Agile

In my 3 years as a Scrum Master, it's safe to say I've helped facilitate a few estimating sessions. Despite my best efforts, some of these were long (2 hr+) sessions that could lead to team frustration, low engagement and sometimes a loss of confidence...

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity via Shine recently to attend the inaugural OWASP AppSec Day 2018 (Melbourne) at RMIT. Security professionals from around the globe gave some insightful talks into the state of secure application development in 2018. In this post I'll share you some of the key insights I gained from these talks.

No food reviews here I'm afraid

This year I was incredibly lucky to score a coveted ticket to YOW! in beautiful Melbourne. I was also asked to be a track host for a couple of sessions, so that was quite an honour too. This post is a whirlwind wrap-up of the conference, and only includes my favourite talks from the two day event. If you're hoping to hear detailed reviews on how the coffee/food/WiFi/venue was, then you'll be greatly disappointed (it was all great BTW).
A light dew settles on the leaves of the venerable elm trees which track Melbourne's, St Kilda road. The bulk of the noble Yarra River moves majestically past the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, as it does every morning unaware about what is about to take place within. Light rail service number 96, which I had boarded at the iconic Luna Park, will carry me on my sovereign journey to the DevOps Talks Conference, 2017.   Yet still, those lingering words circle around my mind, like plastic bags caught in the wind, waiting to be sucked into a stormwater drain. Self-doubt is setting in. Am I clearly delusional?

“You’re going to a DevOps conference? Aren't you a developer?”

This is something I had been asked on more than one occasion in the lead up to this conference. Each time I’m questioned, I point out that the term DevOps is exactly six characters long, and that more or less fifty percent of those characters are “Dev”. I have at least half a right to be here.

5 tips on form design to improve your relationship with users

Filling in a form online is one of the most important points of interaction a user has with an organisation. And we interact with them often. We fill in tax forms, grant applications, make online purchases or sign up to dating sites. Forms can be the first step in a relationship with an organisation, or the final step in a journey to achieve a goal. For example get a grant, a drivers license or a partner in crime. Sometimes not filling them properly can carry unpleasant consequences like an interrogation by immigration officers at the airport, or your profile on OkCupid matching you with the wrong date.💔
“A form [ ] collects information from at least one party, and delivers it to at least one other party, so a product or service can be provided.”~Jessica Enders
The role of a UX designer is to help create easy, fast and productive form experiences. To entice users to fill in forms. As form design expert Jessica Enders states, designers should “create an optimal user experience, such that the needs of both the users and the owner of the form [organisation that owns the form] are met.”  

I had the opportunity to attend AWS bootcamp in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. The session I chose to attend was entitled "Securing Cloud Workloads with DevOps Automation". There were many interesting concepts discussed, all hinging around the new term 'DevSecOps'. In this post, I'd like to talk about what this is and how it relates to traditional DevOps.

[caption id="attachment_6688" align="alignleft" width="231"]With permission by @bencrothers Image with permission by @bencrothers[/caption] Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Agile UX conference in Sydney.  A one day conference, run by UX Australia, the topics centred around "designing great user experiences within an Agile environment”.  For me, as a non-UX practitioner, my goal was a greater insight into some of the challenges that others in the UX field are facing.