Prime8: The weekly web roundup 26/05/2014
Prime8 is sad this week. He accidently voted UKIP because he thought it was a party that celebrated having mid-afternoon naps. When we told him the truth he was pretty upset, especially when he discovered Nigel Farage is, in fact, a real person and not, as Prime8 thought, a comedy creation invented to shine a light on the
Prime8: The weekly web roundup 17/05/2014
Prime8 has gone all ‘Nicole Kidman’ on us this week and had a facelift. He reckons he was looking a bit grumpy and ‘complicated’ so he’s gone and had all the creases straigtened out. He now looks all useful and bang-on trend wouldn’t you agree? So with this renewed youthful vigour, lets have a
An environment for working with multiple Rails projects
This post explains how I use nginx and dnsmasq in my development environment to streamline the process of working with several Rails projects. The nature of my work means that I work on a large number of Ruby on Rails projects, and I often switch between them several times a day. Like most people, I
GGA Dev Insights: Using Vim as a multi-language IDE
Last year, I wrote a post about using Vim as a PHP IDE. It turned out to be pretty popular, and I’ve been updating it despite the fact that I now write considerably more ruby than PHP. One of the things I love about vim is the level of support for languages and text formats.
The key to working smarter not harder: prioritise
In a previous blog we discussed the importance of planning your day (read it here). Following on from that article, it became obvious that we had overlooked passing on a critical lesson to you. At GGA, we’ve spent a lot of time analysing how we actually spend our time. Paul (our MD) in particular was
The secret to making everyday count: Plan it!
In a previous blog we discussed the importance of planning your week as a team (read it here). We know, it sounds obvious but not many companies we have spoken to actually do it. Well the same is true of planning your day. For Paul, our ‘enlightened founder’, it is now a habit and something that
Ready, Set, Sprint: Planning your week
In a previous blog we discussed the virtues of planning your company’s work day via a daily standup (read it here). While this is a great way of micromanaging (and I mean that in a good way), promoting team interaction and addressing issues, relying solely on daily planning meetings doesn’t give you a high-level view
Just say NO: How to disqualify your way to success.
It’s a pretty obvious statement that running a successful business is largely dependent on constantly winning new clients, projects and contracts. Keeping cash ringing through the register is what keeps a company moving forward and every sale can be classed as a well-deserved victory. However (and be honest now) how many of us have leapt
Developer Workshops: Share the knowledge to boost creativity and motivation
As I’m typing this, 2 of our development team are sitting around our TV listening to a 3rd dev hold court on ‘immutable architecture’ and the pros and cons of us migrating over to Chef and Puppet. Yeah I’m not too sure what that means either, but I do know that these weekly workshops are now an
The Weekly Retro: The best way to end the week (apart from going to the pub obviously)
At the end of a busy, stressful work week we all need to decompress a little bit. For a lot of us that process starts with a trip to the pub for a few cheeky weekend tipples, and while we here at GGA happily subscribe to that too, we also have a pre-pub activity that
The daily standup: Your most important meeting of the day
If you work as part of a team, ask yourself how often you all get together to discuss what each of you are working on. Is it regularly? Sporadically? Never? If the answer is anything other than ‘regularly’ you are missing out on one of the most simple and effective techniques to improve your business
How to build and launch a tech product in 5 days or less: The highs & lows of our first hackathon
EDIT: Hashed.io has now been taken down. Onwards and upwards! This is the story of how we developed a product called Hashed. It was originally written and blogged about on Friday 15th November 2013. so here it is unedited… A few weeks ago the GGA team made the group decision to stop all client service work