The 'Lean' Oven

A while ago, I started a project to build an outdoor kitchen complete with a wood fired oven. It has been a completely frivolous adventure which has kept me busy over the summer. The whole driver for this was the wood fired oven (and the need to build things, obviously).

When I came to the point where I wanted to fit the oven, I kinda stalled. You should know that these things are really expensive, the cheapest was around £500 the most expensive around £1000. I had planned to have a small one since I figured I would only use it a couple of times a year.

It was this thought that made me realise that I was not thinking clearly about the value, or perceived value it would bring me. I had bought into buying the oven because I wanted an oven and that is as far as it went.

So, I started to think how I could test if having an oven would be as valuable as I thought it would be?

So, I found some guides on building a clay oven. This made more sense - it was less money, I could fit it into the space I had created already and it looked fun to do.

Most of guides said how they had 'dug up some free clay' which obviously makes this sort of caper much more attractive. Not much of that around here, so it would be a cost. I found a local company selling clay, the cheapest was around £6 for 12 kgs. A rough calculation suggested I might need about 5-7 bags. This is mixed with sand which is easy to get hold of and relatively cheap so I ignored that for the time being.

It also had a hidden cost in the floor should probably be made using firebricks. It doesn't have to be but if normal bricks crack from the heat then I would loose my entire investment. I would need 15 for my base and they cost about £4 each locally. I can get them cheaper on the Internet but the postage offsets this so much that it probably is not worth it.

This would give me the option to keep it if it worked, which is a fair presumption since I would probably be following instructions from someone else rather than making it up as we go along. So, to test this idea with the option of keeping it would be around £100 - significantly cheaper than buying one that's for certain.

My thinking was a little clearer now. As great as this was sounding, it's still limiting my options and carries significant risk too. It was certainly a do or die operation - if it worked then awesome but if not I would only have a base and a whole load of clay to get rid of.

Then I saw this....

Yes, it's a fire back. I removed some from my house a while back and put them to one side since they are heavy.

I saw an oven however and with some bricks I had laying around I quickly bodged something that 'looks' like an oven:

But does it behave like an oven? The guides all have a ratio between the height of the oven and the height of the opening. You need enough to ensure a good airflow from the bottom to the stoke the fire. Let's test what we have and get some feedback to see if we need to tweak our design or if this is a non-starter.

It lights and keeps going at a steady pace, it never roars but the wood is questionable and probably damp. I stick a BBQ thermometer and just leave it for a while, monitoring the temp every now and again.

The max temp the oven reached was about 150 deg C. Way short of the 600 you would expect from a 'real' oven but this was with dodgy wood and zero insulation, which is key to getting the temperature up and holding it. Whilst it was going, a lot of smoke come out of cracks and gaps. I solved this by simply packing them with some damp sand, which worked a treat and was nicely temporary as well.

What I also observed when I lit the fire was how the smoke came out of the front, which looked like it was causing a bottleneck. I also noted that the heat losses where significant since it got really hot, so insulation would certainly play a part in how well this works for actually cooking things.

So a further improvement would be to create a chimney just after the dip with a column to funnel the hot air up and out a little easier and hopefully improve draw. This is a one time shot since I would have to cut the fire back but I happen to have a spare so this is not as bad as it sounds. If I ruin it then I still have this one as a backup - so I still have options. If I break the first one I would need to be clear on my commitment since if I break the second one too, I have no more options with my current experiment.

Before I do that, however I could try to insulate it and make sure I can get higher temps. Just a covering of sand would probably help, maybe with an oven fire blanket too which has pretty good insulation value. Using some decent wood would be more representative and pretty low cost (or zero cost if my neighbour lends me some from his wood pile).

This is still a work in progress but it is the thought process that I thought was interesting. I was unsure what value my 'feature' would provide me so I wanted to test it and get feedback. I looked around to see what I had that could get me feedback as fast as possible. I then review what I now know and see if it fits with what I thought. I learn from it, tweak it and iterate to get more feedback.

I still have to prove that the oven will provide me with 'value' a.k.a yummy pizza - but a pile of wood and a few friends will answer that. So my BBQ 'showcase' will get me buy in to create a production version of my prototype.

