Reflections on Map Camp

This year I was finally able to attend MapCamp 2019 with ~600 other people at Sadlers Wells Theatre, London. MapCamp is a conference introducing and describing the technique of Wardley Mapping, a tool for mapping strategy. I first came across Wardley Maps a couple of years ago through the medium book. I found it compelling, Simon Wardley has a lovely humble style of writing. He described how he went from ‘bumbling CEO’ to ‘having a vague idea of what I was doing’....

<span title='2019-10-28 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>October 28, 2019</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;15 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames

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....

<span title='2019-10-16 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>October 16, 2019</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;6 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;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....

<span title='2019-02-26 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>February 26, 2019</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;2 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;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....

<span title='2019-02-05 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>February 5, 2019</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;6 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;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....

<span title='2019-02-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>February 1, 2019</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;7 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames