Hello there, potential future SharePoint wizards! 👋 As someone who has a career littered with brief pieces of SharePoint administration and development, I know firsthand how this platform can serve as an invaluable entry point into enterprise software development. Whether you're a junior developer or looking to break into tech from a different background, understanding SharePoint and its…
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Introduction I recently stumbled upon a potential job opportunity through a mate. While I might not tick all the boxes, I do have relevant experience in several areas the employer is after. So, I took a punt and chucked my CV into the mix. However, if I do land an interview, I'll need to brush up on my previous experience and sharpen my skills a bit. In the world of data, it's often about…
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Whilst I am still learning and actually struggling more so than with any other language/framework than I've tried to get on yop of before... Flutter is brilliant for whipping up cross-platform apps! But here's the rub: what works a treat on your trusty emulator might throw a wobbly on a real phone. I thought I'd make this blog post about my recent experiences working on an app with a friend. I did…
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As someone who struggles with staying focused and managing my time effectively, I was drawn to the Pomodoro technique. But I couldn't find a free, high-quality app that fit my needs, so I set out to create my own. The Pomodoro technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. Named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used during university, the technique is a time…
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Refreshing My Personal Portfolio: A Shift in Perspective It's time to give my personal portfolio a much-needed overhaul. My understanding of what a portfolio should accomplish has evolved significantly. Previously, I viewed it as a mere showcase of projects and technologies. Whilst that's partially true, I've come to realise that explaining the rationale behind each project is far more crucial…
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Playwright: My New Best Mate for Web Testing 🎭 Hey there, fellow web enthusiasts! 👋 Ready to jazz up your testing game? Let me introduce you to your new best friend in the coding world: Playwright! 🚀 What's the Fuss About Playwright? 🤔 Picture this: you're juggling multiple browsers, pulling your hair out over flaky tests, and drowning in a sea of code just to check if your website works…
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The Rise of DeFi in Web3: Your Ticket to Financial Freedom? 🚀💰 Hello, fellow Web3 admirers! 👋 Are you fascinated by the buzz around Web3 but still trying to figure out where you fit in this exciting new world? Well, buckle up, because we're about to dive into one of the hottest topics in the space: Decentralised Finance, or DeFi for short! 🏊♂️ What's All This Web3 and DeFi Malarkey? 🤔 First…
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Testing 101: An Introduction to Software Testing I'm still trying to crack this 'get a Developer job' thing, but I have started to realise that as my projects get bigger, in the hope of building something useful enough that an employer might be interested in taking a chance, the lines of code have increased hugely. When you look at something like a React project, it is likely made from many…
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Blockchain Bonanza: There's More Than Just Bitcoin, Mate! 🎢 Alright, let's be honest. When most people hear "blockchain", they immediately think "Bitcoin". And fair enough! It's like thinking of fizzy drinks and immediately picturing Coca-Cola. But hold onto your hats, folks, because the blockchain world is a lot more colourful than you might think! 🌈 Bitcoin: The OG of Crypto 🕰️ Let's start…
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Once a Blog, but not so much now One of the oldest domains I still own (not including all the projects I have long since abandoned...) is called ChineseHotpot.co.uk. It has been many things over the years. It started as a blog site on a terribly clunky platform. I eventually shifted to WordPress, which was better, but I couldn't quite get the control over the platform that I wanted. I then…
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Building in Public: Using GitHub, Netlify, and Firebase with Environment Variables Building in public is an excellent way to engage with the developer community, get feedback, and share your progress. It is a popular hashtag on Twitter/X and has a thriving community that often give one-another feedback and support. I have been trying to #buildInPublic for a while, this involves leaving the GitHub…
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As a newcomer to the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency, it's essential to grasp how tokens work. This blog post aims to demystify WallaceCoin, a hypothetical ERC-20 token, by breaking down its code and discussing potential improvements. By the end, you and I will have a clearer understanding of how cryptocurrencies function and some best practices for security and decentralisation. Setting Up…
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Number bonds are pairs of numbers that combine to make a given total. They are fundamental to developing a solid understanding of addition and subtraction in mathematics. By practising number bonds, children can enhance their mental arithmetic skills, making more complex calculations easier to handle. Background I have a six-year-old (at the time of writing) who shows a decent level of arithmetic…
