Random musings

My Favourite Retrospective - The Netflix Pitch

2019-04-01 22:00:00 +0000

I watched as the team shuffled into the meeting room, some holding their “Start, Stop, Continue” post-it notes in their hands.

“Okay folks! We’ve got an opportunity to pitch a new series that Netflix are going to air later in the year”

The team look at me, bemused.

“Basically they want a mockumentry on the work we just completed, and the way we delivered it. I’m worried that it’s not going to be dramatic enough. Can you help me make it more dramatic?”

I could see one participant put away their post-its nervously.

“First let’s consider a suitable genre. What do you think, Love story?”

I hear someone shout “Comedy”, another one calls out “Farse”. I don’t let them see my grimmace as I write these on the whiteboard.

“Good stuff, we’ll go with farse for now. Let’s think up who we’d like to play ourselves.”

Minutes later we have a cast list. Robert DiNero is in this series, as is Bruce Willis and Monica from Friends. Someone has added Remi Malek and I’m pretty sure another suggestion is the person from the Twilight movies, but I try not to show my age. I’ve written them down, but not written which character belongs to which team member. This allows people to assume the roles play better.

“Good stuff, now I know a little technique from writing stories. It’s called a tension graph. You map the tension over time. I want to know what where the main moments of tension.”

I draw a dot and write the project start date. I draw another dot and write the end date. I remeber a bank holiday somewhere in the middle and write that date.

“Do you remeber when the Dave broke the build right before the easter brake?” asks someone

I move to the list of characters and try to read them “Dave…?” I ask looking mock-confused. The respondant sighs and says “Bruce”.

“Excellent” I state, as I mark on the timeline ‘Bruce breaks the build’. “I’m guessing tension was pretty high at this point then”, and I draw an arc going upwards.

“Not as bad as when the requirements changed right at the end”

The energy lifts in the room, the team were getting the hang of it.

…

I love this retrospective format as it gets people thinking about themselves in the third person. I cannot stress enough how useful it was for me to hear someone say “Monica was crying at this point because…” as a moment when an individual could admit the (heightened) emotional impact of certain situations, and accidentally revealing things they don’t normally say in a professional context. It’s easy to then explore alternate ways the “drama could have played out”.

After the story arc is established and we’ve explored the key moments I ask the team to visualise another scenario.

…

“Great work team. Now Netflix is keen to hear what the second series will be like, so let’s try to dial up the drama a little. What could we make more extreme?”

This allows the team to explore the things that would make things worse. It’s useful power because in the later days you may find members losing theseleves and repeating the mistakes from before. Now you have an amusing way to set them on the right path “I’m not sure Remi Malek would do that again”.

I also then like to ask the teeam to consider an alternative.

“… but we all know that the second series they comission is rubbish, so let’s make this the most boring second series ever. What shall we change?” and now the team jump into all the things they want to do differently to make things better. I write everything they say down, and snapshot this board for prosperity.

You can conclude with a simple query…

“It might get dramatic again, tensions will rise and fall. Please take a moment to think over the next few weeks ‘How can I make this series more boring?’.”

How to fix GSAM Battery Monitor in Android Nougat (Using OSX)

2016-11-24 22:00:00 +0000

I’ve been used to GSAM’s excellent battery monitor tool on android for a year or so, but recently after upgrading to Nougat I’ve noticed that it’s stopped reporting accuratly for most applciations.

There is an Android Root companion that is supposed to fix the issue, but Nougat is unable to run it (thanks to better security built in to the mobile OS).

GSAM kidly request that you star an Issue on the open source issue tracker BUT DO NOT COMMENT ON IT. This can help Android offer users the choice to allow apps to access the Battery APIs built in to the OS.

Until this request is brought into the OS (I don’t think it will be any time soon) there IS actually a way to enable the functionality. It’s hidden in comment number #27 on the page…

 > #27 rjkmadi...
 > In the interim, you can give permissions through an adb shell.
 > pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm android.permission.BATTERY_STATS
 > or pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm.pro android.permission.BATTERY_STATS
 >
 > (Thanks for flindaman on Reddit.)
 > Oct 3, 2016

Excellent! But what does that even mean?

Well - let’s try it out. Before I begin a disclaimer.

adb

First let’s see if we have adb…

adb

For me I didn’t. Rather than installing the android development studio, I just want ADB, so I decided to install the minimum bits I needed.

This means getting the “Safe way to install things” using brew. Let’s see if brew is on the machine…

brew

If not - follow the instructions here

If you do have it then make sure it’s working

brew doctor

Since upgrading OSX I had to run an extra command to get Xcode tools working…

xcode-select --install

Now I was ready to install the android-sdk.

brew install android-platform-tools

Now plug in your android and ensure it is connected using PKP connection (the picture communication connection from the menu on your device when you plug it into your mac).

Next let’s ensure we can see the device…

adb devices

It should display your device in a list. Awesome!

Now let’s find the application name installed on the device..

adb shell pm list packages

Somewhere in the list you will see GSAM like com.gsamlabs.bbm or com.gsamlabs.bbm.pro

Take that text and run this next line to enable the hidden permission for this app to monitor battery information.

adb shell pm grant com.gsamlabs.bbm android.permission.BATTERY_STATS

Then next time you restart your Android, GSAM Battery monitor will have what it needs to monitor all the apps running on your device.

