In my post on retention the other day I mentioned we were planning to trial monthly neck and shoulder massages in the Brisbane office. Well today we had our first ones.
The masseur arrived with their own special chair and relaxing music and setup in our boardroom. We each had a 15min massage and the general consensus was a big thumbs up. So we shall continue these as part of our overall health & well-being initiative.
Tagged Ephox
The IT sector is heating back up again, and as such, salaries (at least in Australia) are increasing. With this increase however comes the challenge of retention of good staff. Most people see this as having to pay higher and higher salaries but I believe there are other options.
Tagged Ephox
So you’ve got talented people and as we all know, you need to invest in maintaining those skills. While there are a lot of ways you can do this, some of which are quite expensive, sometimes the little things have the biggest impact.
Tagged Ephox
Andy recently pointed me at an interesting article, “The Paper Version of the Web” that shows some great examples of UI designs sketched on paper. In the article Sean collects together some of the publicly available UI sketches for well known websites like Flickr and Twitter.
At Ephox, we have quite a lot of UI design required and as such we’ve tried a few different things from quick Java mock-ups to Photoshopped images. To me however the best solution is the paper sketch. Why, well other than it being pretty cheap to develop and modify, anyone can do it, including the “client”. Finally, there’s also no chance you will be tempted to use the “prototype/mockup” as the basis for the final version.
At Ephox we introduced the concept of Creative Coding Afternoons (or CCA) back in 2006 based loosely on the Atlassian and Jotspot Hackathons. Occuring Friday afternoon every 2 weeks, the original idea was to develop plugins for our editor based on the public APIs. Essentially do things that our clients could do. The best of these were posted on our LiveWorks! site as freely downloadable components.
Our CCAs are evolving into more advanced research that resemble 20% time, with projects spanning many CCAs. So when Atlassian announced it was going to emulate the Google’s 20% time model I was keen to see how it worked out for them.
Tagged Ephox
View Brett Henderson's profile