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I have long admired what I think Web3 could become. I have built a few ERC-20 tokens and Smart Contracts, for educational purposes only. I've looked at NFTs and Blockchains in general, in fact I often blog about these topics. Studying, reading about and trying to make things related to Web3 and blockchain is essential for understanding the future of the internet and finance. These technologies…
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Technical Debt I feel like I just learned create-react-app and then the next time I went to build a React app, the recommended route was not to use it anymore. I briefly toyed with learning Angular but I didn't enjoy it. It's actually more different from React than I was expecting. I wasn't sure what the point of these competing frameworks was, so I dived in, had a read, tried a couple, and ended…
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Mastering Prompt Engineering: The Key to High-Quality LLM Outputs Crafting the right prompts is both an art and a science, and it’s the key to unlocking the full potential of LLMs. In this post, I’ll explore the essential steps required to master prompt engineering and consistently achieve superior results. 1. Understand the Task and Define the Objective Before diving into prompt creation, it’s…
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How AI is Supercharging my deep dive into Software Development Like so many others after the 'stay at home' periods in 2020-2021, I found myself at a crossroads in my career, feeling unfulfilled and seeking new challenges. After much soul-searching, I decided to take the plunge and transition into the world of software development and data analysis. Little did I know that this journey would be…
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Creating a Snake Game with AI Prompt Engineering In today's world, artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we approach problem-solving and task automation. One fascinating application of AI is prompt engineering, which involves crafting human-readable instructions (prompts) to guide AI models in completing specific tasks. In this blog post, we'll explore how we leveraged AI prompt…
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If, like me, you are one of the many that are currently looking for a new job then you are probably searching for opportunities across multiple sources such as job sites, agencies, LinkedIn or with potential employers directly. If you live in some strange ideal world where you can source and apply for all of your job opportunities through a single platform, first, I am jealous and second, this is…
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In my search for a new job I recently spoke to a recruitment agent that asked me if I had used php. My answer was 'yes, but not for a long time'. We moved on to Laravel, which I'd kind of poked about with but never really got into it. The recruitment agent went on to suggest that there's a big shortage of php developers at the moment and companies are willing to recruit those with less than ideal…
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I am currently battling through another PoC mobile application, this time using FlutterFlow. The new project I have never used this platform before, and I still haven't figured out how to hand over the end project to someone else yet (I need to build the project in my own account for a couple of reasons, before handing over to a client upon successful delivery), but I'm also a long way from the…
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I previously had a go at building a Proof of Concept mobile app in Flutter, though I didn't truly understand what I was doing, I just did enough to find my way through and get a working concept. By working, I mean, it had a layout and responded to clicks, it didn't actually do anything interesting, there ws no engineering under the hood. I just figured out how to get the layout I wanted and for it…
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You're probably already familiar with Contexts in React, we use them with useState and useEffect to keep track of session data, such as who is logged in, if they have anything in their shopping cart etc. We use actions and unique strings which may or may not contain a payload. We might need some examples to make this a little easier to understand. Stick with me here. For now, we need to know that…
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I've talked before about how my parents see things like Bitcoin as being 'that thing that bad people use', I also noted that those same people didn't have the same opinion about Ethereum, though it wasn't much better, but for different reasons. So Bitcoin has marked cards and Ethereum is basically not really known at all beyond tech-crowds, what about NFT's? NFT's are seen as silly monkey pictures…
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Is the number of Formula 1 Driver Championships the measure of The GOAT? I recently returned to a project that I started more than a year ago but that quickly fell away as my other commitments took hold of my time. This project is mostly around using Python for Data Analysis, the data to be analysed will come from Kaggle. There will also be an element of web-frontend involved as I want to display…
