Get ready for a productivity party as Ian and Ash dive into the chaotic world of getting stuff done! From Ash's Trello-powered life management system to Ian's valiant attempts at David Allen's Getting Things Done, our dynamic duo explore the highs and lows of personal productivity.

Warning: may contain traces of work-in-progress limits and an unhealthy obsession with database administrators.

But wait, there's more! Brace yourself for a mind-bending journey into Conway's Law, where organizational charts meet software architecture in a cosmic dance of confusion. Watch Ian struggle to grasp Ash's examples (don't worry, he gets there eventually) as they unravel the mysteries of monoliths, microservices, and everything in between.

With a sprinkle of neoliths, megalithic humor, and a dash of LinkedIn bot paranoia, this episode is guaranteed to leave you questioning your team structure and reaching for your Trello board. Remember folks, in the world of What A Lot Of Things, everything changes while staying exactly the same!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Links

• In Defence of Productivity by Jason Swett
• The Protestant Work Ethic by Oliver Burkeman
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and his TEDx Manchester talk Why Patience is a Superpower
• Productivity software: OmniFocus 4, Trello
• Outside Context Problem, from Excession by Iain M Banks
• Windows Recall: How to turn it off and why you should at Tom’s Guide
• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Nicole Forsgren
• Strangler Fig blog post by Martin Fowler, and his post on Conway’s Law.
• Conway’s Law and Mel Conway's paper How Committees Invent
• Dealing with Creaky Legacy Platforms by Jonny LeRoy
• Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley and The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks.
• When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink
• Hachyderm

Email us on TechnologyEeyores@whatalotofthings.com or visit us on LinkedIn.

Hold onto your keyboards, folks! In this episode of What A Lot Of Things, Ian and Ash embark on a wild ride through the treacherous waters of R&D tax credits and the murky depths of technical debt.

Watch as Ash dons his cape and mask as the Testing Avenger, attempting to save Ian's poor, test-less Ilkley Live website from certain doom. Marvel at Ian's creative excuses for avoiding automated tests, and cheer as he finally succumbs to the relentless pressure of good practices in context.

Along the way, our intrepid hosts navigate the choppy seas of database migrations, wrestle with the kraken of personal project maintenance, and attempt to decipher the ancient runes of government innovation incentives.

It's a rollicking adventure filled with British wit, playful banter, and enough tech talk to make your CPU overheat. Don't miss this episode - it's more entertaining than watching a Clanger try to use Twitter!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you haven’t already, we’d love it if you would contribute to our listener survey.

Links

• Sifted: UK startups warn they ‘won’t survive’ if HMRC claws back tax credits
• HMRC: Claiming Research and Development (R&D) tax reliefs
• Innovate UK
• AWS Amplify
• The most excellent Mark Steadman and his podcast health check service.
• Ilkley Live (this is significantly more interesting in the 3 months before the event) and the Ilkley Live Facebook group.
• Ilkley Live technologies: React, NextJS, NodeJS, Javascript, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and Vercel. Zod and Yup. Oh, and Bun.
• …also, Notion and Notion Databases
• Testing frameworks, Playwright and Cypress.
• Ministry of Testing for learning about testing.
• Technical debt

..and you should email us, either at TechnologYeeyores@whatalotofthings.com or, for the more timid, IanAndAsh@whatalotofthings.com.

Strap in for a wild ride as Ian and Ash tackle the dystopian world of employee monitoring software! Marvel at the horrors on sale as our hosts ponder whether these digital taskmasters are the future of work or just really creepy ways to watch people type.

But wait, there's more! Venture into the mind-bending realm of the Cynefin framework, where our intrepid duo attempt to make sense of not a model, but a framework. It's also not a quadrant (although it kinda looks like one).

From mouse jigglers to Welsh castles, this episode has it all. Will Ian and Ash successfully navigate the complex waters of these topics, or will they end up in the "confused" domain? Tune in to find out, and remember - in the chaotic world of What A Lot Of Things, sometimes you just have to act first and think later!

Links

• PC Mag: The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2024
• Mouse jigglers on Amazon (not an affiliate link because we know that nobody reading this will buy a mouse jiggler)
• Homer Simpson's keyboard bird
• HP Quality Center (tl;dr it changed hands)
• The Cynefin Framework as invented by Dave Snowden
• Cynefin wiki, including a page on the Domains which mentions the carnival example.
• The Rodecaster Pro II that we use for our recording, and that provides all-too-easy access to silly voice processing effects. Sorry.
• Wardley Mapping
• Use Due for iOS and MacOS to be persistently nagged to remember what you went into the kitchen (or any other room in the house) for.
• Time and motion studies
• Welsh castles, although Dave Snowden apparently doesn't live in one.
• Fairport Convention's website, including info on Cropredy Festival where Ian could hear Rick Wakeman and Richard Thompson, but not sadly Trevor Horn for health reasons.
• WOMAD festival
• Siphonaptera, a poem about fleas which was not, in fact, by Spike Milligan.