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Alumni blogs

Lots of our people have lots of opinions. Here are just a few of them

ThoughtWorks embraces the individuality of the people in the organization and hence the opinions expressed in the blogs may contradict each other and also may not represent the opinions of ThoughtWorks.

A/B Testing: User Experience vs Conversion

I’ve written a couple of posts over the last few months about my experiences with A/B testing and one conversation we often used to have was around user experience vs conversion rate.

Once you start running an A/B test it encourages you to focus more on the conversion rate of users in different parts of the flow and your inclination is to make changes that increase that conversion rate.

Another one of our drivers is to provide the best user experience that we can to our customers and since sometimes this means that the best thing for…

Blog post by Mark Needham
18 May 2013

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Agile Project Status Reports – Example #1

Here are some ideas for project status reports.

The 1 Pager

1-pager

On this one I am trying to communicate all the important stuff on a single page.

At the top I’ve got how we are doing for time, money and scope. To the right I put any headlines or issues. I’ve got a risk section showing the problems we are facing and how we are addressing. Then the velocity and projected date on the right.

So at a glance I should be able to see whether we are in trouble (via the red, yellow, green…

Blog post by Jonathan Rasmusson
17 May 2013

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Mocha Release 0.14.0

Release Notes

Blog post by James Mead
17 May 2013

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Agile Without Social Engineering

Blog post by Elena Yatzeck
16 May 2013

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neo4j: When the web console returns nothing…use the data browser!

In my time playing around with neo4j I’ve run into a problem a few times where I executed a query using the web console (usually accessible @ http://localhost:7474/webadmin/#/console/) and have got absolutely no response.

I noticed a similar thing today when Rickard and I were having a look at why a Lucene index query wasn’t behaving as we expected.

I setup some data in a neo4j database using neography with the following code:

require 'neography'
 
@neo = Neography::Rest.new
 
@neo.create_node_index("Id_Index", "exact", "lucene")

Blog post by Mark Needham
16 May 2013

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Lonely Beach

Lonely Beach by Christopher Johnston (fuzzylizardstudios)) on 500px.com

Blog post by Christopher Johnston
16 May 2013

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How are you using MongoDB with Java?

So, like one of my presentations, I have a question for you.  Actually, I have more than one question for you.  I'm not going to bother with survey monkey or whatever, I want to share the answers so please, answers in the comments:
  1. Are you using the Java driver for MongoDB in your application?
  2. Are you using the Java driver directly, or are you using a third party library like Morphia, Spring Data, the Scala driver, your own abstraction layer, etc?
  3. If you're using a third party library, why did you choose that over using the Java driver directly?
  4. If…

Blog post by Trisha Gee
16 May 2013

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Why Chief Design Officers Need To Lead In The Boardroom

Putting design leadership to define strategy makes good business sense

“A successful digital product strategy uses validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterativereleases to deliver products and services as a cross-functional team that accurately meet customer and business needs with a minimum waste of investment.”

- Eewei Chen, How To Create Awesome Digital Consumer Products

Background

Many traditional methods of advertising and marketing are no longer effective alone at convincing consumers to choose products. Early work by Dieter Rams whilst as Design Director at Braun has allowed the likes of the late Steve

Blog post by Eewei Chen
16 May 2013

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Clojure: Combining Calls To Doseq And Let

I've you've ever looked at the docs for clojure's for macro, then you probably know about the :let, :when, and :while modifiers. What you may not know is that those same modifiers are available in doseq.

I was recently working with some code that had the following form.


Upon seeing this code, John Hume asked if I preferred it to a single doseq with multiple bindings. He sent over an example that looked similar to the following example.


That was actually the first time that I'd seen multiple bindings in a doseq, and my immediate reaction…

Blog post by Jay Fields
16 May 2013

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Go Defrustrator

At programmiersportgruppe I blogged about the go-defrustrator, a userscript that dynamically improves Go’s user interface.

Blog post by Felix Leipold
16 May 2013

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