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This is a completely different post to what we might normally find on this site. The original Surface Duo reached End of Life support on September 10th 2023. An amazing concept What is the Surface Duo I hear no-one asking, and that's part of the problem, but we'll talk about problems later. This device was one of the best folio concepts we've seen so far. It was designed with Productivity at heart…
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This is my own web resource, so it is a pretend project, I'm the PM, the designer, the developer, the product owner, the whole lot, but there's no reason why we can't walk through some of the PM stages. The only exception is that resources (People, Time, Money) don't really count in this example. Project Initiation We need a reason for the project, why are we doing this? Define the project goals A…
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I originally wrote this blog post for my employer, before they abandoned the blog section of their website, so 'We' and 'Our' = my Employers organisation rather than multiples of me. At the time of writing, we have pretty much successfully migrated all of our web resources (both ours and the web resources of customers that we host) from our dedicated VPS (virtual Private Servers) instances to a…
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Of course I don't agree with pretty much any of the video content, I'm not going to link here as I don't want to generate additional traffic for something I think is mostly ill-informed. That said, there were bits, especially content related to NFTs where I thought 'hmmm, I can see how they came to that conclusion'. What I am interested in is the comments related to IPFS specifically, which…
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Always look at your data It is important to always look at the data before you do anything, a good old Eyeball mark 1.0 can give you a lot. Now of course we know that when it comes to analysing large volumes of data, nothing will beat a machine, but it is quite amazing just how much you can get from just looking at the data. If you can't see the data, then don't believe it, always be a data…
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I thoroughly enjoyed Kai-Fu Lee's book 'AI Superpowers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order when I first read it in 2018. At the time, both finding the content immensly interesting yet also considering it still something that was some way down the road. ChatGPT and the rise of the LLM 2022 and now 2023 has seen an explosion in LLM news, with Open AI's ChatGPT probably taking most column…
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I saw a great question in one of the communities I'm a part of; What are some points, where a web2 voting system would not be very secure, compared to a web3 voting system? I saw a couple of points straight away and thought I'd share on my usual waffle board. Manipulation Web 2.0 is centralised, anyone can take control of the web2.0 resource and manipulate it, sometimes in undetectable ways (of…
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Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Ethereum blockchain is that it's more than just a crypto-currency. We can mint tokens in the form of coins and NFTs, but we can also use the Ethereum for things like smart contracts, Decentralized Applications, Decentralized Autonomous Organisations, Decentralized Finance and more. But how can so many different things live on the ethereum blockchain…
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Unfortunately data science is full of new terminology that often has no agreed meaning, so we see lots of confusion around things like AI, Big Data, Data Mining. We do things like Exploratory Data Analysis in the company I work with, we do that as a way of investigating the data, digging in, trying to find correlations but when a customer first reaches out to us, we find that they confuse this…
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What I’m going to discuss here is the benefit of using Machine Learning to improve or automate email handling. The fairly big elephant in the room is just how much effort are you willing to put in? For those of us with Gmail from Google or similar, the service is already pretty good, but there is still room for improvement, however, in order to deliver this, you’d probably need a gsuite account…
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Scalability Allow for scalability when building a dataset, this needs to be able to grow in both number of observations and in terms of features observed. We should consider both our need and future needs (this means documenting the data!). Be aware of conditioning data to meet a tools requirement, that is to say that if we engineer the data to suit Tool X later we may find that Tool Y is a…
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Whilst working for a Client previously, I had the welcome challenge of moving a new team, that as individuals, all know about Agile but were used to delivering in Waterfall. I started with a few high-level talks about how they can deliver work much quicker, emphasising the importance of short feedback loops and agreeing on the definition of done before we start churning out products etc. The team…
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When making improvements to an existing product, service or solution, arguably, the most efficient method is through marginal gains which is a term that essentially means continuous improvement and involves breaking down the problem into smaller problems and tackling each in turn with many small improvements adding up to an overall big improvement. But when we want to make something completely new…
