For the last couple of weeks, Graham, Marcel, Sinem and I have been experimenting with Amazon’s Alexa Echo Dot. An Electric Hockey Puck that uses voice recognition powered by Amazon Alexa voice assistant. In this blog I’d like to explain how one…
You might have read that we had 2 weeks to play around with Alexa and build a sommelier skill to recommend wine pairings to your food.
I've lost count of the number of times organisations have told me they have a "fail fast, fail often" approach to delivering projects. This isn’t a new idea, but in practice, so few companies are open to systematically trying new things, making…
Karma Tracker is an internal project at Red Badger, implemented in Clojure, that tracks contributions to OpenSource projects by the members of an organisation. It allows us to keep track of Red Badger's contributions to the OpenSource world. What…
Recently, I had one of those moments where someone asks you a question that exposes a lack of knowledge you didn't know you had. The question concerned accessibility and best practice in this area. It's possible that I once knew the answer, but if I…
As the name implies, this is the perfect companion to Design Thinking. For those who don't know, Design Thinking is a collaboration method that helps a group pool their collective IQs and come up with startling good problem solving ideas.
Starting a new job brings the inevitable challenges of everything being new; routine, colleagues, locations and ways of working. While you obviously have an opportunity to gauge a company culture during the interview process, you don’t really know…
“Strategy is a process, not an event. Organisations make their strategy 24/7”Clayton…
On the weekend of the 4th & 5th February I went to Brussels to participate in FOSDEM, Free and Open Source Software Developer's European Meeting, for the 3rd time. FOSDEM is the biggest free and open source software conference in Europe and it is…
A good test harness is an essential safety net in any code base. Tests save us from ourselves – from writing bad functions, regressing existing features, and creating user journeys with dead ends. Most importantly, they give us a sense of trust that…
Red Badger is prototyping a series of play cards to help solve sticky challenges with inspiration from Lean, Agile and Coaching. Our research has shown that the toughest challenges for design consultants may not be in design or tech. In this third…
This title is a bit of an oxymoron. You can’t really call it a cross-functional team if there isn’t UX and Design in it to deliver your product. But we see so many times we have to dig deep to keep these disciplines in our delivery teams.
Getting around London is very easy. The London Underground (Tube) is super quick and the buses come every 2-3 minutes. Although, the best way to see everything will be to walk - the tube map can be deceiving - everything is a lot…
This January 24th we gathered for another React London meetup. Pizza and drinks brought us joy and warmth while Facebook’s office got packed with hundreds of developers excited for a great round of talks. This month we had three presentations. The…
Enzyme is a testing utility library for React. It lets you shallow render your components one level deep so you can test them in isolation. I'll show the problem with shallow rendering and what you should use instead when unit testing React…
Mid last year Red Badger decided it was time for a React conference in London. We’ve been hosting the React London meetups for almost 3 years but we’ve never managed an event as big as a conference.
If I said to you I know about less safe dad, the place where your brain would go probably isn’t toward project management. Technically, if I was being completely correct I would say LeSS SAFe DAD. Sort of looks more like a cry for help created from…
A few weeks ago I attended Clojure Exchange at Skills Matter's CodeNode venue and spent two days getting up to speed on Clojure Spec, ClojureScript and everything in between!
Yep, we know about mob programming. It’s a technique the developers use here at Red Badger to work through stories, from complex programming problems to deciding on the lexical semantics of CSS, and is based upon the concept that more brains are…