Ben Barden

Product management and process tips

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A small blog refresh

I’ve been thinking whether to move to a different blogging platform, roll my own, use static files, or simply change the theme.

This is far from the first time I’ve come to this point. Years ago I wrote my own CMS. Prior to that I used static HTML. I’ve also used lots of different platforms. In short, while the tech behind the blog is important to a point, I feel it’s secondary to the posts. I don’t want to focus too heavily on the tech and lose sight of the content.

For the time being, I’m sticking with WordPress and taking Timber for a spin. Timber allows you to create Twig-based themes and abstract the WordPress-y bits out of the templates. I use PHP for Switch Scores, but it’s a different world when you use Twig for templating, and Laravel for the framework. I’ve never really wanted to build a WordPress theme, as it feels like the “old days” of templating, with a mixture of PHP, HTML, and arbitrary WordPress functions all over the place.

My blog theme isn’t the smartest – it’s a poor imitation of the previous WordPress theme I was using – but something I’d always wanted to do was displaying lozenges, or “badges” (a la Bootstrap) for the categories on each post. Voila!

It’s got a bunch of things I need to fix (maybe don’t look at it on mobile), but it’s a start, and hopefully gives me a nudge to start posting content again.

Edit: Famous last words – I’ve temporarily reverted to the previous theme as it looks like there are a few things to fix.

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Thoughts on tech support

In tech, providing some kind of support is essential. However, I’ve found that a lot of people don’t want to do it.

Maybe I’m weird – but I quite like tech support.

Support is a great way to learn, and can be quite varied and interesting. Sometimes it’s given to new or junior team members – but I’d argue it’s important for everyone to do it now and again. Tech rarely stands still, both within a business and in the wider industry. Support gives you a snapshot of the types of things that people are dealing with day to day.

I find support to be quite social. I get to interact with far more people when doing support than if I’m buried in a project. Don’t get me wrong, I like the projects too – but I like having the opportunity to do a bit of support too.

We use Slack for our support, and I’d say it helps with keeping things friendly. Thinking about it, almost every company I contact for support does it all via email. Credit to the fine folks at Kolide for opening up a shared Slack channel with us and giving us a great way to communicate with them, so we can reach them on Slack and not worry about email.

I also find it immensely satisfying and rewarding to be able to answer questions and solve issues for people. The “big ticket” items such as rolling out Okta are huge, but sorting out smaller things is also important.

One downside is if you’re trying to focus on something and you keep getting interrupted with support requests. Teams can solve this though. I’m in a team of four and we each do one week of support every 4 weeks. It works well and keeps things fair.

Sometimes the same things come up repeatedly, and you find yourself answering the same things over and over. This is a good opportunity to write a few guides. It’s much easier to share a link than keep writing the same answer. And when the same things keep coming up, this can help you identify issues with tooling, or process improvements you could make.

I think there’s a lot of good reasons to do support now and again.

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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.