Author: Andy

Andy

The Power of Fluff: Enhancing Team Collaboration

I’m sure somebody who is an expert in human psychology could shed more light than I, but there’s something about fluffy objects that brings us joy and comfort. Cute dogs and cats, baby ducks, snugly blankets. We just can’t resist the fluff, its part of who we are. Except for the fluff on peaches… that’s gross. Nectarines are just better.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Yet fluff is also a visible sign of superfluity – fluff is a disorganised, chaotic, mass of extra material that seemly isn’t essential to the function of the object to which it attaches. So its easy to think of fluff as something we need to cut through for efficiency’s sake. Indeed, it was with this lens a couple of years ago, that I found myself booking a long overdue planning meeting for my new team. Knowing that as a remote team there would be some delay in getting everyone into the Teams call and settled down, I flippantly added this time to the agenda for the first five minutes as “obligatory fluff”.

To my surprise, not only was this block of time where the team were given permission to chat crap about any topic they wanted very successful, but the phrase stuck. It quickly became a trademark of my team and entered into our way of working.

We even had memes we’d share in meetings when we had run too far off topic and the meeting had become “too fluffy”. We loved the idea of fluff so much that it became a part of everything we did – fluff at the beginning of calls to get settled. Fluff at the end as a reward for finishing early. Fluff in the middle of the meetings when we got distracted and started talking about random things.

A cartoon image of a sad cat with text reading "404. Fluff Not Found"
Not enough fluff makes for a very sad team.
A cartoon image of a sad cat with a lof of fur with text reading "413. Fluff Too Large"
Too much fluff in a meeting? Pull it back on topic.

Maybe it seems here that we were losing sight of what we should have been doing, but it was the opposite. By having permission and time to be fluffy, it was easier to call the event to order and focus on the important core of the meeting. Its about balance.

Fluff – far from being an extraneous thing to be cut back, simplified, made more efficient – became the warm, cosy embrace that tied us all together as humans, collaborating on a shared project, rather than drones clicking though one Jira ticket after the next.

The team bonded really quickly after that. They saw each other as humans with more depth than just being a “backend engineer” or “that guy who fixed the bug nobody else could figure out”. They started to care about each other, and as a result worked stronger as a team. They would help each other because they wanted to, not because that’s what it said they should do in the career matrix for the promotion they were hoping for.

Look, I’m not saying you need (or necessarily should) be friends with your colleagues – boundaries are an important part of maintaining a strong work / life balance, and leaving your colleagues at work can be part of that. I’m certainly not suggesting you describe yourself as “one happy family”, but there’s no reason you can’t have work friends. In fact I (personally) think you really should.

Would you invite them to your birthday? Probably not. Should you huddle in the kitchen together and vent about management? Hell yeah! Should you tell them about your relationship issues? Definitely not! But sharing your passion for hobbies with them, why not? We’re not just cogs in a corporate machine – we’re complex, messy, multi-dimensional humans, with squishy, complex human lives. And its okay to be yourself. Just remember to keep your fluff safe for work, “off topic” does not give you permission to make people uncomfortable. Know your audience, folks.

From my first flippant mention of “fluff”, I never intended it to become one of the core tenets of my management style. But I’ve seen its power, and when I moved on to a new company and a new team, I decided to take it with me. To make fluff a word, and a way of thinking for that team too.

So, maybe next time you’re having a dead serious meeting, about important things. Take a look around you, look at each member of your team in the eyes, and ask yourself – is this person a cog in my machine, or are they a human? Could they benefit from and contribute to fluff? I bet they could.

Give it a try. Bring some fluff to your meetings and see what happens.

Andy

Exciting News: My Insider’s Guide to Landing a Tech Job Is Now Live!

It had been a dream of mine for quite some time to work in software engineering. When I reconnect with distant family members and they ask what I’m doing now, they often aren’t surprised. Many tell me they always knew that’s where I would end up. And I agree with them—my choice of career has remained remarkably steady from my early school years all the way to university, with only one or two momentary diversions from that dream.

My family always embraced modern technology, but they weren’t particularly knowledgeable about how to actually get started in the field. These days, getting into programming, hardware, IoT, or even AI is much simpler. There are countless resources available to help you build the skills you need.

However, one hurdle often remains: how to turn those skills into the job you’re looking for.

During my career, I’ve worked as a hiring manager and interviewer at both large and small companies. I’ve helped sort through resumes during the initial application process, written interview questions, and even trained new interviewers. I’ve mentored and coached engineers from the very start of their careers all the way up to principal level, and I’ve worked directly with leaders to understand what they need from a productive team.

That’s why I’ve decided it’s time to start sharing what I’ve learned to help others—giving them the advice I wish I had.