CV.alt

I hate my CV. I know it contains what agents want to see but I don't think it represents 'me'.

So here is me playing around, maybe I should just send it and see what happens :)

Here is a link to a larger version

Christmas cards for your competition?

The Internet has thrown up some very counter intuitive business models in the last few years. In time, some of these could well be shown to be daft but for the time being they are on the cutting edge of business.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that having no competitors would be an advantage but in a market place as large as the Internet I think you need competition to ensure any sort of customer base.

Imagine a start up with an innovative idea. There is no established sector but there is potential to attract them, probably from other sectors that are related. Or maybe an established company with a niche product that needs to attract new customers to ensure growth or stability.

This is where competition comes in handy. Although you are all after the same customers, you are all marketing and drawing people to the same sector which advertises both you, your sector and potentially your competitors. So, you win some sales, you loose some sales - but you do stand a greater chance of getting them with competitors doing the same.

Different marketing strategies will target different people and conversions are not always obvious or guaranteed. So once the sector is discovered, customers will often look for competitors to secure the best service and/or price.

I would go as far as saying that entering a completely new sector would actually benefit from competition, so why not create some? You could open source your product and actively encourage people to provide a competing service to stimulate the sector.

Competition ultimately fosters innovation. Each company will be looking at their competition, assessing their products and comparing with their own. This basically creates a feedback loop, where we can reflect on what works and what doesn't work and plan what to do next. We get some new ideas from this new perspective, which starts the loop again from our customers perspective.

Our competitors also push us to iterate ideas faster, to forge better relationships and basically be better than them to ensure we get and retain our customers. All good things, if you ask me.

Complacency is too easy to fall into if we have no need to change. Competition forces us to look for value and act. Our competitors should be considered a mirror - what can we learn about ourselves by looking carefully at what they are doing?

After I wrote this thought process down, I found some other people with the similar points:

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fgdi45eekll/5-reasons-why-competition-is-good-for-your-business-2/
http://www.shaunrosenberg.com/10-reasons-why-competition-is-a-good-thing

How nice to feel wanted

On returning from a conference, I was greeted by my daughter who flung her arms around me and said:

"I missed you Daddy!"

Aww. So, I asked her:

"What did you miss most? The hugs, the kisses or the cuddles?"

"Your password to the tablet" was her honest response.

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Azure Recommendation

In 2013 I won a competition to go to TechEd. I have since killed the blog it was on - here is the winning blog entry republished from http://thecodechimp.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/teched-azure-recommendation.html Enjoy!

Yo Boss!

Sorry for the unproffessional start to this email but over the years I feel we have come closer.... the server crash of 2010, the staging server version snuaffu of 2011, the disk error nightmare of 2012 - good times! As a developer I feel I need to be frank with you - our relationship needs to change. Not mine and yours! The relationship with our hosting setup...

I know it will be difficult. Those new boxes we get every year are fun to open, aren’t they? I love the smell of new servers in the morning....  What I don’t love is the ensuing build, re-build, testing, fixing, patching and endless hours of investigation that go with each glorious box that we open. I’m not sure that men spending this much time together, alone, late into the night is a good thing.

I am a simple man, ask my wife - I just want to develop. Your specs are complicated enough, I really don’t need any extra challenges. I want to do this for you at lightspeed.... Speed Of Light Development, a fitting acronym given you have probably already SOLD whatever we are developing.

Jeff doesn’t work at light speed. Jeff? You know Jeff.... or “The Server  Guy” if you prefer. I know Jeff well.... I think he would be my Best Man, if I ever got married again. You see, whenever I need a new environment or virtual machine I need to talk to Jeff. This happens a lot - and Jeff is really Support. Yeah, I know multi roles are great but  honestly, I think Jeff is just looking everything up on the Internet.... I’m fall guy when everything goes wrong, which sucks.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You have already made one decision that will help enormously - we develop our products in Microsoft .NET. Yeah, I know you are a bit fuzzy on what that means but trust me, its a good thing. And guess what? It could be so much better. Seriously, all it takes is to embrace uncertainty.

