Q How would you describe Gurn?

“It’s about flow and getting to everyday resources. Gurn is kind of like muscle memory, I don’t have to think about what I’m doing anymore. So it takes a level of hassle out the way and it makes me more productive.”

Q What was life like before Gurn?

“Life before Gurn was pretty much a bunch of bookmarks. Like most people, I would have a load of shortcuts on a toolbar in a browser of my top 20/30 things that I wanted to get to every day and probably a bunch more which didn’t fit on the toolbar.”

 

Many of those bookmarks carried identical icons, e.g. 5x AWS links would all use the AWS logo in the toolbar, and so I’d have to hover my mouse over each for the full URL to display.

 

Also, it was all a waste of time, because when the underlying URL changed my bookmark was dead and I’d have to hunt around to try and find what the new link was. Using Gurn within our team solves this problem.

“I just type ‘go crawl metrics’ and I’m there”

Q How do you use Gurn?

“We work in a fast-paced and complex technology environment serving multiple customers via our SaaS platform. Like most developers, I need to access a number of tools and applications constantly. However, instead of having to go to a console and navigate through a few different steps to get to where I want to go, with Gurn I can now:

 

• Jump straight to Elastic and Kibana dashboards
• Navigate instantly to where I need to be in AWS or GCP
• Navigate around the metrics that we’ve got on the system to isolate problems and identify them as quickly as possible is gold for us. So if I want to see the crawl metrics on the system and check that the crawl is running fine, and I type ‘go crawl metrics’ and I’m there.”

Q How did you hear about Gurn?

“I met Simon, the guy who developed Gurn, and he pitched me. …I was a bit like yeah, I could see it for Enterprise, but I just didn’t get why I would use it.

 

I tried it out because I am a bit of an experimentalist and I thought I would give it a whirl, and then it sort of clicked with me and I started to use it and it started to make sense. And now I use it every day – like lots!”