I’m kicking this off by launching my new video course:

“From Application to Offer: The Insider’s Guide to Getting a Job in Tech”

This course distills everything I’ve learned—helping candidates, whether new or experienced, gain an edge when applying for software engineering and other tech roles.

🔹 Craft a tailored resume
🔹 Master key interview skills
🔹 Tackle design challenges with confidence
🔹 Ask the right questions in interviews

It’s been a real journey learning the skills needed for video production, from lighting and sound to editing. So I’m incredibly excited that the course is now available!

I would love for you to check it out and share any feedback.

It’s available now on Skillshare and Udemy! If you don’t have a Skillshare account yet, you can get one month of free access using my link.If you’re using Udemy, use code “ANDYCB-FEB24” for 25% off for a limited time.

I hope you find it useful!

Andy

Redefining Technical Debt: A Guide to Prioritizing Tasks with Customer Value in Mind

Anybody who’s worked in software engineering – be that as an engineer, program manager, designer, or any one of the numerous other roles essential to the delivery of quality software – will be well aware of the term “technical debt”.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

At its most simple level, Technical debt is a technical task that was omitted earlier in the project (often to meet a tight deadline) that requires repaying (ie. It still needs to be done). The challenge comes from its nature as a “technical” task – that is, it is most easily attributed to bringing value to the code, or technical team, than it is to the customer.

This tension can often make tech debt tasks hard to prioritise – if you’ve been involved in planning or the management of software engineers how many ties have you heard a complaint to the effect of “I can never get the technical debt prioritised, the business only cares about new features”?

I’ve worked on different teams, on different projects, and at different companies, during which I’ve formed a few opinions on how tech debit is best managed and prioritised, which I think can help teams be most productive.

Before you read any further, I should make clear, that I don’t believe that the “most productive” teams, (that work harmoniously and resolve this tension) manage this by just fixing all of the tech debt. Nor do I think everybody is necessary happy with the outcomes. They key thing is that all parties involved have made a conscious and deliberate decision that they should or should not work on a particular task at a particular time.

There have been several methods used in teams to try and manage this balance – one such technique is reserved time – ring fencing x% of a team’s capacity for tech debt tasks. There are places and times where this works great, but I don’t think it a solution that considers all of the angles.

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Andy

Building a Connected Cuckoo Clock

I’ve been building up my smart home setup for the last couple of years, and it generates a lot of data – from the cat’s weight, to the humidity in each room, and like any Smart Project full of sensors, the question becomes what do we do with all that data? Graphs and dashboards? Push notifications? Disembodied vocal announcements using the Sonos?

While cuckoo clock on a yellow wall. The clock has a ring of light around the dial and a red light shining onto the pendulum.

In the early 2000’s a company called Violet, released the Nabaztag – an internet connected Rabbit, with extremely expressive ears and lights on its belly. It wasn’t something I could afford at the time, but ever since, I’ve been interested in the idea of ambient or glanceable devices – devices that fit into our environment and let us know important information without directly calling for our attention.

I decided to try to use a cuckoo clock as the foundation for an ambient device project.  I had this plan that I could add a light to the bottom of the clock that would create a nice glow on the wall behind it. I also planned to take control of the cuckoo mechanism, so rather than chiming on the hour, it could chime whenever I wanted (if I wanted a somewhat less passive notification). While putting together an order of the components I would need, I came across a ring of 20 RGB LEDS that would fit nicely behind the clockface, so I added that to the plan too.

Now, I have far too much respect for mechanical clocks to go tearing into beautifully made mechanical clock, so I started on eBay with a battery powered, plastic quartz clock. I was actually pretty impressed by this clock in its default state, it was reasonably attractive (if you’re into modern minimalist cuckoo clock styles) and the cuckoo sound was decent. My only real complaint was that the hands were a really long way forward of the clock face, which didn’t look so great if you weren’t looking at the clock directly from the front.

The Teardown

I started pulling the clock apart to see what I would find, and it was pretty interesting. The chime & cuckoo are in their own module, connected to a clock & pendulum module. I was amused to find that when I further dismantled that clock module, it contained a standard clock unit inside it – complete with normally inaccessible AAA battery connecter. Because sometimes, even in mass production, its easier to repurpose an existing item then built it from scratch.

The quartz clock module, showing the AAA battery connector

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Andy

State of the (IoT) Union 2022: Smart Home Year in Review

Hello again! It’s almost the end of the year, and I think it’s a good moment once again to run through the various smart home things I shared and how they’ve panned out after the post were published.

A pot noodle surrounded by tools including a soldering iron, wire cutters and a multi meater.

Bathroom Fan

Last year, I shared how had used a Shelly Relay, Home assistant and some humidity sensors to add some smarts to my bathroom fan. Since then, the system has been running un-modified and I am very impressed with its reliability. The only issue I’ve encountered is that as the fan switches on, sometimes the relay will reboot, and the fan would stop again. It was very irritating. This is caused because the fan cam sometimes causes electromagnetic interference as it starts and can be fixed with the installation of an RC snubber.

