Steve Workman » Projects

An Evening with Sprintly

Steve Workman — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:41:50 +0000

Last night, I was lucky enough to meet Joe Stump, former Lead Architect at Digg and founder of SimpleGeo, who sat down with 7 developers near Old Street and showed us his latest creation: Sprintly. Here’s my notes from the talk.

Sprintly was born out of frustration in how products are made. Joe is a business major, not CompSci like many Silicon Valley successes. The guiding principle behind Sprintly is that product is greater than the process.

No time like the present
The first major difference to most agile tracking tools is that there’s no concept of time in Sprintly. In SCRUM, we use points, but that’s still tied back to a notion of time (where it should be effort+complexity+doubt), so it’s still a developer lying to themselves. Sprintly works with the notion of features, and those features will ship when they’re done.

Sprintly has Stories, Tasks, Tests and Bugs. Stories are your general user stories, Tasks are any other tasks, Tests are for developers to write tests for their code and Bugs are bugs! Any of these can be tagged with anything. A lot of teams tag with “a release” (1.0, Cupcake, whatever) which is fine, but the release will happen when stories are done or when the team decides to release something. Sprintly isn’t there to enforce the process, just help you along the way.

The holy grail for “older” clients: e-mail integration
Everyone is allowed to be part of the process in adding stories to the backlog, favouriting a story or just looking around. There’s e-mail integration whereby emailing a specific Sprint.ly address and cc’ing a developer will create a task assigned to that developer with the content and attachments of that email. The developer can then respond via email and that will be added to the conversation. It’s awesome. I can see my clients getting involved with the agile process through this even though they may not be aware of it, helping manage the admin overhead of ticketing through e-mails. Long-term there will be ZenDesk support and potentially others depending upon “how much their API make me want to kill myself”.

Tasks can be sorted easily with the quick-sort bar which shows in-progress and backlog items. These are integrated with GitHub, but it can work with any SCM that has a post-commit hook (SVN,Perforce etc), and even those SCMs behind a firewall. Any open bugs can be modified with your commit messages, even closing or marking multiple tickets as fixed.

Dashboards for those up top
There’s a dashboard with standard drag & drop Kanban board on it. It’s a bit bare at the moment but this will be much improved in the future, including tools that allow managers to estimate better and identify overloaded developers. There’ll be a read/write API coming in January so developers will be able to do our own dashboards for stakeholders etc if we don’t want them to have access. Eventually Sprintly will give you daily digest emails and better integration with email when tasks are closed/broken.

In comparison to others, it’s got its own niche: “Jira is like bringing a thermonuclear warhead to a knife fight”, you only use 1% of it at most. Trello is similar but isn’t just for software developers, it could be used for anything so won’t be as useful in the long term.

Sprintly is currently getting loads of great feedback from users with around 35% retention rate for daily task usage creation, which is excellent for such a new product. You just have to search Twitter for Sprintly love to see how well they’re doing.

Making money right now, and opening beta in 2012
Joe talked about how important he thought it was to be making money straight away, rather than having profit as “an afterthought”. So, from January 1st 2012, Sprintly will be $9/month/seat (which is cheap compared to competitors) and it will enter open beta shortly after that.

I’m really looking forward to using Sprintly in anger at the start of next year. If you want to be part of it, get yourself on the waiting list. Thanks again to Joe for talking to us and I can’t wait to start playing.

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End of an era

Steve Workman — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:12:55 +0000

It’s the end of an era for me. On Monday night, I got this e-mail from my old university hockey club

It’s a sad time for me as www.sheffieldhockey.com was my first big web project. Over the four years I was at uni, I re-wrote it three times. As I learnt more and more about programming, CSS, MVC and HTML, I discovered whole new things I could do. It was one of the first sites I’d seen that used Facebook to log people in, well before Facebook had a proper mechanism for allowing you to do that, and people loved it. It was my playground and now it is no more.

However, all is not lost. I’ve set up http://sheffieldhockey.steveworkman.com to serve as a lasting memory of an awesome site. Joe, the new club captain, may still want to carry on with the site, get one of the freshers to, well, freshen it up. I’m hopeful that my gift to the club may continue to be used in some capacity, but, for now, it’s gone.

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Patching iUI

Steve Workman — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:22:58 +0000

Recently, I’ve been working on an iPhone web app for my employer (internal, so I can’t share). I based the design and architecture around the iUI library by Joel Hewitt, which became an overnight de-facto standard for web apps. However, after a lot of playing with it and turning it inside out, I’ve found there are a number of problems which have not yet been fixed.

