Few executives would be happy to walk into their conference rooms to find their leading staff playing poker but in software companies, that’s exactly what’s happening. And the boss is playing as well. The players aren’t gambling with their salaries though, or even their options. They’re betting on the amount of time it will take to develop a feature. The practice is known as Planning Poker and...
When Facebook moved into new offices in Menlo Park in 2015, Mashable called the campus “a child’s candy-fueled daydream.” Designed by Frank Gehry, the building has a nine-acre rooftop park, teepee swings and meeting rooms that double as ball pits. Mark Zuckerberg called the mile-long workspace the largest “open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people.” The goal, he...
As communications have improved and productivity platforms like Slack have made it easier than ever for scattered team members to stay in touch, virtual working has started to look like the revolution the gig economy needed. More than a third of the US workforce has said that they have telecommuted and the World Economic Forum has described flexible work both as a “general trend” and “one of the...
DevOps is intended to be a faster and more efficient way for enterprises to roll out software. It replaces the traditional stages of planning, development, testing and implementation with a concurrent system in which development, testing and implementation are merged to form a single, seamless whole. It’s a relatively new way of working—the system emerged from an Agile conference in 2008—but it’s...
The name of the end product might be decided by ad men, focus groups and marketing people who think tags are for displaying brand names, but while a project is in development, it’s the programmers who get to come up with the working titles. It sounds creative and fun, an opportunity for geeks to undo their ponytails, let their hair down and come up with something cool and funky. Often they do...
“I was working for Google Maps then as a software engineer,” recalled Tatsuo Nomura in a BBC interview, “and every year Google would do an April Fool’s joke. I did a couple of them and one of them was called Pokemon Challenge. Because I was a huge Pokemon fan when I was a kid… I thought it would be interesting if I put the Pokemon on Google Maps and have the users find them and catch them.” And...
Being an artist always seems like such a lonely job. They always have to work alone, surrounded by half-completed canvases, overturned paint pots and wobbly easels. At best, they’ll have a model to console themselves with at the end of the day – unless they’re painting a still life – but usually, if a painter talks about his ideas, it’s to himself and to his work in progress. Writers are little...
It sounds either horribly confusing or wonderfully psychedelic. Synesthesia is the ability to hear in color, taste words or imagine numbers as shapes. The condition comes in a variety of different forms, with the most common linking numbers or days of the week with a color. “Tuesday” might be red, for example; “3” could always look green. Other synesthetes might associate low musical notes with...
“Think Different” says the slogan of the world’s most creative company — the firm that imagined what would happen if you combined touchscreens with mobile phones then blew them up into the most mobile of computers. With hindsight the success of the iPhone and the iPad looks stunningly obvious but you can have a lot of fun trawling the Internet for those with a lack of foresight. But what does...
There used to be a time when entrepreneurs would dream of building million-dollar businesses. They’d wire together some gear that they picked up in Radio Shack and hope that one day it would all work well enough to give them seven figures and a large house. For techpreneurs today, that amount is barely worth getting out of bed for, and in Silicon Valley a million bucks won’t even pay for a...
Recent Comments