Matt Lucht – blog

It's been a blast, now time for the next challenge

Matt Lucht — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:02:52 +0000

Note: I've been reflecting on my time off during the past few months and found it useful to write a few things down. This was a helpful way for me to collect my thoughts and didn't initially intend to share them but it was suggested by a couple of people that I post them online. It may be interesting, or maybe not!

I've broken it down into my past work (application, webby stuff); my time off (music, travelling stuff, occasional tipple of bourbon); and thoughts on the future (what I'd like to do next) so that you can skip the bits you're not interested in.

On the 17th of September I made a pretty big decision. I decided it was time for me to move on from my job at BT and find a new challenge. I was at BT for ten years and that's a long time to be at one place, although in a company the size of BT it's easy to move around and try different things and each time feeling as though you're joining somewhere new.

Deciding to hand in my notice turned out to be much easier than I thought it might have been. It had been a little while coming so certainly not on a whim, I decided on a Friday night that it was time, gave myself the Saturday to not think about anything work related and then re-thought about it on the Sunday - that evening I wrote my resignation letter and the following day met with my manager to talk through my decision.

From the point of handing in my notice I've not had a single thought of doubt about the decision. Plenty of people have questioned me as to whether I was making the right choice, and each conversation left me more and more convinced that it was the right thing to do. I was asked probably one hundred times that week what I'd be doing next, and I didn't have an answer. I knew a lot about what I didn't want to be doing but much less than what I did want to do.

I was fortunate that personal circumstances allowed me to take some time out, I booked a trip to the US to see friends (and make new ones), unwind and clear my head. That adventure is now over and it's time to move onto the next challenge.

The past...

When I first started working with BT I had no idea what I wanted to do. I'd been to college and studied computer science, human biology, sports science and maths. I'd planned to go to university but a mix up with my UCAS application and a college tutor mentor who went AWOL meant a bunch of applications (mine included) were never sent. I found out too late and decided to take a year out to earn some money and re-apply the following year.

I'd qualified as a personal trainer and massage therapist and joined a company who promoted healthy working within large organisations and was given some clients - Rolls Royce, Reuters, BUPA and BT. The part of BT (Carrier Services & Solutions at the time, now BT Wholesale) that I was working with had a hugely different atmosphere to all my other clients. They'd taken on a big intake of university graduates, recently moved to new offices in Three Bridges, West Sussex where the majority of people were co-located. There was a big social element to working there - everyone worked hard but also had a lot of fun.

A year of getting people fit and healthy flew by pretty quickly and I started thinking that I ought to consider what I wanted to do. Someone suggested to me that joining BT might be a good thing. Being young and having had a year of earning some money the prospect of going to university and being a student again had lost some of its appeal. I knew and liked the people at BT, and that they were working on some really cools things (this was just at the advent to Broadband becoming a thing) so I decided to give working at BT a go!

Understanding your users

My first role at BT was on the technical support team for a CRM application. There was a lot of repetitive work, picking up and closing off trouble tickets. This was a new world to me so the repetition and nature of the trouble tickets being on average 15-30 minute fixes meant I was able to learn quickly about the application and how it was being used. Something thats stuck with my from that role is that regardless of level a good place to start a new job is spending some time solely working on trouble tickets or bug lists. My manager at the time, a guy named Dave Maxwell, suggested that it might be useful to do some analysis on the types of tickets being raised. He and I spent time manually trawling through historic tickets categorising them into groups. After removing all the one-off issues we found that the majority of tickets sat in three groups:

people trying to do something that the application wasn't designed to do
people doing things that the application was designed to do, but in the 'wrong way'
actual application errors/conflicts

We broke these down into further sub-groups and I was asked to present findings of our analysis to the application steering group - a mixture of senior stakeholders, external consultants and project managers. They were surprised at some of our findings and asked me to join the steering group as a "user representative" to help form requirements for future application builds. Through this role I learnt (and fully recognised later on) the importance of understanding the user, seeing how what you've built is being used in reality and factoring the learning back into application development. At the time though it mostly just felt fun to be a part of helping to design something new.

Learning about agile

Over the next year I worked more closely with users both on the internal sales/service side and external customer side. This allowed me to see how the application I cared about fitted into the bigger picture - how sales opportunities turned into actual orders, how those orders were fulfilled on other systems and then fed back into the CRM application. At the time there was a lot of focus around moving customer applications away from deployed thick clients and putting them onto the web. This fascinated me and I spent as much time as I could working with the 'online team' to learn about what they were doing. After a while an opportunity came up to join that team and I moved across with a remit of managing the development of web applications for order fulfilment and fault tracking user journeys.

My new role allowed me to spend even more of my time split between users and the developer teams. I'd spend time at customer meetings, forums and workshops observing the discussions and listening to the issues they faced. I'd then play back what I'd learnt to the team and we'd come up with potential solutions. This is before I was aware of what agile was and one of our biggest downfalls was that we'd take a real customer problem, identify a great solution, get the buy-in from the users and business ...and then go away build it in isolation. We'd come back with what we'd promised to deliver but by then priorities of users had inevitably changed and usage wasn't as expected.

A while later a particular problem came via one customer who was being very vocal. After meeting with the customer one of he design team suggested that we ought run the project in an agile fashion. This was new to me but the more that he explained the more sense it made. Funding was already in place for the year so that was one challenge out the way, however there were three obstacles that we had to overcome:

Getting a real customer to agree to work more closely with us than they usually would and be willing to use and feedback on an 'in progress' application
Getting everyone co-located - the dev team were in Mumbai, the designers in Pune, the customer and I were in London
Being able to find an environment where we could drop code frequently and outside of the standard 90-day release cycle

Thankfully those obstacles were overcome and the only compromise made was around everyone being co-located - I spent sometime in Mumbai with the design/dev team and we held regular video conferences with the customer. As we moved through the sprints I quickly learnt that setting the right expectations was particularly important with agile deliveries. Users were accustomed to handing over some requirements and the next thing they saw was 'finished' product. With this project we were being very open and transparent about where we were and what'd been completed. Particularly during the early sprints (each two weeks in duration) what we showed was functional but not complete and it took a bit of coaching (for all involved) to focus feedback on the right areas. As the project progressed the overall vision remained pretty consistent but certainly some of the subtleties evolved as we learnt more about was was really important.

After the success of our first agile project we were keen to use this approach for all further work, however this wasn't always easy to do. It wasn't because people were particularly reluctant or didn't see the benefit, but rather they were tied into practises and processes that had been in place for many years and were hard to circumnavigate. At my position in the organisation I had little influence over changing this.

Being open and following standards

Thankfully I was introduced to a part of BT called Osmosoft. Osmosoft was a company owned by Jeremy Ruston and subsequently acquired by BT with the primary purpose of helping the organisation understand more about open source, open standards and better working practises. They did this by splitting their time between running an open source project called TiddlyWiki and then later TiddlySpace whilst simultaneously delivering web based solutions for internal BT users and BT's customers. Meeting with the team was a breathe of fresh air and I jumped at the chance to join them!

I joined Osmosoft as their Community Advocate which meant I was able to continue the close interaction to users that I'd enjoyed in previous roles, however the size and dynamics within Osmosoft meant I was also able to work much more closely with the developers on the team. This taught me a huge amount about what was possible on the web and the pace at which things could be achieved when done right. Working independently to the rest of the organisation we had the luxury of a great deal of autonomy. This meant that not only could we follow agile principles more closely but we also had the freedom to pick and choose the right frameworks and tools required to tackle a particular problem. This was great during development and whilst running user trials, but when it came to handing the work back over to the core business we often encountered push back due to this different way of working. I wrote a little bit about that a while ago.

I also learnt a lot about the use of standards and what make The Web important. Everyone on the team influenced this learning but none more so than Paul Downey (aka @psd) and his awesome 'The Web Is Agreement' uber-doodle!

Joining the leadership team

A 18 months of so after joining Osmosoft there'd been some changes within the team, various people had decided to pursue opportunities outside of BT, including Jeremy. There were also senior supporters of Osmosoft who'd moved on from BT. This left some uncertainty around the future of the team. Thankfully the CEO, Clive Selley, recognised the importance of what we were doing and supported the continuation of the unit and I was asked to take on the running of the team.

With this new role came a position on the leadership team. This was a big jump up for me but the best advice I was given was to not change what I was doing and how I was doing it. As a stroke of luck at my first meeting with some of the leadership team I met someone who remembered me from my days in the gym. This made me think that whilst he may be a sharp suit, power tie wearing executive he was also just a person and that put lots of nerves at ease!

With Osmosoft having successfully delivered a number of projects I was asked to take on a new challenge. Alongside Osmosoft I was approached to set up a 2nd team and be responsible for the design and development of a new BT product in the world of supply chain management. This was a completely new proposition for BT and the timescales to get something out to market were extremely tight.

The senior stakeholders responsible for funding the launch of the product had seen the success we'd had within Osmosoft at delivering the minimal viable product for internal applications and wanted to follow the same approach for this product. They already had a real customer lined up who had bought into doing the development on their internal systems that our product would require - and for me that meant it was worth accepting the challenge!

Within the core team of the customer, the developers, product owner, and business lead we were all clear on what was needed to be delivered. However the area that caused the most headaches were when having to engage with wider communities such as the finance, legal, commercial, operations and marketing teams who's goals and measures were less about meeting the immediate known needs and more around the future longer terms aims. Ultimately, we had the right senior level backing allowing us to do things differently and a first iteration of the product got shipped and that is now generating revenue.

Decision to leave

There wasn't single particular reason why I decided to leave BT. I'd enjoyed my time there and was fortunate to be able to work in a number of teams in varying roles across the business. I was extremely conscious that 10 years is a long time to be in one place and I felt that should I stay the direction my career was likely to take would see me moving away from close interaction with users and developers, and I was pretty certain that's a place I didn't want to be heading.

The present

A quick note to potential future employers. My time off was much more rounded than this section might suggest, it just happens that a lot of the fun stuff happened to take place in dive bars across London and the US!

I handed my resignation letter on September 17th and worked an extended notice period to help ease the transition of projects that I was involved with. Right up until the last day it was pretty intense. My first day of not having a job was a weird one. I it dawned on me that for the first time since I was 18 (15 if count part-time) I didn't have a job. It took me more than a few days to stop constantly checking email and looking at my phone. Thankfully I had plenty of things planned and it wasn't too long before I was able to properly switch off and relax.

I thought I'd jot down some of the highlights. Mostly because it makes me smile when I think back over the past few months, but also because I promised a few people I've not yet caught up with that I would!

If this section needed a soundtrack then I'd pick John Moreland's, Earthbound Blues. That album got played pretty much everywhere I went. Give it a listen here, and then go buy it here!

Lucero four-night stand

About a week or so into my period of unemployment Lucero came to the UK to play a four night take over of my favourite bar in London, the Brixton Windmill. If you've talked to me about music then you'll know that they're one of my favourite bands and I've probably played you a bunch of their stuff. If you don't know who I'm talking about then hit the play button below and check them out:

If I hadn't started to relax before those four nights then I sure had by the time they were done. Each night just got better and better and by the time they were over there were some fairly sad farewells!

Last night of Lucero at Brixton Windmill

Little Rock, Arkansas

A few days after the Lucero show's at the Windmill I was due to be heading the US. I had a travel itinerary sorted that would take me to a few places I'd not been to before. One place I'd wanted to visit was Little Rock, Arkansas. In Little Rock is a bar called the White Water Tavern and a whole bunch of my favourite bands (Lucero included) compared the Brixton Windmill to the WWT. When I was booking my flights I'd looked to see who was playing and as there was nothing listed I decided to visit on another trip some other time. ...but then on the night of the last Lucero show one of the best line ups I've seen was announced for the WWT right when I was due to be in Memphis!

Being someone who's never driven a car and also lives in London the distances between places in the US was a bit incomprehensible. Was it possible to get from Memphis to Little Rock? How would I get there? I posted something on the Facebook event page and straight away the utterly awesome Travis Hill (organiser of the event and owner of the brilliant Last Chance Records) sent me a message telling me that I should plan to go and he'd help get me to Little Rock! I didn't need to be told twice, I bought my ticket straight away.

My US trip started out with a couple of nights in Houston, before flying to Atlanta and then onto Memphis. With the help of Travis and some other folk who were attending the gig at the White Water Tavern it turned out that the easiest way from Memphis to Little Rock was by bus. I'd heard some tales about riding the Greyhound but figured it was during the day and only 140 miles. It'd be fine.

I checked out my motel in Memphis and took a taxi to the Greyhound station. On the way the taxi driver asked me whether I'd taken the Greyhound before - I told him nope. He then gave me two pieces of advice. Firstly, never hold eye contact with anyone - even the driver! And secondly, if anyone speaks to you and you have to respond the best response is simply "right on, brother" and then walk away. I don't know whether that was good advice or not but I kept it in mind.

The bus terminal in Memphis was pretty easy going. It was new and there were only about 10 people hanging around. I waited for an hour or so for the bus and when it arrived the 10 people and I formed a queue by the gate. The driver told us that Memphis was the first pick up and that Little Rock was the 2nd and from there it was going on someplace else. Perfect, a big bus (one of the new ones too) and hardly anyone on it.

When we boarded I was about the 8th person to get onto the bus and took an empty seat a few rows from the front. A couple of other people got on and sat further down the bus. And then the last person got on. He was quite a big guy, probably about three of me wide and one-and-a-half me tall! And yup, he sat in the sat right next to me - not across the aisle but right next to me, practically on my lap! At this point I probably should've just gotten up, squeezed past and sat in one of the other 40-or-so empty seats. But I figured it's only a three hour journey, it'll be fine! I put my headphones on and stared out the window.