For example; I want to run an AJAX search on a page one menu down my site tree. I found that this wasn’t possible as subsequent javascript code was not evaluated by Safari. There’s other things too, like any iPhone/iPod application link not working, having to press any link that goes to “_self” twice and having a slide animation that stutters more than a broken record.

I am happy to say that fixes exist for all but the last item, and I have put them all into a javascript file, which can be found at the end of this post.

However, I do not believe that this is the solution to iUI’s problems. I feel that a complete re-write in a standardised library like jQuery is the solution. Who knows, I may even find time to write it

So, here’s the file: iui.patched.js

Steve

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Re-design

Steve Workman — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:48:18 +0000

Greetings!

I’ve given the design of this blog a much-needed update and have finally made a wordpress theme (comments welcome).
The whole site now fits nicely into the design of steel-software.com and I’m pleased to say the process wasn’t too hard! I followed a guide on Deziner Folio (though don’t copy code directly from the website, all the ‘s and “s are HTML encoded and dreamweaver doesn’t like it). I’ve even managed to make the site widget-enabled which works rather well.

So, in summary, I’m pleased with myself.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Bloc Party
Currently Eating: Burgers, 3 in 3 days!
Currently Watching: Blade Runner, not understanding the whole Deckard is a replicant thing
Currently Reading: How to win friends and influence people
Currently Feeling: like a pork pie

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A Catchup and a Roadmap

Steve Workman — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:53:19 +0000

Welcome to the first update in months!

There are a few reasons why I’ve been so quiet since the release of USEv4. Firstly, I’ve started my job at PA. It’s been a great couple of months and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. However, this gives me very little time for updating blogs etc. Secondly, because I’m no longer in Sheffield, I’m away from the club that I created the system for, giving me little need to update the site unless something was broken

With that out of the way, I’m happy to say that there’s more updates to USE coming in the next few months. My time at PA has reminded me what project management was about and that it actually matters, even if it’s just a one man band. So, in honor of such knowledge, I’ve created a defect tracker, which can be found at tracker.steel-software.comÂ to track my defects that I’ve noticed, and to help me plan my releases.

If you have a look at it now, you’ll see that there’s 16/17 known issues and fixes, most of which are minor, though some are new functionality. They’re arranged into versions so you can see what’s going to get fixed in what release.

Talking of releases, the next one, 4.10, should be happening over xmas. It’s got a big list of changes in it, some of which have already been implemented. One of these, is Facebook notifications.

If you’ve noticed, when a friend of yours posts some news, an event, a match report or selects you for a match,Â you are sent a notification with a link back to the site! Very neat.

This feature will be expanded in the 4.2/4.4 release, though those currently don’t have a schedule (cos this job has taken my weekends).Â If you’re interested, 4.3 is quite a small release relating to crontab functions.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for long enough.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Coldplay
Currently Watching: Heroes in HD
Currently Eating: takeout
Currently Reading: How to win friends and influence people
Hours in the office this week: too many already

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USEv4 is Done!

Steve Workman — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 19:53:26 +0000

I am very proud to announce the immediate availability of USEv4, the latest generation of sports clubs websites. This generation features a massive amount of enhancements and new features, lots and lots of which are below:

New design – Completely re-done layout with all the latest CSS trickery and web 2.0 graphics.Designed to focus your view on the content and yet have every option at your fingertips. Features collapsible menus, lots of fancy transitions and auto-completing forms
Facebook logins – Associate your account with facebook and use that to log in and out of the site. Your profile will then be read from facebook and notifications will be sent to your account! (pending a minor change)
New Gallery – Pictures now feature tagging and are organised into albums. There are also shared albums that anyone can create, edit and add to.
Improved editor – USEv4 integrates with the TinyMCE text editor so it’s easier to create more colourful messages
Improved squad selection – much-improved selection process
More efficient – All this extra functionality for very little extra downloads
Templating system – USEv4 uses the Smarty templating system, allowing different designs to be made easily
Many, many, many bug fixes….

Version 4.0 will be the last major revision (unless anyone wants to but it??? Anyone?) though there may be additions to it, and there will be bug fixes of course (if you find any, contact support@steel-software.com), but as I start my job on Monday, support will be limited until I get settled.

So, what does this mean for the clubs? Well, I’ll be sending out invoices in the next few days for this year’s upkeep and as soon as I receive payment you’ll be upgraded to v4.

For the average user, once your club has received v4, all you have to do is click the button that looks like this:
This will then ask you to log in to facebook, accept the application and then find your username in the list. If you’re not on the list then you can register from that page.

