Mark Edgington

I attended QCon a few weeks back and Gregor Hohpe of Google was the host of the Architecture track.  This ended with a panel and each had a Rubik’s cube, only Gregor got anywhere near solving it; i think he could have done it if he had any time to look at it.  Anyway, for the past week Ive been trying to  solve it and now succeed on every attempt in less than 3 mins.  I’m pretty happy about this as i remember first seeing one on my granddads key chain in the 80’s, at which point i managed one layer and gave up . So twenty years is not much of a record, but goes to show you can return and conquer at any time.

Ive been back in the office for 1 week, so how has QCon helped.

Conversation around cloud computing has been a big hit. I got some good contacts and these have lead to investigation on using the Elastic computing and S3 services from amazon for one of our clients. Thoughts from ‘ The Zen of Agile Management’ have allowed me to view our Agile and Prince 2 processes in a new light; I expect my observations to work round to discussion and change in the coming weeks. Also the Domain Specific Language knowledge has invigorated conversation around framework and language selection on projects. All in all a good week.

In short fantastic. I’ve attended many larger conferences and I found the smaller size more enabling for communication, both with the speakers and conference attendees. I attended tutorials on Agile management and DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages) and followed tracks on cloud computing, effective design and architectures. Each of these had a great set of speakers and there was only one session in the whole week that I felt was weak. I left the conference armed with lots of ideas and inspiration and a handful of excellent contacts. I also have a stack of notes that I am digesting and hope to put some clearer views together than my short blog posts on sessions from my N810.

After a number of comments around the conference regarding the near fanatical religious nature of the guys on the Ruby stream, i had to attend. I was not disappointed. If you broke the panel down into individuals i believe you would get a very balanced discussion around the sessions subject, When is Rails an appropriate choice however as a panel lead by Nic Williams, was in my opinion hindered. Why? well Nic is quite obviously an intelligent guy, with alot to offer, but on this occasion (maybe due to the fact that it was the end of the day), all he offered was general sweeping statements, about the greatness of Ruby; which may well be true, but a little backing up would have been nice. The problem for me was, i really wanted to know when rails, would be an appropriate choice. I came away with comments regarding the fact that it does not run the same on Windows as Unix, and you start to get worried business sponsors; especially if there development team are stocked with Windows PC’s and there not that keen to run Virtual PC for development purposes. Couple this with the only use pushed was for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) apps and you don’t feel particular informed. Does this sound like a recipe for world domination?

I actually was happy with my view of Ruby and Rails before i went. I think its a great language and framework for the right problem, CRUD applications. I also think that Ruby’s usefulness has been expanded into the Java world by JRuby and the IDE integration in Netbeans and INteliJ. The tie ins with Java, allow it to be used clearly as an external DSL (Domain Specific Language) that can augment the general problem solving capabilities of Java with a fantastic and agile language like Ruby. It would have been nice to expand my knowledge beyond what i knew, rather than just be told ‘Rubys Great, use it’ for an hour.

Poor Rod Johnson had obviously been up all night working on his Java One slides (there was a deadline on the 14th) . He looked completely exhasted and near drifted off to sleep at some moments; obviously a little bored with some of the subjects or answers the panel were giving. However, even through this, he still, IMO gave some of the best comments the panel made. He also kept on making little notes, not sure if these were inspired thoughts from the conferance (as he stated) or just the ravings of a tired man. I wish i had them to look at.

A fascinating talk, or maybe a tutorial on how the world of market risk works within BNP Paribas . By outlining clearly the problem space and problems faced by IT departments in the banking world;procurement and strategic sign-off and procurement. You got a good feel for how the architecture came together. In this case i felt that the open source decisions, many made due to restrictions, lead ultimately to success and what i would expect to be a happy development team. Probably the most surprising part of the architecture where a set of processes running from Java Main; it seemed to have come about as application servers where the remit of another team, and asking them for involvement was not an option.

It was interesting to hear about the problems the BBC has in identifying the location of requests in order to both serve advertisements and apply DRM. We tend to forget that the BBC gets a near set amount of money with which to work, so spending money serving content outside the UK for nothing would be an expensive business. Also giving away content which is often under license agreements would also cause legal issues. I was interested to learn that the advertisement is coming on line now, due to the foreign office charging there policy of funding the BBC to deliver outside the UK.

Its been interesting to listen to speakers, each of which portraits the strategies and principles and this time was the turn of Randy Shoup. His four strategies for architectures for scale.

Partition everything
ASync everywhere
Automate everything
Remember everything fails

Around these points he very clearly showed pattens ebay have implemented and how these directly related to his strategy.

Another excellent talk in which Kent provided his latest views on how he thinks problems should be solved from the design point of view. He started by following on from his keynote, pushing that we must design with people in mind; design for the skills of your availoble developers. The talk built up to five principles that Kent felt should be followed when a problem or new piece of functionality is required:

• Leap (you have confidence, just do it)
• Parallel ( you lack a little confidence do it in parallel)
• Migrate (your comfortable with your solution that is in parallel, migrate to it)
• Simplify (eliminate constrainsts to make the problem easier)
• Place a stepping stone (tackle it a piece at a time by breaking it into easier steps)

Walking through the list showed a clearly thought out path and one which i belive is useful in the approach.. The aim is to try to move your functionalty towards Leap, i look forward to more on these ideas.

A simple journey to put across some guidelines to aid in designing user interfaces. The talk lacked a bit od depth for me, in that some of the observations felt a little personal rather than having mucg evidence to back them up. It was what i needed though to allow me to think about the previuos talk. The guidelines:

• Understand the context
• Just simple enough ( shrink, embody and hide)
• Organise
• Don’t make the user wait
• Test

Yes all a little general and obvious, but that’s what simplicity is all about; the simple things that get ignored.