About 15 minutes into the journey the guy next to me tapped me on the shoulder, I looked at him and he asked me "hey boy, da' you think you're pretty!?" Thinking about the taxi driver's advice I thought that a reply of "right on" wasn't going to cut it so nervously shook my head and went back to looking out the window hoping that'd be the end of it. It wasn't. About 20 minutes later he tapped me on the shoulder again, I tried to ignore it but he kept tapping. I looked back at him, "hey boy! You tryin' to be pretty!?" I managed a very nervous sounding "no" and willed the the bus to speed up whilst thoughts of Criminal Minds and CSI episodes ran through my mind! For the remainder of the journey the same line of questioning happened about 10 times, each time he said nothing else and did nothing else. When the bus pulled into Little Rock bus terminal I think that was the happiest I've been, and even happier when he stayed on the bus!

Holiday Hangout

After recovering from the bus ride it was soon time to head over to the White Water Tavern for the first night of the 'Holiday Hangout'. The gigs were taking place over three nights and were a celebration of artists related to (and friends of) Last Chance Records and Arkansas, as well as Travis Hill's birthday - it was undoubtedly the best birthday party I've ever been too! If I could've picked my perfect line up of artists I don't think I could have done any better over the three nights. There was music from (and I think I've remembered everyone):

Micah Schnabel at the Holiday Hangout, by Carra Martin

The venue itself was uncannily similar to that of the Brixton Windmill, from the locals hanging out at the bar, the intimate environment and lack of backstage/green room area meaning that everyone hung out together. They'd also recently reopened the kitchen - if you're in the area you have to try the Double Wide (a fried bologna sandwich topped with sriracha and a fried egg)!

Over the course of the three evenings (I'd only planned to stay for two but it was too good to leave) I had an amazing time and made so many new friends many of whom I've run into since leaving Arkansas. A couple of those friends took some brilliant photo's from the weekend, you should check the photo's out: Carra Martin and Melissa Brawner.

Memphis, Tennessee

After the Holiday Hangout weekend I headed back to Memphis for a few days. I'd been given a ride back from Ben Nichols who'd suggested a bunch of things to do - record stores to check out, BBQ to eat and the Museum of American Soul. Due to the impromptu visit to Little Rock I only had a couple of nights in Memphis but being based in mid-town gave me a good starting point for the day and a good end point for the evenings and I pretty much managed to squeeze in everything that I wanted to do.

On the first night I took the obligatory walk down Beale Street, the temperature had suddenly dropped (it had gone from being warm enough to sit outdoors at 1am to being so cold my phone stopped working!). Beale Street looked like it could be a fun with a group but the people hassling you at the doors to come in for an $8 beer put me off, plus there was another bar a few blocks away that I wanted to check out. If you in downtown Memphis you have to check out Earnestine and Hazel's (531 S Main St) and if you're a Lucero fan it's opposite Arcade Restaurant.

When I arrived at Earnestine and Hazel's there were about three people sat along the long bar, I grabbed a seat and order myself a bottle of Ghost River, a local golden ale and a Soul Burger. I knew a bit about the history of the bar and when the bar tender asked where I was from he was more than happy to pull up a stool and give me the full history. Everything from it's past as a pantaze drug store, the building's life as a former brothel, and the place where the likes of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Albert King and a whole bunch of Stax musicians would hang out at. Finishing the story he asked if I wanted to take a look around upstairs, probably something that all tourists coming to town do! He handed me a key and pointed me in the direction of the back stair case. Upstairs was a long corridor, walls covered in flaking paint and dimly lit red lighting. It looked as though nothing had changed since the days of the 60s. I had a wander around but it was seriously eery and didn't hang about too long. Plus I needed another Soul Burger before closing time!

Upstairs at Earnestine & Hazel's

The next day the weather had picked up and I had a wander about mid-town stopping off at Sun Studio's. The place is tiny but if you're in town and have time for the 30-40 minute tour then it's definitely worth it. The history of the studio is amazing. From the recording of the first rock 'n' roll song, Rocket 88, through to the early Elvis Presley tracks, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins. A whole load of my record collection was made there and it felt pretty cool to be in the studio. Later in the evening I happened to sit next to a couple of people in a bar who worked at the studio, one was a tour guide and the other an engineer. It was clear how much they love the place and offered to give me an extended tour the next day, unfortunately I'd be heading out of town.

Sun Studio

After the Sun tour I headed over to the Museum of American Soul. It was a bit of a distance from where I was so I ended up taking a taxi, I happened to get the same cab driver who'd taken me to the Greyhound station a few days before. We had a good chat and he told me some hilarious stories of when he was a driver for Ray Charles. On the way to the museum he asked if I was hungry, I'd not eaten so he suggested BBQ. He turned the taxi meter off and took me to Payne's Bar-B-Que. If you're in Memphis and need a ride definitely call Tim: +1(901) 619-5777.

On the site of Stax Records (though not the original building) the museum is a replica of the Stax Recording Studio. If you're a fan of Motown or Soul then the museum is worth a visit. The tour starts off with a 20 minute video showing the history of Memphis music, after which you're able to wander around with an audio guide if you need it. For me the highlight of the museum was right at the end - Isaac Hayes' restored Cadillac El Dorado!

Museum of American Soul Music, Memphis

After finishing off at the museum I did a bit of record shopping - a Sun Records vinyl box set being my favourite find of the day - followed by meeting some friends for drinks at the Buccaneer Lounge to see out my last night. Here my Memphis trip gets a little hazy!

Nashville, Tennessee

Next stop on my US trip was Nashville. From Memphis it was another Greyhound ride and thankfully aside from being crazily busy on the bus this one went pretty smoothly. I had planned to stay in a hotel whilst in Nashville but during the Holiday Hangout I got chatting to Bingham Barnes from the band Glossary. He told me to cancel my hotel and to come stay with him and his girlfriend, Angela. They both welcomed me into their home and were super kind in showing me around and introducing me to a whole bunch of people. I hope that in the future I'll be able to return their generosity.

Arriving in Nashville the first stop that Bingham took me to was Robert's - the first and only time we'd visit one of the honky tonk bars in downtown. It was a fun experience and something ticked off the list! Next up we grabbed some food at the Family Wash. For anyone visiting Nashville from the UK and feeling the need for some familiar food then the Family Wash is for you - a Shepherd's Pie as tasty as home but in American sized portions!

The next day I was in for a treat. I got introduced to the craziness that is Jesco White. I'd never heard of the him or his family before and having seen him I'm not sure I'll ever be the same again! Jesco, also known as the "Dancing Outlaw" is from Bandytown, Boone County in the Appalachian Mountains and is an American mountain dancer. He was 'performing' a show in Nashville that drew a surprisingly large crowd. The show mostly consisted of him sitting on stage with his sister, downing cans of PBR and occasionally getting up to say something incomprehensible into the microphone and doing a bit of a dance! I think for the 40 minutes-or-so that this went on for I was just stood by the stage with a look of utter confusion! Thankfully I wasn't the only confused person in the room. What was already a fun night was made evening better by seeing Birdcloud play after Jesco. They were also a new to me and a lot of fun - careful though, their lyrics and videos are probably NSFW!

The following day was pretty special. Austin Lucas was recording his new record with Glossary and said I'd be welcome to stop by the studio. I obviously jumped at the chance. I think that everyone thought I was pretty crazy for wanting to hang out in the studio but and found it fascinating to the see the process artists go through whilst recording. I'm not sure when the album's coming out but hopefully sometime soon and from what I heard I reckon it's it'll be right up there with some of his best stuff.

New Orleans

I wished that I had more time to spend in New Orleans. From the moment that I arrived to when I was heading back to the airport I loved the city. I had rented an apartment that was a few blocks away from Frenchman Street. My flight in was early evening and I had just enough time to grab some food and a beer at Buffa's Lounge before heading over towards the financial district to see Amy LaVere play the Circle Bar. She was great but played quite late and by the end of her set I was about ready to head home via a quick stop at R Bar.

I only had one full day in New Orleans and wanted to do as much exploring as possible. I took a walk along the banks of the Mississippi, coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde and then boosted my vinyl collection at some of NOLA's record stores. Walking around town Bourbon Street was already pretty crazy, and this was on a Monday morning. I decided that seeing that part of town should probably be avoided in the evening and I'd find somewhere else around Frenchman Street.

Coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde

In the afternoon I headed out to get some food. I wanted to try a place that Bingham and Angela had recommended, a place called Liuzza's By The Track (1518 North Lopez Street). Supposedly it does the best BBQ shrimp Po-Boy in all of New Orleans, it was also the place the John Goodman's character took his last meal in the series Treme. It was about 15 minutes by bus and well worth the trip. I'm no expert when it comes to Po-Boy's but if there's a better one out there then it'll be insane!

During the evening I didn't have anywhere specific to go, I took a wander around the French Quarter and headed over to Frenchman Street. Compared to the busyness of Bourbon Street this area was pretty quiet. I stopped by a couple of bars but I seemed to be arriving at places in between things. I moved onto a bar called the Apple Barrel, I walked in just as a guy (who I now know as Sam Cammarata) was taking the stage. It seemed like a cool place, small and smokey. There was an empty seat at the bar and ordered myself a bourbon and a beer. It wasn't long before I got chatting with others at the bar and it turned out they were all local musicians playing the Frenchman Street circuit. They told me all about what it was like being in New Orleans during Katrina and what has happened since. They told me about how they saw the Bourbon Street area expanding and the fears they had on the impact of local musicians and the music they'd be able to play. It was a great crowd and drinks were flowing pretty steadily.

A part way through the night a girl stumbled into the bar and took the seat next to me. She was on the drunker side of tipsy and asked if I could read her a chapter of the book she was carrying. I was also approaching the same level of drunkenness and I think my new found friends at the bar could see I needed rescuing. Sam came over and told me that "...if we wanted to make it then we'd have to leave now..." and looked towards the door. I had no idea what he was talking about (or maybe it was a previous conversation and I'd forgotten) but got up and followed him out the bar. We met up with his girlfriend, Stella, and they took me over to the 9th ward and a divey blues bar called BJs Lounge. Here the drinks must have been extra good or the music extra fun because I have recollections of dancing, and that never happens!

California

Next up was California and a welcomed change of pace. I also got to meet up with my girlfriend, Anna who was joining me for the last part of the trip! I flew into LAX where I met with Anna and a friend of hers, Zita. I'd heard a lot about Zita but this was the first time I got to meet her and her husband, Joseph. We were spending the first few nights of the California trip at their home in Huntington Beach. I knew a bit about Huntington Beach but mostly from my buddy Eamon who told me no matter what anyone else says Santa Cruz is the real surf capital of the US and not Huntington Beach! Having now been to both places I have to say it's pretty close at to which one is better. Sorry Eamon!

Huntington Beach, Surf Captial?

From Huntington Beach we were taking a road trip up the coast to San Francisco stopping at a few places along the way. Anna got to hire her dream car, a black Ford Mustang convertible, whilst I nervously sat alongside in the passenger seat in charge of navigation (that mostly consisted of "keep going straight ahead"). The drive up the coast was beautiful, our first stop was in Santa Monica where spent a couple of nights and then onto Santa Barbara to spend Christmas Eve. From Santa Barbara we drove further up the coast to Santa Cruz where we spent a few days with our friend Eamon and his family.

Anna and her Mustang

We arrived in Santa Cruz just in time to join Eamon's family for dinner on Christmas Day evening, and I'm glad we did! Eamon's uncle had made the most amazing cioppino, it's something I've tried to replicate a couple of times since coming home but I need a lot more practise! I'd heard a lot about Santa Cruz from the time Eamon had spent living in London so it was good to have a personal tour guide showing all the sites. From his old childhood hangs to checking out the seals under the wharf, I can see why Eamon is so fond of the place!

From Santa Cruz Anna, Eamon and I headed up to San Francisco. I'd hope to catch up with a couple of other friends living there but it being the holidays they were out of town. Nevertheless we had a great time! We got the extended San Francisco tour from Eamon, checked out a number of his favourite bars (for me it was between Thee Parkside and Benders as to which was my favourite), and ate more burritos in five days than I'd had in the previous year! The end of the trip was topped off with a hotly anticipated basketball game, the Golden State Warriors playing at home the LA Clippers. It was a great game that the Warriors led from start to finish, and a perfect end to the San Francisco adventure and time to head back to London!

Warriors vs Clippers

SXSW: Austin, Texas

Arriving back in London after California my initial plan was to straight away start looking for a new job but between catching up with friends and family who I'd missed over Christmas and getting on top of some of my non-travelling to do list (working through some Code Academy projects, catching up on reading) I soon found that time was flying by and all of a sudden March was approaching and a trip back to America for SXSW. This would be my third SXSW and with snow forecast for London I couldn't wait to get to the sunshine of Austin, Texas.

SXSW kicks off with a week of interactive followed by a week of music. In previous years the group I've gone with have mostly headed home after the end of interactive but this year the majority were hanging on for the whole thing. We had rented a house not far from South Congress Avenue and this proved to be a good move, we could easily walk into downtown and had the option of getting the bus or taxi if needed. There were also armadillos in the garden!

Before buying a ticket for this years event there was a discussion amongst my friends as to whether it was worth going, the quality of talks have in the past been a little bit hit and miss. But the value is mostly in hanging out and meeting people, this year proved to be no different. During interactive I attended a couple of great talks - I think my top one was around the digital focus of the US Government, they talked a lot about what they were doing and how they were following closely that of the UK Government and GDS. But most of my time was spent around downtown catching up with friends and meeting new ones. We also managed to make a pilgrimage out to Salt Lick for an immense BBQ.

BBQ at Salt Lick

On the day that music rolls around there's a strange feeling as old friends leave and new friends arrive. The laptops and iPads being carried around the convention centre get replaced with guitars, the hair gets longer and beards thicker. It's a great time!

