Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey specialises in turning project chaos into clarity. With two decades of hands-on agency experience and agile-certified expertise, he offers practical, immediately actionable strategies, not just theory, to dramatically improve agency project delivery.

False Heroes in Software Delivery Teams

We’ve all worked with developers who prefers to get on with their coding alone. They’ll assign themselves a large set of tasks, tell everybody they’ve got loads to be getting on with, put their headphones in and you won’t hear from them for several days.

They might pin their name to a key change or issue, make all the required decisions alone and get it ready for deployment in record time. They may even be able to resolve complex issues with infrastructure or libraries, but not have the time to share those processes.

You likely know these type of developers by the names Ninjas, Wizards, Rock Stars, or 10x. These are terms of endearment used in praise of the activities above, or even in job advertisements looking to recruit developers with these habits.

What these behaviours actually do to your development team could not be further from a positive outcome.

Don’t get me wrong, the short term progress can be impressive. So impressive in fact that managers, and often less experienced team members won’t be able to help but praise our False Hero. Speed is always seen as a good thing in a word of complexity and deadlines. Solo progress without the need for peer input is often seen as something to aspire to.

Continue reading

Remote connection to AWS bitnami lightsail LAMP MySQL

I’m using Sequal Pro here, but this should work for almost any connection. I’m also going to lock to a single IP for security. You could us ‘%’ for any IP, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you are on a static ip at home of at work.

Log into ssh for the relevant LAMP instance using the browser tool on the Lightsail dashboard.

cat bitnami_application_password to get your application password. Copy it somewhere as you’ll need it shortly.

Run nano /opt/bitnami/mysql/my.cnf
Comment out the line that starts with bind-address. So #bind-address...
Exit and save the file.

For MySQL < 8 – update mysql permissions for root remote access with

/opt/bitnami/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p -e "grant all privileges on *.* to 'root'@'1.2.3.4' identified by 'PASSWORD' with grant option"

Replace 1.2.3.4 with internet connection IP address. Replace PASSWORD with the password you copied above.

For MySQL 8 we have to create the user first

/opt/bitnami/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p -e "CREATE USER 'root'@'1.2.3.4' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';"

/opt/bitnami/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p -e "grant all privileges on *.* to 'root'@'1.2.3.4' with grant option";

Restart mysql with sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart mysql

Copy the IP address of your Lightsail instance. You may want to add a free static IP address, else the IP will change on restart and all this work will need doing again.

In Sequal Pro choose to add a new connection. Select the SSH tab. In both hosts, put the IP of your Lightsail server.

In mysql username put root and in password, put your password from above.

In ssh username put bitnami and in password, put your password from above.

Click to test your connection. All should connect as expected.

You’ll now need to add a database etc. Enjoy.

Android App URL Schemes

This is a functioning AndroidManifest.xml for linking via a local url scheme. In this case appname:// with any (*) following path

To test this you have to redirect to it. Chromium at this time does not understand or process app url schemes. So a 302 redirect from a trusted publicly available url is the best method for testing.

Note how the second intent-filter here is still inside the .MainActivity <activity>

Different categories and an additional <data> tag are used.

<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.appname">

    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" /> 
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW"/>

    <application
      android:name=".MainApplication"
      android:label="@string/app_name"
      android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
      android:allowBackup="false"
      android:theme="@style/AppTheme">
      <activity
        android:name=".MainActivity"
        android:label="@string/app_name"
        android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|orientation|screenSize"
        android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize">
        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.DOWNLOAD_COMPLETE"/>
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
        </intent-filter>
          <intent-filter android:label="@string/app_name">
              <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
              <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
              <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
              <data android:scheme="appname" android:host="*" />
          </intent-filter>
      </activity>
      <activity android:name="com.facebook.react.devsupport.DevSettingsActivity" />
    </application>

</manifest>

Moving into The Co-operative’s Federation House

Shared Desk Space

Although I spend a fair amount of time at client offices across the UK with individuals and teams, I’ve now been primarily working from home in South Manchester for twelve months. I have a work space which doubles as a spare bedroom. I have all the requirements of an office space; desk, power, wifi, tea making facilities, but there is something missing when you work from home the majority of the week, human contact.

Working from home can be lonely. Yes, you’re answering emails to other people and you have phone or video calls to make. You might even see the postman more often. But what you don’t have, and many of us need, is face-to-face human contact.

Just being in the same space as others, even if you’re focused on completely different tasks is enough to support mental health and general wellbeing.

Continue reading

Pressure and pragmatism lead to more progress

There are reasons that tight deadlines and huge pressure often get results.

The first is that people get immediately more pragmatic about what the actual requirements are, and agree to do less. Less can be done more quickly, and completed items are less likely to be subjected to a full loop of subjective tinkering.

The second is that when faced with a deadline, and some pressure to achieve it, people focus on just the single most important task.

The single most important thing to do right now is abundantly clear in these high pressure situations.

Continue reading