Ben Barden

Products - Projects - Process

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Two years at Octopus Energy

Today is my 2nd anniversary of working for Octopus Energy. It’s been a blast and I look forward to more.

I was trying to think of something that could sum up the last couple of years. I have worked with so many amazing people – it would take a while to list them all! But there’s a much shorter answer that I think many of us can relate to every single day.

Slack.

So much of what we do day to day is connected to Slack in some way. Our Slack has everything from big announcements to the smaller, more nuanced tips and tricks. We might be reacting to something that needs attention, or proactively sharing info and guides to help everyone learn a little more.

We encourage everyone to have a profile picture, and we have hundreds of custom emojis that are often surprising when you find a new one, or a group of them – cat and blob emojis being personal favourites. These add so much vibrancy and personality to our messages.

Perhaps I’m preaching to the converted, but it’s incredible to compare the speed and versatility of Slack with the days of communicating via email.

Of course, we are far from the only people using Slack – but I think it’s an important part of our DNA.

Anyway, roll on 3 years!

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Album review: Genesis – Calling All Stations

Back in 1997, Genesis released what was to be their final studio album, and the only one following Phil Collins’ departure from the band. Featuring Ray Wilson on vocals, and long-time stalwarts Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, the album didn’t do especially well when it came out – and the band cancelled the tour partway through, subsequently going on indefinite hiatus.

Much has been said of why this happened. With Collins no longer involved, it seems that a large chunk of the audience lost interest. Wilson joined when the album was already in progress. When the reception for Calling All Stations (CAS) wasn’t too hot, Rutherford didn’t sound keen to start building a following all over again. In interviews, you can tell the Banks/Collins/Rutherford “power trio” would almost prefer that it never happened.

But you know what… the album really isn’t that bad. Sure, it’s overly long and drags in places – but a lot of the ingredients were in place. To its credit, some of CAS is more like “old Genesis” than “new Genesis”, although it does lack an accessible pop song – a far cry from the previous six studio albums, all of which yielded at least one hit.

Calling All Stations (the title track) is a slow burner, a dark, driving song that kicks off with a great Rutherford guitar riff and equally great Banks chords to back it up. Wilson’s voice is very different to Collins, but it’s decent, and fits the mood well. Though, it’s already clear this is an entirely different Genesis, and probably too different for many of the fans who enjoyed the 80s Genesis. It’s a long way from Invisible Touch.

Congo is good enough, but not really strong enough to be a memorable hit. It changes direction towards the end, but does this a little too late, then fades out just as the first track did – a disappointment. Shipwrecked is average and is fairly boring on repeated listens. You can see why it was dropped from the tour setlist partway through.

Alien Afternoon is better, though it goes on a little too long; Not About Us is fine, and unusual for being a more acoustic track with not much in the way of keyboards. I find myself nodding and thinking “yep, that’s ok, but what’s next?” We’re not really pushing the boundaries since the title track. Then it’s onto If that’s what you need, which is more keyboard/synth-heavy, but I find it incredibly boring.

The Dividing Line easily saves the album. There’s been mentions that this could have been the album closer, which would have worked well – if you listen that far, of course. It’s powerful, with an excellent combination of guitar, keyboards and drums, solid vocals, and a memorable melody. Even with a tour that didn’t go so well, this is the calibre of music I would have loved to see more of from this line-up.

My views on the next two tracks seem to differ from most – I find Uncertain Weather a bit boring, and I like Small Talk. The former is a bit like some of the previous album – We Can’t Dance – I guess it’s ok. Small Talk is more upbeat and I daresay quite catchy.

I’m a big fan of There Must Be Some Other Way – it has a feeling of finality to it, and I love Wilson’s vocals here, particularly in the chorus. There’s also a decent instrumental section. Again, I would’ve loved to hear more like this. Then there’s One Man’s Fool, which is one of those Banks tracks that takes you on a bit of a journey – it’s good, but it isn’t that exciting at the start, and there’s a fairly naff short instrumental bit in the middle (around the 4 minute mark). After that though, it picks up, and I really enjoy the rest of the track.

