Stuart Eccles's posts

Made by Many are looking for some more great technologists to join our team. As a company we conceive, design and develop new digital products and services for our clients. We relentlessly focus on user experience through a synthesis of great design and great technology because we believe that technology isn’t just the cogs in the engine, invisible to user, but is integral to how people feel about a product and the companies that make them. The products we make closely resemble digital start-ups and we use similar approaches and technologies to build them.

Our approach is highly Agile, using Scrum and sometimes Kanban based approaches; we work iteratively but even before that we prototype products with lightweight technologies to refine our thinking and test with customers. 

Our main back-end technology is Ruby, primarily because it is well suited to delivering innovative products in an iterative environment but we also work with NodeJS, iOS, MongoDB and other tech. We believe that making bespoke solutions utilising ‘small tools’ allows us to create innovative, emotional software. A lot of our solutions are deployed on AWS hosting and knowledge of deploying with Chef and scaling services would be helpful.

If you are experienced Ruby developer with a background making digital products and want to work in an environment working with designers and strategists collaborating on conceiving new ideas for products we would love to talk to you about a job here at Made by Many. We are looking for people with opinions about the right thing to do, passion for technology and great chops to pull off difficult coding challenges.

Please apply with your CV and your github.com username at http://madebymany.recruiterbox.com/jobs/4411 or email jobs@madebymany.co.uk

Can you work with these people?

Over the past 3 years our little company has grown to over 28 people and we are now looking for a financial controller with experience of working in service companies to manage the finances of the business. Primarily working with the management team, it is a great opportunity for someone wanting to take on the challenge of this new role in an excellent work environment with great people.

While there may not be many readers of this blog looking for this kind of job, maybe you know of someone who loves this kind of thing and want a job with creative people  in our studio near the canal. 

Not so long ago, Neil Perkin invited me to speak at the event he was arranging to take place at Google UK HQ. Neil was keen to explore what Agile Planning means and the event, named FireStarters, brought together a 100 or so planners to share in the discussion. What followed was an excellent evening that included Mark Earls giving us What She is Having and many breakout sessions on various themes over beers. Neil has a great write-up on his blog.

This was a great chance to expand on the Lean Startup based approach we are using at Made By Many and introduced at Planningness in NY back last September. Since then we have learn't alot and the presentation I gave (embedded after the jump) introduces what I think can become some best practice for developing "Lean Agencies", agencies built from the ground-up to search for innovation. 

While the news of Twitter Annotations has been around for quite a while, it was announced at Chirp in April, outside of a geeky developer audience it hasn’t captured the imagination of the Twitter global echo-chamber. For me the potential of Annotations could mean, for Twitter, this changes everything. Again. At the same time it could lead to a lot of divergence and confusion in the client marketplace.

Twitter Annotations allow metadata to be delivered along with a tweet, that is additional structured data outside of the 140 character limit. Now some Tweet metadata already exists, such as geolocation and a specific tweet you may be replying to and there is also some unstructured user created metadata such as #hashtags and @replies. Twitter Annotations is going to allow developers through the API to deliver any form of structured metadata

The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.

From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.

In the last two-and-a-half years at Made By Many we’ve often been asked, “So who would you consider your competition to be then?”

The question always bugs us, because we’re uncomfortable with everything it assumes, but we know people are trying to work out who we are and what we do when they’re asking us this – and so we usually mention some names of people who seem a bit like us in one way or another: in terms of structure, world-view, beliefs and opinion about what is effective online. These are the people most likely to answer a brief in a similar way to us, whose work we respect and often wish we had done.

This Agile has a capital A. It can also have a lower case a, in which case it is an adjective, to be lean/nimble but that’s not what I’m talking about. Agile with a capital A is a noun, a name used for the philosophy described in the the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the suite of methodologies primarily used for software development such as SCRUM and Extreme Programming.

Tim’s post on Agile as a ‘Cargo Cult’ highlights a problem in the adoption of Agile, not only for software development but for creative and business processes. Everyone is trying to adapt to a rapid and disruptive world screwing with business models in every category. Organisations are looking to close the gap with nimble digital start-ups who are out-innovating them at a fraction of the cost-base. Agile seems to offer a well-packaged magic ability to compete in a new way.

Massive excitement at Made By Many as the resident Apple fan-boys stayed in the office to keep up with the WWDC keynote. We cursed our recent MacBook Pro purchases and waited for news of the new IPhone. Some great news there but let down by the news that getting the IPhone 3GS means buying out the existing contracts! (Bad news here, all employees have an business IPhone at Made By Many).

Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough of not being at SXSW and getting assailed with people going to cool lectures, eating Tex-Mex and drinking cocktails. I’ve decided to create myself a SXSW-free Twitter.

Unfortunately I only have a half-way-house solution feeding the Twitter stream through Yahoo Pipes and hacking out all SXSW mentions.

Have you ever been reading your daily morning commute newspaper and stumbled across a great article and thought “I must share that with my friend X”. After getting to work, after partaking in your morning coffee, you browse through that papers online edition as you know with today’s more-convergent news operations everything is re-published online. Then you can twitter,del.icio.us or email that link off. But it’s impossible to find and the newspaper’s online search can’t find it because lets face-it their search is terrible. You give in and return to Techcrunch.