‘Work Life Balance’ returns over 280 million results in Google, most of them associated to remote workers. While it’s important to have time for both, this is especially difficult when working on the move for nomad workers and business travellers. I have had my share of work travel and the four tips below have helped…
Scrum is an agile methodology that organises work is small increments and that focuses on the continuous delivery of usable solutions. In this post I talk about Sprints, the heart of Scrum, and describe the roles, artefacts, and ceremonies that form it. I eventually add in tips based in my experience that aim to help…
For a while, I used Zenhub and githubs to do my project management where my developers where. While I am currently using Atlassian tools, like bitbucket for my code repositories and JIra to manage my roadmap and my product backlog, I still find that zenhub and github are great options if you are working with…
I travelled to Cordoba to organise a Rails Girls workshop at the coworking space cosfera. This event had as a goal to let women with no previous programming experience make their own project using ruby on rails with the help of a tutorial and local mentors. We took this chance to join the education community…
Some months ago I spoke about networking at mrgn.in/berlin, a morning meetup I organise for Asquera. You can also see a video of the talk here, or join our next meetup if you are in Berlin.
Comes from this post 2. The Value Proposition Canvas by Peter Thomson Business and emotions Peter J Thomson modified Alex Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas, as he felt it didn't take into consideration the emotions of customers and the marketing aspect present in every business development process. Thomson’s Value Proposition Canvas helps decide where to start…
The business model canvas template is a one-pager that showcases the most important details of your business model. In this post I want to give you different templates and advice to fill it in. It is widely used at startups and hackathons to iterate on business models on paper. Each of the sections of the…
A year ago this time we were probably sitting in my living room, eating snacks and giving shape to feelgut. The summer before Laura had told me about her idea of building a social platform for people with rare diseases who were searching for alternative treatments, people with chronic diseases who felt the need of…
A project charter is a short document that contains the most relevant project information is approved by the project managers and stakeholders is kept up to date, and can be used by all team members as the single source of truth when running a project, specially in the initiation and planning phases. A good project…
The Kanban board is a tool used to track progress in projects. In a Kanban board, the tasks needed to complete the project move along a progression of states. Project managers can use it assign work to teams and team members, who will use it to track the progress of development, letting everyone do things…
In 2014 I have moved flats, changed my hair, changed jobs. I did my best and tried to swim, do yoga and go to the gym - that didn't work out too well. In 2014 I have been out less, read more and ridden my bike more often. In 2014 I have been busy attending and…
In November this year I offered my DIY Social Media course to a group of designers and creative workers. In the first quarter of 2015 I will offer it in Spanish. Today I wanted to share the slides I used in this course and to throw a question: What's your biggest online marketing or social media…
There are a number of benefits to using project management tools, and I bring you 7 in this post! If you are a project manager you are probably already sold to the idea of using them in your project. Project managers, we love issue and project tracking software like Basecamp, Redmine, JIRA and the long…
Since my first days working at Regus, events have been some of the things I enjoyed the most. Organising an event is like throwing a party: you have to think of what you want, who you'll invite, what will you do, buy and prepare food... I've organised big events and tiny ones, and from every…
TV towers are the one single thing that do the trick making me believe I am at home. Forget about the food. Forget about the weather. Who cares about the language I speak? Everyone around me is provisional and will eventually leave. But TV towers will be here forever. Or at least, that is what…
Ellen König is a full-time web developer, information junkie and part-time psychology student. She is about to give her career a change of direction and will join Soundcloud soon as an insight engineer in October. We met at Mrgn and I saw her speaking at eurucamp a few days later. She was bold and inspiring, so I did my fan thing and asked her for an interview.
Mission and vision are two terms that you have probably heard some times by now and that you'll hear about more and more in the future if you plan to start or retune a business anytime soon. In this post, I review the definitions and share the mission and vision statements of organizations like Disney,…
This post proposes six guiding principles for businesses. They have been written with small and large organizations in mind and are based on my experience and the advice I got after the first edit of this post: Scratch your own back, execute brilliantly, mind the money, your team is king, customers are your best asset,…
I'm exhausting my deeper thoughts for the book I am working on and my cared-of writing project for the things I am writing for work. This is why, for this week's read I am indulging in the x-items-list format again. The topic, web apps for work/productivity, is a recurring one, but I hope you find…
Since I announced I was leaving Cobot at the beginning of the month, I have been asked a lot about the reasons to move on, and where my steps brig me next. On the 29th February 2012 I flew from Valencia to Berlin, where I had never been before, with a one way ticket and…
One of the things that surprised me when I discovered the tech and entrepreneurs community in Berlin was the incredible number of opportunities to learn and meet people that were available. There is a number of user groups and workshops for specific technologies, such as the Ruby user group; up.front, a monthly meetup for designers;…
In the last weeks I have been asked a couple of times whether coworking is a trend only popular amongst freelancers and startups or whether it is also affecting how larger companies work. My answer is always 'have you heard of corporate coworking?' and the aswer is usually 'uh, nope'. So, here's a brief post…
#coworking spaces should look a lot more like libraries, playgrounds and classrooms and a lot less like #offices — Cris Santamarina (@crissantamarina) June 13, 2014 Follow my Coworking board on Pinterest.
