Rafał Pastuszak is an experienced startup consultant specialised in web, mobile, emerging technologies and human-centred design. Click to find out more.
I remember the first time I drew a face. It looked like this: I was sitting on the slope of a hill overlooking my house, together with my older cousin. It was a late summer afternoon: still warm, with the grass still golden, but slowly turning red, the air smelling like honey and beeswax. He drew first. I followed. That's how I draw faces now: I also remember the first letter I ever wrote! It…
Today I want to talk about three of my favourite spicy words: procrastination , laziness , and play . Hopefully by the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll see them in a more useful light. And, if I do my job right, you’ll leave this post a little bit lazier, and slightly more playful. Along the way, I will also try to smuggle in some tips on how to work with yourself when tackling a design…
“Are you pondering what I’m pondering?” “I think so Brain, but I still don’t understand why commit messages would matter?” Unaired episode of Pinky and the Brain For reasons beyond the scope of this post, I spent a possibly unhealthy amount of time watching Pinky and the Brain as a kid. It wasn’t too bad. ORF, the main Austrian broadcaster also aired the German version of Teletubbies shortly…
In this article I’ll be using Sit. as an excuse to talk about some wider ideas (motivation, mental health, iterative design processes). We’ll explain why it came about, but not how . In part 2 I’ll show you how to take an idea from a hunch into a working app. Stay tuned! Before you read on, open the app and check it out for yourself. It shouldn’t take more than 1–2 minutes and if it does I’m…
I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool. Also, good morning/afternoon (wherever, whenever you are)! Here’s something you’ve never heard before: we’re more charitable when explaining our own behaviour vs. behaviour of the others. Emotive conjugation illustrates that by mimicking the grammatical conjugation of irregular verbs. Here’s an example: The term was mentioned for the first…
Hi there! It's been a long time, I know. I took a break from work and started working on some small, personal projects (toys). One of those small projects is potato.horse where I keep all of my doodles, visual short stories and jokes. Check it out! However, this post is not about my break from work, other experiments, or the site itself. People seem to like one particular technique I used in the…
This one will be short. A few days ago I was facilitating a retrospective for a team being a mix of old and new people, all of that in an organisation that has scaled up quite a bit in the past few years. It's not a surprise that many of their questions dealt with their process, practices, figuring out how to live work with each other, how to make stuff. I remembered that I had an old template of…
I'm a big fan of Fun retros , and I like smuggling my doodles into my work*. If your retrospectives feel a bit repetitive or you're working with a team you don't know well and want to learn a bit more about them before you hit the ground, check out Hot-air Balloon, Bad Weather . It's quite versatile and works well with remote setups. And, feel free to use the template I made! Version A (borders)…
The main reasons I write tests are: reduced cognitive load, improved communication with my peers, ability to sleep at night. Testing allows me to split hard problems into chunks small enough to fit in my head. I'm young, but with every passing year as a software engineer more and more often I wonder whether these chunks are becoming smaller because I'm getting better at my craft or because I'm…
OK, this was supposed to be a longer post, but I'm trying to learn to get things like this out quickly, instead of yak shaving and eventually letting them fester in drafts. So, here we go. This one’s about pair development. Pair Development is one of those habits that many of us practice in one form or another before realising that: people have already come up with a label for it (it's a thing) a…
In the past few weeks I've been messing with turning some of my doodles into little apps. Here's a (fairly) private and (mostly) secure P2P transfer thingy: You can check it out here , and here ( source ). What are the other tools/digital products that are so simple, so low-tech that we'd choose them over the alternatives purely because of their aesthetics or how they make us feel? I'm not talking…
Are you working on something new, exciting or weird? Are you learning about a new piece of tech or just looking for someone to bounce off an idea that has been haunting you for some time? Brilliant! I'm available throughout the week for a coffee and a chat about ideas big and small. There's no specific format to this—ask me any question and I'll see if I can help, free of charge. I also have a…
Ensō is a writing tool that helps you enter a state of flow. It does this by separating writing from editing and thus making it harder for you to edit yourself. The rules of the game: you can't select text you can edit only a character at a time only a few last lines are visible as you type, fading away and losing their importance you can download and review your text when you’re done writing I…