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During a Stage a PM will distribute Work Tasks to various teams, monitor and record the quality, update and maintain the business case as well as recording and managing risks & issues. We often take input from the various teams with regards to their work and and deliverables, recording these in places such as the Quality Register and use those details to produce Highlight Reports. A highlight…
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Use a whiteboard You want to start with a large space, a whiteboard or a wall and a big pile of post-it notes, begin by identifying the product, then ask the team to break it down into deliverable sized chinks. A chunk will vary from team to team, something can be built in isolation and others cannot, some can be built in a few short hours and others may take a few days. Some teams will define…
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Good Data This is data that has been cleaned and curated to remove noise (the stuff we don't need). We may have performed some Feature Engineering such as scaling or reducing dimensionality. Data Curation is a time intensive activity. Right Data When the Data Scientist makes a hypothesis we need enough relevant data to be able to build a predictive model. The Problem Description is very important…
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If you’re building a team from scratch, this part is actually quite interesting and I’ll try not to talk too much about maturity of process at this stage as I think that subject is actually worthy of a post of its own. Selling Agile If I asked everyone how long a piece of work would take, and then I asked them how long that piece of work actually took. Some would estimate too little, others, too…
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It’s important to have the right team for your project. Without the right team, no matter how good a plan you have, the work will not get done. If you’ve followed parts 1 & 2, you’ve seen that we covered the importance of a project plan, dividing up the tasks and estimating time. In this post, we ‘re going to talk about People and Costs, or what is sometimes known as resource management. People…
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Typically, cleaning up the data is often the most time consuming part of a data practitioners working day. Feature Selection Getting the best results from your data requires work, we can start with something called Feature Selection. Feature Selection, also known as variable selection, attribute selection or variable subset selection, is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features…
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Estimating Time is probably one of the hardest aspects of Project Planning. Typically, it is felt that most people are generally not naturally good at estimating time. However, with a suitable approach, most people can get over this challenge. It helps to have accurate time estimates, but they don’t need to be perfect. You’re trying to predict the future here, there is a great deal of uncertainty…
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Just to step back a moment, this idea of a project plan isn’t specific to any one methodology and therefore I’m going to avoid using methodology specific terminology throughout. The central point of Project Management is to ensure that you achieve your objectives within a predicted timescale and within, what is usually, a fiscally limited budget. To help visualise and document the project goals…
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Data comes in all shapes and sizes, there is as much variation as you can possibly imagine, probably more so in fact. There is one constant; working with data is hard! Data Collection Data collection is time consuming and is often resource intensive. We can buy data, but this is usually expensive and not always suitable for what we need, therefore even purchased data needs to be cleaned and…
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Okay, okay, we’re not really going to be building an Xbox here. The title relates to a book I read on the subject of Kanban and the development of Kanban for software development throughout the building of the xbox. Stepping back a little; the Kanban system has been around longer than the xbox. Kanban (看板), meaning billboard, or signboard, in Japanese, is a scheduling system for Lean…
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Have you ever wanted to deliver your meeting a little differently? Perhaps bored with the same old PowerPoint slides and the usual structure of one person talking and clicking and everyone else watching? Well, this is a way of making the meeting a little more involved and getting attendees to feel part of the meeting. This works best with an empty wall and some big, clear post-it’s. Start with a…
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Some time back, I was hired as a Project Manager for a Security Team. We were keen to fix old problems, one of those was over-promissing whilst under-delivering, So we decided this was a good team to bring into the Agile fold. I was lucky to find my self in an organisation that had an existing Agile Coach, so I reached out and asked how he might get my team ship-shape and raring to go. The team I…
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One of the first posts I wrote about was comparing PRINCE2 with PMP and something similar and just good old common sense. At the time, I was working with a process-based-methodology, something that my employer at the time had built on the back of PMP. I weighed up one against the other and felt that whilst PRINCE2 told me why to do something, PMP was better at telling my how to do something but I…