The first night of music kicked off with Glossary's traditional SXSW opener at the Hole In The Wall. This year they were joined by Two Cow Garage, Grand Champeen, District Attorneys, Ol' Yeller, The Ripe and The Pollies. It was a great start to SXSW music and if that turned out to be the best night then it'd have still have been a great week!

It's actually really hard to pick a highlight of the week, there were so many amazing bands. People I'd seen before like Star & Micey, Austin Lucas, Lydia Loveless, Caitlin Rose, Two Cow Garage, Glossary were all great. Also a bunch of people who I saw for the first time and would love to see again - Murder by Death, JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, Waco Brothers, Whiskey Shivers, Nikki Lane and many more that'll keep coming back to me!

At the end of each SXSW I've left thinking I've had an awesome time but couldn't do it again. This year I left having had just as much fun as before and I'm already looking forward to getting back out there next year!

Star & Micey, SXSW 2013

Food

I think that the question that I'm asked the most is "where was the best food?" There's no easy answer to this, but with the help of FourSquare checkins to aid my memory he's my best stab:

best burger: Hubcap Grill in Houston, TX
best taco: Mas Tacos Por Favor in Nashville, TN
best burrito: La Taqueria in San Francisco, CA
best ribs: Payne's Bar-B-Que in Memphis, TN
best pulled pork: The White Water Tavern in Little Rock, AR
best coffee: Barista Parlor in Nashville, TX
best brisket: Salt Lick, Austin, TX
best shrimp: Liuzza's Bt The Track in New Orleans, LA
best salad: haha! There was no salad!

The future

In between the bars and bands, flights and Greyhounds I've had plenty of time to think about what I want to do next. When I left BT I knew quite a bit about what I didn't want to do but wasn't sure exactly what I did want to do. A few months later I certainly haven't boiled it down to wanting work for a specific company, or even a specific sector - there are however a few that I'm really interested in! What I've learnt probably sounds quite simple and obvious on paper but they are things that feel are important to me.

Filling the gap between users and devs

In all my previous roles I've been in a position where I've sat somewhere between the users and the developer/design teams. My closeness to each community has swayed throughout my career but the thing that I enjoy most is being sat in the middle of the two. I enjoy working with users to help get an understanding of a problem, trying to move their mindset away from approaching the development teams with a preconceived solution but really getting an understanding of what they need rather than what they believe they want. The same also applies to the development teams, making sure that they are fully aware of where the user is coming from.

Following on from this I enjoy working with design and dev teams to document and translate the user needs into a language that everyone can understand and working with the team to think of potential solutions that'll tackle the problem. As a project progresses I've also gotten my kicks from being the person who helps remove blockers and barriers from the developers, letting them focus on what they're good at and trying to avoid them worrying about the politics or red tape that might slow them down.

When I left BT I wasn't sure what this role might be called, our internal job titles didn't translate very well to the outside world. I've spoken to a lot of people explaining what I've done in the past and what I think I'm good at, the general consensus is that I should be looking for a role in the region of a Product Manager, ScrumMaster or Delivery Manager.

Building stuff

Working on changing a culture within an organisation has been fun, it also taught me a lot. I enjoyed meeting new people and being able to talk about the things I thought were important and help them overcome challenges in new ways. However if I wasn't in a position where I could do this whilst also being a part of a team where we built things then I think I'd have gone crazy. And with building stuff also comes being able to ship stuff. A big frustration was working on something that we all thought was great and added value but then being stuck behind a long process that meant it never saw the light of day, or when it did people's needs had changed and it'd become less relevant.

Something meaningful outside the workplace

At BT I worked on plenty of interesting projects, especially things like OpenBritain and ILGA these carried good weight in conversations with friends outside of the office. However projects like internal applications for engineers as exciting and transformational as they were they only warrant a limited amount of conversation time at the bar! It'd be great to work on something that directly means something to people I know, something that they're excited to hear about and I'm excited to tell them about.

Conversations, discussions and debates

One of the things I missed most since leaving work are the conversations, discussions and debates we'd have within the team. I've been fortunate to have colleagues around me in the past who've all been vocal about ways of doing things whether that was around methodologies, technologies or design principles. This led to a lot of shared learning and also developed a great deal of trust within the team. We were able to approach problems as a team with everyone able to influence the approach and as a result we came out with a better solution.

Keeping the hair and beard

OK, this one isn't entirely a deal breaker, or is it specifically about the beard (though in the past few months I've grown a beard that I'm quite fond of). What I really want is an environment that lets people be themselves and express themselves. Whether that's rocking up to work in a sharp suit or in jeans and converse. One of my favourite stories from a BT meeting was someone telling me that they were envious of me turning up to meetings with my long hair, jeans, plaid shirt and converse. But they wished that they were able to do the same and that their 'rebellion' was that they wore non-matching socks to work!

To sum up

If you've read from the top down to here I should apologise for my rambles. This started as me making a few notes for myself and then changing the narrative after some folk suggested it'd be useful to post online. It's long winded and I ramble on quite a bit! But thank you for reading!

I've had a great time out of work, and I hadn't realised quite how much I needed the extended break. But I'm now ready to jump into the next challenge and looking forward to whatever comes next. If anyone has ideas about roles that I might be suitable for then I'd love to hear from you. Actually, I'd just like to hear from you whatever the case. Maybe grab a coffee or a beer and check out some music!

Songkick Detour London

Matt Lucht — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:48:49 +0000

Songkick is one of a handful of services that I use on a daily basis. I started using it a few years back when I was moving house and found a shoe box stuffed full of ticket stubs for gigs that I'd been to over the years. I was trying to downsize and didn't want to take the stubs with me, but I also didn't want to lose the record of the gigs I'd been to. I started adding all the artists and gig dates into a personal wiki. And then someone told me about Songkick.

Over a couple of evenings I added artists and gig attendance to my Songkick account, it probably should've only taken an hour or two but each ticket stub reminded me of the evening which inevitably led to grabbing a record by the artist and reminiscing whilst listening to a few of my favourite tracks. Over the years I've tried to keep my Songkick account up to date with bands I've seen and each morning look forward to the email telling me who is playing in town based on my historic gig attendance and my LastFM listening data.

Last night I went along to the Songkick office in Shoreditch where they launched a new service called Detour. The idea is to bring artists to countries and cities where they'd not normally play by proving demand for tickets up front. The initial trial is for London only but I'd imagine it'll pretty quickly expand to other cities. Michelle You (one of the Songkick founders) talked about how they could see through the Songkick data that there were strong fan bases for artists outside of their hometowns but either the artist, their management or local promoters felt it was too risky to commit to expensive tours.

Michelle cited a conversation in the Songkick office where one of the team was raving about a San Francisco based electronic artist called Tycho, he had a reasonable following in London but hadn't yet made it over. Michelle and the team decided to see whether they could do something about it and contacted all the London based Songkick users who were tracking Tycho asking them whether they'd be willing to commit to buying a ticket and if enough people did then the Songkick team would work their magic and try and put on a show. Well, the fans were willing to commit and the gig happened.

Detour London builds on the Tycho experience. When you log into the site you see a list of artists that you've recently tracked (or alternatively you can search) you can then vote for as many artists as you'd like to see play in London. However your vote only counts once you've pledged to buy a ticket -- for each artist you can say how much you'd be willing to pay and how many tickets you'd buy. Once you've done this your votes are visible to other Songkick users through the artist's page, a leaderboard, and "Hot Artists".

When 50 votes are received the Songkick team will work with local promoters to try and put on the gig. Of course there're no guarantees that the gig will happen but they'll do their best and if it does go ahead then you'll not only get to see one of your favourite bands but also have that warm-fuzzy feeling that you helped make it happen!

Prior to going along to the event last night I was a little dubious about how this might work. I had visions of going along to a gig where an artist had gotten all their mates to vote for them to play and turning up as an outsider would be like gatecrashing a private party. But the fact that this is fan driven opposed to artist driven makes me think this could be a pretty cool idea. Certainly talking to other Songkick users who were at the event there was a good buzz and lots of enthusiastic discussion and debate about who people would like to see.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

At the moment the Detour London is in beta, if you'd like to take a look I've a couple of invite codes to pass on.

Music Wordle

Matt Lucht — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:21:12 +0000

Last week we had a bit of a cleaning frenzy in the office and decided to put up some new posters. A new addition to the wall is an Osmosoft Music Wordle -- an infographic showing the top 100 artists listened to on the Osmosoft stereo.

In a not-so-scientific way I took an export of LastFM scrobble data from myself, Colm Britton and combined with a cut of data I already had for Paul Downey, I'm not sure why I had that data but in a cyber-stalkerish way it was already on my hard drive. Between us we tend to control the music played in the office.

I merged the play counts together and stuck the data into wordle.net, did some custom configuration to get the colours on Osmosoft brand and this is the result!

And we're live!

Matt Lucht — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:16:37 +0000

Today, after what has been a bit of a frantic build up, we've gone live with a project that Osmosoft have been involved in for some 18+ months. Over the course of that time the scope of the project has shifted, twisted, turned and materialised into a number of things. Since the beginning of the project we've lost some good people from the team -- not specifically as a consequence of the stresses of the project I hasten to add. But with those of us remaining we managed to get through it!

There was no fanfare or applause when the go live button was pushed, and there certainly wasn't any champagne corks popping or pyrotechnics. But never the less it feels like a pretty good achievement and one that I personally have learnt a lot from. The work was for an internal BT project, and at the moment the stakeholders are a bit cagey talking about the specifics in public -- that'll change and I plan to elaborate a bit more about what was built. But in essence we started with building a prototype that helped business folk explore different ways of sharing information amongst themselves using positioning and sizing of snippets of information as a mechanism for conveying importance and relevance. An early prototype of this can be seen over here -- use 0 to zoom all, left/right cursor keys to navigate.

That early prototype led to a number of discussions around how further abstract models of sharing information could be used. There were some interesting conversations and ultimately what got proposed was a toned down, slightly more enterprisey solution. The key win however was getting senior buy in to move from a world where information was being shared in Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents via email to one where information lived and evolved on the web within a wiki.

What was built was an application whereby content was authored within a wiki, on top of that there's a layer that pulls content together and presents it within a structured manner with a separate interface. This allows for viewers of the content to be able to follow a step-by-step walk through in a logical manner, or take a more explorative path using all the goodness that wiki links provide.

Putting technology to one side the thing I've found most interesting about this piece of work is the reaction from management teams when they realised that individuals who are using the content -- most of it being processes, procedures, and best practise -- are also within the same pool of people creating and maintaining the content. For most that's been a massive paradigm shift from a culture of auditing and ownership coming from a single 'trusted' source.

Another interesting aspect was that the solution has been built on an open source stack. Now, this certainly isn't the first open source project deployed within BT but we still came up against some of the same misconceptions around what open source meant. Questions such as who do we go to (blame) should something go wrong, who 'owns' what has been built, can it scale, does it have Enterprise level robustness etc etc. Thankfully misconceptions around open source weren't shared by everyone and with some careful educating and demonstrating through building rather than pushing around spec sheets we were able to get the application deployed within a production environment...eventually!

(On the point of open source I'm not sure how relevant what we've built will be outside of BT, but where it makes sense we'll be putting the code up onto Github).

Whilst all the politics was playing out around strategic vs non-strategic and whether or not an 'open source' application was fit for purpose a related piece of work came our way.

The same group of people who were using the wiki to view and maintain process and procedural information were also backed up by a telephone support team who they were able to call should they come across a particular problem that hadn't been documented. These kinds of issues may be very specific and time bound, they might be relating to a particular customer or geographic location, or some may be quite generic and ought to be added to the wiki.

The details of the calls weren't being captured anywhere and the business were quite rightly concerned about valuable information exchange being lost.

The thing that we ended up building was pretty nice looking web form that as you entered information about the call it displayed details of previous call logs and related information from the wiki. Details of a call could be linked to related information to help promote reuse of content and highlight common themes. There is also some social voting where inspired by stackoverflow.com where answers to questions can be voted up or down. We also introduced some features that used the browser geolocation to pin point an individual on a map and layer on top additional information.

Our remit for this piece of work was to build a first iteration of the application that could be deployed for use in a live environment but also seeded ideas for its evolution. It feels as though we've done a good job on that and one of our small (but heroic) victories was around getting agreement to roll out a webkit browser to sit alongside the standard IE7 internal build. This has allowed us to demonstrate how recent developments in the HTML spec can quickly and (relatively) easily help tackle some key problems. Hopefully this will pave the way for some more interesting work over the coming months.

The applications that we've built have been hosted on a dev server for a while now and been in trial with a number of teams across the business. Today marked the day that the application moved onto it's own production environment with the trial badge removed and support taken over by a full blown 24/7 team.

It's been a fascinating project to work on providing a whole load of stimulating conversations around technology choices, business process, enterprise culture and change management. In a way it's sad handing it onto another team, but on the positive side it means we're now ready to move on and pick up the next piece of work!

Who'd you want to see a hologram performance from?

Matt Lucht — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:09:00 +0000

So, the Tupac hologram performance from Coachella this past weekend is currently doing the rounds on the internet. That got me thinking who I might want to see perform in a hologramtic fashion! Here's a quick five in no particular order:

Andrew Wood (circa Mother Love Bone)
Jimmi Hendrix
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Townes Van Zandt
Jim Morrison

SXSW 2012 (not so short) short list

Matt Lucht — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:02:31 +0000

So I'm starting to build up a rough short list of who I want to see at SXSW next month. There are still more bands to be announced, and of course those who show up for impromptu gigs. I'm trying hard not to just list bands I've seen before, however with some of these that just ain't possible!

Anyway, a complete list of the official bands can be found on this site or over on the LastFM events page, let me know who you reckon I should check out!

Here's my in no-particular-order shortish list!

Lucero

Screaming Females

The Calm Blue Sea

Gary Clark Jr

Tim Barry

Zechs Marquise

My Jerusalem

Jamie N Commons

J Roddy Walston And The Business

Against Me!