Smart Heating

One of the first things I wrote about here was how I built a smart heating system without damaging my property. Last year I mentioned that I was going to upgrade the system to also use Shelly relays.

I did, indeed, complete this project but didn’t really write about it. I’m really pleased with this upgrade, as it allows me to switch on an off individual heaters, rather than the entire properly at once. I created some somewhat elaborate Home Assistant automations to switch on only the rooms I need when I am working from home. Hopefully this should help me save some energy.

Cat Litter

In June, I wrote about my connected cat litter project, which I could use to track my cat’s health over time by automatically weighing her whenever she uses it. While getting it working at first was a little bit of a struggle – requiring me to film the litter tray to figure out how Ellie was using it that was causing issue – this has been incredibly reliable and a great success. I’m very happy with it.

A notification reading Ellie (3.65Kg) has left you a present in the litter box (20g)

Unfortunately, Ellie was a little ill early this year and lost a lost some weight. I’m pleased to say that she has made a full recovery now, and the smart litter was fantastic for tracking her recovery as she gained back a healthy weight.

Misc Smart Stuff

  • Automatic Blind – While renovating my bedroom, I added a very basic blackout blind, to stop the morning some from shining around the curtains and waking me up. In an Amazon sale I picked up an automated blind opener. I integrated this into Home Assistant, and I was really happy during the summer heatwave, that I could leave both the window and curtains open, for the best cooling, but have the blind shut itself just before sunrise.

  • The lights in both my bathroom and kitchen are both Ikea Tradfri GU10 spotlights. Initially I was pretty impressed with these as a cost effective solution to adding smart lights to rooms that require a lot of individual bulbs. However, during use, they’ve proven to be really fickle. I have one set connected to my Hue Bridge, and the other to a Zigbee card connected to my Home Assistant Pi. Both sets of lights exhibit odd behaviour where they will turn on really dull and then 30 seconds or so later, go to full brightness. This stopped for a while during summer, while they worked perfectly, but came back again – given they are installed in the roof space, I wonder if this is temperature related somehow?

  • Living in an older property, keeping an eye out for damp in cold weather is a way of life, I recently added a dehumidifier to keep a handle on the indoor humidity when cooking. To keep running costs down, I made use of the humidity & temperature sensors in each room to detect when it needs to be turned on and when it can be turned off again.

Looking Forward

I’ve got a few projects planned for 2023, some big and some small, but I’m going to keep them as a surprise for you. I also want to take a look at energy monitoring, possibly making use of the Home Assistant Glow project.

I hope you have a happy new year, and I’ll see you in 2023!

Andy

Git For Humans: A Easy To Understand Video for Working With Git

A few years ago, I was working on a team who had been working with TFS project for some time. They had just started a new project and decided to move to Git in the process. Git was new to all of the engineers on the team, myself included, but we continued anyway.

At first, everything seemed to work fine – Visual Studio’s built in Git UI did a good job of hiding Git’s power, and presenting it in the same way as TFS. However, we increasingly ran into problems; people lost work, or waisted time working though merge issues. Visual Studio was doing a fantastic job of hiding Git, and while this seems like a well-meaning and helpful thing to do, it was causing us issues in the long run, because we were didn’t know what we were really doing behind the simple UI.

I decided to go away and deep dive into Git. I found that by understanding the Git graph, it allowed me to demystify the Git’s command line and visualise & plan their impact on my repository.

I started sharing what I had learned with my team, and was frequently asked to run training sessions or solve problems. I really did find that by understanding how Git works, and visualize the operations, I was able to work much faster and with much greater confidence.

I’d love for everybody to see and understand Git in this way; it really is a wonderful tool once you’ve unlocked it. So, I decided to put together a video to share how I see Git.

You can watch it above. This was a fascinating learning experience for me; setting up the recording and learning how to efficiently edit large projects (shout out to my video editor friend who’s brains I picked several times!). Constructive feedback is, of corse, gratefully received.

As ever, you can get in contact by commenting or on Twitter / Mastodon

Andy

Internet of Poop: How (and Why) I Built a Smart Litter Tray

Naturally, we want our pets to be as healthy and happy as possible, and just as with humans, one valuable metric to know is their weight. Knowing the weight of our four-legged friends, not only helps us to verify that they have a healthy amount of body fat, but can also can be used to detect things early on that may need medical attention. As they cannot speak to us and tell us when don’t feel well, it is our duty to listen to all of the different signals we have to understand their wellbeing.

Photo of a black shorthair cat sitting.

That’s why I wanted to know the weight of my cat, Ellie. Unfortunately, she really dislikes being picked up or handled, even by people she trusts. This means, it’s not possible to weigh her on a bathroom scale, and the only datapoint I have is her yearly examination at the vets. 

