Blog
Lean Enterprise Over the last 8 weeks, Tom D and I (Chris) have been taking a break from our regular design and development day jobs. We joined forces with Toby, the product owner from Naturejobs, and Paul at Lean Mammoth to identify potentially ...
July saw our CTO, Andrew White host the Ruby on Rails 4.2 networking breakfast, right here at Unboxed Consulting HQ. Members of the Ruby community attended this one-off session to hear what’s coming in Rails 4.2, straight from our very own Ruby o...
It seems there is a lot of talk about agile testing circulating, but is it really worth it? Agile testing is a mindset. We all know mindsets can be a challenge to change, and this is no different. But what are the benefits of moving to an agile te...
Chris C, Veronika H and I attended jQuery’s 2014 conference in Oxford. Between the three of us, we could cover quite a lot of different talks that were available on the day. This blog post is just a slice of some of the talks we attended tha...
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...
Fast and Native-Like Hybrid Applications with PhoneGap Here is a short summary of a really good workshop I went to. It was part of the JQuery 2014 Conference in Oxford. About the workshop The workshop was held by Christophe Coenraets, who used ...
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...
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...
Sometimes you will inherit a ‘legacy system’. This particular system was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Rails 2.3.18. Due to the recent Heartbleed security hole, the applications OAuth provider had updated their security certificates. This meant I wa...
As a software tester within an agile environment I ascertained that it is not enough to reduce the project timeframes, discard the documentation and change the requirements document name for a project to be true agile. In order for an agile proj...
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 ...
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...
While facilitating a stakeholder workshop recently, I ran two rounds of grouping and ordering. One I used dot voting, one didn’t. On reflection I was surprised with the results. The question asked during these processes following a pattern of, wh...
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...