Hot Water Music

Maps & Atlases

Bruce Springsteen

Bare Wires

Chuck Ragan

Cory Branan

Dan Mangan

The Black Belles

White Horse

Youth Lagoon

Zola Jesus

Yukon Blonde

Star & Micey

The Black Angels

The Bombettes

The Magnetic Fields

The Ettes

Therapy?

William Elliott Whitmore

Two Cow Garage

Tommy Stinson

The Coathangers

This Will Destroy You

Tribes

My favourite albums of 2011

Matt Lucht — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:03:56 +0000

This time last year I listed my bands of 2010 and figured I'd do the same again this year. 2011 was a good year for music, some great albums released, mind blowing gigs and opportunities to attend some amazing festivals. It was a tough choice but here it goes!

10 - Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Release date: 12th September 2011
Label: True Panther

Father, Son, Holy Ghost was a surprise album for me. I wasn't expecting to like it but have found over the past few months it's an album that I've not taken off of my playlist. The album contains many references to lead singer Christopher Owens's bizarre childhood being brought up in the cult Children of God and it's genre switching mixture of surf-rock (Honey Bunny), metal (Die), and indie-rock make this second album from Girls an interesting listen.

9 - Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

Release date: March 8th 2011
Label: Matador Records

Likened to Tom Petty, John Fahey and Bruce Springsteen Smoke Ring For My Halo is Kurt Vile's fourth full length album. With its wry lyrics and intricate guitar its the best indication yet of what is likely to come from this 30 year old.

8 - The Dodos - No Color

Release date: 16th May 2011
Label: Wichita

No Color is the 4th album from The Dodo's and follows 2009's disappointing Time To Die. The addition of influence and vocals from Neko Case (The New Pornographers) appear to have made a big difference and tracks one through to seven are great, it's a shame that the final two tracks of the album slightly let it down.

7 - Cass McCombs - Wit's End

Release date: 11th April 2011
Label: Domino

Wit's End is Cass McComb's fifth album and first of two releases in 2011 (it was followed later in the year by Humour Risk). It's a stripped down, moody album at the kind of pace you've come to expect from the enigmatic figure. Certainly an album to listen to at the right time.

6 - The Phoenix Foundation - Buffalo

Release date: 10th January 2011
Label: Memphis Industries

Wellington six piece, The Phoenix Foundation have been around for over a decade yet have struggled to make much of an indent outside of their home country. In 2007 their third Album, Happy Ending, received good reviews but quickly disappeared. 2011's Buffalo, will I hope, be a different story. It sounds like a much more complete and grown-up album with dreamy, hazy sounds akin to the Beach Boys or possibly some Belle & Sebastian. They toured Europe earlier this year, hopefully they'll be back again in 2012.

5 - Russian Circles - Empros

Release date: 14th November 2011
Label: Sargent House

For me Russian Circles are one of those bands who'll always sound better live than on album, but that aside Empros is probably their strongest recorded album to date. Their dark, instrumental rock has a slightly different feel to previous albums, most notably on album closer - Praise be Man.

4 - Explosions In The Sky - Take Care

Release date: 18th April 2011
Label: Bella Union

Everything about Explosions In The Sky is pretty epic. Their songs are epic, their videos are epic and their live performances are epic. Hailing from Austin, Texas the four piece set up of three electric guitars and one drum kit describe their music as "cathartic mini-symphonies". Perfect listening for almost any occasion.

3 - tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l

Release date: 18th April 2011
Label: 4AD

A blend of R&B, folk, afro-beats and lo-fi combined with Merrill Garbus extraordinary voice makes for a great sound. The albums edgy theme deals with topics such as "power struggles that arise from inequity and lead to further cruelty and injustice" immediately obvious on tracks Powa, Gangsta, Killa, Riotriot and Doorstep.

2 - William Elliot Whitmore - Field Songs

Release date: 12th July 2011
Label: Anti

I was lucky enough to see William Elliot Whitmore play a few weeks ago at one of his rare London gigs. I did a quick write up of what was a truly amazing gig. Despite being in his early 30s William already has seven albums to his name and his latest, Field Songs, is in my humble opinion among his best. Its a much stripped down affair switching between banjo and guitar to accompany his throaty vocals. The lyrics on the album, like many of William's others, talk of real life, working to make a living whilst still trying to stay true to who you are. Perfect listening for cold, dark nights with a bottle of your favourite drink.

1 - St Vincent - Strange Mercy

Release date: 12th September 2011
Label: 4AD

Prior to this year I didn't know too much of St Vincent, I'd given 2009's Actor a brief listen but quickly discounted (probably a bad move) and it wasn't until one of my housemates and I were talking about our favourite albums of the year that I was pointed in the direction of Strange Mercy. Straight away it jumped into my top albums of this year. Throughout the album there are complex hooks and riffs which combined with Annie Clark's angelic yet melancholic vocals keeps you enthralled and on edge from start to finish. For me, stand out tracks of the album are: Cheerleader, Northern Lights, Cruel and Dilettante.

Narrowing down to ten was a challenge in itself, putting them into a one through ten was almost impossible. Anyway, if I was going to do a top twenty list here are the (unlisted) albums that probably would've made the cut.

Night Beats - Night Beats
Le Butcherettes - Sin Sin Sin
TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light
Dum Dum Girls - Only In Dreams
Zola Jesus - Contaus
Austin Lucas - A New Home In The Old World
Cults - Cults
The Crookes - Chasing After Ghosts
The Kills - Blood Pressures
Foster The People - Torches

William Elliott Whitmore - Windmill, Brixton

Matt Lucht — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:23:08 +0000

Photo by Pieter Morlion

There are many great things about living in Brixton and one of those is being just a stone throw from the Windmill where on Thursday evening William Elliott Whitmore took to the stage. A rare opportunity to see William play in such an intimate venue the gig sold out weeks in advance, however being both slim and very lucky I was allowed to squeeze in!

At the Windmill it's been a fine year for artists of the folk-punk/alt-country genre with Austin Lucas, Digger Barnes, Two Cow Garage, Crazy Arm, Frontier Ruckus and Franz Nicolay to name just a few who with tattooed arms and shots of whiskey have taken the stage in recent months.

Support on the evening came from London based, and Windmill regular JD Smith. I arrived a little too late to catch his set but based on previous times I've heard him play he's well worth checking out if you get the chance.

William's act is a minimalist one accompanied with just his banjo and kick-drum, and there was a sense the evening would be a long one as he invited folk to make room for others saying "there's plenty of room up here on the stage, just don't touch me or touch my shit!". And a long one it was, for the £10 entry you certainly got value for money with a set which topped the two hour mark.

With seven albums to his name there were plenty of songs to play and it seemed as though William would have been happy playing through all of them. Taking numerous requests from the audience William was willing to play whatever the eager and informed crowd wanted to hear, and the frequent stops between songs for banter, a steady flow of whiskey being passed forward from the back of the room and the lights down low it only added to the intimacy of the event.

Although a great banjoist it's William's voice that really sets him apart. His deep, throaty vocals are often described as 'the voice that Tom Waits has been after for years' and something of a mix between Solomon Burke and Captain Beefheart with plenty of whiskey and cigarette abuse thrown in for good measure. A blend of gospel, blues, folk and country it's a sound that wouldn't be out of place in the 1930s but fits equally well in 2011. And lyrics of solid Americana pedigree speaking of drinking, loving and losing, the devil and darkness, as well as reflections of life growing up on his grandparents farm in Keokuk, Iowa you were left entertained, informed and feeling as though as long as people kept making music like that then everything was going to be alright.

If you get a chance to see William live you should, and if you don't then you should at least give him a listen!

Seven Myths of Open Source

Matt Lucht — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:58:28 +0000

At the moment at Osmosoft we're running an open source awareness campaign. Whilst its focus is to an internal audience the messages are just as applicable outside. As a part of the campaign we're creating a bunch of posters that will be placed around various BT buildings.

One of the posters that I've put together highlights some of the main misconceptions around open source. Clearly this doesn't pick up on everything (and it's certainly no uber doodle), but hopefully it will provide some thought and discussion.

The Seven Myths of Open Source

The photo is published under Creative Commons so please feel free to use, share and better the poster!

foursquare, rules and reasoning for using it

Matt Lucht — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:20:00 +0000

Recently I've once again begun getting more and more into foursquare, the location based social networking site. I first signed up when it became available in London sometime late 2009 and after a few months of avidly checking in everywhere that I went I began finding it less and less useful and eventually stopped using it.

Then earlier this year prior to attending SXSW I recalled someone saying how useful a service it was during the previous year for helping to keep track of where everyone was during the conference and throughout the evening parties. And it was. Throughout the conference the convenience of notifications each time a friend moved from one venue to another was invaluable both in terms of knowing where to go next and of course saving on costs of expensive SMS and voice messages.

Coming back to London post SXSW I continued using foursquare, although the benefit of knowing where my friends were quickly subsided due to the small number of people I knew who used it. My check ins were becoming less and less frequent, often occurring when I was stood in a queue, or I happened to notice the foursquare sticker on an entrance door. That was until I attended a London Quantified Self / Self Hacking meet up.

At the London Quantified Self meet up I heard from a bunch of people who were using data collected about themselves (from mood, to weight, to productivity) to help analysis and improve themselves. This got me thinking about the data that I collected about myself (at the time I wrote a short blog post) and other data that I may like to capture. One personal data set that I have which is fairly vast is a list of music I've listened to. The data goes back to pretty much all (digitally recorded) music that I've listened to since 18th July 2008. In a similar vain I also have a fairly comprehensive list of all the gigs I've been to. Many of these pre-2008 were added from memory or from rifling through a shoe box full of ticket stubs!

On the point of the listened to (or scrobbled) music I could have had a much richer data set. Pre-signing up to LastFM, the service which allows you to scrobble your music, there was a period where I didn't know why I'd want to capture a record of all the music I'd listened to. It seemed a bit pointless and I'd have no idea as to what want to do with that listening history. So I didn't sign up and I carried on listening to music.

Granted, right now I'm not doing massive amounts with that listening history. It provides a great mechanism for recommending new music to listen to, and via being hooked up to Songkick it serves well in notifying me of upcoming gigs based upon the music I listen to the most. And of course it provides great ammunition for bragging rights over who listened to a particular band first! I'm also certain that in the coming months, year, and years there'll be many more services that will call on that data to provide me with great things. So in hindsight I'm annoyed that during the period when I could have been scrobbling my music listening but chose not to I'm now missing out on having access to (personally) valuable data.

Back to the point of foursquare location data. I'm now thinking that although I don't know just how useful the data will be if I don't start capturing it now then it's lost forever. And when there's a revelation as to its use I'd be at risk of missing out due to not having that data available to me. Capturing the data is cheap in terms of effort, and there are all ready some obvious immediate benefits such as knowing where friends are hanging out, seeing places I've visited before, or the restaurants friends are liking. The potential future of location based data is exciting and I'm keen to make sure I'm set up for it!

Explaining my rationale for using foursquare has helped encourage a few more friends to also sign up or to revert back to checking in. This has evoked another side to foursquare, gamification, the use of points, badges and leaderboards to encourage some healthy competition amongst peers. Clearly this provides some added fun to process of checking in, some instant gratification to the process of collecting longer term useful data. It has also stirred up some healthy debate in the Osmosoft office, particularly around what constitutes a suitable check in. I thought I'd share a few of the unwritten rules that we've been playing by and highlight some areas of contention!

Your home – a check in here is borderline acceptable. Personally I don't do it but I wouldn't take offence against any of my friends who checked into their own home. Discussions around this point inevitably led to debates around the wider security implications of letting people know where you are and when you're not home. Lots to think about but given you could likely garner the same information from Facebook status updates or recent tweets its all a bit of a non-issue.
Train stations, bus garages, airports – this is fine as from the perspective to collecting data about where you've been this is all useful stuff. However I draw the line at checking into a specific platform, unless its platform 9¾!
Coffee shops, restaurants, bars – these are all clear yes's although there are some finer points which need to be considered. For example, on Friday two of my colleagues and I went for lunch. We fancied some jerk chicken so headed to Caribbean Lunches on Strutton Ground. We were a little late for lunch and whilst queuing I checked in. Reaching the counter we were told that there was only enough food left for two people, Ben and Jon had jerk chicken and I went off to get some other goodness from another place nearby. I didn't check in at the other second place as I'd already completed my lunchtime check in and didn't want to be accused of hoarding points! I'm not sure whether this is the right etiquette to follow?
The office – this is cool, however typically should only be done once a day. Going out to lunch and returning to the office doesn't warrant another check in! Exceptions to a once a day check in may be if you move between offices.
Shops – this is a tricky one. One of my general rules is to check into places of significant importance or a place where some form of social interaction may occur. Checking into a supermarket or a pharmacy may be frowned upon, however checking into somewhere like Magma, one of my book shops in London, is fine as friends who've seen this check in would likely ask what awesomeness was acquired in that trip.
Multiple checkings – similar to the office scenario there are certain times when checking into a single venue more than once in a day is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps you've met some friends in a bar, moved on for dinner and then return to the same bar later in the evening. This would warrant three legitimate check ins. However going to a bar, ducking out to visit an ATM and then returning to the bar should probably require just the one check in for the bar.
Dubious check ins – a statue walked passed en route home (ahem, Jon) or north-west corner of a park followed by south-east corner of the same park would be considered dodgy check ins.

Clearly this list is neither exhaustive nor is it official, its all a bit of fun. Standards for using the service will continue to adapt and evolve amongst groups, and new applications that utilise location data will open up exciting new possibilities. Lots to think about but right now I'm off to my local coffee shop to claim my mayorship!

D Generation at The Borderline

Matt Lucht — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:33:23 +0000

This evening I fulfilled a missed teenage opportunity. To see D Generation live. Described as one of the most important bands in punk rock history I was introduced to them whilst working at a friend-of-the-families record store in Soho.

