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Digital Customer Programme Discovery Phase: Show & Tell #1 with New...
October 11, 2016
I spent Wednesday morning visiting the Digital Team at Newham Council, to attend the first Show & Tell of their 10-week Digital Customer Programme Discovery Phase. Over the last week, a small Unboxed team have been working alongside the Dig...
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Faster than Lightning: September's Developer Event
September 30, 2016
This month we hosted our regular ‘Faster than Lightning’ developer talks, where Unboxed developers get together to discuss code that we’ve been working with, and share stories about these with each other. The idea is to get together an...
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Development Re-bundling in Dockerland
September 5, 2016
Development Re-bundling in Dockerland When starting out development on a Dockerized application, adjusting Dockerfiles and rebuilding images is a common task. Bringing together two separate services, as well as applying some gem security patche...
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Faster than Lightning: July’s Developer Event
August 12, 2016
We regularly host “Faster than Lightning” code talks where our developers get together and submit a snippet of code that they found interesting - Ruby, CSS, JS, test code, server config or anything else. It’s an opportunity to learn a little about...
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Meetup: UX For Life
July 22, 2016
This Tuesday was the initial first UX For Life meetup, held at Unboxed HQ. Hosted by Leon Odey-Knight and Alice Richmond, UX For Life is a meetup group consisting of lightning talks which delve even deeper into the user experience of our existenc...
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Brighton Ruby Conference 2016
July 22, 2016
Brighton Ruby is unsurprisingly a conference about Ruby based in Brighton, and organised by @AndyCroll. Being quite new to both Ruby and to Rails, a Ruby conference seemed like the perfect place to pickup a few tricks of the trade and see what&rsq...
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ShareDigital conference 2016
July 19, 2016
The conference: Share Digital 2016 The date: Wednesday 6th July The attendees: Graeme, Martyn With the aim of growing and expanding my knowledge in the digital public services area, I jumped at the opportunity to attend this year’s ShareDigital 2...
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Faster than Lightning: May’s monthly developer event
June 9, 2016
Each month, we host a Dev Event which is an opportunity for our developers to get together, share ideas, or just catch up with each other. May’s developer event This May we hosted “Faster than Lightning” code talks. For this event, each d...
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Shaking up early product development, part 2: The Minimum Viable Pr...
May 4, 2016
An MVP is a Minimum Viable Product. This is the smallest possible thing that delivers value and you can learn from. Your MVP can usually be thought of as your initial product; the first thing you try to sell to your customer. But your MVP can help...
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Spanning the rift: Beginning your first agile project in a waterfal...
April 21, 2016
One of the first mistakes you could make is thinking that the transition from waterfall to agile as being simply a process change – a change from one set of processes and practices to another. It’s much more about your culture and behaviour. In t...
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Event: Digitalising Local Government Services
March 18, 2016
With ongoing spending cuts and budgets getting tighter and tighter, it’s becoming more costly for local councils to maintain their services as they currently work. Shifting these services to digital reduces running costs, increases accessibility a...
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Recruitment: Test Driven Candidate Self Selection
March 7, 2016
The Problem I have been to a number of university careers fairs - as both a job seeker and an employer - and know how awkward those conversations with somebody that you do not know, who almost definitely intimidates you, can be. As a jobseeker yo...
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The Unboxed product accelerator adventure goes to South Africa
February 2, 2016
We’ve been on a mission to conceive, build, nurture digital products that matter for many years now. More recently this means creating an ecosystem in which other people’s ideas can become reality. Unboxed invested in my purpose-led start up acce...
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SnowHow: Mountain vs. Startup
January 26, 2016
At Unboxed, we like to work with, and mentor, entrepreneurs and startups. We love ideas. Growing ideas and exploring new ones – not only our own but those of others. That’s why we’re spending this year working with 50th Generation – a purpose-led ...
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Guest post: Learning in Local Government - Part 2
January 18, 2016
Following on from part one in our ‘Learning in Local Government through Discovery’ series, part two is a guest post by Helen Gracie, a Business Improvement Advisor for Buckinghamshire County Council. We’re currently working alongside B...
LifT Digital
January 15, 2016

Invoice financing: faster, simpler and cheaper directly through your existing online accounting package Many growing small businesses in the UK need to ease cash flow quickly - but it needs to be cost effective and sustainable over time. LifT i...

