Mearso

End of day. Finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable with SASS, but a little annoyed that I...

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:45:41 +0100

End of day.

Finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable with SASS, but a little annoyed that I feel I have taken too long on basic aspects of the CSS /HTML that i’ve been working on.

At least i’ve slogged through my own optionitis and will try to concentrate on making decisions and seeing them through tomorrow.

Working on CSS with CSS Edit today. Started of a bit of a slog, with me suffereing from my usual...

Mon, 18 May 2009 16:53:19 +0100

Working on CSS with CSS Edit today. Started of a bit of a slog, with me suffereing from my usual lack of confidence.

Realised that the only way to work through it is to keep going and be driven by things that need to be done.

So, I’ve been trying to make the views in the app consistent, along with trying to work out what I need from the 960 framework, and what I need to add that is different.

Fantastic

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:18:52 +0100

Fantastic

Can we change the color?

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:34:53 +0100

Recently read some documents from work, and despite my own promises to myself to not get worked up about things find I can’t help myself reacting. I find my motivation plummets each time one of these idiotic documents comes out, though I do derive some black humour from the contributions by people clearly unaware of the sitcom “The Office”.

Maybe by venting my spleen in words I can move on and not let the well intentioned, but spurious arguments that prevail stop me enjoying what I do. If all this sounds a little vague it’s because I’d rather not get in trouble by publicly calling people out over the things they say. It’s the right thing to show some self restraint, and I hope that ultimately we all want the same thing - good websites and experiences.

I guess my frustration is that everyone rightly, can have an opinion about how websites can and should work, but not all those opinions should carry equal weight. Unfortunately I’ve been in plenty of situations where exactly that has happened, and even worse. I’m sure I’m not the only designer who’s had to change a color because the wife of a senior manager didn’t like the color on a cursory glance of a website. I’m sure I’m not the only designer who’s had to bite their tongue whilst daft ideas are lauded and applauded because the sponsors are misguided. I understand that design is subjective, and there’s never just one solution. Perhaps I’m being naive in hoping that others would realise that too.

Trying to end on a positive note, I’ll write some things that might help me to channel my energies in more fruitful directions.

I am creative.
I enjoy creating images and designs.
I have experience doing the above.
I’m paid to do the above.
I understand that design is subjective
I can only make myself happy.

Going forward.

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:17:46 +0000

The past week or so has felt a little like a belated New Year, now that our contractor has left and other projects are demanding our attention. It feels like an opportunity to take stock, have a little breather and dive in to the new things we need to do.

It’s quite exiting to have some more variety of projects to undertake, but I hope we can continue with the Agile methods we’ve been using so far. The rest of the team seem broadly positive about what we’ve learnt, and I feel that were we to look back over the last 3 months , where we’ve been using Pivotal, then we can be reasonably pleased with what’s been done - ( even with the difficulties of a particular part of the work).

I think our reporting is very comprehensive, which helps us not only do the work, but get some idea of how we can do it better. One of the pressing issues at the moment will require us to state where we’ve come from, and where we see things going. To do this we need to have a thorough look at our work and ourselves to muster up the necessary energy.

Just noticed a twitter tweet from someone at the University linking to and pointing out a silly...

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:43:43 +0000

Just noticed a twitter tweet from someone at the University linking to and pointing out a silly example of a blog post that has been put up.

I’m refraining from naming or linking to them because i don’t want to distress either. However, it did get me thinking. It seemed a curious thing to do; to link to an example of a colleague doing something daft and then draw public attention to it. If the purpose was to educate them about their behaviour then surely a private communication would have sufficed.

I would have hoped for a better understanding that there is a person at the root of blog posts, and that ridicule, though fun, it probably ceases to be so when in public

Wrestling with GIT again, but thanks to the helpful people on IRC I have a better understanding of...

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:13:11 +0000

Wrestling with GIT again, but thanks to the helpful people on IRC I have a better understanding of what went wrong. All fixed now

This week’s retro went by pretty quickly, I only had one thing to show since I missed half the sprint, and other things continue to be difficult to launch.

Somehow though we managed to do loads more points, which at least bumps up our average.

Learnt some things about myself this week. Remembered that I really enjoy creating images, and...

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:33:52 +0000

Learnt some things about myself this week. Remembered that I really enjoy creating images, and consequently shouldn’t be surprised that at the clamouring from content people to have a go too.

