started life as a Winforms app, spun out as a Service, switched to MVVM, implemented several different UX frameworks and now resembles Sloth from The Goonies. As you can imagine, Jeff is fairly dissatisfied at work. If you were to ask him why, well he’d have a list longer than his arm. The tech is archaic – all his friends are playing with the latest .js library and he’s merely keeping the life support running. This means he is not getting opportunity to learn, develop and challenge himself. He also works alone and feels abandoned on this project. This has led to him no longer believing in the mission of the team or the values of BigCorp. ...