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About #CrazyTechStories Hacker Noon believes that tech infiltrates all aspects of our daily life and exists in everything we do… But what is the craziest tech story? Let’s find out at our first London event, featuring 5-minute talks loaded with awesomeness, cleverness and real-world craziness. Big thanks to our sponsors expanding access to tech talent) and (workspace accelerator & community for the curious) for supporting London’s developers, makers and free-thinking tech professionals. Indeed Prime ( Huckletree by , Artist, Magician and Hacker (visit his ) “Hacking the Art World” Thomas Webb webb.site Got an idea for an event? P.S. Start a community thread.

Hacking the Art World with Thomas Webb

Where Hacker Noon brings you a handful of stories from the community at large. Сrazy tech stories is part of a larger series of talks presented in association with Indeed Prime and Huckletree at Huckletree’s London location. This episode of Hacker Noon is sponsored by Indeed Prime. Visit to flip the script on the job search and join now for access to resumé reviews, 1:1 sessions with technical career coaches, personalized work-style assessments and even negotiation tips to help seal the deal. https://www.indeedprime.com/hackernoon/ In this episode you get to meet , developer of , , tech lead of and , CTO of . Simon Woolf Ably.io Alex Bor Huckletree Anton Mozgovoy Humaniq You get to discover what happens when a bug disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it from of , how succeeds in bringing together a disruptive community of startups in London, Dublin & Manchester from its tech lead and why you should never do your releases on Friday from of . Simon Woolf Ably.io Huckletree Alex Bor Anton Motzgovoy Humaniq Listen to the talks on or watch on . iTunes YouTube Production and music by Derek Bernard — https://haberdasherband.com/production https://hackernoon.com/ https://community.hackernoon.com/ https://contribute.hackernoon.com/ https://sponsor.hackernoon.com/ https://podcast.hackernoon.com/ https://twitter.com/hackernoon/ https://facebook.com/hackernoon/ P.S. If you dig the new Hacker Noon Podcast , consider giving us a 5 star review on iTunes. Also check out the , , and . top stories from July the latest stories today’s homepage #crazytechstories #hackernoonpodcast

#CrazyTechStories @ Huckletree, London, England

Hacker Noon 2.0: Origin Story And Raising Funds

Okay people, grab your goggles because I’m here to bust some myths wide open. You see, when you’re a “normal person” (read: not super smart) happen to be a successful software engineer — a lot of people ask you what your deal is. and also With a degree in Economics, a life in software engineering wasn’t what I was expecting. I simply took the least bad option in my career, right up until the point where people were paying money to code. quite With that kind of background, it’s no wonder I’m such a massive evangelist that literally anyone can learn to code. But most . don’t The reality is, most people have built coding up into this demigod of fear. And all those fears stem from the idea that “I’m not good enough”. So I’m here today to be a bit of a prick and tell you why you’re all wrong. But like, in a nice way. I have to be good at mathematics This is so ridiculously untrue that it hurts. When I was in school, I was very bad at math. So bad in fact, that my parents got me a tutor. And even with weekly tear-filled sessions I barely scraped through my GCSEs. I just didn’t get it. Fast forward ten years and one glow up later, and I’m a full-stack software engineer. How? Because I’m telling you, it wasn’t by getting better at math. The reality is, math isn’t that important anymore. Sure, back in the day when we were writing in binary or building frameworks — mathematics was kinda a big deal. But now, outside of Machine Learning and academia, you’re not going to see much math that you don’t know. Can you count to ten and know your timetables? Congratulations, you now know enough mathematics to be a software developer. Please collect your certificate at the door. I’m not saying coding is “easy”. It’s not, it’s of work to learn. But it’s also not a load of random green sprawling text from the matrix. It’s a language, and if you take the time to learn the concepts one by one, you get it. a lot will I mean, take a look at . It’s pretty beautiful isn’t it? I’m telling you, the math we used we used in that website — any kid with an abacus could do. But you know what that kid couldn’t do? Choose the right colours. Think about the user flow. Decide on the right fonts and sizes. Understand how to draw the user in. this website There are whole careers in software engineering like that. Careers where you won’t touch math. But where you’ll draw upon that calligraphy book your mum got you every day. Where that time you spent reading trashy magazines will help you plan better layouts. Where all those years playing Xbox will help you think more logically. The web is art, and coding is simply a paintbrush. I’m not smart enough From Zuckerberg to that creepy guy on Silicon Valley, our collective idea of what a software engineer — starts and ends with that nerdy genius stereotype. is I’m not here to tell you they don’t exist. They do. They’re also like the 1% of all software engineers. For every genius teenager living , there are hundreds of regular people building neat stuff. in a bunk bed in the valley Think about Airbnb — one of the biggest software startups in the last decade. Okay, maybe now they’re a unicorn and have the time to do complex stuff. But back when they were a , their MVP was something anyone with Rails could do. cereal company I’m not trying to take away from what they’ve built. But what I am saying is this. You don’t need to re-write JavaScript in smoke signals or design algorithms at Google to be a coder. You can just be the girl building cool things in your bedroom. I don’t have the right mindset A lot of programming revolves around logic, and being able to reason about problems. My beef is this is often unfairly attributed to being a skill — rather than a general skill. math life And sure, logic is pretty important. But it can also be . There are books that teach reason and the scientific method, and logic puzzles online you can do. Even reading blogs by other coder will give you an insight into how they do it. learned But here’s the secret: . There are other skills more important than logic You know what else is important? Communication. Time Keeping. People Management. Let’s say you take my advice. You do a bootcamp, and survive by the skin of your teeth. Congrats! You’re now a very junior programmer. But if you can be that being able to communicate with other developers and management. being able to plan out a project and keep to deadlines. getting people to like you, and persuading them to work hard to help you build cool things. whilst Whilst Whilst Then my friend, you have . a bright future Huckletree is now hiring a Junior Software Engineer! If you’re a JS engineer with an eye for design based in London, then make sure you let us know .