I’ve updated the security settings so that current committee members have access to everything they need.

I’d love to hear you comments on the site and any suggestions that you have. Any feedback is better than no feedback so leave a comment in this post or if you’re registered, post on the sheffieldhockey.com forums!

That’s all for now. I hope you all enjoy the website as much as I enjoyed making it

Steve AKA Girder

Currently Listening to: Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Currently Watching: Goldeneye on tv
Currently Reading: PA Consulting’s code of conduct!
Currently Eating: Home-cooked food!
Hours til I start my new job: 36

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Getting a Facebook Login working on your application

Steve Workman — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 21:25:48 +0000

Update 2010: This method is still valid but has been replaced with “Facebook Connect”. See a follow-up post: Facebook Logins with Facebook Connect

I’m writing this after a hard day’s work with the Facebook API. It’s almost been work the blood, sweat and tears that I have shed during the last 5 hours. This will also hopefully serve as a guide for anyone trying to get something simple done with facebook authentication.

Firstly, my mission:

Enhance the current login system of USE to use Facebook, thereby giving me access to their facebook profiles and posting messages to them there, instead of giving my users ‘just another thing to update’
At this point in time, I only want my users to be able to log in with facebook
Doing this also makes my login more secure

My first steps take me to platform.facebook.com and to their guides. I add the developer application and get myself an API key, setting up my server at the same time. There are plenty of other tutorials that show you how to do that.

The next thing I do is go to the authenticaiton documentation and grab their login button and put it into my website. As previously mentioned in other posts, I wanted to use the thickbox technique to log in; however, I then came upon the first limitations of the facebook platform

The thickbox can open an iframe with the facebook login in it, but in order to close that box on the click of login, I have to attach some javascript to the button, which I can’t do
Even simply having the login come up in a popup has the same problem.
Even so, ignoring that, once you click ok, Facebook redirects you to the callback page, but it does so in the iframe/popup!
Even if that was all acceptable, in order to retrieve the Facebook session, you need to use the auth token provided in the returned URL, which you can’t get at in the iframe/popup without some funky javascript

Thus, I’ve dropped the thickbox login. Very sorry. If you can think of a way around this, please please please let me know.

Next comes with what to do with everything. My previous login was actually controlled by the phpBB forums and, whilst it is still possible to throw the token to the forums, I haven’t in this example as it overcomplicates things (and I’m waiting for phpBBv3 to go gold). I considered the following tasks that the script had to do before it would log people in

Test if the auth_token is real
Test if the user is in the database
Get their details and fill my session variables
Prevent this process from happening every time

The first one was quite easy actually. Looking at the facebook.php file in the client library (from the developer tools) I found a do_get_session($auth_token) method. This swaps my token for a session, returning an array if it’s alright, nothing if it’s not. The array contains the user id, session key and a time for when the session expires

The second bit is the hardest. On sheffieldhockey.com alone there are 435 registered members (though only half that number are active really). Also, not all of them are on facebook and I certainly don’t know their facebook IDs to populate the database with. Therefore, this second bit involves a test to see if the user is there, then if they’re not, they will be bounced to a page asking them to register, or to pick their name from a list. This is the only way I can see a nice smooth transition without me getting the admin to trawl facebook for people.

The third part isn’t that hard, assuming there’s a person in there. Simply get the data and set it.

Preventing it from happening each time is a simple check of the sessions to see if they’re set and then if an auth_token is set. The trickiest part of this was that I’d been defining my variables twice and so it looked like the sessions weren’t setting until a refresh of the page. Thankfully that’s fixed now.

The hardest part in this game actually seemed to be getting the logout working! Facebook requires that to log a user out you must POST to www.facebook.com/logout.php with confirm=1 set. I tried a couple of ways first, initially with a form, but that simply dropped me out into a Facebook login screen and when I went back, I hadn’t cleared my sessions so I was still logged in!

Secondly, I tried and AJAX request to the page, but that page disallowed it. Finally, I found a script that let you do POST requests without forms (google for it) and from there I made a page, called the function, cleared my sessions and headered back as normal.

And all that does is log you in… it’s a lot of work for not very much, but it’ll allow you to do so much more. That said, the pain of not being able to do the thickbox login is annoying and to be honest it distracts from the site. Any way around that and I’ll be eternally greatful!

There’s no nightly USE build tonight due to the above (and me not having finished the facebook ID associator)

Steve

Currently Listening to: My Chill playlist for Emily
Currently Reading: Facebook documentation
Currently Watching: Batman Begins
Currently Eating: Leftovers and Milka
Current SVN Revision: 81

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Fixes and Fancy Stuff

Steve Workman — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 23:38:33 +0000

First, sorry for not updating this blog in the past month. I’ve been to Greece and then spent another week here doing all the touristy things with my girlfriend so I’ve not really had time to update this.

