Entries Tagged 'Setfire Media' ↓

Over the last couple of years, we’ve got heavily into agile methodologies – in particular, Scrum and Kanban. Here are three of our task boards, from three of our current main projects.

This first board has evolved from a Kanban board introduced by Andy P. It features the Icebox, Todo, On Hold, In Progress (limited to 2 stories at a time) and a Review column. Done tickets are stuck to a nearby wall – with competitions as to who can get them the highest with a running jump!

This rather messy Scrum board is a work in progress, and utilises the three windows between one of our offices and the games room. It features a full product backlog, a sprint backlog, In Progress and Done (‘Done Done’!). Team members like to place the postits below individual members/pair names so we’ve added this on.

Our last board is a modest but effective Kanban approach for a small team. One thing that’s interesting with this project is that initially the team didn’t have a daily standup/scrum – but after using the board for a couple of weeks, they felt one would help them keep each other updated so started one.

We’ve really felt the benefit of agile working, and the ‘informative office environment’ is a big part of it. I personally have a lot of love for tools like Pivotal Tracker, having previously used it on a big project – but there’s definitely something to be said for the tangible Post-It note plus Sharpie formula.

Just a quick one to say thanks to everyone who came to NWRUG last night! A good time was had by all, and thanks to @will_j for organising, and to @leehambley for being my fellow speaker. It was great to see you all and share a beer or two.

See you at the September event; it promises to be a good one!

Update: Lee’s presentation is available at slideshare. As my presentation was more of a live coding demo (I’m braver than him!), we’ll keep mine as a “you had to be there” thing!

Setfire will be sponsoring and providing the talks for the North West Ruby User Group (NWRUG) meet on the 20th of August, 2009. The theme of the evening is Capistrano, a technology we use internally to deploy production sites. We also actively support its development. We’ll start with a newbie guide to getting an existing site deploying with cap, and move on to some more advanced recipes.

We’ll then move on to the much more important business of geeky chat and pizza, on us of course, and then, if experience is anything to go by, we’ll be off to a bar!

Interested? Read more and sign up. See you on the 20th.

Today, we announced a new role at Setfire – our first dedicated Technical Project Manager. This is an exciting move for us and is part of our continuing growth; we’re looking for somebody who can keep the machine running smoothly and bring a fresh perspective to our process and techniques.

Do you (or somebody you know) love software development, working with both technical people and clients, and have a keen eye for process? Do you yearn for a laid back environment, free of corporate hassle, where you can get things done as part of a winning team? Then check out the Technical Project Manager job and apply!

Send your covering letter and CV to recruitment@setfiremedia.com today.

Last Thursday we celebrated a year since the launch of Setfire Media. It’s been a great year for Setfire, with some major product launches, new staff and some important projects making big strides forward. We’ve expanded to take over both floors of our office and have the strongest team we’ve ever seen!

We celebrated with a team lunch, quick speech and, of course, a round of ‘Outside Table Football’ (or OTF for short!)

Thanks to our team and our clients for making this a cracking year.

We’re proud to announce that as of today one of our developers, Lee Hambley has taken over maintenance of capify.org. For many people involved in Ruby on Rails development, Capistrano is a vital tool, making the whole process of maintaining production environments that much simpler, by automating and combining many of the more laborious and repetitive tasks involved.

Continue reading →

On the Beach Holidays (www.otbeach.com) have been named the 13th in the list of private equity backed companies with the fastest growing profits.

On the Beach have been a Setfire Media client since they made the move online.  Developing the website on a day-to-day basis, Setfire Media are an integral part of  On the Beach’s success.  See the full Buyout Track 100.

Learning lessons about the importance of UI from the iPhone

Having seen a LOT of buzz over on Twitter and Friendfeed about the forthcoming N97, I feel compelled somewhat to make a point about this subject, especially as everyone seems to be missing the point badly. I should admit now that I haven’t used an N97, but then neither it seems has anyone else apart from Robert Scoble, so I feel as well placed as anyone to comment.

Killer or Filler?

The label ‘iPhone killer’ has become so hackneyed now I’m not sure anyone believes it when it’s applied to a new product, but yet again we see it slapped onto another touch screen wannabe. There’s already a lot of positive hype about this product, which I’m sure will be fairly slick in many ways, Nokia do design some great phones. However, I remain skeptical about the ability of Nokia or Symbian to turn out an OS experience as compelling and slick as the iPhone.
Continue reading →

Those of you who use Wordpress on your own websites will likely encounter this problem pretty soon.

Installing the latest Flash version 10 will disable the ability of any web platform that uses the SWFUpload library due to security reasons. To put this into context it will cripple the upload ability of Wordpress, Flickr, Yahoo, zooomr – along with many more services I’m not aware of.

In Wordpress you click you Add media > Add an Image, and from there click on Choose Files to Upload, only for nothing to happen.

Continue reading →

How To Create The Perfect Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

If you’ve been working in search optimisation for any length of time you’ll have heard how important it is to properly optimise your page title tag. Chances are you’ll also have heard that the meta description is also important, but on a lesser scale.

I agree wholeheartedly: getting your onpage SEO dialed in is critical. It’s much easier to rank a site that ticks all the onpage boxes, but that’s not to say it is impossible to rank a poorly optimised site through sheer brute force. However, I would rather make a job easier in the long run and so before I start trying to build links into a site I like to get the basics sorted.

Getting your titles and meta descriptions done properly is a painstaking and at times arduous task, which is something I can attest to. However, when you see the fruits of your labour, ie. ranking higher, then it can actually be a rewarding endeavour. So here we are: 18 tips to help you optimise your page title and meta description.

Continue reading →