Xebia Articles

Big projects take forever, never get done, and lose relevancy for before anyone uses them. Building things nobody uses is a waste of time, and money, but we spend fortunes doing it, over and over again. There is a better way.

“We know just what they want” is a common statement to come across while working on a project. It is expressed by people who fancy that their experience gives them the knowledge necessary to use substitute thinking. To decide for others what they want. The hope is that this will speed things up. However, it can lead to discovering later in the process that you are going about things the wrong way. Surely this is not a desired scenario. It would be much better to sympathize with your target group as much as possible.

The amount of voice searches is growing at a phenomenal rate. The reason is simple: people speak quicker than they type. A US research company (Alpine.AI) estimates that currently, each month sees about 1 trillion spoken search queries taking place on the web. With the more and more Voice Assistant devices such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home entering the market, and more and more websites supporting voice searches, this type of query will soon become part of our everyday lives.

This means that being found on a website or an app no longer suffices. You will need to investigate the possibilities offered by voice search if you don’t want to miss the boat and be caught by big players. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. These 3 steps will make your business Voice Search ready!

State of Product Management Conference – November 16, 2018

Set better priorities, manage your personal growth, and increase your personal effectiveness across all levels of your career. At State of Product Management, you can expect three tracks with fast-paced, interactive sessions about the latest, progressive, topics in product management.

We all dream of being a rocket scientist
Everybody's inner geek probably has an inner rocket scientist that has probably contributed great theoretical advances to inner rocket science, advances that the real world is probably not ready for at present! :) The past couple of months I have had the pleasure of letting my inner geek rocket scientist out to play with the actual rocket scientists! I wanted to share some of my experiences.

In the previous post I stated that there is more need for engineering talent, and that there is a war on talent going on which will only increase. However, we see many organisations that have trouble hiring engineers, and even then there is a high chance that these new hires leave within a year - sometimes even within a month. The reason is that those organisations do not provide the right environment - they do not understand the engineer’s mindset. In this part of this series we will talk about what the engineering mindset is.

The internet makes information available everywhere, but it also comes with a downside. If a user wants to gain access to specific pages and apps, they are often forced to hand over personal information to third parties, which can lead to undesirable consequences. This article examines the current situation online and describes how decentralized technologies could empower individuals to take back ownership of their data.

One of the defining aspects of a public blockchain is that anyone can add information to it. However, before it is added, the information must be verified. All cooperating nodes in the network must agree on the definitions of valid, and invalid, information. For example, in the case of Bitcoin, there must be a consensus on what defines a legitimate transaction. When the new information is deemed valid by all participating nodes in the network, then the consensus is reached. This article explores how a decentralized network could achieve consensus through two different algorithms: proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.