So that’s the album – but there’s more, in the form of various B-sides. We can largely discount Papa He Said and the much-derided Banjo Man, although Phret is a bit better, and 7/8 is worth a listen. (As a sidenote, it’s frustrating these four tracks didn’t appear on the remastered boxsets – the argument being that the band didn’t want to have too much material from the CAS period – though it means the fairly pricey boxsets are incomplete.)

However, it’s the extra tracks from Not About Us that are a real treat, particularly Anything Now, and Sign Your Life Away. I could live without Run Out Of Time, but again I think my view differs from most fans here. I’ll mostly ignore Nowhere Else to Turn as I don’t think much of it, although worth saying this brought the extra tracks total to eight for CAS alone.

I wouldn’t normally mention so many B-sides when talking about an album that already runs to well over an hour across 11 tracks, but I think they deserve a mention, because two in particular are so good they could have saved this line-up. It’s baffling that we got tracks like Shipwrecked and If That’s What You Need when gems such as Anything Now and Sign Your Life Away were buried on a single. Not only were a couple of odd choices made with what to put on the album and what to keep off, the ordering of tracks was strange too. Personally, I’d have put Anything Now as the first track and lead single. And hey, even with no changes to what was put where, a second album with this line-up could have been quite special.

So while the album isn’t amazing, some of the tracks from the sessions are definitely worth a listen, and it’s a huge shame the band didn’t do another album with Wilson. It’s also a shame they’ve not put out any new material as a group since then. Oh well.

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Tech in plain English

When I was young, I wanted to be a teacher.

I’ve often found it difficult to learn new things. There’s always that hump you need to get past: when you go from reading and digesting, to starting to understand the core principles behind whatever it is you’re learning, and becoming more fluent. It could be a musical instrument, a foreign language, or a new thing in tech. I often struggle with getting past the hump.

The reason I wanted to be a teacher was to help other people to learn. Perhaps there were other people like me who found it hard to learn. Perhaps I could give other people guidance in where to start, and give clear explanations to help them learn.

In a tech role, I can still channel teaching (or training) in a number of ways, particularly through tech support. Doing tech support is an excellent way to connect with people outside your immediate team, help solve problems for those people, and learn a bit yourself. If the same issues are raised repeatedly, writing a guide could help. If the same names are coming up again and again, perhaps those people would benefit from some one-on-one help, or a repeatable training course.

A big part of this is communicating in plain English. If you’re using jargon right out of the gate, whether it’s in a Slack post, a written tutorial, or a group training session, there’s a risk you’ll lose a few people along the way. Different methods of communication warrant different approaches. I often write with myself in mind: not as a person who works in tech, but as that person who finds it difficult to learn new things.

If you’ve ever felt learning new things is daunting, well, you’re not alone. Not knowing where to start can make learning seem like a mountain to climb. My advice is to take it one step at a time. As they say – Rome wasn’t built in a day. Meanwhile, if there’s anything you’re confused about in tech, add a reply – perhaps it would make a good future post.

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Clear cookies, cache, and reboot: not a swiss army knife for any support issue

Years ago, a lot of day to day business and personal matters had to be done in person or over the phone. We didn’t have smartphones with dozens (or hundreds) of apps. We didn’t have online ordering for pretty much any store you can think of.

Technology is in a great place. However, it means that many companies are now tech companies in some capacity – whether they realise it or not. As soon as you give people a way to self-serve – to login, to place orders, to change their details, or do a lot of things without needing to rely on back-office staff to do it for them – you’re providing a service.

Software is a great way to automate manual processes – but it doesn’t remove the need for people. If customers can place orders online, you’re going to need people to fulfil those orders. Not to mention the ongoing need for software development, and a bunch of other things.

When you’re in the business of providing software that people use, you’re going to need to support it. And this is where I’ve seen a lot of companies fall short.

The common line is to ask you to hard refresh the page, clear your cookies, clear your cache, restart your browser, and restart your computer.

In some cases, these can help – but not all.

One major downside of using this guidance first is that if it does solve the issue, you could be masking a solvable problem.

It’s worth taking a moment to understand what each of these actions does – and how to make sure you’re doing it properly.

Hard refresh

One of the common uses of a hard refresh is when releasing a new version of certain files (particularly JS / CSS files). A website might look odd following changes to these files – until you do a hard refresh (or clear the cache).