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I will admit that I have been surprised with how much NFTs have exploded this year. I guess it has something to do with everyone stuck at home and some people getting things like government payments to get them through these difficult times. What the heck is an NFT? A unique digital identifier, it is immutable (cannot be changed) and is used to record who owns what. I said previously that I think…
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Interestingly, the MNIST data is actually a modified set of an older database of handwritten numbers made up of 60,000 from the United States Census Bureau and 10,000 from American high school students. The original data was modified so that half the training data and half the test data came from both sources. Getting this test running was my first step into doing something with this machine…
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Simple Linear Regression is when we consider a single independent variable. Whereas an examination of many independent variables is called multiple linear regression. Linear Regression has 5 key assumptions: Linear relationship Multivariate normality No or little multicollinearity No auto-correlation Homoscedasticity Linear relationship requires a relationship between the independent and the…
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Conjecture ONE – Agile doesn’t work 😥 Firstly I know agile works! but does it work in big companies? Or maybe the big company is fine, maybe it’s the team I’m in, perhaps the team just don’t get it! The team is geographically dispersed and I would say that this (geographical dispersion) is a huge disadvantage for a fledgling agile team, nothing beats a board full of post-it‘s but if no-one walks…
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I previously wrote about the blockchain as a kind of blockchain 101 post, but it was smashed in the comments. Not just because I skimmed over bits or oversimplified others, but because this blog used to be a WordPress site and every single bot in the WordPress community spammed me with crypto-scams, so I promptly de-listed the post, just to give my mailbox a rest. This post is my 101 to Ethereum…
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An SVM is one of a set of algorithms called Kernel Methods. Kernel methods are a a set of classification algorithms that aim to solve classification problems by using decision boundaries. A Decision Boundary is a line (Hyperplane) that might be drawn to separate to classes of observed data. New data points are considered against the line in order to check which side they fall. The better the…
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In something like a PRINCE2 project, there are 6 aspects of project performance to be managed. Each aspect requires some form of control, these controls feed in to reports and updates to your stakeholders as part of a managed communication strategy. Risk Benefits (or dis-benefits) Timescale Scope Quality Cost Risk There is Risk in all projects, a project is by its very nature, something…
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So what distinguishes a project from Business as Usual? Projects are how we introduce Change into an organisation. As stated above, that Change could be any number of things. Projects are Temporary in nature. There should be a defined start and a defined end as well as a defined scope. Once we the deliverable has been handed over to the business, business as usual resumes. Projects are often…
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Like most things, you can engineer this tool to do anything, if you’re ace at automation, you can use the Risk Register to update Issue Logs, Learns Learned Logs or Action Trackers, you can even use your Risk Register to feed updates into a Project Schedule. That said, don’t forget the good old 1960’s US Naval principle; KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and don’t go crazy. The areas we want to…
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I recently started working on some Hyperledger stuff, which from what I can tell at this early stage, is an opensource blockchain technology of sorts. Which got me to thinking; can I explain blockchain to my parents? Have you heard about Blockchains? The answer was a resounding No. What about BitCoin? The answer was 'yes' but with caveats. It seems that my aging parent folk have associated this…
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Project Initiation is pretty much Document Control: Where are you going to keep those documents? Who are you going to tell about the project and how will you tell them? Project Definition Client/Customer Engagement Project Kick-Off Where are you going to keep those documents? Keeping and tracking the project documents is more important than where or how you keep them. Clearly some systems are…
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A constant in any organisation is that the rules that were once there to help manage a process or define a workflow gradually become more an more complex. As the organisation, the process or the workflow grow, there is a tendency to add more and more rules. Having rules for every possibility is impossible. The Project Management Office or PMO tries to create rules for Project Managers, these…
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Whilst working with a Client, I needed to do some troubleshooting on a member of the Sales Teams laptop. So began my introduction to something called LinkedIn Team which is a Sales targeted version of LinkedIn. SalesLoft and the Tracking Pixel. With regards to LinkedIn Team, in all honesty, this wasn’t a huge surprise, there had to be a reason that Microsoft wanted to drop a cool $26b on a…