I wanted to build something that would fit into her life to track her weight automatically, without any intervention. I decided to modify her litter box, so that on each visit it records her weight.

But WHY, Andy?

Okay I get it; you think it’s weird. So here are the main goals of the project: 

  • Track Ellie’s weight because I want to know how heavy she is without going to the vet
  • Learn something about how load cells work
  • Have fun building a new project
  • (Hopefully) Inspire others to try out new ideas and projects by sharing what I learned. 
  • Track the weight of poops because I thought that was funny. 

The Hardware

Rather than build the whole litter tray from scratch, I decided to build a platform that her existing litter tray would rest on. This platform would contain all the equipment necessary to detect when Ellie was using the litter and start taking measurements.

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Andy

How To Make a Long Term Career Plan That Actually Helps

A career plan: we should all have one, right? But it can be hard to know where to start, or what you should do with it once you’ve made it. This can be especially challenging when you’re just starting off in your career – you manager asks what you want from your job, and don’t really know what you want beyond ‘just progression’.

A child stand in the countryside, holding up a map.
Photo By Annie Spratt

Today, I want to tell you a little about how I manage long term career planning for myself, and how I use that to make regular evaluations of those plans and my progress towards them.

A Plan Is a Guide to The Next Step, Not a Rigid Set of Rules

It’s easy to think of a career plan as something rigid and unchanging; a plan that you must stew over and perfect every detail, and then stick to forever. This can make a career plan a very intimidating document. How do you think it all through? How do you know if you’re on track or not? What if you’ve made the wrong plan and won’t be happy!?

Instead, think of a career plan as a framework to help you process your feelings and observations in order to plan out next steps. You can then regularly use this framework to evaluate your current path and chosen destination.

Imagine, you’ve been dropped in the wilderness without knowing where you are or how to get back. Perhaps you climb to the top of a large tree nearby and look out around you. As you look to the north, you can see smoke rising in the distance, maybe it’s a camp? You decide to head towards it and find out.

A person standing in the clearing of a forrest.
Photo by Robert Bye

After walking for a couple of hours, your progress is halted by a wide, rushing river, and there’s no way you can cross it. There’s no way to continue to the north now. It’s time to revaluate your plan, heading north was a great idea in absence of more information, but now you know about the river, is heading that way, still the best path? Perhaps you can see something else from here? Perhaps north is still the best direction, but you need head a different way for a little to find a place to safely cross and head back.

That’s the thing with plans: You need them, they give you direction of purpose, but the most successful people are always considering their plans – changing and tweaking them to ensure they’re making the best choices for the current data they have. Changing a plan is not a failure, it doesn’t mean your plan wasn’t good enough. Changing plan means you are in control and evaluating input data.

Where Do You Start?

Just like with the above example, you start not with the next step right in front of you, but with the destination, and figure out next steps from there.

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Andy

State of the (IoT) Union 2021

Following on from last year’s IoT roundup, I thought I’d take another moment to reflect back on the current state of my smart home; how some of the previous projects have aged since first writeup, what’s new and what I’m looking to tackle next.

And oh my gosh, what a year 2021 has been! New homes, new jobs, even more working from home! Let’s get stuck in…

TikTok

As I built more and more smart things, I decided it might be fun to share what I learned on TikTok. I started the AndysSmartHome channel, and so far I’m really pleased with how its going.

Home Assistant

In last year’s round up, I mentioned that I was starting to play around with Home Assistant, this year it’s the centrepiece of the whole SmartHome setup. I am super super pleased with it. Getting it to work as I want is sometimes more a challenge than I would like – its certainly not something I would recommend to a non-technical person – but i’ve really been able to achieve a lot with it and I’ve not scratched the surface.

Bathroom Fan

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Andy

How I Hacked My Coffee Machine To Be Smart

This post is for information only. It is not a guide. Do not try this yourself. If you ask for help, I will not be able to give it.

Before the pandemic, when we started working from home, I used to make coffee a number of different ways, depending how I felt. I liked to experiment – sometimes I would use a V60, others a French Press, coffee syphon or espresso machine. This worked well on the weekends when I had time to experiment a little. However, when you need to grab a quick coffee between meetings, it turned into a real faff; there’s just no matching the convenience (if not the quality) of the office coffee machine.

My solution here was to pick up a Morphy Richards Verve filter coffee maker that I could leave running while I went about my work and come back to when it was done. I was really surprised with this machine, I was expecting to sacrifice a lot of quality for convenience, but with a little fine tuning on ground size and water quantity, its capable of producing some very drinkable coffee.  

Occasionally, though, I would get it brewing and forget to go back to collect the drink, leaving it going stale on the hot plate so I decided to see if I could connect it to my network for notifications and control.

My requirements were:

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