Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Facebook Globally Launches Messenger Day: Facebook launched Messenger Day, a new way to share photos and videos “as [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
The following is an extract from our book, Scrum: Novice to Ninja, written by M. David Green. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here.
Trust is a large component of scrum, and by extension, a large component of working in any type of team environment. We all rely on each other to fulfill our obligations, and support the team process.
But human beings are naturally curious. Any time there's confusion about what other people are working on, there's always a tendency to want to ask questions and explore. Everybody has opinions about what everybody else is doing, and that's the nature of working together on a team. That curiosity is healthy.
However, it's important to remember that people need the space to carry out their work as they see fit. Part of having a role in a group process means allowing other people to have their roles as well. When it comes to scrum for web and mobile development, this means allowing the engineers to work in an uninterrupted way on the stories they have agreed to complete during the sprint. This is part of the self-managing nature of scrum, and it allows for a high degree of individual flexibility, as long as productivity is maintained.
Continue reading %The Scrum Contract (Part 2)%
jQuery Tree plugin allows you to create tree structure using Bootstrap or Material Design styles. Free open source plugin distributed under MIT License.
As the world moves to software architecture based on microservices and multiple repositories, the ecosystem struggles to keep code bases maintainable. From monoliths to publishing hundreds of micro-packages, solutions try to battle growing code duplications across repositories. Bit is a new OSS distributed code component manager built to make components reusable across repositories, and much more.
In this article, Bit team member Jonathan explains the idea behind this new approach to managing code, which has hit the ground running as one of the most popular repositories on GitHub.
Most developers are all too familiar with code duplications. Usually, these are the direct result of copy-pasting small code components and snippets across repositories. Sometimes, duplications are the result of stopping to reinvent small components time after time. As the use of microservices and multiple repositories increases, managing reusable components across repositories becomes a painful issue. Maintaining duplicated code snippets in multiple places becomes a growing headache, and breaking changes become an everyday trouble. This phenomenon touches everyone, including some of the leading JS open-source projects on GitHub. For example, here are 4 of the over 100 different implementations of a simple isString functionality in GitHub’s top 10K repositories:
The time invested in reinventing the wheel would probably have been better invested in breeding creation. The duplications across repositories (which are not a part of the same code base in this particular example) makes maintenance an odyssey.
To battle this problem, the ecosystem developed different solutions from gigantic monolith applications used in huge enterprises such as Google, Facebook and others and to community leaders publishing hundreds of components to package managers such as npm. Both solutions are not optimal for most people.
While the first has its pros and cons, it simply isn’t practical for most of us. Building and maintaining a giant monorepo application simply isn’t practical for most developers and teams. Using npm as a duplication free snippet base takes an incredible amount of time and effort, while having multiple shortcomings created simply because traditional package managers were not built to benefit from managing small components: runtime dependency resolution is slow, versioning is complicated, packages are hard to find, they don’t take care of CI, they require the creation and maintenance of multiple tools (Git, Packages, CI etc.) and add unnecessary weight and complexity. Practically speaking, most of us simply don’t have hundreds of components used as micro-packages.
Addressing the problem of making small components reusable requires a tool built specifically for this job; a tool allowing components to be make without overhead or initial configuration; a way to make sure these components are easy to find, and are maintained and taken care of throughout their entire lifecycle including simpler versioning, faster dependency management and even build and test execution. To achieve this, a new, open-source code component manager named Bit was designed from scratch, custom built to make small component reusable.
Continue reading %Managing Code Components with Bit%
This article was sponsored by Squarespace. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Enhancing the way your clients interact with your business lets you create much better, deeper, more valuable customer relationships. In an increasingly competitive landscape, building trust with your clients is vital to your success and longevity. Every touchpoint you have with your client is an opportunity to understand them better, strengthen that trust, and ultimately leave them delighted.
That starts the very first time a client contacts you, and continues through onboarding, engaging you for work, communications, scoping, delivery, and more. It sounds like a lot of effort, but a Squarespace website makes the whole process easier.
Squarespace has an easy-to-use form builder to let you gather important information from your client. You can combine Squarespace forms with built in Google Docs and G Suite (formerly Google Apps) integration to make creating important documents and managing customer relationships a breeze.
Clients and customers expect to be treated with respect, courtesy, and professionalism. That includes providing documentation on what you’re going to do for them. Clear, concise documents help to:
This can help with all types of documents including:
The Squarespace form builder can help you with all of these areas.
You might wonder why you would build a form to collect information from a client rather than having a conversation over the phone, or discussing things via email, Skype or Slack. It’s important to note that the form isn’t intended to replace those other communications, but using Squarespace’s form builder has several big advantages.
You can gather together all the questions you need and present them to the client in a clear and consistent way. You don’t need to remember to ask specific questions through other communications as everything will be available through the Squarespace form.
If you ask questions in the right way you can get high-quality, consistent information. This makes putting together your contract, proposal, SoW or other document much easier. It also makes it easier to scope potential work and provide value pricing. It will reduce any ambiguity and confusion with your client.
Asking the right questions will help to focus the mind of your client. They can clarify exactly what is is they need when they are answering the questions. An online form also lets the client answer in their own time, so they can give the answers the right amount of focus.
In two-way conversations it can be difficult to stay on track when it comes to requirements gathering. An online form removes that issue and lets you capture exactly the right information at exactly the right level.
A good online form, and the documents you can create from the answers, will impress your client. You can produce high-quality artifacts, which reduces friction, builds trust, and gets your working relationship off to a good start.
Before you start using the form builder on your Squarespace website, it’s important to spend some time planning out your form. That will make building the form itself much easier.
You’re going to ask different questions for different types of document—a contract will have distinct requirements separate from those for a proposal or project brief. Start by understanding exactly what type of document you’re going to be gathering information for.
Next you’re going to write a version of the document without client information in it. This would be the standard text that goes into all documents of this type, with placeholders for areas where you would enter client-, project-, and work-specific information. This will let you understand exactly what information you need from clients to complete the document.
Now you have a basic document, go through each placeholder and think about the client information you need to gather to complete each one. When you know what information you need you can then write questions to gather that data. For example, if you have a final completion date in the document, you can ask the question, "When do you need this work completed by?"
Match every placeholder and area where you need client information back to a specific question.
Now you have your placeholders and the client questions for each one, run through the questions to make sure they can be answered in a suitable way. You should be able to integrate client answers into the document without too much manual effort or guesswork. If you can’t do that, tweak the questions so they guide the client to provide you with specific, useful information.
Your preparation combined with Squarespace’s intuitive design will make building the form quick and easy. Here’s how to do that.
Continue reading %How to Create Perfect Client Contracts Using Squarespace Forms%
