Right in the middle of a retiring of a big external platform and moving it over, slice by slice into separate company owned products and APIs (and a few off the shelf things mixed in too!)
I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.
Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.
To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.
Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.
Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.
Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.
But is the user story format the best way to get those common pain points or behaviours out front and centre?
It’s important to know what they are. But the format you use to describe them can change a lot in how you even understand people and what’s going wrong.
And the why is so important in knowing why someone’s dropping out of a journey, not clicking a thing etc
I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.
My reasons are:
- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar
- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14
- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger
- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff
The vaccination rollout programme is very much NHS. Vaccination is something the NHS does. So that shouldn’t be surprising.
Believe Cummings point was that The Department of Health wasn’t in control as it is in terms of test and trace. So NHS + Cabinet office (and not DHSC’s normal red tape, funding models) = success.
However, I think “sources” in the vaccination task force have said Cummings is full of it.
Having redesigned a hospital's recruitment process to use Facebook advertising for the more "blue collar" type jobs (porters, support workers, estates type jobs as well as nurses) I can really see this working.
We got ridiculous traction in the local area. We were reaching people who had never really thought of a career at their local hospital. But a hospital isn't just doctors.
Often with Facebook we didn't actually directly hit the candidate either. People's mum, uncle, brother or friend would find the advert and pass it on.
Facebook is already successful in recruitment. Only makes sense they really target this market and provide the business tools to do it
I've got three things. The last is the key in a "I know more now" sense but the first two provide the framework to let you go ahead and do it or hold you back.
Confidence. You are only as good as you let yourself be. Believe in yourself more. Don't let your worries block your development.
Forgiveness. Forgive yourself for mistakes and not knowing things. As that DHH viral Twitter thing showed, even the best and most productive developers Google the basics all the time
Challenges. I grew the most as a developer when I had to do something and I needed to get something done. Be it a side project, new job or saying yes to something a little out of your comfort zone, challenges help you forge ahead with purpose.
It's often why books and courses don't get you that further ahead on their own. It takes that need to fix x or implement y to really develop
It used to have a minimal set of things you could install but moved to a clean Ubuntu box that you can pretty much muck about with and install what you like.
For Rails, it is perfectly suited and very easy to spin up an Ubuntu VM and play.
I used Cloud9 before hand and though this was a while ago, I had a demo of an Express thing with MongoDB and about 15 mins before said demo it started falling apart.
I believe the uptime is pretty great, just a lasting impression of failing just at the wrong time.
Codio seems to have pivoted however to be more about offering educational institutions the ability to create courses etc. so though powerful, that is what the developers are focused on now
Occasionally the version number of things lag behind in Codio and that is my biggest gripe. That and PHP boxes not having mod_rewrite enabled out the box, but that is just me
I work in a large health organisation right now and the thing that seems to blow most away is just saying yes.
I don't work in the IT department and they basically say no to everything. Regardless of business value or difficulty.
I work in the chief executive office and numerous departments will be amazed when I say yes... Let me look into that.
Recent example was a publicly facing, real-time waiting time tracker for the city's A&E (as well as two walk in centres). Each solution I thought of had compromises but they chose the one they could live with.
Lots of good advice here about pushing back. Be sure to do it in your own voice of course and no need for a revolution. It may be best to focus on small things and grow from there
In that vein, the BBC used to vet new hires (in an assessment) around how they would react to a colleague who kept asking for help on similar things but refused to learn how to do it themselves.
No idea if they still do this but worth thinking if you are enabling your colleagues to just dump it on you.
Ask yourself, do you completely take over? Have you tried getting them to do it by talking them through but not hands on solving it for them?
Often quicker a couple of times to just take over but long term they'll be reliant on you and you'll be stuck helping them solve that problem time after time.
Harder to do that with tasks from a manager or similar, but I've found it helps to talk through what you'd have to do, what you'd have to drop and problems you see coming. You'll probably still have to do it but you can make explicit what will move down your pecking order.
Wish you and the team at Brightwork well Josh. Good luck on the launch.
Don't want to be negative but I will say the landing page wasn't as polished as expected. So important in terms of confidence especially as I'd be paying you to own lots of my apps' back end. Case in point is the use of images with text in them rather than an image with text underneath.
As someone who has to build things solo most of the time, AWS does not need a specialist.
Oh yes, to squeeze the most out of it, I am sure it does.
But you can get along with EC2, Route 53 etc. pretty fine.
Personally found the multiple terms, docs (outdated) and other stories of people being billed lots pretty intimidating but when it came down to it, it wasn't as scary as I made it out to be and I've set things up at about half the cost of Digital Ocean and others.