Using scss compilation and master CSS files

2016-05-31 22:00:00 +0000

We’ve been working on our Master CSS files. These are files that repsent a section of the site.

Historically we would dump a load of CSS files in a MasterSiteAreaCSS.aspx and it would look somethign like the following….

<%@ Page language="VB" ContentType="text/css" Inherits="BaseCompressedText"  %>
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/global.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/tabs.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/Css/fancybox.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css" -->
<!-- #Include virtual="~/SiteArea/Css/Detail.css" -->

This has served it’s purpose for years, but it’s getting very tired. Firstly it relies on a nasty ASP Includes hack. It also doesn’t allow us to do anything clever with the CSS files.

Our frontend dev is desperate to get on to playing with SCSS, so we decided to start playing with it to see what little changes we could make to our code to get a similar implementation using SCSS.

Here’s our first attempt:

@import '/Css/global';
@import '/Css/tabs';
@import '/Css/fancybox';
@import '/SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css';
@import '/SiteArea/Css/Detail.css';

This worked for files in the same directory, but we seemed to get errors when trying to get files off the route.

Eventually I worked out the correct syntax is to use ./ notation../

@import './Css/global';
@import './Css/tabs';
@import './Css/fancybox';
@import './SiteArea/Css/SearchResults.css';
@import './SiteArea/Css/Detail.css';

Which now seemed to work from an IDE, but had issues when talking to a build server. What we needed to do was add metadata to describe the compilation process for a build command to pick up.

We opted for Gulp

package.json

{
    "name": "mywebsite",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "My Website dependencies",
    "devDependencies": {
        "gulp": "^3.9.1",
        "gulp-sass": "^2.3.1"
    }
} 

gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');

gulp.task('sass', function () {
  return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
    .pipe(sass().on('error', sass.logError))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./'));
});

This got us the behaviour we wanted. Time to go further, could we minify the css as well?

package.json

{
    "name": "mywebsite",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "My Website dependencies",
    "devDependencies": {
        "gulp": "^3.9.1",
        "gulp-sass": "^2.3.1",
        "gulp-clean-css": "^2.0.9",
        "gulp-sourcemaps": "^1.6.0"
    }
} 

gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');
var clean = require('gulp-clean-css');
var sourcemaps = require('gulp-sourcemaps');

gulp.task('sass', function () {
    return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
    .pipe(sourcemaps.init())
    .pipe(filter)
    .pipe(sass({}).on('error', sass.logError))

    .pipe(clean({ compatibility: 'ie8' }))
    .pipe(sourcemaps.write('.'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('.'));
});

Looking good, but then we realised it was doing some compilation in areas we didn’t want it to.

We decided to include gulp-filter to fix this.

package.json

{
    "name": "mywebsite",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "My Website dependencies",
    "devDependencies": {
        "gulp": "^3.9.1",
        "gulp-sass": "^2.3.1",
        "gulp-clean-css": "^2.0.9",
        "gulp-sourcemaps": "^1.6.0",
        "gulp-filter": "^4.0.0"
    }
} 

gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp');
var sass = require('gulp-sass');
var clean = require('gulp-clean-css');
var sourcemaps = require('gulp-sourcemaps');
var filters = require('gulp-filter');

gulp.task('sass', function () {
    var filter = filters(function (file) {
        return file.path.indexOf("exclude-folder") === -1 && file.path.indexOf("node_modules") === -1;
    });
    
    return gulp.src('./**/*.scss')
    .pipe(sourcemaps.init())
    .pipe(filter)
    .pipe(sass({}).on('error', sass.logError))

    .pipe(clean({ compatibility: 'ie8' }))
    .pipe(sourcemaps.write('.'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('.'));
});

This seemed to work nicely. I wanted to get gulp-filter working without the function - there is a declaritive syntax, but I couldn’t get it working.

Remeber to add node_modules to your .gitignore file.

Describing git concepts using javascript visualizations

2015-08-29 22:00:00 +0000

The other day I was trying to describe some branching and merging strategies over distributed repositories to a remote coworker. Sadly I’m fairly new to complex git branching behaviour, so I had a hard time describing what I was trying to say.

I realised the best thing to do was to try and share some diagrams. Now being clued up on javascript, and having a few minutes spare I researched to see if there is anything I could use to generate descriptive diagrams for me.

Luckily I stumbled across Git Graph JS. It’s a really simple library for showing git concepts. Without further ado - let’s see some code.
read more

PCI Complience with TLS version 1.0 with Internet Explorer

2015-05-05 22:00:00 +0000

PCI Compliance is necessary on any site that takes credit card transactions. Trustkeeper is an example of a service you can use to scan your site and see if the site conforms to PCI (Payment Card Industry). To be PCI compliant you have to ensure with various security enhancements are present on your server.

On Feb. 13, the PCI Security Standards Council declared that TLSv1.0 is an unsafe protocol, and now Trustkeeper deems it as a failure if you have TLSv1.0 on your site.
read more

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