Wubbleyou

A tech company launches scholarships to inspire innovation and empower the next generation of talent in the North East. Wubbleyou's collaboration with Northumbria University reflects a shared commitment to driving technological progress and empowering the regional economy. Read more: https://buff.ly/3Ogpyr7

A tech company launches scholarships to inspire innovation and empower the next generation of talent in the North East. Wubbleyou's collaboration with Northumbria University reflects a shared commitment to driving technological progress and empowering the regional economy. Read more: https://buff.ly/3Ogpyr7

I used to struggle with delegation, this dev maxim changed that: Make the change easy, then make the easy change. Sometimes in software, a part of it can be really hard to work on, changing it is scary. Sometimes you find yourself changing the hard thing over and over, and it’s a slog. It's hard to delegate without high risk. In those situations, it’s beneficial to step back, and invest time rewriting it so that change becomes easy, and actually enjoyable to make. Easy to the point where change makes you feel like an artisan, a surgeon – the change is so effortless and fluent, you feel like master of your craft when you work on it. I think this applies in business growth too: Make the change easy, then DELEGATE the easy change. This usually means, investing time to bake knowledge and capability into an underlying asset to get it going, then delegating management of that. A challenge with delegation can be that you’re an industry leader, very knowledgeable about stuff, and you’re delegating to smart people but with less knowledge. Which is entirely natural. However, that can create frustration when it’s not clear how to do it properly. Delegation can fall into 3 camps: 🎯 “Here is a strategic objective, achieve it” 🎯 “Go fix that problem” 🎯 “Do this specific thing” “Do this specific thing”, is normally delegation of essential but lower value activities, delegated to free up time. If the business is growing quickly, it’s not well documented and is just done from memory. The delegate can receive a crappy description on how to do it and lacks the knowledge to fill in the gaps. The delegator is then unimpressed when the job isn’t done properly, the delegate feels set up to fail, no one is happy. Where I can get away with it, I’d normally create a Loom video showing how to do it, and the task is to turn that into a process in Notion and keep doing it. But that doesn’t always work – the thing is sometimes too hard. 🧠 Example: Until 2023 our Ops Manual was hard to update if you were not a developer. I’d delegated an objective to create a single source of truth for project management, but it was slow, hard work for the people involved. I spent a weekend migrating the entire Ops Manual to Notion, which was far easier to use. Barrier removed, progress sped up considerably. 🧠 Example: We’ve only really been marketing the business in earnest for 18 months. We brought in help, and the questions were always: “What’s the message you want to get out? What stories do you want to tell? What do you want the readers to do?” Good questions. We then spent months incrementally building a bank of assets, including stories, imagery, presentations, actions to take, videos - reusable assets. It’s now far easier to do/delegate, easy to change if we need to. We create a lot of content around how to turn scaling business owners into innovators, join here to see more! https://lnkd.in/eTc7Y5JN #scaleups #Newcastle #Innovators

🏆🥇😎 Technology Innovation of the Year Award What was special about this is Myfolks were also a finalist for this award, a Wubbleyou client. Louise Thompson and her team deserve huge credit for leveraging tech to provide support for those you love most at the press of a button. Frontline Integrity were also in the room represented by Brian Kerrigan and Hannah Kerrigan, who are revolutionizing pipeline threat analysis with their unique to market pipeline integrity tech platform - another Wubbleyou partner. We had great table company with Annabelle Hill, Alistair Hill and more, representing Sea the Love as finalists in the New Business Category. But here's the thing... The UK is a knowledge and capability economy. People in the UK do very clever things. 56% of exports from the UK is services. But, valuable IP is stuck in people's heads, in business processes, in dusty documentation. Productising services into great tech products creates market dominating opportunities, and leverages that IP enormously. Wubbleyou were represented last night by Vincent Onyeabor, Divya Behera and Joey Emery who are great at creating market leading tech products, and as I learned last night, dancing their way to the stage when awards are won 😂 As I said on the night, we are what we are, and we are because we have a great team and great clients. Thank you to everyone who trusts in us to deliver tech products in partnership, and also the North Tyneside Business Forum, Amy Farrell, Layer7, Christopher Tait, Michael James, Christopher Wilson, Will Bevin-Nicholls and plenty more for an amazing night!

Read the full report from our latest Dynamo Leadership Forum on Shaping Tomorrow’s AI Landscape and share your thoughts on the recommendations in the comments below! 🤖💬 We recently brought together over 40 leaders from across the tech sector to explore the future of AI – discussing key topics like AI regulation, workplace integration, and skills development. The goal? To gather insights that foster knowledge sharing and help shape policies for the future... To read the full report, simply visit: https://buff.ly/3YOtsN1 This work was put together by Dynamo, with thanks to the collective input from individuals across the following organisations, whose contributions were invaluable: Accenture | Accordant Solutions Ltd. | Apexon | BJSS | Bulien | Collingwood Business Solutions Limited | Cosmo Digital Solutions | CGI | Durham County Council | Durham University | Gateshead College | Hicomply | HM Revenue & Customs | Jumping Rivers Ltd | Land Digital | Layers Studio | Leighton | Muckle LLP | B Corp™ | Newcastle City Council | NHS Business Services Authority | Nomad Digital | North Eastern ICT Partnership | Northumbria University | QGEMS Limited | Stable State | St Oswald's Hospice | Sunderland City Council | tombola | Ward Hadaway | Waterstons | Weightmans | Wubbleyou | Xplor Technologies #AI #Tech #Business