This is a bit of a cop-out, but also doesn’t scale well if you’re making lots of changes that affect lots of users. You shouldn’t have to ask users to do a hard refresh every time these files change. Putting a query string on the end, or changing the filename, will force new files to download across all browsers. Example:

<script src="assets.js"></script>

Any changes to this file will require a hard refresh to pick up. But you can do this:

<script src="assets.js?v=20210511"></script>

You could populate the bit after the ?v= with a timestamp generated by your build and deployment process.

Setting cache headers to expire will not immediately force the file to re-download, as the browser cache may ignore these headers for longer than you specify. It’s also hard to get this right across every file you’ve changed when you could just pop in a new query string.

I’ve been using the query string approach for years and it’s the only method I’ve found that works consistently.

Clearing your cache

I’m not going to lie, this has saved me a number of times. Today I was doing quite a bit of admin, and the site I was using was running more and more slowly. Clearing the cache fixed it.

What this does is remove temporary files stored on your computer that can make repeat visits to a website a bit quicker – so the browser doesn’t have to keep downloading the same files every time you visit the site – or on every page load.

Over time, the cache will fill up, and it’s worth clearing it now and again. In Chrome, the clear cache option looks like this:

Look for the part that says “Frees up 1.1GB” – that’s quite large. Even half that would be big.

Make sure you look at the “Time range” option, as by default that will only clear the cache for the last hour. If you set it to “All time”, it will clear everything. If the cache is your issue but you’re only clearing the cache for the last hour, it won’t do much.

Clearing your cookies

Cookies are small files that contain things like settings for certain sites. If when logging in, you’ve ever ticked “Remember me”, or “This is a private computer” (or a shared computer), chances are the site will remember that setting via a cookie.

So, if you clear your cookies, expect to be logged out of everything – and you may need to re-apply some settings for certain sites.

If you’re worried about not being able to login again, you should probably look at password managers. 1password and LastPass are both good. There are others too.

Clearing your cookies can be good to do now and again, but it can be quite annoying to clear cookies regularly. Instead, if you’re running into issues, it’s worth trying Incognito Mode in Chrome. This is like having a fresh browser without actually needing to clear anything. It’s a faster way to troubleshoot issues with a site you’re using, or perhaps with a site you’re working on as a developer or tester.

Restarting your browser

Chrome can be a bit of a resource hog, and sometimes restarting it is necessary. But if you aren’t also clearing cookies and cache, and you’re reopening your windows when you restart, you might find it doesn’t help that much.

It’s worth looking in Chrome’s task manager to see if any tabs are more resource-heavy than others. If so, close the ones you’re not using.

I’d also recommend having as much RAM as you can. I recently switched from a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM to a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM, and I’m using a similar number of tabs (usually around 30 at a time). It’s not just the RAM that’s different between the two Macs – but the difference is like night and day. Large Google Sheets can be particularly heavy-going, and my MacBook Air was borderline unusable with a much smaller number of tabs open.

In short, restarting the browser might not make a lot of difference – though it is necessary if you have a browser update to install.

Restarting your computer

These days, restarting your computer should be a rare thing. Outside of operating system updates and certain software updates, a full restart can be pretty pointless when most of what you do is in a browser. If you must, restart your browser first.

What to do instead

Instead of suggesting a hard refresh, clearing cookies and cache, restarting the browser or restarting the computer, another way would be to do the following.

  • Find out which browser, browser version, and operating system the person is using. Look out for any particularly old setups, such as old versions of Windows, old browsers, or old phones and tablets. Aside from it being harder to support these older versions, using unsupported software or devices is a security risk to the user.
  • Find out, step by step, what the person is doing and what happens as a result. This will help you identify if things are working as expected – and also gives you the opportunity to try for yourself.
  • Ask if any error messages come up.
  • Ask for screenshots.

Listen to the feedback – and pass it on to someone who can review it, and either deal with it or help to give an appropriate response.

As a software company, tech support is part of customer support. By taking the time to deal with any feedback, you can identify any issues that could be fixed – or any improvements that may be needed. Great software means happier customers, and fewer people needing to call to report issues – so a win-win for everyone.