If you are involved in the startups world, it is likely you have read or at least heard about Traction, a popular book written by the CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg. It frequently features on ‘must read’ lists for startup founders, alongside books like The Lean Startup and Zero to One. In short, this awesome book – buy it, if you haven’t already – tells how a startup can discover which marketing strategies work best to grow their business. Continue reading
Why Baidu’s ECharts Is the Only Charting Library You Need
If you are a frontend software engineer, it is likely you will need to implement some kind of chart or data visualization in your app at some point. Whether you are building a full-blown analytics tool or enriching some small part of your application, you will need a charting library that is easy to use, highly-configurable and features a wide range of chart types. You will typically reach for a familiar library already in use on thousands of other web apps; something to get the job done.
But, if your experience is anything like mine, you will most likely find your chosen library is deficient in some significant way. If you are lucky, you will discover this early on, before a requirements change truly lands you in hot water. You may find your chosen library does not support more complex visualizations or has minor – but nonetheless irritating – bugs around chart sizing and positioning. Continue reading
Software Project Management: Limit Your Priorities
Head to your project Trello board, or JIRA, or whatever tool you happen to be using, and look at your backlog. How many of those tasks are in each of the highest, high, medium, low or lowest priority levels?
If it is more than 5 in each priority level, you have got a problem. Here’s why… Continue reading
Modern Portfolio Theory for Cryptocurrencies
Somebody recently mentioned to me that Bitcoin had passed through $2,500 earlier this month. Knowing I had most recently purchased Bitcoin at around $235 dollars in January 2015, I was a little disappointed at missing out on a 10x return over 2.5 years. Yes, I had spent my Bitcoin soon after buying. Continue reading
Why Git Bisect is My Favourite Git Feature
For almost any non-trivial software development project, bugs are an inevitable fact of life. Although software teams can, and should, use unit and acceptance testing to reduce the frequency of bugs, from time to time a developer in the team will introduce a bug to the codebase. Continue reading
Voting System for Group Decision Making
The voting system is perhaps the most important aspect of any collaborative policy-building tool. For the past year, I have been working on an experimental side-project, code-named Commons, to build an online debate and voting platform to enable people to collaboratively build political policy. The aim is to build an online, distributed alternative to centralised parliaments, so that the general public can truly have political influence. Continue reading