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. ...

There was once a King named Harold who ruled over a glorious Kingdom. His lands stretched from the highest mountains in the North, to the whitest beaches in the South. His people were a pleasant, happy bunch and this was driven from the top. Harold was a kind, generous king who served his people true and fair. He had grown his Kingdom through assimilation and was always keen to promote integration of cultures. Whenever he came knocking at the door of a new land, the locals would be happy to join Harold knowing they would lead a better life. ...

Following my review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things , I wanted to discuss The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters . The book focuses on how to change your way of thinking in order to achieve greater confidence, success and general happiness. Although it can sound a bit pop science throughout, the author does have extensive qualifications across various branches of science and medicine. Along with this, he has also worked with some impressive names such as Liverpool FC and the Sky Cycling team. ...

We all know the story. One minute you’re a junior developer learning your first regular expression. A few years and promotions later, you’re put in charge of a team of developers. Simple right? Just keep on cranking out the code, review the teams work and everything should fall into place. Except it doesn’t. It turns out being a manager is a completely different job to be being a developer and most people feel the pain as they make this transition. So having been through this myself, I thought I would share some of my personal lessons learned as a manager. ...

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. ...

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, written by Ben Horowitz, is a tale about his personal career and lessons learnt. For those that haven’t heard of him, Ben Horowitz is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was somewhat ahead of his time and is much revered within the community. He now spends most of his time working and investing in tech companies. The book guides you through how he started his career, set up and sold Opsware , and went on to become a venture capitalist. ...

I thought my first post, having been the inspiration for me to start this blog, should be a wrap up of NDC London. This is the second time I have now attended NDC and having moved to Westminster, the setting itself was a lot more majestic than last year’s industrial backdrop of East London. If you’ve not been before, picture 3 days of talks by some of the coding world’s rock stars interspersed with coffee, beer and the occasional Brainfuck . ...

Inspired by my recent trip to NDC London, I have decided to create a foothold on the web in an attempt to build out and control my “personal brand”. Although the software developer in me is scared by this term, the leader and entrepreneur realises it’s an essential marketing tool and chance to show where my passion lies. This blog will focus on how to use technology to deliver business value, rather than technology for the sake of technology. I will explore new trends and how these can be utilised to deliver faster results and ultimately more value to end users. In the meantime, head over to my about page to discover a little more. ...