Led by the captivating Jesse Malin, D Generation, or DGen, formed in pre-hipster Brooklyn during the early 90s gaining reputation playing venues such as CBGB and The Continental, and through supporting tours with the likes of The Ramones, Kiss, Social Distortion, Cheap Trick and Green Day.

Over the years I've seen Jesse Malin a number of times, playing both solo and with bands of various guises. In earlier gigs he regaled stories of growing up in New York, failed attempts with hookers as a young teenager, and later antics as a removal man for the rich and famous. More recently his enthusiastic between song rants (in the best possible way) have been of the state of the music industry and how people today would rather watch a song on YouTube than go to a club. He may have point, but at least they're listing to The Music, right?

This evening, D-Gen rifled through in a 'best of' set list to an eager and knowing crowd. Highlights were a'plenty, with standouts being Frankie, Capital Offender, Helpless. My pick of the night? The set closer, No Way Out. I suggest you check out this YouTube video and then go see some live music:

Young Rewired State - 2011

Matt Lucht — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:00:59 +0000

Last week at Osmosoft we hosted the Westminster arm of Young Rewired State, a week long mulit-site event for 14-17 year olds to build amazing things with open Government data. It was an awesome, though throughly exhausting week!

This is 3rd year of Young Rewired State and 2011's event was the biggest yet with 14 centres, 100 coders and over 40 hacks being produced.

At Osmosoft we hosted seven YRSers; Kush Depala, Alex Hill, Joshusa Allwood, Isabell Long, Joe O'Dell, Daniel Saul and Priyesh Patel. Throughout this blog I'll collectively refer to them as coders – as that is what they are, everything else sounds a bit too patronising!

At the start of the week there were varying level of abilities in the room ranging from those having only done a little bit of coding through to others being pretty proficient in a number of programming languages. We were also joined by two mentors, James Marwood, a business consultant and Robert Young, a back end programmer and expert data wrangler!

We started the week with a group session where we discussed our motivations behind attending the event and what we wanted to get from it, this discussion included everyone. Reasons for attending ranged from previous attendance at a Young Rewired State event through to wanting to get more involved in coding. A common comment however was that opportunities to get involved with and learn about coding whilst at school were few and far between – without exception everyone was self-taught and it was through events such as this one that they got to learn.

Day one idea boardAfter finding out why everyone was here we moved onto what everyone wanted to get from the week, ideas they had for potential hacks and problem areas which needed addressing. At first the discussion here was a little quiet, but not surprising given that there were a lot of new faces and the environment of a hot, air condition-less Telephone Exchange somewhat different to usual surroundings! But it didn't take long to get ideas going and we discussed the merits of each, the feasibility of coding something up in a week and other data sets, tools and open source projects that could be used to help. At the end of the session we had a number of ideas for potential hacks and the coders broke into pairs to discuss further, gather data and get to work on building something.

Throughout the week the involvement of the Osmosoft folk and mentors was fairly low touch, we gave some pointers as to different ways of tackling problems, ensured that focus was being given across all the required areas, but the code was written entirely by the YRS coders. Where there were gaps in knowledge we were able to get them started but very quickly they took full control of the reins – for example Kush had never done any CSS before, I spent 5mins showing a couple of things and when I came back 30mins later he'd styled a page including some pretty funky looking Webfonts!

Jon Robson of Osmosoft w/ Joe O'Dell

Judging by the quality of all the presentations from Friday across all the centres I'm not sure that this is needed, but I thought I'd highlight a few of the things which worked especially well for us and are worth considering next year:

Spending enough time planning as a group – encouraging discussion with everyone led to a number of initial ideas being adapted into potentially stronger ideas following inputs from everyone and not just those who wanted to build it. Don't be tempted to break away from the group too early as holding off getting into the code for just a little bit will pay dividends
Pairing up coders – there is a lot of be said about pair programming and it was certainly beneficial during the YRS week. By pairing up ideas were constantly bounced off of each other and it definitely helped to keep momentum going over the short but intense period of time.
Having ICR on screen – this year we made good use of the IRC channel where we had it set up on a large screen in the centre of the room. Not only was it a quick and fruitful place to ask questions it was also reassuring to see what others centres were working on (plus a reminder to stop for lunch when there was talk of pizza and donuts)!
Regular stand ups and show & tells – each day we ran and recorded a daily stand up at 12noon and a daily show & tell at 4pm. There were no excuses, everyone had to participate. The noon stand up was, as you'd expect, a quick 30 seconds per person on what they're currently working on, their next steps and any potential road blockers. The 4pm show & tells were slightly longer and were geared towards preparing everyone for being able to relay and demo what its was they were working on in 2 minutes (as per the rules for the end of week presentations).
Supply of food and drinks – sounds like an obvious one but having a good supply of food and drinks available is a tremendous help. Last year everyone had to go outside the building if they wanted to get soft drinks or snacks, this led to a lot of stopping and starting but having them on hands in the room kept things flowing nicely ...although next year I'll remember to get Coke Zero rather than diet!
Having lunch together – everyday we made a point of stopping and having lunch together. It was directly after the noon stand-up so followed on nicely for those who wanted extend discussions about their hacks, but more often than not it was an opportunity to talk about something other than YRS. It was great for getting to know everyone and a healthy break away from the screen!

YRS coder: Josh, Kush and Alex

By the end of the week the YRS coders based at Omsosoft had produced five working hacks;

The Solar Panel Project: was built by Issy and Joe to map solar panel installations across the UK with an aim of analysing trends for their usage across urban and rural regions.
projects2011.tiddlyspace.com/SolarIndex
To Infinity and Beyond: a Google maps mashup of Openreach's fibre-based broadband rollout plans across the UK. With this data Issy and Joe planned to overlay various Government data sets to try and identify possible correlations between faster broadband speeds and better educations, lower crime rates etc
projects2011.tiddlyspace.com/ToInfinity
Snackonomics: was built by Kush, Alex and Josh and its purpose was to provide a way of breaking down large incomprehensible numbers (such as the total UK national debt) into things that you might be more familiar with.
alxhill.com/snacks/
Wealth & Education: was produced by Alex and plots wealth and quality of education onto a Google Map. Having only arrived at YRS on the Wednesday this was turned around pretty quickly from Alex!
alxhill.com/yrs/

The Mood Map: was built by Priyesh and Daniel overlays live tweets and level of deprivation data onto a Google map. The tweets are analysed for their sentiment and colour coded as being happy, sad or neutral. With this data you can explore the correlation between sentiment and depravation levels. Priyesh and Daniel have a number of ideas on how to extend this project so definitely keep an eye out for updates to their site!
themoodmap.co.uk

On the final day of the week all the YRS coders from across all the centres got together at Microsoft's London office for an afternoon of presentations. There were some incredible hacks produced and its probably safe to say that everyone left in awe of what had been done in just a week. The YRSers from Osmosoft did a great job in showcasing there efforts and with slightly shaky hands (I think I was more nervous than they were) I recorded their presentation:

It was a fantastic week and I'll definitely be taking part again next year, although that seems so far away – hopefully there be an opportunity to do something similar in between?

Field Day 2011 line up

Matt Lucht — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:52:33 +0000

This is more so that I have it to hand, but perhaps useful for others - the stage times for Field Day 2011. I've put a little mark against those I'm interested in seeing play and hopefully add some Soundcloud links in there later. Theres a bit of overlap but then at a festival that's always the way. It should be a fun day!

Eat Your Own Ears Main Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
21.40	Wild Beasts	*
21.00	Baio (Vampire Weekend) DJ
20.10	The Coral
19.40	Jen Long DJ
18.55	Warpaint	*
18.30	Huw Stephens DJ
17.45	John Cale	*
17.15	Huw Stephens DJ
16.30	Electrelane	*
16.05	Jen Long DJ
15.25	Villagers
15.00	Justin Spear DJ
14.20	Sun Ra Arkestra
13.55	Justin Spear DJ
13.25	Junip	*
13.00	Chimes
12.30	Willy Mason

Bugged Out! Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
21.45	Carl Craig presents 69
20.30	Michael Mayer
19.15	Kieran Hebden B2B James Holden
18.00	Erol Alkan
17.00	Benga & Youngman
16.00	L-Vis 1990
15.00	James Blake DJ
14.00	Roska
13.00	Pearson Sound
12.00	Matt Walsh

Laneway Festival Stage in association

Time	Artist	Wanna see
20.50	The Horrors	*
20.20	Baio (Vampire Weekend) DJ
19.30	James Blake
18.40	Baio (Vampire Weekend) DJ
18.00	Jamie Woon	*
17.30	Jon Hopkins DJ
16.50	Twin Shadow
16.30	Jon Hopkins DJ
15.50	Mount Kimbie	*
15.30	Laneway Festival DJ
14.50	Matthew Dear Live Band
14.20	Laneway Festival DJ
13.50	Connan Mockasin
12.50	2.54
12.00	The History of Apple Pie

Village Mentality Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
21.35	Gruff Rhys	*
20.25	Anna Calvi	*
19.15	The Sea and Cake
18.00	Omar Souleyman
16.55	Konono No.1
15.50	About Group
15.25	Jon Hillcock DJ
14.45	Ariel Pinks Haunted Graffiti	*
14.20	Jon Hillcock DJ
13.50	Mark Kozelek	*
12.55	Toy
12.00	Faust

Bloggers Delight/Lanzarote Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
20.00	SBTRKT
19.00	Jamie XX	*
18.00	Actress	*
17.30	Casper C DJ
16.50	Zola Jesus	*
16.25	Nik Nik Nik DJ
15.45	Oneohtrix Point Never
15.15	Skull Juice DJ
14.45	Darkstar
14.25	Casper C DJ
13.50	Ducktails
13.25	Skull Juice DJ
12.45	Anika	*
12.00	Lanzarote DJ

Shacklewell Arms/Lock Tavern Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
22.20	Glasser	*
21.55	Chad Valley
21.20	Factory Floor	*
21.00	Dollop DJ’s
20.30	Born Ruffians	*
20.10	Dollop DJs
19.40	Tribes
19.20	Sexbeat DJ
18.50	Trophy Wife
18.30	Sexbeat DJ
18.00	Clock Opera
17.40	Leather Boy DJ
17.10	Martin Creed
16.50	Leather Boy DJ
16.20	Givers
15.55	Feeding Time DJ
15.25	Cloud Control	*
15.00	Feeding Time DJ
14.35	CocknBullKid
14.15	No Pain in Pop DJ
13.50	Spector
13.30	Beach Creep DJ
13.05	Creep
12.45	No Pain In Pop DJ
12.20	S.C.U.M
12.00	God Dont Like It DJ

Do You Come Here Often? Stage

Time	Artist	Wanna see
21.00	Veronica Falls
20.40	Star Slinger DJ
20.10	The Bookhouse Boys
19.50	Star Slinger DJ
19.20	Spectrals
19.00	No Bones DJ
18.30	Still Corners
18.10	No Bones DJ
17.40	Visions of Trees
17.20	Jig T DJ
16.50	Echo Lake
15.00	Boom Boom Cabaret
13.40	Dance Party 4000
13.20	Greenwich Tea Party
13.00	Club.The.Mammoth VS Grimes DJ
12.40	Alitrec
12.20	Kicker Conspiracy DJ
12.00	John McIvor

A little bit of Brixton was lost this morning.

Matt Lucht — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:07:52 +0000

Image courtesy of Rocker_44This morning squatters of Clifton Mansions were evicted after a 15 year occupancy of building. Lambeth Council who own the building plan to turn it into luxury flats, which for me seems to go very much against the original purpose and essence of the flats.

Located on Coldharbour Lane the 22 flats were built in 1896 to house the workers of Brixton Theatre (now the Ritzy cinema) and over the years have maintained a strong cultural link with the community - former residents have included members of The Pouges, The Cult, and notably 2004 Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller.

In recent years the building has suffered a decline in maintenance but lost none of the character which made it special or the sense of community from those who inhabited it, many of whom were musicians and artists contributing to the local area.

In 2007 the Clifton Mansions Initiative (CMI) put together a regeneration proposal at the heart of which the vision was to provide 22 affordable live/work units for use by the Creative and Cultural Industries. It would also provide retail units to help generate income for the workspaces and a centre for outreach programmes focused on tacking Brixton's social problems.

As recently as a few months ago I heard rumours that Lambeth Council may be interesting in resuscitating ideas from the CMI - sadly this seems not to be the case.

UX Camp London - UX and the Enterprise

Matt Lucht — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:27:39 +0000

Yesterday I attended the 2011 London UX Camp, it follows the same format as a traditional BarCamp but only over the course of one day rather than two and focused on UX, or at least anything that could be related to UX.

I'd gone along with my Osmosoft colleague, Colm Britton, and we decided to give a joint talk on the topic of UX in the Enterprise. Neither Colm nor I would consider ourselves "UX experts" (although Colm is much more design focused than I am and has recently begun taking a lead on the design elements of Osmosoft's work - and a great job he's doing too) so we figured given the audience of UX Camp it might be interesting to talk about our perspective of pushing good UX from within an Enterprise, the challenges faced, what's happening to make improvements and some of the questions we have.

At the start of the day we put our talk post-it note up onto the grid and we were somewhat surprised to see a number of Enterprise themed talks also being proposed - in fact the two main themes of the day appeared be 'UX in Agile Development' and 'UX in the Enterprise'

I thought that I'd run through some of the main points that Colm and I talked about, and some of subsequent conversations that arose during our and others presentations. I won't go through all the slides, however the full set can be found here.

Many of the following points are based upon experiences working in BT both on the business side (I was previously responsible for some of the web innovation work for the Wholesale arm of BT) and recent experiences working with Osmosoft - given yesterday's conversations I'm confident that these points are Enterprise wide and not necessarily BT specific ...that said the usual caveat of 'these are views of my own and not of my employer' applies!

