Category: mobile
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Running an Effective Mobile Engineering Team, Part 3: Setting Priorities
Clear on priorities: When you ask people what is most important and why, they can answer. Problem: Leadership is often dominated by iOS users, so Android can feel like an afterthought. If you ask a person on your team what your top priority is as a team, can they tell you? Can they tell you…
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Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 2: Creating Predictability
Predictable. The team has a regular cadence. They can set goals and expectations around deadlines. Challenge: Shipping compiled code. Most advice about improving team velocity talks about continuous delivery. Ship constantly! As many times a day as you call! Roll back if you need to! Tell us about that time you broke prod! YOLO! Here’s a fun…
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Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 1
When talking about team effectiveness, the first thing to consider is what an effective team looks like. Predictable. The team has a regular cadence. They can set goals and expectations around deadlines. Clear on priorities. When you ask people what is most important and why, they can answer. Connected. People work together and take an interest…
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2 Months of Photo Blogging
Since January first, I’ve been posting a picture a day on photo.cate.blog. Now I’ve been doing it for long enough to consider it a proper project, I asked one of my colleagues for a suggestion for a better theme, and she suggested this one – Cubic. I really like it. An incomplete list of what…
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Upcoming Talk on Effective Mobile Engineering Teams
I’m working on a talk about running effective mobile engineering teams – I’d love to know what questions you have about this, what you worry about when it comes to mobile teams in your organization, and what you’ve found most helpful to communicate about them. Comments or email or DMs on Twitter welcome! Title: YOLO…
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What Does a Good Media Experience Look Like?
One of the things I wanted to do more of this year is explore photography. Sometimes I worry that creating a photo editing app and writing a book chapter about creating image filters sucked some of the joy from photography for me. I wanted to do more with my pictures for their own sake, rather than…
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Show & Hide: Free on the iOS App Store
I released Show & Hide nearly a year ago now and it’s now free on the app store. It’s not set the world alight, and I haven’t made the progress I wanted to on releasing the Android version (still in beta), but it’s got a few nice comments, and I’ve seen some beautiful photos. Here’s one of…
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Speaker Notes: How To Be Invisible
Speaker notes from a talk I gave earlier this year at Try!Swift, and 360iDev. There was an article I read last September that profoundly affected my thinking. It was by Sarah Tavel, and is called “Times have changed — going after dollars vs minutes”. She breaks products down into minutes – which I think of as attention…
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Android: Testing an Intent Service
There’s a handy thing in Espresso called the ServiceTestRule, which is for testing Services. Yay. I thought it was just what I needed until I read this bit of the documentation… OK, first up – refactoring my IntentService. This class already did very little, poking something else depending on the kind of Intent it received, and…