The 3 Lies Stopping You From Learning To Code

When we wrote the first line of code, 4 years ago, for what would be , we didn’t expect to be where we are today with thousands of customers having sent over 1.6bn emails. Unlike traditional businesses, web startups often don’t build a business plan or invite the mayor to cut the red tape at a grand unveiling. They grow and iterate — often without defining who they are as a brand, where they’d like to be or why they’re even in business. EmailOctopus Our style guide following the brand sprint At EmailOctopus, we had an abstract idea of a brand and a common, vague goal. But we’d never really discussed it as a team and we’d certainly never written it down. As we re- the site and write even more blog posts, a common understanding of who we were and who we wanted to be was more important than ever. design Now a team of 5, it felt like the right time to really work out what EmailOctopus stands for and we did that using the following process on a team away day. The day, featuring a morning of serious brand chat, a few friendly games of darts and a few drinks after took place last week. Here’s how it went, and how it looked like. The brand meeting We started the day with an all-hands meeting, discussing where the business was and our short term roadmap. As you may have guessed by the term all-hands, everyone attends — from our Marketing Intern, Hamzah, up to co-founder Gareth who takes a more advisory role to the business. We do our all-hands meetings every month. Doing so ensures everyone is on the same page and understands our short term objectives. Internally we’re very open with the whole team about our performance — metrics such as MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and accounts acquired are shared regularly through Slack updates. The all-hands meeting gives an opportunity to answer any deeper questions that the team may have, in this meeting for example we prepared analysis breaking down all our user behaviour on site — giving the team insight into which features are being used, how regularly users are using the platform and what types of users are using EmailOctopus. By sharing these insights it allows the whole team to have significant input over the coming month into the work we’re doing. Preparing for the team meeting With the all-hands discussion done, we moved into the discussion around the EmailOctopus. We’re big fans of the process and we used their to add some structure to our brand discussions. As per the brand sprint guidelines, we designated a decider (Jonathan), facilitator (Tom) and picture taker (Hamzah). GV Sprint Brand Sprint 10 year roadmap This is where we look at where we see EmailOctopus being in 10 years time. Regularly we look 6 months or a year ahead, so taking some time out to think and visualise where we could be in 10 years time was an interesting exercise. After each writing down our own vision at intervals of 1, 2, 5, and 10 years we discussed them. Our short term, 1 and 2 year aims were all very similar. Tripling the number of customers, adding additional features, and expanding into other similar areas, such as SMS or Facebook Messenger Marketing. Not a huge surprise because we regularly talk about the short-term objectives. All our ideas on the whiteboard for where we want to be at certain points in time At 5 and 10 years, however, our visions became slightly different. Some expecting to sell the business with others wanting domination of the email marketing industry. We spent a good 15 minutes discussing where we thought we could be, before Jonathan made the final decision. What, How, why The What, How, Why is based on Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle”. You can watch his video , explaining the concept. But in short, Sinek argues that you need to know why you’re in business (and talk about it). Apple are the best example of this with their why mantra of “We believe in challenging the status quo and doing this differently.” In short, when a company has a strong motivation, customers buy the product. here The most important part of this exercise was the Why part. The What and How are just how you are solving your bigger question at the present time. With that in mind, we all wrote down our answers, stuck them up on the board and then spent around 10 minutes discussing the What and Hows around EmailOctopus. Our Golden Circle When we got to the ‘Why’ we spent a little longer. Discussing each persons idea in detail to understand