The Spreadsheet Gap

The essence of the computer’s power in the modern age is the ability to take a previously time-consuming task, and to automate it. Often not just automate, but speed up, and reduce the chance of errors. For decades now this power has been open to all thanks, mainly, to the existence of the spreadsheet. From early data entry systems on mainframes through VisiCalc, Lotus and of course Microsoft Excel then onward to modern web based tools like Google Sheets & Airtable the spreadsheet has granted far more people the ability to record data & process it - magnitudes more than the number of computer programmers out there.

In recent years the spreadsheet has been joined by it’s distributed equivalent, the API toolsets of If That then This, Zapier, Segment etc. that promise to stitch together sets of proprietary tools via their individual interfaces into powerful distributed automation systems for businesses. But for every company that’s discarded their custom software in favour of getting smart non-programmers to stitch together a set of general purpose software, there’s a business creaking under the weight of managing a spreadsheet, trapped between its complexity and the high cost of building it out as custom software.

I call this dissonance between general purpose software and custom software the spreadsheet gap

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Behaviour in virtual vs physical worlds: the Handforth example

This article pertains to the video which went viral in the last week about an online meeting of the Handforth parish council. Given the last (almost) year of life in the UK has largely been conducted over online video meetings we have had some fascinating insights into both the technical challenges, security challenges and social challenges of moving so many of our activities online.

I am sure the internet is heaving with opinion pieces on this council meeting. Who was actually in charge? Was it right these people were kicked out of a meeting? Should this video have been shared at all? Are there better ways to manage such a meeting, or tools with more features to support procedures that are mapped out for real life meetings? I want to add my voice to the cacophony - this is an opinion piece, so feel free to agree, disagree or disregard as you see fit!

Having thought about this meeting and some of the basic questions, I arrived at what I think might be the key question. Not “should this have been shared” or “was the behaviour correct?” but:

Where does the boundary lie in public vs private when physical interactions are brought into a virtual world?

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Simple Autoscaling With Apache on AWS EC2

One of the early advantages of migrating off of traditional shared hosting, VPS or dedicated hosting and onto a platform such as AWS is the ability to auto-scale. This sounds like a bit of a magical concept, so what do we mean?

Well, the basic concept is that the compute resources available to you can increase when demand increases (meaning you can serve more people) and decrease when demand drops (meaning you can spend less money).

The ability to scale on demand is a key cloud benefit - no longer does an online retailer need to pay for a 12 month contract of some huge servers that sit idle most of the year apart from the run up to Christmas. Instead, deploy just the servers you need to handle expected load - most cloud providers charge by the hour or minute. Autoscaling takes this a step further by automating this process based on some metric from your servers.

But how?

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What I learned doing a startup: part 3

This post comes from a series; read the series overview here.

Early decisions do matter

It’s hard to remember every decision you make as you begin a project, especially if you’re not quite sure you’re beginning one (see the intro linked above). But as with setting out on any journey, it’s best to bring some preparations, possibly some snacks.

If the project happens to be one involving computers, you have a lot of such preparations you could make. What programming language do we use? How is data stored? How do I get the software to the user? You won’t have an answer for every single one of these - and even those you do have can be hard to guarantee as the right answer but regardless what you choose, it’s important to remember that it does matter.

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What I learned doing a startup: part 2

This post comes from a series; read the series overview here.

The customer isn’t always king

As already mentioned Ground Control didn’t start as a SAAS business; it began out of my desire to have something resembling an agency. My attempts at actually building an agency had been somewhat faltering due to a lack of insight about how one actually gains business leads in that space. As such the promise of recurring revenue from a more modern style of software business seemed appealing. However a key thing to remember when starting a business is that if something seems too easy, it probably is.

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