Craig Pardey

Your email address identifies you in this online world. Companies use it to verify who you are, to communicate with you and for resetting passwords. You may also use the same email address to correspond with your friends and family, and it may even be linked to your calendar too.

It makes sense to separate your personal email from your work email - you don’t send personal emails from your work address, nor do you send work emails from your personal address. In all likelihood you use a free service like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo for your personal email.

This is a continuation of my post about clean tea, except this time I analysed the offerings from Tealyra.

Tealyra by the numbers:

• 490 teas (excluding kits and samplers)
• 175 contain sugar and/or flavourings
• 187 caffeine-free

So I filtered the list to only show teas with:

• No caffeine
• No sugar
• No stevia
• No flavourings

86 teas on the Tealyra® menu pass my filter for what I would consider to be “clean” which makes Tealyra the best of the three that I’ve looked at so far. Overall the offerings from Tealyra are pretty decent once you filter out the ones with sweeteners and/or flavourings however I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of options.

I recently had an unexpectedly great support experience from a company that one does not usually associate with excellent customer support: Microsoft.

I had been running Windows 10 as a VirtualBox VM on my Linux laptop for quite some time. I needed Windows for a few things like my accounting software (Quickbooks) and remote access to the office but the setup wasn’t working as cleanly as I’d like, particularly around support for external devices like my Garmin Forerunner GPS watch so I decided to switch to a dual boot.

This is a continuation of my post about clean tea, except this time I analysed the offerings from Teavana® (a Starbucks company).

Teavana® by the numbers:

• 101 teas (excluding kits and samplers)
• 70 contain sugar and/or flavourings
• 31 caffeine-free
• 4 had no ingredients listed

So I filtered the list to only show teas with:

• No caffeine
• No sugar
• No flavourings

Only one tea on the Teavana® menu passes my filter for what I would consider to be “clean”. It is … (drum roll) …

I recently weaned myself off coffee. My daily intake levels were well above normal levels, as was my tolerance. The only thing it was doing for me was preventing me from getting a good night’s sleep. So I decided to quit. I spent two weeks cutting back, and then went cold turkey over the Labour Day weekend.

I’m now sleeping much better, and no longer need that morning jolt to get me going.

This is a quick cheat sheet taken from a great little book called “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries & Jack Trout. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in marketing … even developers!

The Law of Leadership
It’s better to be first than it is to be better.

The Law of the Category
If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.

Configuring Hubot to work with a self-hosted HipChat server took a bit of tweaking, so here’s a quickstart guide based on what I discovered along the way.

First of all, follow Atlassian’s guide to create a copy of Hubot. This will download the source code including the HipChat adapter.

$ npm install -g yo generator-hubot
$ mkdir myhubot
$ cd myhubot
$ yo hubot --adapter hipchat

Answer the questions, and you’ve got a basic bot config

Me: Why is this report different to the one in production? SysAdmin: Dunno. I guess they must have fixed it production and forgot to check it back into source control.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had that conversation I’d be a rich man. It is usually the result of some late-night troubleshooting and finally the system is working as expected and everyone goes to bed. But the next day, nobody remembers what exactly they changed that fixed the problem, nor do they spend the time to figure it out and get it back into source control. Worse yet, they were making untested changes in a live environment - that shouldn’t be possible!.

There’s nothing that beats the feeling of being part of an exceptional team and yet it is strangely difficult to define exactly what makes one team great and another team not-so-great. Google recently set out to learn how to build the perfect team and came up with some interesting, albeit previously discovered, answers.

To summarize their findings, Google’s Project Aristotle concluded that on good teams:

1. All team members spoke roughly the same amount, and
2. Team members were empathetic towards each other

Harvard Business School’s professor Amy Edmondson described this as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up”. This may seem obvious until you find yourself on a team that crucifies anyone for speaking their mind. I have experienced those teams first hand, and believe me, they’re no fun. Conversations become antagonistic and argumentative and the team dynamic rapidly degrades.

I’ve been pushing large enterprises to adopt agile development practices for years so I was very excited when I began seeing many of them embarking upon ambitious Agile Transformation projects where they attempt to not only change the way they build software, but completely revolutionise the entire IT process from inception, finance, HR, delivery and operations.

But they rarely discuss culture.

“Culture” in this context is used to broadly describe how people behave in the company.