Sabine Geithner is an iOS developer in the making. We met two years ago, when I moved to Berlin and we were both part of the Rails Girls Berlin organisers. She is currently finishing an internship at nxtbgthng, an iOS development agency, where she worked on an app for Berliner Philharmonie - the Digital Concert…
Two months in the Chromebook Challenge, I can say I am generally happy with the experience. My Chromebook does almost everything I need it to do; I am lucky because most of my work happens on online applications such as Cobot, Gmail, Intercom, Base, Github, Asana... Google Drive lets me make files available offline, what…
It's my first working day with a Google Chromebook. I needed a replacement for a broken Macbook and was very curious about the Google Chromebook, so I decided to give it a go. I still have a backup for more demanding things (another much bigger laptop running Ubuntu) but the Chromebook will be my main…
Here's a new tradition: a blog post with my very own best of the web in the web on the previous month - a mix of stuff I liked and stuff me and my friends do. Hope you enjoy! Did I miss a good one? Let me know in the comments :). Let's get started…
The first time I heard sharing is caring, it had a strong italian accent. Some of my Erasmus friends in Prague (well, they were Erasmus, I was not) used it as kind of a group motto. It was nice to the ear and meant something beautiful, so I added it to my very own list…
Internet friends are those you met online, or with which you stay in touch mainly online. I have a lot of them. I've always had! Since I was 14 I've been active in different online boards (about music, films...), started one of my own (Riot grrls in Spanish, not active anymore), and even had a…
It's the end of 2014 and like every year-end, it's time to make balances, plans, and predictions. These days we are bombarded with blog posts about the future of big data, the future of wearables, or the companies we should keep an eye on. How will coworking spaces be like in 20 years? Will we…
“I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class.…
Personal computing The best way to seed an interest in technology to someone that has never seen a computer or the Internet (try it with grandparents!) is to go to Google Maps and fly to their house, a famous touristic place like the Eiffel tower or a place with any significance to them. Spreadsheets are…
In the summer of 2013, I was invited to join a group of tech entrepreneurs on stage at Campus Party in London to present Rails Girls, a free workshop that introduces women to software development over a weekend. My short presentation highlighted: Technology is trend: The larges companies in the world have a technology base…
Is it coworking or co-working? What a difference a hyphen makes! The hyphen debate has been an ongoing one since the beginning of the coworking movement. I am all for coworking, without the hyphen. I have you three practical reasons to convince yu to ditch the hyphen: 1. Using just one word The use of…
GOTO is a conference for software developers that happens in different locations, including Berlin. It features some of the industry's best speakers, practitioners and trainers and it covers topics such as agile development, UX, mobile, APIs, or product management. co.up sponsors some of the GOTO team activities, so I had access to a free ticket.…
Buffer is a web and smartphone app and browser extension that lets you schedule posts and measure reactions, helping you get maximum exposure for your content without filling your friends' or customers' timelines. Buffer is free for normal users, and has a low fee if you want to handle many social accounts and very reasonable…
The education sector is running behind the schedule in the process of adopting the use of new technologies and integrating Internet in our lives. The use of paper has been dramatically reduced in the business sector, and the use of aggregated data to identify issues and resolve problems in now done naturally in companies, transport…
37signals creates and maintains web-based applications for collaboration, project management, and information sharing. In their own words, they build ‘frustration-free web-based apps for collaboration, sharing information, and making decisions.’ But beyond developing applications to help us get things done, they maintain a popular company blog and job board, write insightful books, and their developers contribute…
The global economical crisis has pushed professionals from all industries to join the freelancing workforce. Being a freelancer means you enjoy more freedom, but also suffer the solitude and lack of support and inspiration. To fix this a new way of work started in the United States and spreaded around the world. It is called…
A couple of weeks ago I traveled to Czech Republic to go to Rupy. In November 2012, just after 8 months in the Rails world, I received an invitation from the organizers to go to Brno and speak about Rails Girls - I couldn't say no! So on Thursday 15h I jumped in a car…
It's a rainy Sunday at 20h and I am running to co-up, the coworking space where I work from. Im running there because I'm going to be late otherwise and I don't want to miss Mary's talk. The talk was hosted by Rails Girls Berlin, together with Berlin Geekettes and Soundcloud. Mary Rose Cook is…
