Software Companies are the Wild West

Between the 1600s and the late 1800s, thousands of people set off from the edge of the new American civilisation and headed West. Driven by vision, stubborn determination or maybe just a pinch of peer pressure, they travelled across uncharted territory, forging new paths, discovering new places and dying in

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Orienting Teams around the Axis of Change

Tech is a very fluid and changing world, but one of the most lasting truths in technology is Conway’s Law. Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. “How do committees invent?“, Melvin Conway What does Conway’s

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How do you measure expertise?

What is expertise? How do you know when to promote someone? What’s the difference between a Mid-level and a Senior? All of these seem like they have subjective and vague answers but this article intends to provide tools for making these decisions explicit and consistent. What is Expertise? Elliot himself

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Things I learned at my last job

Today I closed a chapter in my life. After nearly 4 years tenure at a company I wanted to reflect on the things I learned over that time. I have been very lucky to have a few excellent – world-class even – mentors here who have taught me things that will

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How to Take a Good Photo

Christmas is almost upon us and pretty soon the flood of pictures of Uncle Bob in his reindeer jumper will reach its peak. Photography is a very simple thing, you just point and click, right? And with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and other devices you’d have thought that learning

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Generation C

The new leaders of the free world are Generation C. They aren’t an age group, people born between certain arbitrary years such as Generation X or Y, instead it is a mind-set and an attitude. But the really interesting thing is that they don’t know they’re in charge. The C

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