"Team leads are different. Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit Umbrella. Your goal is to find all of the peripheral stuff involved in getting the product out the door—important stuff, such as making sure the delivery schedule for the new servers makes sense for when you want to ship the product that needs them, or taking customer calls at 11 PM on a Sunday because their account quit working and they want to know why they should keep paying you, or figuring out when doing features the sales and support teams want makes financial sense—and then coming back and presenting a focused direction to all the developers so that they can get the features written without worrying about how they actually ship. You switch from doing the building yourself to enabling others to build stuff on your behalf."

"I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying."

"The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches."

Coworking space near TCR.

Useful from the other side i.e. how to be hired as a consultant and not suck.

Wondering why I didn't save this in 2008. Keep referring to it.

Salary Benchmarking for London 2011.

Lots of discussions re. ratios.

I like this. "A quick note to say that I am really disappointed that you have still not paid me the [..] that I'm owed for the work I did for you. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money, but actually I think that this is more a matter of respect."

"There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad."

"A product manager enables the team to execute the company vision."

"That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will." Although only if you're working for people who've actually heard of github i.e. not adland.

"The key idea here that most entrepreneurs miss is that you really need to vet your own ideas. Many aspiring entrepreneurs dream up an idea, and then stick to it doggedly, either because its the only idea they have, or they find it technically interesting. They don't want to discover that it won't work, so they don't try to figure it out! This is a bit like writing some code, and then not testing it because you really don't want to discover that its buggy."

"Here’s a pricing technique that sounds, at first, like the dumbest newbie move of all time. Call it ‘fill-in-the-blank’ invoicing. Or ‘pay what you want’ pricing. The notion is, you do the work first, then let the client decide how much to pay for it." Heavy caveats.

"I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work."

"Employing an internal data griot makes a lot of sense: someone who can spend the time looking for both large trends and individual needs and uses that illuminate and portend. It’s a hard job, needing a mix of skills rarely found – a smidgen of hard maths and statistics, a pinch of programming, and dessert spoons of various liberal arts. The Economist (sub required) posits them as data scientists (a position Flickr are currently looking for), but this misses the ability to ask interesting questions, and having hunches – being so immersed in the data that relevancy screams out."

"Analysis: The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products."

"Details and links to managed workspace providers in Hackney."

""This has come to be known as the Colour of the Bike Shed Phenomenon: the time spent on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance. Relentlessly, the trivial squeezes out the non-trivial [...] Similar effects – where small stuff preoccupies us because it's small – course through our lives [...] I fear that something related is also what's transpiring whenever I get that delusional feeling of achievement from having powered through multiple unimportant items on my to-do list, leaving untouched the few tasks that really matter. Taken together, Parkinson's two laws amount to a wry but certainly not trivial warning: the work we do expands to fill the time available – and, half the time, it's not even the most important work."

"What would videogaming look like if it rejected the machine as a model for play, if more games incorporated gratuitous moments of relaxation from their constant, accelerated striving? Or if more games did not treat us as employees but as autonomous co-creators?"

Bad title, interesting points. "I learned that introverts prefer to think before they speak, while extroverts tend to think /as/ they speak. I also learned what energizes introverts (solo activities) versus extroverts (social activities) [...] They seek out allies as trusted sounding boards and champions who can help spread the word about their quiet strengths."

Always do good things, never do bad things.

"Friends tired of forking out for a Classic Super Club or a Wild Crayfish and Rocket to eat at their desk have asked me to chuck a few suggestions their way for something they can make themselves to take to work."

"A funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers..."

"When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others."

"Here’s some things I’d recommend that you consider if you’re looking to get hired into a creative company". Particularly like this part: "don’t be scared to big-up other people you worked with".

"I have been asked by my work place to provide my passport." Not just employers; looks like it's becoming standard practice for recruiters to ask even if trading as a limited company. Something to do with the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006.

"Twitter revolutionized public communication by creating organic networks for one-to-many updates. Present.ly brings this revolution to your business with tools and features custom tailored for a work environment."

"What would I do if my business allowed me to do in a downturn? Keep ahead of the curve. Get myself to any and every relevant show, event and conference, meeting and networking opportunity. Get up to speed with what’s coming down the pipe from all of the technologies. Understand their priorities and where they think we will be in the coming months and years."

"One of the biggest problems in the UK, and I would say Ireland as well, is that digital or ‘new media’ agencies only ever decide to incorporate new Web apps or social networks into their thinking when they bubble up from Silicon Valley or elsewhere. Few ever think to jump in and create a few apps themselves."

"Thanks to the wonderful credit crunch, many of you are about to become freelancers (ie fired). I have freelanced before (and am likely to be doing so again) so allow me to enlighten you as to what to expect."

Digital media recruiters near Old Street.

For PH.

"When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work..."

"This is just a list of free and open spaces in London, places where smallish groups might congregate to do something, like talk, understand things better, make plans, organise other things."

"The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous product

"Slowing down is essential to any kind of creativity — even if it makes you unfocused, inefficient, undisciplined, or unsystematic too"

"Adbusters have changed their Turnoff TV week into Mental Detox Week, its tagline is Escape the Fantasy."

"Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics!"

Some good, some bad.

"A small article on making the leap to working for yourself"

"212 Pages of Expert Freelancing Advice"

The Group calls itself a "place for anyone to share their experiences, frustrations and successes in driving change inside large organizations." Monthly meetings, the first being this week, will combine guest speakers and open discussion.

Mostly obvious but always good to be reminded.

"Some people are naturally wide, some people are naturally deep. But the assumption is, in most business contexts, that you can — and should want to — jump between the two as the need or situation dictates. But this is a load of crap."

"or why I won't, until the money runs out..."

"Articles on how design is managed, with practical ideas and real-life examples of design being used for business success."

"Great ideas are only great if they fit a purpose, as such it is important to be clear from the outset what your site’s core user proposition is."

"Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat."

"Microsoft threw an invite-only gathering at its London offices: something about start-ups and Web 2.0. [...] Here are the notes I took…"

"Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities."

"Whatever your skills as software developer or web designer (or whatever your web work career entails), you need to also understand the basics of estimating."

"Unlock the secrets to your advertising/creative agency’s happiness, fame and fortune."

"The tricky situation of quoting for web design and development projects, and the various types of contracts you can agree upon."

"As a musician [...] I've often thought about this. I've come to the realization that the price factor is a "problem" that is going to grow exponentially as time moves forward."

"This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff."

"Based on the paradoxical notion that anarchists have to be more organized than average if they don’t want to depend on power structures, and presents some ideas on how to kick the boss habit."

"When you see your client's pubic bone, something has changed."