Mark Edgington

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.

As expected a full energy opinionated talk on why REST together with the internet as your enterprise bus is leaps and bounds above anything vendors or WSDL and The WS-* (death star) specs have to offer

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.

Ari Zilka CTO of Terracota gave an excellent presentation on how the product works and how it can be used. I was not going to attend this session, but he was excellent on the previous sessions panel, so i was drawn to it. His view on the world of using stateful in memory data and replication goes against the views of many, but is very compelling. I’ll be looking into it deeply.

Scale up, Scale out, Split the problem space, tune or re-architect. You may want to build with a vendor in mind.

Highlighting that the focus should be on social rather than technical skills Kent coaxed developers towards integration with the business people. He pointed out that honesty works and hiding behind complexity and changing requirements is not the best way to build business partners and get them to trust in the software your developing. This is a simple and yet key problem for many.

Jim Webber and Martin Fowler where fantastic. Humorous and poignant from beginning to end. You really had to be there, go to InfoQ and hope they filmed it.

Without a doubt the highlight of the day so far. The panel of the days presenters covered the whole spectrum of cloud computing from current position to future issues. I have five pages of notes from this so not one for my N810 or my thumbs will go dead. The key points of interest to me where the fact that the cloud is almost a renewal of some old technology ideas that did not quite make it, mixed in with standard tried and tested ideas and innovative pricing. If there was or will be a key issue it has to be Security (trust), i think it would only take one major security breach (loss or steal of data) and it could take down a company; many will have to base themselves firmly around trust so one to watch.