I’d then like to say, that whilst I’ve not been updating this, I’ve been hard at work on USEv4. Since I last updated, the whole site has been put into the templates and at the moment I’m just going over everything and fixing any problems I come across. Whilst I’ve been doing this I’ve been getting the opportunity to add a couple of fancy bits in. For instance, I’ve now got the Thickbox jQuery plugin working for squad status (see below)

Basically, instead of popping up a new window showing the page, this tiny 10KB plugin makes the rest of the page inactive and gets whatever little bit of data I want. This will also be used in the new facebook login

Talking of the Facebook login, I’m going to try and have that done by early next week. I’m actually quite looking forward to getting on to the new stuff. Fixing the current site (all 20,000 lines of it) is alright, but it’s monotonous and really gets to me because it’s very repetitive. New stuff gives me chance to make things better, not just fighting to make them work!

So, Wanna see what this all looks like?
http://beta.steel-software.com
Username: hockey
Password: love

It’s updated nightly with the latest revision and there’s a list of things that are working and aren’t on the front page.

I’d love to hear what you think and if you find anything that’s wrong. Also, I’d love to know about how fast the website loads. At the moment the adverts are disabled so that’ll save some time, but I often worry that it’s getting a little bloated.

Anywho, that’s enough from me. Take a look at the site!

Steve

Currently Listening to: The White Stripes
Currently Eating: Chicken Rogan Josh
Currently Watching: Whose Line is it Anyway
Currently Reading: Nothing, Harry Potter was good though!
Current SVN Revision: 75

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2 weeks in

Steve Workman — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 01:38:16 +0000

I thought I’d write about what I’ve learned so far with the developement of USEv4. I’ve been working at it for 2 weeks now and it’s come quite a long way, so quickly, here’s a list of what’s been done.

The re-design is complete, navigation is now completely in the header, context-sensitive options are on the right, information is on the left.
jQuery functionality has been integrated. Sidebar panels can be closed with a fancy slide transition effect.
The public side of things (calendar, match reports etc) are now in the smarty templating system.

The benefit of putting everything into the template system, is not only for code re-use, but for the future and for expandability, i.e. if you want to make your own templates and completely change the presentational layer, you can! The other benefit is that I’m going through what is now 2-year-old code, some of which was updated a year ago, some of which wasn’t. At every line I’m making it more efficient, removing loops, updating the SQL, and putting everything into objects.

Objects are something of a life-saver. At uni, I’ve been taught that Object-Oriented programming is great because of code re-use. I’ve never been the best O-O programmer, but I do know how to do it, though it seems from my previous two years work that I’ve forgotten! For example, the current site has 3 places where a ‘mini-profile’ is displayed, containing the same information each time. In USEv3, this was controlled by 3 separate sets of statements. In USEv4, this is controlled by one object, meaning that to display a mini-profile now only requires 4 lines of code, instead of 70.

Putting the major website functionality into objects is taking time though, but I’ve got 90% of them done now, so development will speed up significantly.

Quickly, a word on jQuery. It’s incredibly powerful but also very annoying because even the tinyest slip can throw an error, but firebug (javascript debugging in firefox) doesn’t always pick it up! However, it is easy to do some very fancy effects with it, though I’m wondering how much overhead this is going to create for the website! Thank god for broadband prevelance!

Steve

Currently Listening to: Pink Floyd
Currently Reading: Stuff about Greece
Currently Watching: Not much
Currently Eating: Curry
Number of USEv4 SVN commits: 24

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USE v4 Preview

Steve Workman — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:13:03 +0000

Well, I’ve been hard at the re-design for 2 days. The underlying code now seems a lot more readable, and the page is far more organised and robust. I believe I’ve completed the layout of each sections, and I’ve completed the first iteration of the header stylings, which I’ll show to you, right now

I am currently feeling that the lower buttons are too tall and they need to be different in some way. The header is also a little too tall itself. I was considering moving the home/forum/FH buttons to the top, next to the club name. We’ll see.

That’s all for now, might update when the rest of the page is of a similar standard.

Steve

Currently Listening to: Harry Potter 6 on audiobook
Currently Eating: Parent-cooked food
Currently Reading: My CSS book again. Lifesaver!
Currently Watching: Rome, never has there been such an excuse for flesh
Commits to the USE v4 SVN: 4

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