We're creating 3x tech scholarships with Northumbria University 🥳 Why? Wubbleyou started at NU because a leaflet stuck to my foot. I was a Computer Science student - it was 2009 and the job market was crap - "The great recession". It was a sandwich course, 2010 was my year in industry, I was meant to get a proper job for a whole year. Looking about, simply nothing appealed to me at the time - "oh well, I'll just finish my degree" Walking through campus, a leaflet stuck to my foot. Wait, it's not a 2 for 1 offer on pints of Carling - "Have you ever thought of starting a business?" What a question. Michael Peeke-Vout and I met Graham Baty soon after, who to this day looks after graduate businesses at NU, and we then started Wubbleyou. To this day, Wubbleyou work with Northumbria University on initiatives around AI, strategy and business, we've employed NU grads, we've coached graduate businesses, spoken at NU events - the value we've received from these opportunities is enormous. What better way to pay it forward, than this. But that's not the end of it. Imagine a future where more North East businesses are more valuable, and able to grow very quickly, because tech made it really easy to export their knowledge and capability around the world. To do this, we need more highly skilled, and ambitious people starting tech careers. We believe providing a scholarship encourages this and provides fairer access to higher education. We think this is important because tech is disrupting lots of industries, and businesses need to get ahead to survive. We strongly value learning, education and building tech products. When James Wilkinson MSc presented the opportunity - it was a no brainer! Interested in keeping informed? Join: https://lnkd.in/eTc7Y5JN

“What is your tech stack? Competitor X says theirs is better/cooler” Boring tech stacks make our customers a lot of money. Plus, our modern tech stack is cool to us and not boring. Conversely as another founder put it: “We’d let devs have fun with new frameworks, and then spend years maintaining a product in some alpha JavaScript framework that’s no one has ever heard of” If Competitor X is proficient and using a modern tech stack different to ours, both are likely equal, and neither is better. If Competitor X is building your business-critical platform in some cutting edge, new to market framework, it will be cool for about 3 months and then be a total slog to maintain. The sort of codebase you take to another tech partner and they want to rewrite it. Plus, your customers don’t care – they want to use a product that adds value to their life. They don’t care that some techy in a hoodie like me says the code looks really nice. I think what really matters, is that your tech partner does the following: ✅ Uses a modern tech stack, and knows it inside out. They are really good with it, like really, really good ✅ They focus on building tech to create value for you, and solve your problems Building a really cool product that no one wants to use, is a big waste of time and money. There must be a big emphasis on discovery and what business success looks like before building a tech product. How do you measure the product is successful? How do we gear the product to achieving that? Wubbleyou does this very well. For our stack, at Wubbleyou we use Laravel, Vue, Tailwind, MySQL, deployed into a highly scalable AWS configuration using a Terraform recipe we’ve iterated over the years. We can solve a lot of problems quickly with this method. Sure, we use Golang, Python, NodeJS etc when there is a sharp problem we need to solve where another language has a clear edge. For example, for computation speed, Golang can win, Python for data analysis or solving hard optimisation problems, Node if someone has already solved your problem and made a library for it 🤷 Tools in a toolbox. Otherwise, we’re using a tried and tested stack that has a long life ahead, which we know is capable of building tech products which service millions of users and generate millions in revenue. All things equal, I think “which partner’s tech stack?” is only a considered question if you have an existing tech product, and you’re keeping everything in one stack for maintainability.

“Can we trust AI which gives us a different answer every time?” It’s a great question – if an accounting report gave us a different number for last month’s revenue every time we asked, we would not trust the data. But, there is a difference between true facts in a statement and the statement itself. If I asked someone in my team our revenue last month, they might say: “£X, with a net profit of £Y”, or “Revenue was £X, and we were Z% over budget on compute, but under budget on travel”, or simply “£X” So, the question becomes, “would we accept AI that presents the same facts in a different way?” We accept it in people. As long as… They actually present the facts correctly. However, LLMs are known to hallucinate. The trouble with this is, LLMs are a black box – you can’t just open them up and see what caused it to respond like this – they are very fancy prediction engines always trying to predict the next best word to say. So the final question might be, would we accept AI that presents the same facts in a different way every time you asked, as long as the core truths presented are validated as correct before they’re presented? Yes, this seems sensible to me. So how do we do that? LLMs can be tuned to be more or less ‘deterministic’ via a temperature setting, where deterministic means asking the same question more than once will create an identical response every time you ask, creating the more reliable predictability, we can combine that with instruction on how to present a response, to get more predictable responses. We can also review the 'facts' in the response, and sense check these before the LLM is allowed to use them. This could be conventional software or more AI. Where LLMs are used to create actionable insight, it makes sense to: ✅ Introduce a monitor, to check key facts as correct/incorrect before they are presented, then once these facts are validated, present these back to the LLM for presentation ✅ Be very specific with the expected structure of the response, and configure to be more deterministic ✅ Be specific with prompting to only use the facts presented to create output Great discussion with Dynamo North East, expertly hosted by David Dunn, with insight from Deborah Hardoon. Good to also hear from Sarah Glancey, Al (Aleasser) Alzein, Esther Gillespie, Michael Stirrup, Jon Leighton, Paula Harrison, Jon Saunders & plenty more. #Newcastle #Scaleups #AI

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Missed our LinkedIn Live interview with Lisa Eaton (CEO, Fabric) yesterday? Watch it on replay here ⬇️⭐️ #marketingstrategy #marketingeducation