I’ve been creating some postcards for print, which I need to finish off tomorrow, and it’s be interesting to rediscover the process of being creative with imagery. As soon as I worked through the harder stage of generating ideas, and something with merits started to emerge then the the creative muscles really start to flex. The ideas about colours, textures, composition, balance, function and practicality amongst others really start to flow.The hardest part is the really compressed timescale I’m working under, and the knowledge that I have to get the job to a releasable state. I’m not naive enough to think it’ll ever be perfect, but I could’ve done with more time.

However, a good step back on the design path.

Blimey, it’s been 13 days since I last posted. Where the time goes is a bit of a mystery. I...

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:17:33 +0000

Blimey, it’s been 13 days since I last posted. Where the time goes is a bit of a mystery. I know that 5 days disappeared under a blanket of snow last week.

This week I’ve been pretty happy that I managed to clear some of my more technical outstanding jobs and got cracking on creating some designs. However, I did find it harder than expected to get the creative juices flowing, not being in the swing of things.

I’ve read a few discussions about just where design fits in an agile method, and I’m finding that it’s quite difficult not to put oneself under pressure to get stuff live as soon as possible. The short sprints are great for things where it either works or doesn’t but as soon as one bring qualitative judgements to bear it becomes problematic.

I’ve been thinking that one way I could work around this issue is to get better at breaking down the design task into smaller chunks that can be reasonably tackled in a sprint. Quite how I will do that is something that I need to work out.

Maybe Cucumber story style statements of intent and functions might be interesting to apply to design. Would certainly demand some clarity.

Business like retrospective today. We rattled pretty quickly through the tickets for the week with...

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:21:53 +0000

Business like retrospective today. We rattled pretty quickly through the tickets for the week with only one rejected for further work.

I’m liking our use of pivotal tracker, and it’s great to have all the relevant info in the tickets so we can quickly remind ourselves what each ticket means.

If we carry on like this we might actually get our average points for the week to start going up.

Resolving to get some design tickets on the go this coming sprint. And maybe plan that they don’t have to be done in one sprint.

This week has really flown by. I seems only yesterday that we were doing the retrospective and here...

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:11:00 +0000

This week has really flown by. I seems only yesterday that we were doing the retrospective and here it is again.

Little frustrated this week, I seem to have spent most of my time organising a meeting, helping sort out a GIT problem,writing instructions and remembering lots of things that need adding to our project tracking.

Consequently, I haven’t managed to have a good run at mockups for feature areas on the site. I’m getting a little bogged down, in detail when perhaps I should be starting from first priniciples,but I can’t help having one eye on the implementation.

All this is confirming that it’s tricky to get design and UX issues raised and tracked in the way we are doing agile. Maybe it’s as simple as speaking up more during the planning meetings

Well, at the end of the day, we managed to get ourselves in a right tizzy with GIT. Our pulls and...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:23:00 +0000

Well, at the end of the day, we managed to get ourselves in a right tizzy with GIT. Our pulls and pushes seem to have all gone funny.

As with lots of of things with GIT I have a fuzzy idea and understanding of what went wrong, and an idea of how to proceed.

It seems that the command filter-branch is a mighty powerful one and running that on the repos changes the history such that the object stored in a changed repos will be different from the object in people’s own histories.

I think that a clean clone will fix it. I’ve compared the old repos, and a fresh clone by looking at the tree with the command git ls-tree using the SHA of the latest commit.
The SHA’s of the commits are different in each of the repos. I think I need to go into detail when I understand more.

So, in line with my other writing here, how did THAT feel?

Well even though it’s pretty tricky follow and diagnose, I still think that me and GIT are still friends.

Today, we had our first retrospective since we’ve started using an online system. I found that...

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:51:08 +0000

Today, we had our first retrospective since we’ve started using an online system. I found that a definite improvement on the physical cards, and it was good to have the things in front of us ready to go.

More than can be said for the team itself unfortunately. If the retrospective is all about what we deliver during the iteration, then I guess we all need to get much better at demonstrating the work that we have done. I’m realising, and I hope I’m not alone that publicising what we do and when we’ve done it, isn’t extra it’s part of the process of completing work.

Unless we draw a line under things they tend to hang around and get in the way.

So for me, a general dissatisfaction today at a missed opportunity.

Online Agile System

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:26:41 +0000

It’s been a week since I last talked about work and how things are going. Mainly because most of my efforts have been to pick up where I left off before the holiday. I think I’m back up to speed now, and have some changes to report on our implementation of Agile development methods.

Previously we had been using in the first instance, physical cards stuck on a whiteboard with user stories written on them. When this became unmanageable and difficult to track, we then included a spreadsheet with a variety of other relevant info such as date completed, owner etc. This spreadsheet running in tandem pretty quickly became difficult for all of us to follow.

