Just spotted that 1Password has Travel Mode where families, and businesses can temporarily remove vaults from all devices of an individual. Clever stuff given the current travel situation.

The lollipop lady is doing well for Christmas gifts! I hadn’t really considered how ever present and consistently bubbly and chatty they are. Something in that perhaps.

Utilisation shapes behaviour at agencies. Even when unspoken, utilisation rewards looking busy. Agile asks teams to limit work in progress. Agencies often reward the opposite behaviour. harrybailey.com/agile-coachi...

Amazing visualisation of where Billionaires were born, where they live, and the path of migration. Billionaire Migration Map. wesleystubenbord.com/viz/billiona...

Agencies don’t struggle because the work is bespoke, but because the repeatable parts get reinvented every time. A bit of structure can actually protect creativity rather than limit it.

Agencies don’t struggle because the work is bespoke, but because the repeatable parts get reinvented every time. A bit of structure can actually protect creativity rather than limit it.

ChatGPT: You are right, that paragraph I referred to did not exist on the page. Let’s use what actually exists.

Dropbox desperately trying to convince me that 80.79% is 'nearly full' and I need to start paying. 🙄

Who submitted their actually date of birth to BlueSky? Nobody I assume.

ChatGPT context for chats in a project is faulty. I’ve just had a long back and forth in a chat to understand the limitations and ask about the potential improvements. Here is what the system currently does, and what I think it should do instead. Much of this comes direct from ChatGPT. 🧵 1/7

Found this when going through old uni folders. “Discovering the Web” from 1999

The latest Apple accessibility ad is great. “I’m not remarkable” youtu.be/KmFPWxjmnqE?...

I finally made a ChatGPT project to encourage me to update my wardrobe and dress consciously. It prioritises new items, finds ideas online and tells me what goes together (and doesn’t). Even considers the weather.

A tiny Japan moment made it into the FT’s Working It: a robot tour guide showing me around, operated remotely by a disabled worker elsewhere in the country. A reminder that the real future of work is human (and also kawaai)

I just learned that every red postbox in the UK has the cypher of the monarch in power when it was built, right on the front of it. So now you can work out just how old each box you use is.

I’m off to Liverpool tomorrow to talk agency delivery models, mentoring and The Beatles. Any recommendations for a cafe nearish Lime Street greatly appreciated.

AI is great for content, it's likely been used by most for months now, but the real potential for agencies sits behind the scenes. The next step is to automate (safely and well) the hygiene factors, protect the human elements and free teams to create the magic clients actually remember.

If you use 1Password, you'll have wondered about inheritance of access, should you need it. Sharing recovery details gives access to everything. All logins. Here's a workaround to give only chosen vault access. > Setting Up Partial Digital Inheritance with 1Password harrybailey.com/2025/12/sett...

I was just told I shared a great analogy. Considering how much I lean on analogies, that should probably happen more often.

I still think a lot about the calm tech talk I saw Amber Case do many many years ago.

A very welcome but unexpected all-hands coachee farewell email arrived yesterday. This is why I love the human part of work so much. They made it!

Interesting read.

I’m not crying, I just have something in my eye. xkcd.com/3172/

Should you manage work in progress in agency teams? harrybailey.com/2025/11/shou...

Schrödinger's ticket. Work assigned to people who also have multiple other tickets assigned. The ticket's work is both not being done and being done depending on who is asking. You can only find out by confirming what the person is actually working on.

"an over-reliance on Earth." - I had to read that 3 times.

It's always fascinated me that double dashes were used in place of em dashes in the principles of the Agile Manifesto / Manifesto for Agile Software Development / MASD. "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. " Keyboard limitation, human error, or AI forsight?

A lot of software people in pain today based on my slacks and chats. Remember to postmortem and retro when you can. They’re your path to less pain next time. Stakeholders won’t all swallow “It’s Cloudflare’s fault.” repeatedly.

There’s a balance needed between delivering work, and delivery improvement. It can be hard to stop the work pressures swallowing all the time up, but without the balance you see a lot of work being done, but it likely isn’t of the quality you’d like.

"How can we make our event pages as unreadible as possible?" "I know... a moving background options. Perfect." What were luma thinking? Warning.. it's a lot... luma.com/3133upkx

Nice I’d add showing vulnerability

“If AI generates it, how will we understand and maintain it?” If a team mate generates it, how do you understand and maintain it? If you generate it, how will your future self understand and maintain it?

People who travel with two pairs of headphones all have a devastating story about headphone failure or loss.

Today was full of things falling into place. Nice when that happens. It’s not even a Friday.

Everyone wants a village, but not everyone wants to be a villager.

The Ruby / DHH situation fascinates me, despite my distance from the community. Another great piece here.

Today is the last day to submit a session proposal for next year's Agile Manchester conference: agilemanchester.net/call-for-ses... The event will take place from 13-14 May Tickets now available. Discount for freelancers.

100 - % time building the thing = X X is the discussions, handovers, testing & deployment. X is often the bottleneck. X is where most of the waste is found. But we obsess about estimating and measurement of build time.

I still chuckle occasionally about the naming of The World Series.

Drafted a new talk today. Now I just need to grow the balls to submit it.

A fantastic piece of data journalism from Sky News. A masterclass of data visualisation. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

"We don't deploy on Fridays" is a statement I always have to dig into. Like if somebody says, "I don't like Christmas", you need to know what experiences led to that.

I recently wrote about juniors being a barometer for great ways of working. One part of that approach has to be pair coding. A habit that is often seen as a distraction and a waste actually fosters all the key elements of strong autonomous teams.

Random coffees are great. I spent 30 minutes today chatting way comparing agency delivery to gov delivery. What’s the same? What’s different? How might one approach help the another? Both of us came away with fresh insights and ideas.

It can be tempting to be all positive and confident at project kickoff, that’s what people want to see and hear. But the start of a project is a great time to ensure success, not just hope for it. A quick “If this project failed six months from now, what would likely have caused it?” can help.

Some big-org customer service is wild. Brsk broadband for example: B: Here's your renewal offer Me: Sounds good, I accept B: Done. We've applied a different offer. Pay up. Me: wtf? B: Sorry about the missunderstanding. Pay up though. Me: wtf? B: Yeah we said X, but we meant Y. Me: wtf? B: Problem?

When a developer admits to the habit of xlarge code commits I start here: - Show them how to squash/rebase multiple commits - Suggest they write the commit message first So they know they could always squash, and mindful of pre-planned scope of each change. It's worth encouraging smaller steps.

IKEA recently promoted tiny beds for phones. The Phone Sleep Collection. If you leave your phone in its bed for 7+ hours for 7 days, they give you vouchers to spend in store. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfR7...

3 ways teams handle weekend failures: - No cover, things break. Risk lies with clients, often unexpectedly. Lowers retention. - Unofficial cover, undocumented processes. Risk lies with agency. Gaps exist. Lowers morale. - Official cover, documented processes. Balanced risk. Adds overhead.

Trick or treating has taken a northern spin at our house this year. 🎃 👻