People tend not to trust what they don't know - this is especially true in monolithic organisations where rigid structures and business norms are in place. If you try and suggest a new approach you're often looked at as though you're crazy. On a project a few years ago we were discussing the need for interaction design and the suggestion that we needed to pay for experts to help ensure the application was enjoyable to use was met with horror:

...this is a business to business application, its not supposed to be fun to use

There are many views and opinions as to what skill sets make for a good UX designer - an understanding of the aesthetics of layout, typography, colour and space, the ability to communicate well with clients and developers, being able to apply the mindset and goals of multiple personas, an understanding of human behaviour. There's also a growing trend of prototyping in code so fluency in HTML, CSS, JavaScript could be expected. And with the evolution of CSS3 things like a grasp of animation and motion also come into play.

No matter what your views are as to the perfect blend of skills to make a UX designer it undoubtedly requires a unique multi-disciplined person. In contrast most Enterprises are very much role driven organisations - people fill roles of rigid pre-defined skills and anything you do which falls outside of the bucket in which you've been placed is considered wrong or ignored.

At Osmosoft we recently went through to process of writing our job standards. Here we had what could be seen as a picklist of 'things' that based on our roles we should be doing. The difficulty we had was a lot of what we actually do wasn't a part of our role - it either sat under the title of a different role or didn't exist at all. A positive outcome from completing our job standards was recognition that perhaps new job roles needed to be created and with that hopefully we can shape the skill sets required.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all, and one that came up a lot during London UX Camp was how to justify the benefits of UX. In a world where everything requires an associated quantifiable benefit the cost of engaging a UX team is seen as an unjustifiable cost. Common sense tells you that building something that's unintuitive will lead to dissatisfaction and ultimately people not coming back to use what you've built again. As an argument for bringing in a UX team this kind of stacks up when it comes to customer facing things. But try applying this argument to internal applications and all of a sudden it becomes much more tricky.

Conversations throughout the day highlighted several approaches people have tried taking - analysis of efficiency which can then be related to a cost saving / increased revenue was common but often only possible after the fact.

As a common problem which seemed to be affecting a lot of people there was interest in continuing this discussion and come up with a robust set of metrics that'll stand up to business case reviews. I can see more posts on this topic coming soon!

Some of the challenges of UX in the Enterprise are purely cultural, and one would hope could be changed through best practise and education. However there are also challenges which are more difficult to overcome and in some cases simply cannot be removed.

BT, as you can imagine, has a huge systems estate with much of it having been built many years ago. As such there are often constraints enforced by the capabilities of legacy systems. Like a complicated jigsaw puzzle making changes can be made at the outside but ultimately dictated by what is at the centre - and getting to centre to make changes there means carefully unpicking everything else. This is slow and expensive.

Being cognisant of these architectural constraints can be frustrating especially when it forces you to compromise on the UX - but they do need to be considered. In the past where UX experts have been engaged we've often ended up in a scenario where a beautiful prototype has been produced, this has wowed the business but when it came to actually implementing it things fell apart and what we were left with was a poor resemblance of what was promised. Ultimately this does no one any favours - developers are wary of what designers will ask them to do next, and the value of engaging with a UX team is greatly reduced and questioned by the business.

In projects where a UX team is engaged they are often brought in far too late in the process. It's often at a stage where fundamental experience changes can no longer be made there's only an opportunity to make minor cosmetic changes - as Nick Dunlavey put it 'hit it with a pretty stick'.

When a UX team is engaged one of the many values they add is ensuring that the experience works from a DDA perspective. A common problem spoken about yesterday was when engaged late on in a project there are sometimes major changes that need to be made in order to achieve DDA compliance - no organisation would choose to ignore this so of course the recommended changes are made but often this is at cost to the project both in a financial and time sense. The fact that should UX have been properly considered at an earlier stage the cost and delay could have been avoided is normally overlooked and once again the UX team are seen in a bad light. Not good, huh.

There are a lot of challenges when it comes to UX in the Enterprise, and I've only touched on a few of them here. However I want to end this post (which I apologise has turned out being lengthier than expected) with some examples of how BT are taking steps to improve.

In BT we now have a team dedicated to usability. They are small in numbers and spread thinly across all kinds of projects (web based, internal applications, physical products, complete end to end processes etc). But they are in demand and being utilised more and more. In my opinion having an in house usability (or UX, design, UI, or...whatever you want to call them) team is a good move - they can understand the details of business processes better than an external agency and overtime engrain a user centred design approach to the heart of an organisation.

In Osmosoft one of our core principles to build prototypes rather than PowerPoint. Doing this allows us to more quickly build a closer relationship with the client (whether they are internal or external) giving them something that they can touch and play with helping us to get an understanding of the interaction needs. Based upon feedback we can quickly demonstrate iterative changes that can only be done in code.

Through BT's usability team, Osmosoft and other pockets of the business there are groups running regular masterclasses and awareness programmes to help raise the awareness of UX needs. These follow a ground up approach and focus on those who have an interest - something that was pointed out yesterday, and quite rightly too is that education needs to happen from the top level down as well. Unless the senior members of an organisation recognise the benefits of good UX then there'll always be issues.

Finally, a longer term goal of BT's usability team is to make UX a mandatory check point in its delivery model. As a gated checkpoint early on in the delivery process projects will only be able to proceed if they've had the necessary engagement with recognised usability experts. Inclusion in this process and its enforcement across the business is a long process, hopefully in parallel there'll be enough of a growing awareness that such a check point isn't really needed.

In summary, when it comes to UX in the Enterprise there any many challenges and there is plenty of room for improvement. Conversations at UX Camp London demonstrated there are lots of people interested in resolving these issues and that over the coming months and years there'll be increased acceptance and plenty of interesting changes afoot.

Russian Circles - Harper Lewis

Matt Lucht — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 23:56:58 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks there's an album that I've been listening to a lot - Station by Russian Circles. It's not particularly new, it was released on Suicide Squeeze Records in 2008, but seeing them play live at ULU a few weeks ago rekindled my excitement for them.

An instrumental, three piece band Russian Circles fall into many genres, perhaps most notably post-punk and mathcore – this evident through their past and present associations with bands such as Botch, These Arms Are Snakes, Dakota/Dakota and Mouth Of The Architect.

For me Russian Circles are one of those bands who's music is undoubtedly better live than recorded. That said all of their records are worthy of a listen and make a strong addition to any collection.

Picking a single stand-out track is difficult, but at a push I've gone for the rather epic Harper Lewis - at a little over seven minutes long it gives you a taste of what to expect from the band - a heavy bassline, and a complex use of effects and loop pedals.

You should give Russian Circles a listen, but before doing so make sure you've the volume and bass turned up (you'll appreciate it at around 2:28-2:40 onwards!).

Harper Lewis by Russian Circles

Self Hacking - Quantified Self

Matt Lucht — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:46:00 +0000

Earlier this week I went along to the Quantified Self London meet up. The London group is organised by Adriana Lukas and attracted some 40 or so people who were eager to understand more about the concept of self improvement through the analysis of habits, behaviours, and other personal data.

The meet up was run as a show and tell type session and we heard from four people with plenty of Q&A throughout. One of the experiences shared was from someone telling the story of how through capturing and monitoring his weight on a twice daily basis he was able to use that data as a tool to help encourage him to lose weight. Another was from someone who'd built an OSX application to allow you to track productivity - there were some reasonably complex algorithms in the application which ultimately allowed you to see a graph of the current day's productivity mapped against previous days.

Attendees of the meet up seemed to range from those who'd used the concept of collecting data about themselves to resolve problems or better their lifestyle, through to entrepreneurial types who were interested in building products and applications to assist in the collection and analysis of data. There were also a few people like me who'd really just come along to find out what it was all about.

I'd first heard the term Quantified Self through Gary Wolf's TED talk in September 2010 and feeling a little bit worried about what it meant to have all this personal information floating about. In the pub after the meet up the topic of where personal data should sit and the merits of making it available was discussed - it seemed that everyone felt that security and trust in who could see the data would be crucial in making the concept a success. If you missed the TED talk, it's at the bottom of the post.

After the meet up I began thinking about how I might benefit from Quantified Self. I remember a while ago, when I was a keen athlete (ha, the term 'athlete' to describe me now is laughable!) I used to meticulously monitor my heart rate during training sessions, plotting against it my mood, diet and external conditions such as weather and location. However being keen but still very much amateur this data tended to just sit on my computer as I had neither the time nor expertise to do anything with it.

Now my habits have changed, I've no idea where my heart rate monitor is any more, my once and sometimes twice a day training sessions have been replaced with things like work and going to gigs and hanging out with friends.

But I do still capture and monitor certain aspects of my life. For example – music that I listen to is scrobbled to my LastFM profile and places that I've been captured on Foursquare. Perhaps this falls more into a small element of Lifeblogging then that of Quantified Self? Either way I am still very much in the same situation I was with my heart rate data back in 1990s - the data is there but I'm not doing anything with it.

But maybe I should. Maybe in analysing the type of music I listen to when I'm at certain locations might reveal something? Or perhaps if I were to capture my mood, or a measure of daily productivity I'd be able to determine that say, listening to some Adebisi Shank on the way into work resulted in a more productive me? And maybe thats the difference between lifeblogging and Quantified Self, in the latter you are actually learning something from the data and doing something to make an improvement. When thinking of it like that the term "self hacking" (coined by Adriana) makes much more sense.

Of course analysing the music I listen to mapped against my mood would be of very little interest to anyone other than myself. But when you think of scenarios such as the one mentioned in the TED talk - monitoring the time and location of asthma inhaler pump usage - that could be of considerable interest. Especially if you imagined a scenario of all asthma suffers in London having their inhalers equipped with a GPS transceiver and each time a pump was used it appeared on a map to help articulate 'hot spots'.

This idea of making the information available is where Quantified Self gets interesting for me. In the same way that my training information was stuck, unshared, on my computer, if anyone is collecting data about themselves then by not sharing it they are missing out on some important opportunities - collective learning from others, contribution to a wider pool of knowledge and the encouragement and motivation they'd get from knowing others may also be monitoring what they're doing.

This is certainly an area I'm interested in learning more about, and if it sparks an interest with you I'd recommend taking a look at the Quantified Self website, and heading along to one of the meet ups.

Gary Wolf: Ted Talk on Quantified Self

Sin, Sin, Sin - Le Butcherettes

Matt Lucht — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:11:44 +0000

The Le Butcherettes have been gathering quite a following on the back of their roisterous live performances and there's been an eager anticipation, not least from myself, for the release of their debut full length album. Today it finally arrived and after a couple of listens its already jumped to being my top album 2011 so far (and will take some effort to be shifted).

Produced by Omar Rodriguez Lopez (of The Mars Volta) Sin, Sin, Sin is essentially a punk album that twists and turns through elements of garage rock (I'm Getting Sick Of You), cabaret (The Actress That Are Rousseau), tender spoken vocals (end of The Leibniz Language), and the theatrical and bizarre sounding (Mr. Tolstoi).

Some stand out tracks on the album come from those that already have had a fair amount of airing during Le Butcherettes gigs as well as being available on pre-release. Tonight, the first track of the album sets you up nicely with what's to come. This is followed by New York which speeds through in under two minutes and will be a certain fan favourite. The Leibniz Language is the longest track of the album and demonstrates the greatest variety opening with synthesised organ riffs, picking up pace in the middle before ending with example of the more senstive side of Teresa Suaréz's (aka Teri Gender Bender) vocals.

Sin, Sin, Sin is released by Rodriguez Lopez Productions / Sargent House and you can stream or download the album at the Le Butcherettes BandCamp page.

Track listing:

Tonight
New York
Henry Don't Got Love
The Leibniz Language
Bang!
All You See In Me Is Death
I'm Getting Sick Of You
Riko's Smooth Talking Mothers
The Actress That Ate Rousseau
Tainted In Sin
Dress Off
Empty Dimes
Mr. Tolstoi

Le Butcherettes: Henry Don't Got Love.

Urgh, it seems you're using an inferior browser and can't play the audio! Try enriching your life with one of these Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Safari

Austin Lucas, Brixton Windmill 8th May

Matt Lucht — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:46:00 +0000

For fans of the folk punk genre of music the last couple of weeks have been a real treat at the Windmill, Brixton. Two weeks ago Two Cow Garage played alongside the Blacklist Royals, Crazy Arm and El Morgan. Last night it was the turn of the rather awesome Austin Lucas.

I saw Austin Lucas play at the Windmill last October (that time with Cory Brannan and Drag The River) and was keen to see him again. He played a couple of unofficial shows at this years SXSW but both I and then a taxi driver got lost trying to find the venue (it was quite a way out of town) so I was pretty chuffed to see him booked to play back in Brixton.

In trying to get some friends to come along I described the music genre as alt-country punk, which admittedly doesn't sound very appealing to those who aren't already a fan of the genre. In hindsight I should have done a better job at selling the gig as it turned to be one of those rare evenings where you wish all your friends were there to witness it. Support for the evening came with a wealth of talent in the form of Digger Barnes, Darren Johns (of Crazy Arm), The Henry Brothers, El Morgan and Jimmy Islip all playing. I arrived missing the first act but caught the middle of El Morgan's set, it was the 2nd time seeing her play in as many weeks and I'll definitely be looking out for her coming back to London soon!

Anyone at the Windmill last night who wasn't already a fan of Lucas will surely be now. Playing a solo set as preparation for his forthcoming Country Throw Down tour with Willie Nelson, Lucas started out with the traditional Wild Boar, ending with Go West and winding through songs from across albums A New Home In An Old World, Somebody Loves You and Putting The Hammer Down often turing to the audience to determine what they wanted to hear next.