During this time we’d had a quick look at various sites to manage our process, especially looking at a solution for off site colleagues.

Now it seems that we’ve found a pretty good solution via Pivotaltracker. I won’t go into a full list of the features (it’s covered well by their getting started guide) but it looks a good fit for us.

We now have categories of stories - bug,feature,chore,release. We’ve only been using it for a week or so, but I’m already liking this organisation. We get nice options displaying the state of stories and give the ability to accept or reject work that has been done in the iteration, which itself is automatically filled according to the velocity that we are capable of. This takes some of the chore out of guessing what we can do and bases iterations on past performance.

One small glitch we encountered when moving to this system was that our scoring system was different from that employed on pivotal. After a pretty brief discussion the team agreed that we would try the pivotal system that seems to more easily map to actual units of time. In our case we in effect have 8 work sessions a week and this maps to the maximum score possible in pivotal.

So far, it seems that everyone is positive about this new method, and hopefully we will take advantage of the comments and history features of stories. I can see this being really useful to enable us to pass stories around with relevant discussions included.

Back in work after what seems like a long Christmas break (not that I’m complaining). Glad...

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:15:41 +0000

Back in work after what seems like a long Christmas break (not that I’m complaining).

Glad that I haven’t completely forgotten every GIT command, and indeed everything I was doing before the break.

Considering Pivotal Tracker for our project management. It seems like it’ll do everything that we need, and some things we hadn’t conosidered.

Designing a Cucumber Logo

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:26:00 +0000

Not a logo for Cucumbers as a population, you understand, but a speculative logo for software, Cucumber

Been enjoying myself working on a speculative logo. I’m enjoying the iterations and different directions and ideas that come when one gets going.

You can have a look at some of the ideas on

One thing I’m finding tricky is staying away from the wiki a bit in case people think I’m pinching ideas, when I think people are generally thinking the same way, hence things end up appearing similar. I just hope I don’t upset anyone! We all know how easy it is for things to get out of hand and accusations start to fly.

Managed to finally get some selenium viewtests working, but had a bit of trouble along the way...

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:38:40 +0000

Managed to finally get some selenium viewtests working, but had a bit of trouble along the way targeting a window opened with javascript. Since that was the reason for using selenium in the first place I needed to get it working.

I eventually managed to get the selenium to target the opened window and check for the existence of text on each of the sites the links led to.

I then had a bit of trouble, checking the visibility of an element and on the page which seemed to be fixed by changing the order in which the tests were running.

All in all, pretty daunting, because I can see that Selenium could potentially test a whole load of things very usefully, but there’s still a pretty steep learning curve.

At least now I can move the ticket into completed - until the next version of that feature. Which will hopefully be done by writing the tests first.

Ended the day as I began, struggling with Selenium view testing. Will take a break to turn 39 and...

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:06:44 +0000

Ended the day as I began, struggling with Selenium view testing.

Will take a break to turn 39 and have another crack on Friday.

Started helping the new guys set up their shiny new iMacs today, though in truth there’s not a...

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:21:26 +0000

Started helping the new guys set up their shiny new iMacs today, though in truth there’s not a lot of help needed.

With a few commands rails is swiftly up to date, a good set of core gems is ready to go and GIT is installed.

MySQL might take a little work - ie follow a tutorial, and then the boys can get cracking on their work.

It’ll be interesting to see how they get on with the Mac, both coming from a PC background. Shouldn’t be too tricky to switch. Hoping that they will keep in contact with us and keep asking - that’s the way I’d prefer to impart stuff rather than try to cram too much in on the first day.

The rest of the day got me thinking about design , and some of the lovely designs out there on the interweb.

It made me resolve to trim my RSS feeds and refocus them in a design direction, and diabuse myself of the daft notion I seem to have that doing a design tutorial isn’t work. I’m paid to design, so er.. i guess it’s allowed.

Had to leave retrospective early today, so I will need to catch up tomorrow. Before I left I managed...

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:23:29 +0000

Had to leave retrospective early today, so I will need to catch up tomorrow. Before I left I managed to demo the content that I’d brought over from our Instiki install.

It wasn’t straightforward since the git-wiki didn’t like the format of the filenames (with spaces) which meant that it was not adding and commiting changes to the repository.

It’s a nice idea to use a repository and serve the files, and the next step is to sort out a server and some security. Also liked the attach option, though we’ll have to try out what files it’ll accept and what happens.

Looking forward to planning tomorrow to see how we start to work with the cloud stuff.