Yup, uncertainty. We could be BFFs. You see, when you are coming up with a product you simply don’t know how popular that will be. It is difficult to design a web application that will work the same for 10 people as it will with 100,000 people. Its difficult to plan for something that is uncertain. You need to be able to react - to come up with a plan and know you can deliver it.

This is not something you need to worry about, that’s our job - all we ask is you give us the tools. Give us Microsoft Azure and keep the ideas  coming. Let’s ditch the hardware headaches and simply focus on delivering more product to more customers.

Microsoft Azure will change the way we conceive of products and they way we put them together. It will change the way we do business, if you embrace it. Our tools already integrate seamlessly with this new world, all we have to do is press the button. Literally.

Need a staging environment for your new super-important client? We can create a new environment on demand in minutes. We can deploy directly from our existing development environments and we can integrate our existing source control system to continuously deliver software, again all in minutes. We can take that staging platform and promote it to production, no fuss, no downtime, no problem. All this we can do without  writing a line of code or playing with a single config file. And we did not have to talk to Jeff, which is definitely a bonus.

Our development environment will have a new suite of tools and services ready and waiting for us to exploit on your behalf. We can scale up and out immediately but more importantly we can start to design applications  that are designed to scale from their inception and tune them accordingly. We can concentrate on delivering what you want to sell and fluidly adapt to your business requirements, growing organically without  the current drama.

I know you have different concerns. Security, trust, support, costs etc and rightly so. Microsoft Azure was built by the guys who designed the software we already run our business on. We might have a great relationship with our hosts but from a regulatory perspective, we don’t come close to what we should be doing. Would you prefer that security of  our customers data was managed by the company which actually designed the entire software stack or er, Jeff?

By using Microsoft Azure we are sitting on top of a secured, patched, certified platform which is universal across all our deployments - development, staging or production. The costs are based on what we use and we can scale in real time according to how our customers use our products. Once we know our requirements we can purchase upfront and realise double digit savings on the monthly costs (which I know will be more important to you than some of the other stuff)

Jeff will be happy too. We can purchase support direct from Microsoft - which can also scale - meaning he is backed up by certified professionals who know their own environment inside out. And I won’t be answering phone calls at midnight on a Friday, which is handy. Jeff will  have a array of diagnostics allow him to monitor your business and keep everyone happy as well as give us the information we need to refine our products further.

And this is just the beginning. When your finally decide how you want to  take our product worldwide, we can deploy to a number of worldwide locations and use content delivery services to ensure that our content travels the shortest distance possible to all your new customers. We can  develop applications for mobile or tablets all backed by services on Microsoft Azure. With the vast amounts of data we will accumulate we can  start to mine data with Azure’s Business Intelligence tools to give you all those pretty graphs you love to see.

The future looks great too. Microsoft are supporting development communities and encouraging us to join in. Many of the libraries we already use are backed and many contributed to by Microsoft. And they actually want to know what we think so they can make Azure even better.

Actually, moving to Microsoft Azure will ultimately affect our relationship. I will see you a lot less. Not only because I will be busy but because I really don’t need to be in the office anymore. Microsoft Azure allows us to manage our business when and where we want - I suggest we start with Tahiti. I’m mentally there already, are you going to join me?

The Dev Guy

Out and About: re:develop 2014, Bournemouth

This was a new 1 day conference this year that I heard about through a Microsoft mailer. I was late to the party so missed the very reasonable early bird pricing but was treated to a ticket by my wife for my birthday.

I like conferences. I won an all expenses paid ticket to TechEd 2013 and have decided to get to at least 2 a year since that experience, which was awesome. This is my second this year, being followed up with Agile on the Beach in Plymouth in September.

Personally, conferences can show you what you should be looking at next. They are usually a mix of stuff that you want to know more about and stuff that you should be paying attention to.

Re:develop 2014 was a nice mix and was pretty slick - they guys from Base did a really good job of keeping everything running and looking after everyone. The food was excellent and they made sure there were snacks and refreshments galore - it might seem like a weird thing to say first but the quality of catering goes a long way and seems to stick in peoples minds for some reason.

This is the first year, so I expect it will be even better next year (and hopefully the same price).

The day kicked off with a session from Tom Byers, who is a Lead Front end developer for GOV.UK. He basically went through 10 things he has learnt from his experience on the GOV.UK projects. Of specific interest was how design is a Tool, talking us through what they have learnt about how people read content using eye tracking and how different layouts affected how people accessed the info they needed.