what motivates each of us at EmailOctopus. After a frank discussion, we ended up taking a combination of two tickets. Deciding that at EmailOctopus, we exist to “Make it easier for brands to grow” which at present we do through a “No frills, lean approach” to sending emails. Top three values Brand values have always felt a little corporate. Something a Fortune 500 company sticks up on the wall, forever to ignore. There is some importance to values, however. It adds colour to the “Why” and can help dictate our approach in many different situations; when hiring, when dealing with customers or dealing with internal conflict. The EmailOctopus brand values after voting Again, we wrote down our individual values and put 3 each up on a whiteboard. With a list of around 15, we set about discussing them before Jonathan made the final decision on what would be the final values. The decider in all these excercises plays a key role — whilst in our case Jonathan took into account everyone’s opinion, it was important not to over discuss many of the points. The sprint falls down if we spend hours discussing each and every point — after all a camel is a horse designed by committee. Having one decider speeds up the process significantly and ensures our conflicting opinions don’t get too out of hand. Here are the values we decided on and now take into account everyday at EmailOctopus. We offer value We are reliable We are friendly Top three audiences This required that we analyse what groups are most important to EmailOctopus. As an email marketing platform, we really are used by a wide spectrum of individuals — from individual bloggers all the way through to huge multinational record labels. This exercise we broke down whose opinion matter most to EmailOctopus — again we noted down each of our own answers before voting (and deciding) on our Top 3. A list of all the potential audiences the team though of The final two exercises were more traditional branding exercises. If you’ve ever worked with a branding consultant, you’ve probably done something similar. First up we had to map out the EmailOctopus personality on ‘personality sliders’. We looked at a number of extreme personalities we could associate with our brand: Elite/Mass Appeal, Serious/Playful, Conventional/Rebel, Friend/Authority, Mature & Classic/ Young & Innovative. We again noted and voted — fortunately in this case we found we all felt very similar about where we sat on the scale wanting to be significantly more fun, disruptive and playful than a Chanel type brand. Positioning ourselves similarly to Google. Jonathan and Hamzah positioning EmailOctopus on the personality sliders The last exercise was a 2×2 matrix, where we mapped ourselves amongst competitors such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor. The matrix had 2 axis — Modern-Classic, Experessive-Reserved and we set about mapping where EmailOctopus sit alongside the other aforementioned brands. Despite some disagreement regarding where our competitors stood on the chart, we were all in agreement of EmailOctopus’ position. Finishing up With the meetings out of the way, next up was some team building. Nothing brings a group together better than some drinks, food and darts. So we headed just around the corner, to Flight Club. This will be remembered as the day we discovered Tom’s hidden talent, darts. LET’S PLAY DARTS!!! Want to run your own brand sprint? Is your growing or about to undergo a huge redesign? As scary as it may sound, I couldn’t recommend more the importance of defining your values and common goal. We used the following Medium post as the basis for our day, making a few minor tweaks to suit us better. startup https://library.gv.com/the-three-hour-brand-sprint-3ccabf4b768a The sprint in total took just shy of 3 hours, which we did in an external meeting room (at ) outside of the office. Doing it outside of our own regular place of work gave the team some time to really switch off from day-to-day tasks and focus on the bigger picture. Huckletree Shoreditch Our simple brand guide Following the day we put together a very simple external brand guidelines document, featuring our values, our tone of voice and the colours which make up the EmailOctopus brand. We used the open source Huge Inc style guid to form the basis of this, which can be viewed below: https://threeheartsdigital.github.io/emailoctopus-styleguide/ Originally published at blog.emailoctopus.com

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