Author Archives: Brian

I like apples with a leaf on the stalk, freshly washed strawberries, warm samosas on a Thursday morning, expired film, The Yardbirds, The Small Faces, The Who, The Kinks, sunny Monday mornings with no traffic holdups, Friday afternoons, milky tea, my chilli plant, Ainsley Harriott cup soups, masala tea, Oreos, waking in Venice to the sound of church bells, the scent of jasmine on a warm Italian breeze, Tunnocks Teacakes, thin cut marmalade, egg butties with white pepper, fish and chips, Upstairs Downstairs, shiny shoes, stripy shirts, and bananas.

Is the CV/resume outdated?

During my daily commute, I’ve been listening to Linchpin by Seth Godin, and am absolutely taken by the idea that the CV/resume could be becoming an outdated concept.
As a freelance contractor, one of the key marketing tools I use to get work has traditionally been my CV, so to me the idea that its days might [...]

Context-driven development

In my previous post, I speculated that an agile approach to software development might be a better one than the traditional waterfall approach. That’s probably true with many projects, but it isn’t always the case, so I advocate that ideally an insightful decision should be made based on the context of a project.
Introducing context-driven development
The [...]

Dam the waterfall: get Agile

I’ve spent several years working on large waterfall projects, and am starting to wonder whether the waterfall model is in fact a sound software development methodology.
Tried and tested?
Waterfall has been used for decades, and is one of the most widely adopted sequential processes for development of commercial software, but of course that doesn’t mean it’s [...]

Curation Station: a content curator’s dream?

Today, I found a product called Curation Station that could be about to change the way many of us currently collect and curate content. It’s one of the first movers in the content curation toolkit market, and as such, is bound to capture a lot of eyeballs in this fast-developing space.
I just watched an explanatory [...]

Caffeine addiction update

Four months ago, almost to the day, I took a long, hard look at my lifestyle, told myself “caffeine is nasty stuff“, and stopped drinking tea and coffee completely. A couple of weeks later, I was over the awful withdrawal symptoms, and could safely declare I was caffeine free.
Since then, I’ve had a few people [...]

Leading from the bottom

I used to think that in order to be a leader in an organisation, you had to be in senior management. My reasoning was: you have to have authority to lead, and that only comes with being a manager.
I was wrong. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to be a leader no matter what your rank is in an organisation. You can even [...]

Web writing: the rules are changing

Several months ago, I remember reading an advice blog that basically suggested it was okay to be a sloppy writer online. Apparently, it’s now fine to skip punctuation, okay to stumble a bit with your grammar, and even the odd spelling mistake goes unnoticed.
I had to bite my fingers to stop myself banging out an [...]

iPad will rock for content curators

When the iPad was launched at the end of January, one of the things Steve Jobs tried to impress on us is the fact the iPad will offer the best browsing experience there is.
If the iPad is going to be anything like the iPhone (and let’s face it, it’s essentially a big iPod Touch), then [...]

Why I dislike ‘personal branding’

There’s at least one big craze every year, and 2010 looks like it’s going to be the year of the personal brand.
Everyone’s talking about it. As soon as you mention the phrase on Twitter, you get several self-proclaimed personal branding experts following you, courtesy of their obedient little Twitterbots.

Why I blog

The other day, somebody asked me why I bother blogging. “It seems like an awful lot of work for little or no reward,” he said. “So why do it?”
He was assuming I have a choice!