Tom also explained how much effort they put into the actual content. There was also some great material on making forms easy to use, which was really interesting (including a very painful video showing how it can all go wrong!).

What you should be interested in is what GOV.UK have open sourced and written about various aspects of UX, here are a few that I jotted down:
https://github.com/alphagov
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/how-users-read.html
https://www.gov.uk/design-principles

Paul Davis from the Ghost Foundation followed up with a off the wall look at what it is like to work at Ghost. This was a great insight and maybe hinted at a trend that we will see more of in the future. Ghost work 100% remote - their way of putting it is "Our headquarters is the internet. If you have a wifi connection, we have an office near you.".

Paul revealed the pro's and con's of this style of working with flair and humour. Rather than a polished sales pitch, we got a guy who explained why he loved what he did and who he worked with - should we all be so lucky. Very cool and definitely the subject of most my thoughts on the way home. Check out Ghost for all your blogging needs:
https://ghost.org/

Ben Howdle was a web developer but has since turned to the dark arts and become an iOS developer. This was a pretty code heavy intro into what is similar, what is kind of the same and what is just plain old odd about iOS development. I was really happy to see someone doing this as Objective-C has never been something that made much sense from all the articles, quick starts and blogs that I have read.You can read about his experience in this shift writing an iOS app:
http://benhowdle.im/2014/04/24/ios-for-web-developers-building-permeate/

Secretly, Liz Keogh was the reason why I had to go to redevelop, being a long time fan of her thoughts on BDD. It seemed effortless - taking us through BDD and Cynefin in under an hour. It was definitely too short, I could have listened to her all day. It was the little details that resonated with me. I am no stranger to BDD or Agile but sometimes a specific sentence makes you sit back and reflect on your own experiences. Liz provided me with several of these. Maybe I should start some sort of fan club? Does she sign things? A photo for my desk would be nice.... more awesomeness here:
http://lizkeogh.com/

The boys from the Guardian where not what I expected. Between Kaelig taking us through breaking down the boundaries between developers and designers and Patrick Hamann taking us through how they use continuous deployment there was a load of information to digest. To be honest, I'm still going through the things they raised and will be for a while.

For me the take away thought was about how short cycles mean faster feedback. 2 weeks is too long for these guys, who like to think in terms of what can be put into production today. Some numbers that blew my mind were 10,000 production deployments a year, 7,000 unique types of device using their service and 8 minutes to deploy. I wish I had counted but the amount of monitoring these guys use is amazing - there must have been about 7 different dashboards in use.

They have open sourced a load of stuff along with their deployment tool, Riff-Raff:
https://github.com/guardian

Phil Bennett from the Carswell Gould agency gave us a comic walk through of a project through to deadline, which he described as Panic Driven Development. He emphasised how no one tool or technique will help absolutely, you need to be flexible to deal with the different types of customers and projects you are dealing with. Interesting perspective and certainly explains the differences I have noticed in ex-agency staff once they leave agencies....

Richard Evans works for a company called WDS, where he works on AI within their R&D team. This was a really interesting intro to AI and it's increasing prevalence. His demo's show AI actors responding to social situations, which you could alter and effect by being an actor along side the other AI actors. He explained how the AI engine worked and how each actor is described in a language designed by Richard for this explicit task. Richard made this funny and easy to grasp, which was really good. This sort of AI is being used in customer service to help people find the content or department that will help them.

Ross Tuck was fantastic. This was a non-technical talk on advice - essentially advice on advice called "Things I believe now I'm old". Ross might have a funny accent but don't let that put you off, his delivery was slick, thought provoking and funny. This is one of those talks that you have to see - he is based in Netherlands so I consider myself very lucky! Check out his whereabouts here:
http://rosstuck.com/

Throughout the day several themes re-occurred - these would be my takeaways:

Conversation - this was a theme that was revisited by several of the speakers. Liz hammered home the use of conversation in BDD above and before documentation and tooling and the boys from Guardian talked about the use of common language between their developers and designers. The AI examples we were shown revolved around conversation too, although the focus was on the social interactions within the conversations.

