Looks Good, Works Well

Bringing change in teams is hard work. Bringing change to organizations is hard work. Bringing change to compananies is really hard work. And almost impossible. Bringing change is about persistance rooted in strong belief in core principles. It is also about improvization. Listening and reflecting. This allows you embrace the

When we starting using Trello for candidate tracking, we were highly motivated to have it handle all our communication and workflow for candidates. @trello why isn't there a simple way for a user to be notified by email specifically when they get assigned to a card (w/o

As we started the new year, we have changed the way we do recruiting at PayPal. We create an always active pipeline based on a few key profiles. We have also started aligning our engineering practices around these profiles (web application, mobile, and services engineering). They don't fit everything of

Back in the mid 80's after we had finished writing GATO for the Macintosh, I took some time to explore the underbelly of the Mac. One of these times I discovered that a single M68k operation determined the way MacPaint was visually designed. Image courtesy of Jeff Thompson's blog This

If you haven't discovered James Mickens then I have a treat for you. James is a Researcher in the Distributed Systems Group at Microsoft and writes hilarious articles under the moniker ;Login: Logout. His writing reminds me of the style of Dave Barry. November's article The Night Watch takes a

2014 is a great time to join PayPal. With our move to NodeJS and the release of our open source KrakenJS code base, we are rewriting and redesigning all of our experiences -- all on NodeJS. Productivity is the Reason Elsewhere we have written about that move, but the real

During the week of Dec 9-15th over a half billion lines of code were written for the hour of code initiative by over 20 million people. This got me reflecting on my own original "hour of code". It was a seminal moment in my life. I had never

I am excited to announce that I have moved my blog from Blogger to Ghost, a NodeJS blogging platform. Background In 2005 when I started the blog, the easiest thing to do was to snag a blogspot account and start posting. Over time the blog became more popular and really

My team in PayPal Austin is hiring. We are looking for user interface engineers that can span the stack from node.js up to backbone.js. As part of the change we have been bringing to PayPal, our UIE teams partner closely with our design teams following the Lean UX

In a most unlikely place. We have unleashed the Kraken.

I have discussed in the past that we have been on a mission to change the culture, technology, process and experiences at PayPal. 15 months into my adventure here I have never been more excited.Starting last year we moved away from Java & JSP for rendering our UIs and

Don't judge a book by it's cover (or it's website... or it's poster). Especially true in this situation. David Agan's book "Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems" is a great find, chocked full of simple wisdom on how to find and

One of the first things I did when I joined PayPal was rename the "webdev" to "User Interface Engineering". Now while there is nothing wrong with the title web developer, at PayPal webdevs were considered one step below a "dev".Changing a title in

Started keeping a list of these tools. No particular order.Createlyhttp://creately.com/Axure RPhttp://axure.com/InVisionhttp://www.InVisionApp.comMockingbirdhttps://gomockingbird.com/Balsamiq Mockupshttp://balsamiq.com/products/mockupsRatchethttp://maker.github.com/ratchet/Justinmindhttp://www.justinmind.com/HotGloohttp://www.hotgloo.com/FlairBuilderhttp://www.flairbuilder.com/Mockflowhttp://www.mockflow.com/mocklinkrhttp:

I really enjoy Silicon Valley Code Camp. Lots of speakers, lots of local attendees. Very informal and always a good crowd. No different today. Really engaged audience.One topic I covered was how Lean UX and Agile work together in harmony. Here is a diagram I shared that I have

Coaching teams here at PayPal on what it takes to operate like in a LeanUX manner. I have typically boiled it down to just 3 key principles.Three Principles1. Maintain a Shared Understanding at All TimesThis was key when I was at Netflix and I see it even stronger now.

This is an over-simplified view. But I was thinking about what really matters to frontend engineers (or any engineers) in their jobs (besides money). It matters WHO they work with They want to be challenged by people smarter than themselves. They want to work for someone who gets it and

I am excited to share that we are formalizing the already ongoing effort at PayPal in Accessibility by forming an official Accessibility team.And to kick things off right, I am thrilled to announce that Victor Tsaran will be joining PayPal on Monday 9/10 to lead this team. Many

NOTE: We continue to look for great talent in this space. However, this particular job has been filled. Just one of the many places we are upping the game at PayPal is in our developer experiences. A few months back PayPal formed an Application Platform team. Part of its charter

I have blogged a little in the past as to why I came to PayPal. Today I want to talk about why you should come to PayPal to work with me.To start with let's be frank. Last year when I contemplated joining PayPal it was clear PayPal had long

I am reading the excellent book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions In discussing how magicians manipulate attention (looking at the way Apollo Robbins the Gentleman Thief picks pockets) they described a technique called time misdirection. This is when your attention is misdirected

Thanks to John Foliot for putting on an excellent Open Web Camp. It was especially great as we got to host here at PayPal at our Town Hall facility.Lots of great talks. Check out the presentations at http://openwebcamp.org/slides. The Lean Tech Stack from Bill Scott

We are going full bore on LeanUX at PayPal. This presentation just captures a lot of cautions for our teams. These anti-patterns call out bad behaviors or situations that can become bad which will stifle collaboration. Lean UX Anti-Patterns from Bill Scott What anti-patterns have you seen?

Welcome aboard Doug! Stoked to be working with you again :-) Interested in where PayPal is headed in the world of Javascript/User Interface Engineering? Ping me. bill.scott at paypal.com.

Designing for Reusability Code reuse has been a major concern of mine throughout my career. I graduated with a computer science degree and was taught the value and beauty of loosely coupled, modular code with a clear separation of concerns. In fact some of my most rewarding experiences have been