Alec Burton's Blog

Programming, coaching and general musings.


Finding a Dev Role in London

Published at August 26, 2019 ·  6 min read

With an apparent shortage of talent and a seemingly high demand for developers in the London area, finding a new job should of been easy right? A look back at what has been at times both a joyous and demoralising experience.

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A Definition of Done With Intent

Published at June 9, 2019 ·  5 min read

Designing a better of Definition of Done for multiple cross-functional Scrum teams working on the same product.

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5 Ways to Make Annual Appraisals Less Terrible

Published at May 27, 2019 ·  3 min read

Annual appraisals can be painful for both the appraiser and appraisee. While there are ways to give people better, more regular feedback and help them progress their careers faster, often HR or company policy makes the usual yearly cycle difficult to avoid. Below are 5 tips on making annual appraisals less painful for all involved.

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Creating a Raspberry Pi Based Personal Information Radiator

Published at May 19, 2019 ·  8 min read

Information radiators in the office are great, especially for development teams. Broadcasting the state of CI builds, automated tests and environments ensures that everyone is aware of any breakages, and that these breakages are less likely to be ignored. Attach a Raspberry Pi to large TV or monitor, and you’ve got a cheap and easy way to set this up anywhere in the office.

Here I explore how this idea could be applied at home. Looking at what’s involved in building and coding an information radiator at home, displaying at-a-glance details of daily life.

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Using Docker to teach new languages

Published at May 14, 2019 ·  4 min read

Often the hardest, most time-consuming, part of running a hands-on teaching session to a room of developers, is getting everyone’s environment set up. What if there was an easy way to get everyone up and running quickly at the start of the session? Here are my experiences with using Docker to do just that.

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Tips for Better 1-to-1s

Published at May 6, 2019 ·  7 min read

As time scheduled between you and your manager to talk about you and your career, one-to-ones can be very powerful tool for career growth. Here a few tips on how to make the most out of them.

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Let's Try This Again...

Published at April 28, 2019 ·  4 min read

It’s 2017 and I’m starting to get to grips with my new role as a Senior Developer. This new role contained new competencies aimed to encourage more involvement with the wider developer community. For me it seemed ideal place to start to do this was to run my own blog. Unfortunately after 3 months, and just 3 posts, progress stalled.

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