Harry Bailey

In most agencies teams form and disband often. It's a key reason knowledge is lost and learning is repeated rather than shared. But fluid teaming isn't the only way to handle work that is sold as bespoke to clients. It just happens to be the easiest to use when the system feels or is chaotic.

I tried Joybuy out as an alternative for electronics. They delivered the product to another road in Manchester with a similar name. Now I have to wait 5 days for a refund and longer if I want the product ordering again. They offered £4 compensate. So yeah not brilliant.

This has been a large part of my day, and will be a part of tomorrow too. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The beauty of using AI can be that your productivity multiplies. But one strange side effect is that because you’re often doing zero deep work, you reach the end of each day feeling flat.

Basically all the software delivery models favour long-lived teams with ongoing responsibility for well maintained systems. But agency’s are set up to either pass systems from creators to naive supporters, or make teams build new things while continuing to support an ever growing list of old ones.

The best agencies don’t obsess about Scrum. They obsess about value delivery.

When people talk about making Agile work at digital agencies, they often miss two key points from the solution: 1. Client stakeholders are rarely only on your project so not available how Scrum requires for sprints+feedback to work well 2. Inspect&adapt fails at a project level with fluid teaming

UI challenge: When to show options on hover, vs when to show them on click. Noisy interfaces tend to be the first, but the second talks lots of planning and testing to not hide key options.

Made some tweaks to my recent 'Updating PHP on an AWS Lightsail Blueprint WordPress Stack' article. After several years, and three major article versions, it's still painful to upgrade a Lightsail. harrybailey.com/2026/07/upda...

Migrating stuff to GitHub. 1 down. 5 to go.

Sharing return URLs and flash messages between Yii 1.1 and Yii3 - during a phased migration migratingtoyii3.substack.com/p/sharing-re...

“Who is inside the device you’re holding?” What an article!

Rule 78 of website content management systems: An editor will always populate a field based on how it is displayed to visitors, not what the label or guidance text says on the form.

One of the things I really like about having Claude open all day is the ease of building context for a task I have coming up soon by drip feeding thoughts, links and files. So when it’s time to focus on it I can ask for a read back of what I’ve shared to that point and hit the ground running.

Nice 17.5% pricing increase from iomart hosting with less than a month notice. Lovely.

Billable hours can be the death of small incremental improvement.

I have a case of 'make my logo bigger' in the wild. Send help.

As a user of AI chat Who likes to laugh as well as work I want a random profanities toggle So I can chuckle occasional when I get sworn at by a bot.

Did some running and walking today.

Child 2 thinks gonzo from the muppets is a bird. I have some work to do.

Bloody love parkrun blog.parkrun.com/uk/2026/09/3...

If you were completing a scorecard to rate yourself/business at something, is 10 questions (4 mins) the right length? Would you complete 15 (6 mins) or even 20 (8 mins) if the result was better?

I didn't tell anybody I was going to run today, so I didn't run. Priorities are like that sometimes.

What a headline.

ChatGPT: "The image generator is currently generating item 11 repeatedly instead of moving on to item 12, even when I specify item-12.jpg. I don't know why it is ignoring the next-item instruction." Fantastic. Brilliant.

You had *one job* LinkedIn Guide to Creating team.

I saw a post yesterday about AI companies buying up access to large private GitHub repos and datasets. So they can train models on real data. Today I've seen the same, but for agency comms and process platforms. Access to whole Slack or Teams comms history and decision making records.

The thing about a lot of implementing AI into a business—for example the software development lifecycle—is that even if this whole thing is a bubble, the improvements which enable agents to do good work are also helpful for humans. So, sure things would slow down, but it's not a reset scenario.

I ran 15k at 5:30/km then walked 3 to cool down. It was hotter than I’d hoped for!

Instead of building a software factory, build a value factory or an impact factory. AI and people are both good with goals and north stars, but you have to agree what’s valuable and talk about it often.