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Back in 2018 we had to design and build out the infrastructure for a Clients new office. They were moving from a Leased Office with Managed Infrastructure to a bigger office and their own Infrastructure. They were moving for 2 reasons; the first and biggest being that they were simply out-growing the space. The landlord was unable to accommodate the rate at which they were consuming desks. The…
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A type i error might be when your home smoke detector is triggered by burning toast, this detector is primarily there to wake you up if there’s a fire in your home, so a false positive in this scenario is that the alarm is sounding, but your home is not on fire. The false negative state would be far more serious in that your house is on fire but your smoke detector has not detected the event. We…
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Email can trace it’s history back to around 1965, it’s proved to be a very versatile communication method, we use it nearly every day, even your gran probably has an email address. We’ve built business around it, we check in with loved ones, we use it to pass good news, bad news, business updates, lunch menus, cat jokes and, of course, Spam. Email Spoofing is when someone forges the address of an…
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Like most things, you can engineer this to do anything, if you are an ace at automation, you can easily use the Action Tracker to update Project Schedules or vice-versa. Whilst the Action Trackers potential is perhaps limitless, you should try to avoid over-engineering it. Remember the 1960’s US Naval principle; KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and don’t go crazy. All you really need to capture is: A…
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Quickly comparing Project Management Methodologies. As you can see, PRINCE2 is the most complex visually, although this is not necessarily the case in practice. I’ve inferred the use of the Directing stage in the PMP, Process Based and Common Sense methodologies, however, this is not an actual stage, it is merely there to represent the role of any Project Sponsors or a Project Board that feature…
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As I said in an earlier entry, we have a MacMini sitting around, not doing a lot. Certainly a lot less than we had planned to use it for. So what else can I do with it? Personally I’d chuck it back in a box and send it back to Apple, but as soon as this thing arrived, the Client Ops Team did a quick Power-on check and proceeded to stick an ‘asset tag’ on it, throwing the box in the trash. Sending…
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Machine Learning Machine Learning is all about using known data to predict outcomes based on unknown data that meets certain expectations. This is all about using algorithms to evaluate data, learn from the data and to make informed decisions based on that data. ML involves building and training a model. ML doesn’t have the ability to learn something new. At least not on it’s own… Deep Learning DL…
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Whilst working with a Start-up, I was initially pleased to see they had a fleet that was 70% Apple, I'm an Apple and Linux user myself, so this was refreshing for sure! Then the reality sets in; an Apple estate is actually a pain in the neck when you're used to managing Windows estates. It pains me to say it, I love Apple hardware and have loved it for a couple of decades, but for a an ecosystem…
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One of the things I do is Project Management, I have been formerly trained in the PRINCE2 methodology but mostly find my self in organisations that use Process Based methodologies which loosely follow the PMP, at least at a high-level. More recently, we see an Agile methodology in use (to some degree). What's all the hoopla? When I started down this path, I didn’t really understand the differing…
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Understanding Machine Learning: From Supervised Learning to Inference Machine Learning systems are designed to learn from data inputs, allowing them to make predictions on never-before-seen data based on patterns learned from known data. Supervised Learning: The Foundation The majority of Machine Learning techniques fall under the category of Supervised Learning. In Supervised Learning, the system…
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In our line of work, it is not uncommon to move between clients, some are large behemoths, others are little mom & pop shops and some will be Start-ups. Moving between a company with some 50,000+ employees to one with around 50 employees, the first being 125+ years old, full of red-tape, the second is a fresh start-up, with very little formal processes and very little red tape. The differences can…
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I planned to attend this presentation as I had been working in the IT department within an Engineering & Construction company, now whilst I don’t personally buy into old biases and generalisations, I would say that my personal experience supports the general opinion that IT and Engineering and Construction are Male Dominated occupations. That isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of women in those…
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