10 Things I Learned From Remote Working

This post was originally published on the surevine blog. 3 months ago, I took the next step in my career and joined Surevine as a Team Lead. There were many things that first attracted me to the company, but one major benefit was that it’s totally remote, and so learning how to work collaboratively whilst remote was a challenge that really interested me. Sureviner’s are spread all over the country, and my team alone covers a geographical area that stretches from Durham to Plymouth....

October 16, 2019 · 6 min · Ian Ames

Story Crowdsourcing Game

Emily Webber recently asked if I could run an 8-minute workshop to energise people at the beginning of her regular Agile in the Ether remote meetup. (It is a very friendly meetup and well worth checking out). This is the detail of the game I facilitated: Objective Tell a story that develops iteratively and everyone in the group contributes to. Instruction Each person adds a sentence to a story, but has to repeat the preceding sentences first, then nominates the next person to go....

February 26, 2019 · 2 min · Ian Ames

IPv4 Addressing

I briefly touched on IPv4 addresses in the TCP/IP suite. In summary IPv4 addresses are: Dot-separated. 32 bits long and represented in decimal. There are just over 4 billion available addresses. Therefore it is necessary to use subnetting to separate networks and duplicate IP addresses from one another. IPv4 structure and what it represents So we know IP addresses are 32 bits long and that they are separated into 4 decimal numbers by dot separation (this is known as dotted decimal), therefore each number must represent 8bits....

February 5, 2019 · 6 min · Ian Ames

TCP/IP Protocol Suite

TCP/IP is a set of protocols that form the backbone of the internet. As I described in the OSI model post, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of bytes between applications running on hosts. IP (Internet Protocol) is the protocol for shifting packets around between hosts in the network layer. The TCP/IP suite, however, contains a whole bunch of protocols beyond these two. (Fun fact: If to devices are communicating in a network with TCP/IP they are called network hosts....

February 1, 2019 · 7 min · Ian Ames

The OSI Model

The OSI model is designed to ensure compatibility of network devices (and their operating systems) regardless of manufacturer. OSI stands for Open Systems Interconnection and is defined by the International Standard Organisation (ISO). The model has seven layers: Application layer Presentation layer System layer Transport layer Network layer Data layer Physical layer Which can be remembered by either of two mnemonics: All People Seem To Need Data Processing or from the bottom up:...

January 29, 2019 · 9 min · Ian Ames