David Thacker Blog

This week I officially became a: Scrum Certified Product Owner I have always had an interest in ways to optimise team efficiency, first beginning when I took operations management at University, studying Lean, Agile, Sigma 6 to name just a few. Last year I became interested in Scrum, first reading "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" by Jeff Sutherland. It intrigued me but due to my job at the time I never really took it much further not having a need to optimise team efficiency at the time. New Team This was until I changed teams and became responsible for business operations. The main challenge was to revolutionise the entire purchase process to make it scaleable, measurable and also successful. But we had some issues: -- Monolithic Legacy apps -- Individual projects -- Highly specialised team members with little cross functional capacity. As this was a new team we did not want to alienate them so we started a evolution rather than the revolution bringi...

So in the past when I have had an Issue with my Iphone all I have had todo arrange a time slot and go into the Apple shop and they have always achieved to sort me out with a replacement phone. Now I have not had a my latest Samsung S7 for long but I have now started to experience multiple issues. First was the headphone jack would not allow for Remote control or allow for the headset mic to work. I had contacted Samsung and they said don't worry just drop it into a support center. I first needed to go on a business trip before going to the support center, unfortunately during that time the rear camera glass randomly broke, the phone is protected by an Otterbox, is always in a pocket on its own and there is no damage on the case itself. Apparently this seems to be a well documented issue displayed on many forums. Samsung Forum : https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-S-Phones/s7-edge-rear-camera-glass-broken/td-p/2963 https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-S-Phones/Samsung-s...

If your HTML and CSS skills are lacking or are not as good as they should be then you should consider an HTML editor ( https://html-cleaner.com/ ) that will allow you to copy and paste plain text, edit it and then copy out the marked up HTML. Now I will only use this method if I need to quickly change or update a basic HTLM template usually you can edit the template in a WYSIWYG editor inside MailChimp or similar but if you need to create a basic HTML for your email something like :  https://html-cleaner.com/ is not a bad choice for quickly getting the text out. If Mandrill the service we used included a editor inside Mandrill and not in another service (MailChimp) then this would be perfect.   If you would like to get in touch or have any questions then  please do not hesitate to get in contact.

2 Weeks in with the Macbook Pro So after 2 weeks of using the MacBook Pro,  I have not needed to go back to Windows the only thing I needed was to install Excel as Numbers was not feature rich enough. Using the MacBook Pro is a joy and the hardware is fantastic. I dont really have anything to complain about. If you try to use it like a Windows PC you will not enjoy it but if you accept the workflow of the Mac and adapt to its way you will be happy. The same apply's to Mac users going to Windows. The workflow is much more focused per screen than compared to what windows users expect and may find the focus limiting/ frustrating coming from Windows. Spark Mail - is amazing and has allowed me to deal with email much more effectively instead of hating dealing with outlook everyday. I would say that Spark Mail - is worth getting the mac for  that alone. Sofar I really love the Mac but I still have a place in my life for a Windows Machine too - just make sense that it is fairly recent has...

Beginning  as a startup we required a low-cost phone solution as we grew we opened more offices we needed additional local numbers for the offices we were opening. The solution  we needed would be a VOIP one, Skype had facilitated our growth with little investment. We had used Skype on daily basis for the last 8 years, it enabled our business to have lines so that we were able to operate collocated offices in Germany, France, UK and also America. Skype was by no means perfect but for us it worked up until the day that Skype decided to kill off personalised voicemail… We never received any prior notification that our voicemail would be deactivated. Our first realization was when our phone started to ring out, no stand in voice mail just the phone ringing out. We needed a quick solution that would allow us to recover have voicemail and integrate into FrontApp any other feature at this moment was just nice to have. The options we reviewed were TalkDesk, AirCall.io & JustCall   Tal...

OK so today was my first day with a macbook pro and I was tasked with the migration from a windows desktop to the MBP as quickly as possible so time is not lost on other projects. First thoughts -- Initial confusion on Rights Clicks -- Initial confusion with how to install an application not from the app store -- the app store does not have everything that you would expect there to be such as Chrome, skype etc. -- Favoriting Network drives - Window management with Multiple screens What I like about the Mac so far The multiple desktops, learning a new OS. Adding printers super easy, Finder, Spotlight, Downloads, Imovie processing speed for basic editing. Small form factor, long battery life, nice keyboard, Auto spell check.

Bringing Samsung Android Devices Closer To Stock It is undeniable that Samsung make some of the best Android devices around. The biggest failure is that they come bloated with many Samsung apps for everything. This guide will go through the process of making Samsung devices on Android 7.0 closer to stock Android. 1. Removing Samsung Apps As mentioned above Samsung Phones come loaded with lots of unneeded apps. You no doubt want to use Chrome, Gmail, Google contacts etc. Usually if you try to do this you will have a bloated apps draw full of Samsung apps you dont want or need. To get rid of them you need to navigate over to the play store and install "BK Disabler"  The app comes in at  £ 2.29 GBP and is well worth it. When you fist have the app fully installed it comes with a notification letting you know that you can disable all apps that are marked up as bloatware.I chose not to and to only remove the apps I did not want. Using the search function at the top it allows you to...