But it was his character and interaction with the crowd on stage really shone through. It's clear to see that he's someone who loves what he does and enjoys seeing others having a great time, you got the sense that he'd just as rather been in the crowd as playing on stage. During the set Lucas spoke about how he enjoyed the lack of green room at the Windmill as this meant he could get to hang out with fans stating if your fans aren't good enough to hang out with then you're playing the wrong type of music! In recent tweets Lucas demonstrated again that he appreciates people who want to listen to his music saying, "..love seeing free download links for my album online. It's kinda like when kids make their own Tshirts for your band. You know you've made it", although of course he'd rather you buy the albums. And you really should.

If you get a chance to see Lucas play live then grab it! I'll be looking forward to him coming back to London soon!

Content Aware - Photoshop CS5

Matt Lucht — Sun, 08 May 2011 14:40:33 +0000

This weekend I had a bunch of photo's I needed to edit and with my MacBook Pro going through a weird moment of wanting to reboot itself every 20mins I opted to download a trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS5 onto another computer and use that instead. I've used Photoshop CS4 for a while but hadn't seen any cause for me to warrant paying the hefty price to upgrade, many of the new features were of little interest to me and CS4 did way more than I needed.

...or so I thought!

After doing all the edits that I needed to do using the tools I was already familiar with I thought I'd have a play around with some of the newer features and see what they did. One that I was particularly intrigued by was the 'content aware' function. It can be used under a variety of circumstances such as filling a space or when using the clone tool. It uses a bunch of (i'd assume) very complex algorithms to determine (guess) at what should be in the image background based upon the pixels around the selected area. To test this I played around with using the clone tool to remove a few stray hairs from a portrait shot – something that may have been a 5-10min job to do correctly ordinarily. Switching from the 'proximity match' (as per CS4) to 'content-aware' the hairs were removed in one stroke and replaced with a natural looking background with no horrible dark smudges. It took a matter of seconds and needed no further manual correction. I then tried it on something I thought might be a little tricker – using the 'content-aware fill' function to fill out the missing area's stitched together panoramic shot. The results of this were outstanding!

The panorama below was taken on an Olympus EP1 using an old manual FD mount Canon 28mm lens and consist of 12 images stitched together. Theres a lot not to like about the picture (in my defence I'd just climbed up a bloody great big hill!) not least the amount of the frame that has to be cropped out post stitching:

Example 1 - original stitching

This cropping of images is a common occurrence in the panoramic shot where you can often loss around 30% of the image, unless of course you want to spend hours and hours copying, blending and smudging pixels in an effort to restore parts of the missing image! I never want to do that so end up with a cropped image such as this:

Example 2 - blank areas cropped out

In Photoshop CS5 with the missing areas of the image selected you're shown a new option when entering the fill command (keyboard shortcut: command-shift-backspace). Alongside 'fill with foreground' and 'fill with background' you can also use 'content-aware fill'. With this option chosen the application whirled for a bit (it was a 1.5gb file!) but after around 10mins gave the following result, with no manual corrections applied:

Example 1 - using 'content-aware fill'

I'm not sure whether this function alone is enough to warrant me forking out for the upgrade, but I've another 28 days of the trial period left so perhaps I'll find other new features that'll get be hooked and perhaps going back to my previously thought unsalvageable images I'd shelved!

Should you like to take a closer look the full res images are here:

The Music League

Matt Lucht — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:56:00 +0000

A few days ago a good friend of mine, Kate Hollowood posted on Twitter asking whether anyone knew any photographers who might be able to help shoot an event she was organising. I dropped Kate a note with some details of a group, ZoomIn photography, who'd helped me out in the past with Brixton Oxjam. I also said if she was really stuck I'd be able to offer my (rather) amateur services! It turned out Kate was really stuck!

The event Kate was involved in the organisation of is something called The Music League. The Music League provides a platform for unsigned bands of any genre to perform in front of audiences they may not ordinarily get a chance to play to. In a battle of the bands type format there are a series of events over the next 4-5 weeks at the end of which the overall winner of the league will have the opportunity to play at the 1234 Shoreditch Festival taking place in July.

To find out more about The Music League you should check out Kate's blog.

Last night was the first heat of round one and featured Will Roberts, Red Apples, Dan Shears and JSA. It's tough to call who'll go through. Will Roberts certainly brought the most fans but if it was down to me it'd be between Red Apples and Dan Shears. Anyway, here are a few (currently unedited) shots from the night.

The Windmill, Brixton

Matt Lucht — Thu, 05 May 2011 12:31:00 +0000

Prompted by the NME's Britain's Best Small Venue competition and that a couple of times I've made reference to the The Windmill when talking about bands on here I figured I'd write a short post about the place which Drowned In Sound calls "your favourite new venue".

Prior to moving to Brixton I'd been to the Windmill a couple of times and when a house came up in the same road I wouldn't say it was my main factor in moving but having the Windmill as my local was certainly a considerable factor.

The Windmill has a strong history, in it's past it was best known as bikers bar and then the chosen haunt of Brixton's Irish community. For the past 12 years its been hosting live music pretty much seven days a week and still remains a pillar of the local community – evident in the cliental mix of music fanatics and old time regulars sat along the bar.

It's been around a year since Windmill became my local and in that time I've seen a whole bunch of great bands. To list them all would be impossible but some personal highlights have been folk punk bluegrass-ist Austin Lucas; garage rock band The Ettes, current darling of Nashville Caitlin Rose, Austin legends ...trail of dead, Icelandic classical/pop Rökkurró, experimental glam rock Bobby Conn, and Canadian indie jazz sextet Brasstronaut. Oh, and how could I forget the legend that is Adam Bomb – stadium rock (complete with pyrotechnics) in your living room!

I caught up with Tim, the Windmill's events/band manager to have a quick chat about the venue:

How did the Windmill become a live music venue?
It kind of happened by accident, late night sessions at the bar revealed that the regulars carried a wealth of experience in musicianship and promoting, and since we all drank there we figured that we should get a good band down every now and and again. The bands came and they loved the venue and informality. Many of the bands kept coming back to play again and it kind of evolved from there.

What has been the most memorable gig you've put on at the Windmill?
Some that quickly come to mind are ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead which was just last month. The 5678s played just after Kill Bill 2 had come out and they were in it, Scritti Politti's comeback show after (gulp) 26 years, The Vaccines played last summer to just 30 people, and loads of others such as the much-missed Clor, Stereolab...

The Windmill prides itself on putting on good music, how do bands go about getting the chance to play?
Sound good and don't ask us for a gig four months in advance. There's always decent slots available. No matter how many of your mates you can get to 'ram the place' if your music sucks we're not interested! For more band information take a look here

RoofdogThere are some great gigs coming up, who's your pick to look out for in 2011?
We've got loads of great Canadian bands coming through in May. I'd say Said the Whale. They're blowing up in canada right now.

Roofdog is turning into a bit of a cult legend, how big is his fan base? Does he have a favourite band?
He's got over 500 fans now on Facebook. His favourite band is ...And You Will know Us By The Trail of Roof Dog (it's a covers band) but he also likes Caitlin Rose for chilltime.

You've recently started on putting on art exhibitions, any plans to continue this theme or branch out?
It was nice being arty. We also like having a pop-up shop too.

The NME is looking for the UKs best small venue, in my opinion the Windmill ticks all the right boxes – a good mix of promoting and nurturing local bands as well as bringing in acts from around the world, a venue run by people who know and love their music – and always up for for a discussion about the merits of some obscure sub-genre like alternative folk chamber pop!

If you'd like to cast your vote (and you really should) you can do so here, hurry though as voting closes on May 11th.

A look forward to Primavera Sound

Matt Lucht — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:41:02 +0000

To help work out who to go and see play I'm hoping that Robbie and the team at the Guardian can do for Primavera Sound what they did for SXSW (Guardian SXSW band tracker) ...but until then here's my shortlist of who I'm looking forward to see play.

The Black Angels

One of my highlights of this year's SXSW I'm very excited to be seeing this awesome psychedelic blues rock Austin based band again in the summer. They're playing the Saturday at Parc del Fòrum and then again at the Apolo Closing Party on the Sunday, there's a fair chance that I'll be there for both!

Las Robertas

A four girl garage band from Costa Rica who've been drawing strong comparisons to the likes of the Dum Dum Girls and Black Lips. They liken themselves to The Vaselines, Black Tambourine and Beat Happening - how can you go wrong with that?!

Ty Segall

At Primavera Ty Segall is performing as a solo artist, though he may be better know for his role in The Perverts, Sic Alps or Traditional Fools. His 'neo-psych garage punk' sound has had him compared to the Stooges and White Stripes.

The Tallest Man On Earth

The Tallest Man On Earth, aka former Montezumas frontman Kristian Matsson, is often compared to Bob Dylan, an accolade justly deserved. Having missed out on tickets for his London show I'm keen to catch him at Primavera.

ah, you're using an inferior browser! Just download it...

Of Montreal

Formed back in 1996 Of Montreal is one of the founding bands of the Elephant 6 collective. Their low-fi psychedelic pop funk has been likened to a mixture of Prince, The Beatles and David Bowie. They're renowned for putting on a good live show and will be taking on the San Miguel Stage on the Thursday.

Yuck

With band members formerly of Cajun Dance Party this 90s sounding indie rock band from London are good in the studio and even better live. I may even dance along to these guys!

Swans

Originally a New York post punk band the Swans returned after a long break with 2010's 'My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky' a more experimental sound than their 80s/90s albums I'll be hoping for a mixture of sounds at Primavera.

Wolf People

Drowned In Sound described Wolf People as having the psychedelia of Ocean Colour Scene's 'Riverboat Song' and the rawness of Queen Of The Stone Age's 'Era Vulgaris' - surely that has to be worth a listen!

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

With the dreamy pop sounds of Ariel Pink this should be the perfect band to see in the hot Barcelona sunshine.

ah, you're using an inferior browser! Just download it...

PJ Harvey

If you don't like PJ Harvey then you've simply not listened to the right album yet, if you run through the back catalogue I'm certain that you'll find one for you! This year's 'Let England Shake' took a couple of listens to get into but it's now had a fair amount of play and if reviews of her recent London gigs are anything to go by PJ Harvey is likely to be a highlight of the festival.

Pulp

Playing their first gig after an extended hiatus Pulp are deservedly one of the most hyped bands of this year's Primavera. I'm not a big Britpop fan, but when it's Pulp I'm happy to make an exception.

Phosphorescent

Phosphorescent (aka Matthew Houck) probably falls into the trap of sounding very similar to a lot of music around at the moment, however when its done as well as on the 'Pride' and 'Here's To Taking It Easy' album it may not be a bad thing. Much underrated and definitely one to go and see.

Perfume Genius

Perfume Genius may not be one to get the crowds going, or to put you in the festival spirit but the haunting vocals and low-fi piano sound will certainly be worth checking out at (what I'm assuming) will be one of the smaller indoor stages. Last years album, Learning, received accolades all round making many top ten lists.

Grinderman

Alt rock band, Grinderman was formed by legendary Nick Cave as a means to experiment with new material not associated with the Bad Seeds (though Grinderman features all members of the Bad Seeds). With two albums released after under the name you can expect the same Cave sounds along with some garage and stoner rock sounds.

The National

Seeing The National play at the Brixton Academy last year was, for me, one of the live highlights of the year. The Ohio band are at the very top of their game and can seemingly do no wrong it'll be interesting to see them in the festival environment.

Deerhunter

Self described as 'ambient punk' the four piece band from Atlanta take inspiration from The Fall, Nick Cave, Echo & The Bunnymen and My Bloody Valetine. Having supported the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio and The Smashing Pumpkins, Deerhunter are renowned for intense live shows.

Warpaint

Nominated for BBCs Sound of 2011 poll and featured as one of the Guardian's bands of the day, Warpaint have been gathering quite a following. Their new wave art rock is different to what I'd normally listen to, but there's something about this LA fourpiece which is pretty cool.

Autolux

Heavily influenced by the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails they combine 90s shoegaze with 00s experimental industrial rock. They've toured with an impressive array of artists including The White Stripes, Beck, Trent Reznor, The Flaming Lips and PJ Harvey.

Kaosan, Brixton Village

Matt Lucht — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:56:45 +0000

Since it opened around nine weeks ago I've received a bunch of recommendations from friends to try out Kaosan, Brixton Village's newest restaurant. Today I finely found time and headed down there for a spot of lunch.

The family run Thai restaurant is located at the Cold Harbour Lane end of 2nd Avenue and comfortably seats around 18 people. On a Tuesday afternoon the restaurant was fairly quiet (a group of six were leaving as I arrived) but during the weekend and evenings you can expect a short wait of 10-15 minutes for a table. And it's very much worth the wait.

Being a lunchtime I wasn't after a huge meal. Everything on the menu sounded amazing and for small place there was a varied selection. I opted for Kaeng Khiao Kai (Thai green chicken curry) and after a short wait my meal came out of the open kitchen where you can see the food being prepared. It looked, smelt and tasted great! It was hotter than a typical London thai, but not so hot it caused any discomfort whilst eating!

The average price of a main course was £6.90, a selection of soft drinks and teas are on the menu however if you fancy beer or wine with your meal you'll have to bring your own (apparently with no corkage charge).

If you're about Brixton I'd definitely recommend that you give Kaosan a go, in fact I'd say it's worth travelling to try out. You won't be disappointed.

Opening times:

Tuesday, Wednesday & Sunday – 12pm to 9pm

Thursday & Saturday – 12pm to 10pm

Two Cow Garage, Brixton Windmill

Matt Lucht — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:26:54 +0000

Previous to this weekend I'd not known too much of Two Cow Garage which given their relationship to Cory Branan, Jon Snodgrass, Austin Lucas, Drag The River (a group of artists I'm a fan of) I'm ashamed to admit. Although through the 'artist radio' feature on LastFM I'd unknowingly heard a few of their tracks previously which gave a nice sense of familiarity when I saw them play at the Windmill, Brixton on Sunday evening.