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Learning in Local Government through Discovery
January 11, 2016
There’s a lot of content available online about doing agile with local councils - talks, conferences, case studies, white papers, etc. A lot of content guiding us to knowing what this should look like. But what does this really look like in practi...
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An E-xperience in Colombia
November 26, 2015
Public Digital Innovation I received a surprise invitation in September from Angelica Bello (@hracangie) from the Colombian Ministry of ITC (@Ministerio_TIC) to speak at their annual e-xperience event (@Gobiernoenlinea). This two day conference i...
Visualising UK Government Petitions
September 21, 2015

The new Petitions site has been a massive success since its launch this July, with tens of thousands signing petitions each day. It was suggested to me that it would interesting to visualise this data with a heatmap - giving an insight into the po...

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Thinking product at Mind the Product 2015
September 14, 2015
I’ve been thinking and talking recently about whether “product” is the right word for what I do. I speak to many people like me (oddly, many of them with fine art degrees) who sit somewhere between design, technology and business and end up as “pr...
All aboard
May 14, 2015

The sooner New Joiners feel welcome and prepared for their jobs, the sooner they will be able to successfully contribute to the firm’s mission. As employers, a New Joiner’s interactions with you in their first few weeks and months has a majo...

Roundtable: Digital Healthcare
February 26, 2015

Wednesday 18th February saw the Digital Healthcare Roundtable Session take place at Unboxed Consulting. The session brought together a handpicked and diverse group of healthcare experts and leaders, with the aim to start a revolution in digita...

Rapid UI prototyping and getting on the Rails
September 26, 2014

Having only been in my current position for ten months, there are many members of the Unboxed team I haven’t had the pleasure to work with yet, Chris (Crystal) Carter being one of them. When we both found ourselves “on the bench” a couple ...

Summer Unboxin' had me a blast
September 18, 2014

Charlie joined the Unboxed team in June as part of our summer internship programme, after completing his second year of studying Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen. Having spent the last three months as a member of the team, he is now...

dev_toolbox.pack()
May 20, 2014

Chris C and I recently attended a workshop at jQuery 2014 to learn more about a web developer’s toolbox, lead by Jordan Kasper. Predominantly this workshop taught us Grunt and the many plugins that exist. Grunt is a JavaScript task runner wh...

Innovation days - developing in Meteor
April 23, 2014

Here at Unboxed, employees are given the opportunity to take innovation days: time allowing us to learn new and interesting things. I took this opportunity to complete my personal website - a photography portfolio that would display a subset of my...

The "r" in lean
April 22, 2014

Lean UC NYC 2014 was a jam-packed three days (four with the Balanced Team meetup) and there is no way I can accurately reflect what so many great speakers had to say but here are a few personal takeaways from day one. In general the focus for alm...

Haskell at the London Code Dojo
March 5, 2014

Sleepy Fox recently ran the London Code Dojo here at the Unboxed office. The evening’s Dojo was based around a few parts of Day 1 of the Haskell section of Seven languages in seven weeks. It was good fun and I recommend the next Dojo coming ...

Native Chrome apps on mobile
February 6, 2014

At the end of January some big news passed quietly on the Chromium blog. Mobile Chrome apps can now be wrapped up using Cordova to deploy native applications to iOS and Android. Google seems to be pouring money into Chrome like it’s the cold war...

Why failure isn’t bad, as long as you learn
December 19, 2013

Failure is sometimes seen as a bad word. When you discuss this with people, you discover it carries baggage, often from an identifiable incident where their failure was criticised by someone of influence. They are right in some ways though that fa...