Feedback - "Assume you are wrong" (Liz), get feedback and iterate - do this as fast as you can. "Don't be afraid to break things" (Patrick), monitor, isolate, fix and repeat. We should be used to iterations - how often are we breaking down work based on the technicalities rather than the need to validate what we are doing?

Openness and Trust  - lots of speakers showed how they had benefited from open sourcing their tools and designs. Both Ghost and The Guardian thrive on trusting their teams which helps them buy into what they are delivering. The guys at Ghost seem to do everything, all the time 24 hours a day and are trusted to just get on with it. The Guardian have developed a culture where their developers are also DevOps and put things directly into production many times a day. Ghost also open their business to their employees - do you know how much your employer has in the bank? How about what they are spending each month? Food for thought.

Definately one I would go to again - any chance of a mailing list so I don't forget? It was the only thing missing :)

What do your customers know anyway?

Agile undoubtedly changes how we engage with our customer. The customer is centre stage to all our efforts.

For any organisation that has kept their customers at arms length, this is a scary prospect. It is highly likely that customers are more hostile than helpful in this scenario.

Involving customers in the development process is not an easy thing to achieve. I have even heard it said that it cannot be done for various reasons. This typically reduces customer involvement to demands made during sale or contract renewal - which are both driven by sales people.

At this point, we are clearly in panic mode as our number one concern is to protect revenue. This is typically where good product design is the last consideration and the product is polluted with some pretty badly designed features.

This is not the customer engagement we need. If it were left to the customer they would have the 'Do It' button that basically performs their specific function. The customer does not know best when it comes to product design - you do. That is what you bring to the party.

Just because your existing customers will put up with a naff experience don't forget that new customers might not be so forgiving. A poor user experience will ultimately affect your ability to attract new customers - they have zero investment in you and will simply move on.

Getting involvement with your customer as a standard part of your development process will radically shake up how you work as a business. Listening to your customer is where the agility that you are looking for will come from.

Our engagement with the customer should focus on one thing - what is the problem we are trying to solve for them. By concentrating on the high level behaviours they are looking for, we get to solve that problem for them. That uses our formidable skills as software developers to their full extent.

The customer does not know what they want. They know what problem they need solving. Once we know that, we can create software that is truly useful.

Just like you would not trust anyone to pass on a really important message, getting the customer to explain the problem to the people who will do the work is the holy grail. The more people you have in the way, the less likely we will solve the customers problem. Diluting their message through a chain of dialogues that are each biased is a waste of everyone's time.

If you can do all this, then you only need a team who can guide conversations with your customer to fully appreciate what problem the customer wants to solve.... and we all have one of those, right?

What does that mean?!!!

I hate three letter acronymns.

I think they represent a past that we have hopefully left far behind. They obscure conversation and serve only to make people think they sound intelligent. Unless you are a part of the club, their meaning can often be shrouded in mystery.

Over the years I have witnessed a massive change in the type of person who has ended up being involved in IT. I can still remember when it was unthinkable that anyone without a degree in comp sci could write software.

As the Internet gave everyone a new platform to write software for, the tools became more approachable and now everyone is invited to the party. This has been the single greatest change in IT and has brought about a new generation of conversable developers.

I will credit Dan Rushton with this phrase, it's a good one. He also bagged the domain where you can check out his ramblings.

I like to think that we can solve all the technical problems that are thrown at us. The bit we are missing is understanding what it is we are actually developing. It should be easy, right?

The idea that a specification can detail everything is frankly insane. If it could, it would likely be unreadable. The future is through the oldest of all forms of communication - conversation.

Conversations are the corner stone of agile software development. Nothing allows a team to convey ideas and gain understanding faster than conversation. If there is a problem, you can guarantee that a conversation will enable people to get to the bottom of it. If it's important, you pick up the phone and talk about it. Conversation is a natural instinct.

Although business value is pinned as what we are trying to uncover, I cannot see how this happens without good communication. Good conversations enable us to uncover value at all levels of the organisation. It is the unseen foundation for all agile principles.

As a developer, communication transcends all other issues. It is key to the success of my code and the organisation I work for. So, I write about my adventures whenever I can. Enjoy :)