Category: Development
Technology titles & performance reviews
At TIM in 2012 we specified our titles and promotion path for members of the Technology team, which was later adopted by other parts of the company. The criteria for promotion was the scope of impact and there was a direct mapping of titles to perceived scope of impact. I’m […]
Read MoreUsability Testing Is Not Just For Customers
tl;dr: Developer tools and shared code can be usability tested, providing a different insight to code review or pair programming. While working on a developer tool, knowing I intended to perform usability tests got me focused on making something usable. Just framing the problem as “providing a usable tool” […]
Read MoreGaining Feedback, Building Trust
A powerful means of building trust and collaboration within a team is to gather around a table and tell each other face to face ‘this is how your actions made me feel’, both the good and the bad. The importance of feedback Effective software development requires a robust feedback loop. […]
Read MoreDistributed Pair Programming @ TIM Group with Saros
There’s a particular technology used within TIM Group that has been too useful for too long to continue to go uncelebrated. The tool is called “Saros“, it is an Eclipse plugin for distributed pair programming that is used extensively at TIM Group. Why We Need A Distributed Pairing Solution We […]
Read MoreTopicalJS: A rose amongst the thorns?
We have a codebase in semi-retirement to which we occasionally have to make limited changes. With active codebases, you are continuously evaluating the state of the art and potentially upgrading/switching third-party libraries as better solutions become available. With inactive codebases, you live with decisions that were made years ago and […]
Read MoreReport from DevOpsDays London 2013 Fall
This Monday and Tuesday a few of us went to DevOpsDays London 2013 Fall. We asked for highlights from every attendant and this is what they had to say about the conference: Francesco Gigli: Security, DevOps & OWASP There was an interesting talk about security and DevOps and a follow […]
Read MoreDoes JDK8’s Optional class satisfy the Monad laws? Yes, it does.
As recently came up in discussion: Does JDK8’s Optional class satisfy the Monad laws? Yes, it appears that it does. Please see this gist for the details! View the code on Gist.
Read MoreHigh Availability Scheduling with Open Source and Glue
We’re interested in community feedback on how to implement scheduling. TIM Group has a rather large number of periodically recurring tasks (report generation, statistics calculation, close price processing, and so on). Historically, we have used a home grown cyclic processing framework to schedule these tasks to run at the appropriate […]
Read MoreThe Summit is Just a Halfway Point
(Title is originally a quote from Ed Viesturs.) This past week, TIM Group held its Global Summit, where we had nearly all of our Technology, Product, and Sales folks under the same roof in London. For those who aren’t aware, we are quite globally spread. We have technologists in both […]
Read MoreBring the outside in: gov.uk
Recently, Jake Benilov from the Government Digital Service (GDS) team visited the TIM Group office in London. His presentation on “7 types of feedback that helped make GOV.UK awesome” was a very interesting tour of the key success factors in building the UK central government’s publishing portal. The talk filled […]
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