Despite not knowing too many of the songs Two Cow Garage were instantly listenable, sounding somewhere between (post D-Generation/Fine Art Of Self Destruction) Jesse Malin and early Gaslight Anthem – a good mix of edgy, punk influenced, sing-along-to, alt-country anthems.

On what was a Bank Holiday Sunday evening there was a passionate crowd out in force to see the band from Ohio who played a lengthy set covering tracks across their five albums. As a first time listener there were a number of stand out tracks including 'Sally, I've Been Shot, 'Lydia', 'What Dying Is For', and my favourite track of the evening, the power cut induced acoustic, 'Jackson, Don't You Worry'.

If you get a chance to see them play live then I'd highly recommend it, whatever your taste they play the kind of music that you can't help but drink and have a good time to.

Two Cow Garage: Jackson, Don't Worry:

Two Cow Garage: Lydia:

CSS: a programmable language?

Matt Lucht — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:50:22 +0000

Yesterday I attended the London Web meetup organised by Nathan O'Hanlon. The evening before a long bank holiday weekend and with a number of other web related things happening in town there was a good turn out to hear Peter Gasston talk, The CSS3 Of Tomorrow.

Peter began his talk comparing most CSS3 presentations to the story of Superman as portrayed in many comics – they all start off with the origin, where CSS came from, the basic features, some of the "new" stuff that has really been around for years. The stuff you already know. Peter promised his talk would be different and in All Star Superman comic style it'd fly past the things we already know about (stuff even I'm familiar with) and then dive into the truly new stuff.

True to his word Peter flew through the syntax of border-radius, box and text shadow, backgrounds and borders, selectors, opacity, web fonts and media queries. In this section there were a few nuggets of information that I took away – in particular hearing about using hsla (hue, saturation, lightness, alpha/opacity) to provide a greater level of flexibility in defining colours.

p { color: hsla(240, 100%, 50%, 0.5) } /* semi-transparent solid blue */
p { color: hsla(30, 100%, 50%, 0.1) } /* very transparent solid orange */

Also mentioned was the ability to target web pages being viewed on iOS4 and utilising the higher resolution display. Using the media query (webkit-pixel-ratio:2) you're able to call a separate set of CSS rules which contain higher resolution images specifically for that device.

Next Peter moved onto some of the newer things such as linear and radial gradients making reference to Lea Verou's CSS3 patterns. Before covering transitions, transformations (2D and 3D) as well as animations. Some great examples where shown, many have been doing the rounds on the internet but in case you've missed them take a look at:

a combination of 2D transformation's rotate and scale
3D rotation and scale effects
3D spheres ...careful, you can lose a lot of time playing with this one!
a Mad Man animation scene built entirely in HTML and CSS

So far the talk was pretty good. It had clarified a few things I'd been uncertain of, introduced some new concepts and provided some great reference material to take away.

Before going into the final section of the upcoming CSS3 features Peter gave a short intermission where he described some of the practises he uses when writing CSS. There were some useful tips around performance such as listing your mobile specific CSS first and using media queries to ensure that the heavier stuff isn't loaded when it's not being used. Peter also spoke highly of Modernizr to help detect browser support for CSS features.

To close the talk Peter described some of the new features coming into the CSS3 specification as well as some which are in the very early stages of being worked on right now. There was a strong focus on layout with things like being able to define multiple columns, flexible box layouts, grid positioning and template layouts. Something being lead on by Adobe is CSS Regions. This if successful will allow you to have flows of content around a page, these flows could be in simple column layouts or extremely complicated shape layouts. There are some examples of what can be done here.

Finally Peter talked about the ability to declare variables and mixins in CSS. The simple example that Peter gave was being able to declare a colour at the start of the CSS which could then be referenced throughout making it easy to change the colour in a single place without having to trawl through all the CSS:

@var $myColor #f00;
h1 {color: $myColor;}

The introduction of things like variables, mixins, animations and transformations raised the question, is CSS becoming a programmable language? The answered seemed to be yes and this left another question, where do you draw the line between what should be done in CSS and when should you use JavaScript?

The end of Spotify?

Matt Lucht — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:08:24 +0000

Today there's been a lot of discussion around Spotify's announcement of changes to their open plan subscription. In case you've missed what's happening here's a quick summary:

from the 1st of May anyone who signed up to Spotify Open on or before November 1st 2010 will be limited to listening to a track five times
if you've signed up to Spotify Open after November 1st then the above change will come into affect after 6 months of usage
the total free listening time is also being reduced from 20 hours per month down to 10 hours per month

In their blog post Spotify confirm that there are no changes to the unlimited or premium subscriptions. They also explained their reasoning behind the move.

Comments on the blog are mixed although many seem to follow the trend of the first:

So long Spotify. It was nice knowing you. Guess I'll go back to pirating music again then.

I'm somewhat surprised as to the backlash that Spotify is receiving from this announcement. After all the unlimited plan comes in at £4.99 per month and for that you get unlimited streaming and no adverts – surely a fiver a month is a small price to pay in return for not having to hear those ever so annoying adverts, right?

I've been a user of Spotify for a while (a quick check of my account shows I've been a paying subscriber since August 2009) and in that time its certainly saved me a considerably amount of money. I used to purchase 10-20 albums a month, some of which would get many repeated plays but a fair share only ever listened to once. I still buy the occasional album but most of my listening is online.

However the monetary saving isn't the most important thing to me. Where Spotify adds the greatest value is the ability it provides around the discovery of new music, particularly when combined with LastFM. Having a huge library available to me at a few quick clicks of a button is invaluable and I'd be lost without it. It's also added a greater social experience to music. Before Spotify whether it was with friends at home or colleagues in the office conversations such as "...you should listen to this song..." were restricted to the music you carried with you.

Of course none of this beats the experience of going to a gig and hearing live music. But that's an entirely different post and I won't comment on it now.

In Kate Solomon's post on Tech Radar she identified a potential problem in that Spotify may have given away too much too early. Kate used the metaphor:

...it gave us the whole beach to build sandcastles in and then slowly but surely caged us in to that one crappy bit by the sewer with all the sharp shells and pebbles

I'd be inclined to agree with that – no one likes things being taken away from them. However you can't but help think that this move was inevitable and if not made could have led to a much worse situation of Spotify disappearing for everyone.

...so lets hope that this change doesn't result in the end of Spotify but rather something that'll encourage more people to realise the benefits of being a paid subscriber and prolong the life of a great service.

TiddlySpace, an April Assignation

Matt Lucht — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:38:01 +0000

We're now half way through the April Assignation of TiddlySpace – a week long review of where we are with the project, how we plan to move forward and general open discussion around how we can improve.

Spending a week on a review such as this may seem to some like a prolonged activity and something that could be done in a day, others may feel that its not long enough! However, I think with the approach that we're taking its proving to be just about right. Although a thoroughly exhausting process!

All the notes from the review are public and online, although they may not be so meaningful to people who've not participated in the discussion. At the end of the week you can expect some form of meaningful summary.

On day one we discussed as a team how each of us are using TiddlySpace, what we thought TiddlySpace ought to be, and which things we don't like about TiddlySpace.

It may seem strange to be having these types of discussions at this stage of a project however by its very nature TiddlySpace can be many things to different people and in addition some of the recent client projects we've taken on have shifted the product in varying directions. In itself none of this is a bad thing.

Moving into day two we each reviewed our thoughts from the previous day and individually had an attempt at producing a mock up of how we each saw a new homepage to look. A quick review at the end of the day showed that there were some strong common themes (as one might expect) but also some varying approaches. For example, from my perspective as someone who mainly speaks to non-developer potential consumers of the product I'd focused less on the technology, where as others were slightly more geared to a developer-ish audience ...although not as much as I'd expected before the start of the week.

Today, day three we met again as a group and performed a mini retrospective of the first day, as well as performed a critic of the day two outputs. We made progress in realising what TiddlySpace might become and who its potential audience was. By the end of the week the goal is to have a firm understand as to the immediate goal of TiddlySpace and to be able to communicate that in a way which is meaningful not just to Osmosoft or existing users, but also to anyone who happened to stumble upon our work.

The process of breaking up the group work with periods of individual working I believe has made this week more productive than it might have been. As a group its been great to throw some ideas around, hear about different peoples perspectives but ultimately that's been a lot of talking. Being able to spend time as an individual putting ideas down on paper based on what was discussed has been very productive

Day four of the review we're going back to individual working. Time will be split between evolving the mocks ups based upon today's critiquing and also formulating ideas for a firm product description that'll be the basis of our work for the coming months.

Rökkurró: Sólin mun skína & Sjónarspil

Matt Lucht — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:09:07 +0000

This time last year I'd not heard of Rökkurró, however since seeing them play live in London last year I've given them a fair number of listens and they've held a fairly consistent place on both my iPod and our office jukebox.

The album, Í Annan Heim, is Rökkurró's 2nd offering and I find it to be the perfect accompaniment for wandering around town or those mornings when you can afford to take a more leisurely journey into work.

Singing in her native tongue Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir is accompanied by a complex and often eerie arrangement of cello, piano, guitar and drums. It's difficult to place their music into a particular genre, however the band have described themselves as a mix of indie, post-rock with classical influences. That's got be worth a listen, right?

If you like the sound of Rökkurró then they happen to be playing in London tomorrow (April 13th) at the Brixton Windmill – you should definitely check them out.

Sjónarspil by vas_bxl.

London Web Standards – Fun & Games

Matt Lucht — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:24:04 +0000

This evening I went along to the London Web Standards meet up – a monthly event focusing on well, web standard type stuff.

These are my notes from the evening which I've tidied up a little bit but quite probably contain some inaccuracies that I'll try and iron out later!

David Powers – Adobe Dreamweaver

The first of the three speakers was David Powers who took the 5 minute 'micro-slot' to enthuse about the merits of the recently announced Dreamweaver CS 5.5. At the outset David stated that "those people who say they don't like Dreamweaver have either not used it for a while or they're using it incorrectly" – I've not used Dreamweaver partly through never having had the need (a caveat to any inaccuracies in this post is that I'm not a developer) and partly due to fear of what the likes of Paul Downey might say if I were to use it!

In his talk David stated that Dreamweaver has made great advancements in becoming more compliant with web standards, although it was not 100% of the way there. The latest version would allow you to work fully in code view and had support for CSS3 functionality such as font-face and drop shadows. Within the code view there's an option to switch to a dialogue box of sliders allowing you to change values with great ease whilst simultaneously viewing the effects of those changes on a live page. This combined with the code-hint functionality (which auto-suggested IDs and Classes from the project along with CSS Selectors) looked pretty cool, although from my limited experience I'm not sure what value it gave over say a browser plugin such as Firebug?

I'm not sure that Dreamweaver is for me but I can certainly see there's an audience for it. David's closing remark was "if you've not used Dreamweaver for a while I reckon it's worth a quick look, you may be surprised".

Rob Hawkes – HTML5 Multiplayer Gaming

Next up was Rob Hawkes who announced as of next month will be joining the team at Mozilla. Rob gave the talk "Multiplayer Gaming with HTML5 & JavaScript" and asked the question "are we ready?"

Rob covered some of the technologies available for HTML5 multiplayer gaming, talked about some of the current issues and identified potential solutions. I have to admit that a lot of what Rob covered went over my head but I certainly felt excited about the future possibilities and in particular the open-web nature was of great appeal.

In term of the technologies Rob spoke of three main elements:

Canvas – a part of HTML5 allowing for dynamic, scriptable rendering of shapes and images
WebSockets – facilitates a real time two-way stream of data between the client and the server
node.js – server side JavaScript to process and stream information

It is through identifying these technologies that some of the issues become apparent. For example;

WebSockets has recently been pulled from the latest Firefox build and is only supported by webkit browsers.
slow internet connections cause latency issues which render multiplayer gaming impossible
even the simplest of games can quickly evolve to having a huge amount of data communicated between the server and client which quickly causes issues with rate limiting
being based on open web technologies this does leave your game vulnerable to hacking/cheating

Thankfully Rob was able to offer some advise as to potential solutions to some of these problems;

the use of Socket.IO provides a useful fallback to Flash or Comet whenever WebSockets is not available. This may not be ideal but will help get you out of some tricky situations
look at where you can compress your data. As WebSockets only sends data as text you can afford to cut strings down through removing things like fullstops and replacing certain characters.
when it comes to people trying to cheat or manipulate your game you should view this as a positive thing! Think of it as free testing and use it as an opportunity to identify loopholes in your game.
If you are concerned about people manipulating your game moving the logic to the server side will help (providing of course that your server is secure). In doing this you should also apply "server authority" rules, i.e. whatever the server says is right and whatever the client says cannot be trusted.

Rob summarised by going back to his initial question - are we ready? The answer – sort of. The technology and know how are both there but there is also so much that can be improved upon.

Seb Lee-Delisle – Creating JavaScript Visual Effects

Image from: Seb Lee-DelisleSeb is someone whom I'd not heard talk before and having managed to miss him at SXSW this year I was delighted in seeing him at the meetup this evening.

His talk was really a teaser for what you'd get from attending his two day workshop "Creative JavaScript" – and based on this evening its a course I'd love to attend.

Although best known as a Flash guy, Seb's passion is around creating things of a visual and interactive nature regardless of the technology. This evening through a combination of some previously built demonstrators and some live coding Seb demo'd some of the advanced particle effects you can do with canvas.

We moved at quite a pace and the focus was more on showing rather than telling so I'll simply point to some of the demo's available online:

An array of particles
Image particles – move the mouse around and click to make pretty things happen
Smoke effect
Smoke effect with rotating images
Particle forces – click to add more circles
3D particle forces

Incase you're interested in taking a close look Seb has the source code for these demos are up on Github.

Seb's final message were some very wise words: "warning: with great pixel power comes great responsibility, just because you can do it with JavaScript doesn't mean you should".