First-Time Buying: The Final Days of Rome
The Pound Sterling (GBP) against the Dollar (USD) is the lowest it's been since 1985, and then suddenly it's the lowest it's been in since records began. What a few weeks it has been.
This can only mean bad things for getting a mortgage as a single first-time buyer. The truth is it's been challenging for first time buyers (and young people in general) for some time now... read more
The Masterplan: An Introduction
Our team has grown - we have a new culture - we're now Agile-ish moving away from Waterfall oblivion, I've learnt some cool new skills, and I've become a manager for the first time in my career. It's been a ride, and a laugh, a challenge, an achievement, and quite eye-opening.
Five months ago, we were a small functional IT web team in a large corporation managing, planning, and spec'ing the requirements for new features on the website. Me as the role as a Senior BA (although I did not realise that was what I am because my job title is a generic senior IT job title, but we will come to that later) I spent my time gathering requirements from the business owner, putting them into versioned spec documents, designing mock-ups, and answering lots of subsequent questions because the requirements were vague, and ironically ever changing... read more
Requirements are like Pokémon: You gotta catch 'em all!
If you can grill SMEs, Product Owners, and Stakeholders, you will have 90% to 95% of the requirements straight off the bat. That gives you the core requirement of the project/story/improvement, and that is enough to inform your next disco sessions and refinement sessions, to ask the correct more pointed questions to divet-out those final little nuggets of knowledge and of detail.
Elon Musk, when asked about building rockets and their complexity, he said that no one - absolutely no-one - can write a perfect requirements document and capture all of the requirements and edge cases, and it's true for all systems. Ok selling baked beans is not as "sexy" as selling rocket launches, but the same logic applies.
Ask the difficult questions. Ask the deep questions. Don't assume anything. Be the difficult person in the room and grill them (with olive oil and a little salt & pepper if required). Squeeze every last ounce of juice from their husk until you can be confident of the requirements... read more
Weather Station: A Love Affair
I've written a complete HTTP Server system that runs on the ESP32 and offers an authenticated login area to setup and control attached components and other devices. This "flavour" of it allows you to read the values from the weather station and then expose those as JSON APIs endpoints on the ESP32 via it's local IP address.
The weather station when first switched on will start a new Wifi hotspot and allow you to connect to it. When you've done that you can open the admin portal web page by going to the IP address of the station.
You can then setup the station, including setting the Wifi SSID to connect to, including the login credentials. Once you reboot the Weather Station it will connect to the Wifi and start reading the components and presenting the data as JSON APIs... read more