robinwarren

What is the cause of the reduced drinking? Reduced hours worked meaning you're happier? Or no work colleagues to lead you astray?

The article linked to this one http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-...

That compares data across the OECD, so fair enough this isn't comparing Papua New Guinea to the UK or similar. However, it mentions in the article the difference between Germany and Greece as examples of higher average hours and lower average productivity. I'd still tend to believe this isn't because the Greeks could get more done by working less but that Germans are tackling different work or using more technology in their work than the Greeks.

> Maybe the reason so many british people drink too much is because they're working too much, and they're (mis)using alcohol to wind down.

Maybe. It seems like we agree on this anyway. I was being slightly tongue in cheek here, not trying to suggest all the freed up hours would be spent in the pub :). I'll leave it at that.

I'd like to believe this article, and in fact strive myself to reduce my working hours one day and have more time for all that other good stuff the article mentions. Shorter weeks could bring a lot of benefits with them to those who can enjoy them. Some problems I have with the article however:

1. Working less may well not result in getting more (or the same amount) done. The article mentions a correlation between shorter working hours and higher productivity. As always, correlation does not equal causation. Most likely those countries with shorter work weeks are developed countries which have higher output per capita than less developed ones not because working 40 hours a weeks is more productive than working 80, but that utilising a higher level of technology gives superior output.

2. The idea that because the Dutch apparently spend all their free time riding around on bikes means the brits would if given more free time is a joke. We'd spend it doing the things we enjoy (damaging our livers?), not suddenly become some imagined healthier happier version of ourselves.

All in all a pretty poor article I think as a result of the above isssues.

I find if I've an interesting enough book I'll choose to read that after my daughter is in bed rather than watch TV, or I'll read in bed at night. I'll admit though that for long stretches of the year I don;t read anything, going on holiday can often be an excuse to start a new book. Having a long commute to work used to help but I've been working from home this year so the amount of reading I do has dropped significantly.

Just finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jarod Diamond. A bit longer than it needed to be for my purposes but he covers the material in some depth, I'd definitely recommend it.

Prior to that I'd read Psycho Vertical by Andy Kirk Patrick which I would very strongly recommend, I don't think you need to be into climbing to enjoy it.

I think I'm about to start reading What the doormouse said by John Markoff or finish reading Technical revolutions and financial capital by Carlota Perez. I think I'll leave the latter and restart it when I've more brain time to spend on it.

You need to talk to your manager, it's their job to understand your situation and help you (and therefore the business) to succeed. There is a possibility they won't get that in which case you need to look for a new job (that won't be hard). Pushing yourself too hard can be an issue, doing it with a backing track of stress around others impressions of your competence is a recipe for disaster.

There should be a way out of this which will leave you, your manager and your coworkers happy and productive and your company successful as a result. Focus on that belief when you plan to talk to your manager, and try to ignore any fear you have about negative impressions they may have of you. And take a break as soon as possible.

I believe (in practice if not theory) it is common to handle db schema updates separately and to run both systems off the same database. This way the data only lives in one location but you get to run two slightly different app servers/frontends on top of it. You are then more careful with database changes. This sounds like a pain in the arse but a lot of people seem to be able to run with it without it causing a lot of additional overhead having to schedule your db changes to go out before your dependant code changes.

Thanks! I checked out Ollertap. It seemed to be focussed on stats for individual boards. Not a million miles away from Corrello but quite a different use case I think. Nice work though, especially for open sourcing it.

Thanks good suggestion. It's currently a toss up between

1. It just got real

2. Too serious for a tag line

3. All grown up

I'm leaning towards number 2 at the moment. I'll deploy a new version tomorrow so will make the final decision then

tell me about it :(

They're advertising for a Developer evangelist at the moment. Maybe they will sort that out.

It would not be hard at all I imagine. I built this as a solo founder so the team at Trello could no doubt replicate this if they desired. This is the risk with building anything on someone else's platform and I don't deny I am taking a risk.

However, I'm gambling that the benefits outweigh the impact of those risks in this situation. Building Corrello on Trello gave me access to a large user base (5M as of last autumn) and one which is growing. Check out google trends for asana, basecamp and Trello https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=trello%2C%20baseca... Not directly linked to their user numbers but Trello looks to be increasing in terms of awareness. I believe there are a large amount of people out there who were previously managing projects in excel or on post it notes. Trello has pulled those projects into the cloud and put a decent API on them. That's a whole lot of projects which were previously stuck to peoples desktops (literally in some cases) which are now accessible via an API. I think it's worth the risk that Trello decides to replicate this functionality as there is a good opportunity there if they don't (or until they do)

That's a better way of explaining it :)

Thank you very much. If they've any questions or improvements they'd like to see they can drop me an email: robin @ thedomain linked :)

You could but others could see those dashboards (although not your data). You'd probably be best off signing up for a personal account as well.

The way it works at the moment is that all dashboards are visible to everyone you invite to your Corrello account. However, they all get their own copy of each dashboard, which uses their Trello credentials to load the data for them. In this way you don't accidentally share data with people who shouldn't see it by creating a dashboard in Corrello. This was a bit more work for me to build and a little more complex to explain perhaps but felt like the correct behaviour.

