Author Archives: alankent
How to free up time
I had come out of a big presentation, and one particular thing that resonated with me (as I had been thinking about it a lot before hand) was how to recover time – or at least not waste as much. (It was actually in the context of allowing line managers to have enough time to […]
Crossing the Chasm
“Crossing the Chasm” was a book first published in 1991 and talks about the types of customers in different phases in the life of a technology product. The different segments of customers have different profiles: Innovators are techies. They love technical complexity and being at the forefront of cool new technology. They probably like the […]
Principles of Continuous Delivery
A colleague, Ritesh Triveli, showed this to me some time back. I like it so much, I decided to copy and paste it verbatim here. Extract from Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley. 8 Principles of Continuous Delivery The process for releasing/deploying software MUST […]
Reminder of the Value of Deployment Automation
Some time back I came across an article “5 things Amazon taught me about deployment automation.” It does not say anything radically new, but gives some good examples of why deployment automation (including quality automation) is good. Oh, and this is *nothing* about how Amazon does deployment automation – they just use the end-user Amazon […]
Continuous Delivery versus Frequent Releases
Continuous delivery and more traditional versioned releases are close, but a little different. In this post I dig into some of the practical details and issues that different between the approaches. There is no rocket science in this post – just summarizing knowledge gained from practical experience. Continuous Delivery In continuous delivery, the idea is […]
Magento for Charities – Grouped Products and Cross Sells
I previously wrote about how in Magento Virtual Products would work well for a site supporting a school in Africa. Supporters (“Customers” in Magento retail terminology) can donate (“buy”) towards a selected item such as “pens and pencils” for a student. Grouped products go a little further. As well as listing several individual items on your […]
Continuous Delivery with Maven
Maven is not perfect, but it is very useful for its version dependency support when compiling Java programs. You specify the version of a jar file you want, and it will download the version from a repository and all transient dependencies as well. This encourages breaking a project up into smaller jar files, which can […]
Building a School in India, and the Indiegogo platform
Looking for a hosted solution to raising funds? I just came across http://www.indiegogo.com/. I am going to keep writing on how Magento can build a web site for raising funds, but you should definitely consider whether you can just leverage an existing platform. How did I come across this particular platform? From Dean Nelson (VP @ […]
eBay Small Business Challenge Non-profit edition Austin Tx
I came across this YouTube video talking about some great work from the eBay Austin TX office. Nice! “eBay Inc. employees spend 10% of their time over 6 months working with Austin non-profits. Employees brought technical, business analysis, program management, and marketing skills to partner with 6 Austin non-profits.” There were a few other related […]
Three Strategies to Drive Accountability and Execution
I came across the following some time back – sorry, I cannot locate the original attribution. But I thought worth sharing regardless as a follow-up to my recent posts on Feedback Loops, Accountability, and Execution. Accountability is the heart of execution. And if you’re trying to make that heart pump a little harder and move […]
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