Good idea. I'll likely up the prices or drop the board allotments. I wanted to launch with something a bit more generous as it seems easier to put prices up. Then I can see how people are using it to get a feel for where the bands should be.

It did seem that most people using 3 or less boards didn't have much need for a dashboard which is why I pegged the free one to that. Something like Corrello was more of a nice to have to them it seemed.

I've seen people with close to 30 boards but not over that yet. How many boards people have does remain to be seen but I'm expecting people to sign up to the freelance and startup tiers mostly.

I'd agree that the number of people who need a dashboard will be fairly small in most orgs. That was why I decided to have the tiers based on number of boards rather than number of users logging into corrello.

It's not really aimed at people managing other peoples Trello boards. It's for anyone managing multiple boards, that could be an agency with boards for each of their clients. But those aren't their clients boards, they are part of the agencies workflow and may be private from their clients.

You're right I think. I should think a little harder to find something which conveys the same feeling without the need for the language.

Hi folks,

I left a full time job at the end of last year and after spending a few weeks with my first child when she was born in January I've been looking to build my own products. After a conversation with a friend who runs a content marketing agency about some of the tech issues he was facing I came up with the idea for Corrello. A large number of his top issues were down to getting data out of Trello. For example he was losing upwards of 2 hours a week looking between each of their boards (one per client) making sure everything was on time, nothing had got stuck and no one had added a comment without @mentioning the person required to move the card on. I originally built a prototype to show him but since that first week I've had something live and I've been working with a few early customers to get the initial feature set right.

I think there is a lot of potential to build add-ons and plugins to Trello for any developers looking for a project out there.

I look forward to all your feedback and comments :)

This is a good read on the 10,000 hour myth. I can't remember where I originally heard that the idea as pushed by Gladwell has been debunked, probably the You are not so smart podcast. I've no personal insight to say whether this is a rule or a myth but the original researcher seems to disagree with the popsci understanding of it.

http://changingthegameproject.com/the-10000-hour-myth/

This test still seems to be under the radar of a lot of candidates. We'll need something else to weed out the surprisingly large amount of candidates who don't seem to be able to actually code one day though. Any ideas?

Hi Nick,

SWFounders meetup in Bristol is a good place to start http://www.meetup.com/sw-founders/. It seems to attract a couple senior devs looking for an opportunity when I've been there.

Secondly, feel free to drop me an email (freebananas at gmail). I run http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-and-area-CTO-meetup/. If you can give me some more details I occasionally find out if someone is looking for something.

If anyone is looking for an alternative I've been working on something similar over at http://hulimail.com.

Not a direct replacement but I'm now adding some additional features to try to make it that. If you're an existing Stacklead customer I'd be interested in talking to you about getting your data migrated and making sure everything works as well at Hulimail as it did at Stacklead.

This is my own list, I've not read these yet but collated this list after a similar promotion

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6398792-growing-software

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6233608-software-product-...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13705334-enterprise-softw...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6278270-the-principles-of...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9706236-management-3-0

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17278287-the-founder-s-di...

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Minds-Technology-Officers-Peopl...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1118443667/ref=as_li_ss_t...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Essential-Drucker-Management-Ess...

I'd second this book. I've just finished it and am writing up a synopsis for my blog. It's been useful for improving my own writing and I intend to use the processes laid out to assess decisions made by others in future.

I get the rather bluntly hammered home moral to use safe reliable tech but that misses a lot of subtlety.

I think the moral of the story is to load test before you dump a bunch of customers onto your system. Regardless of the tech you use you can easily fail in this regard. And secondly not to value people for the effort they put in but the results they achieve.

Call me non typically British but it's pretty obvious why they didn't ask. Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly. "Better to do something now and apologise later than ask for permission and not get it" as I think a saying goes.

Better attribution would have been good, and possibly reaching out to original creators asking them to opt out if they'd rather not be involved. Offering something in return (the embedded player for relevant articles) could have helped grease the wheels. Ultimately, if they get bug they may not need massive support from content creators like Scott but they do need not to be on the wrong side of them.

I contacted them about this using the live chat on the site. Their servers are melting down but it sounds like they're on it spinning up new instances etc.

A short comment but the one I was looking for in this thread. People often forget the "People over Process" part of agile which implies no Methodology is going to be the answer. All you can hope for is to create the correct process (methodology) for the people you have at the time.

Trying to fit the people to the process is why software methodologies fail.

Taunton UK - Covalent Software

A small business in South West England, and a great place to work if you're based anywhere from Bristol to Exeter.

We are currently transitioning between a thick client hosted product and a new browser-based version. Work will be on the browser product, the thick client being phased out as we migrate functionality across. We are looking to hire a motivated developer to join the team and hit the ground running. This is a chance to join a strong team moving an existing product to the browser and adopting what new technologies make sense along the way.

We use Java (Play Framework) on the backend and Twitter Bootstrap for base CSS alongside JQuery, Knockout and other JavaScript libraries on the front-end.

Interested? drop me an email robin.warren [at] covalentsoftware.com