Twitter. It's doomed, you know.

The Problems of Twitter-scale data architecture.


All data at Twitter is big data. I have a previous life in databases (quite a long time ago), and back then large data was of the order of a terabyte. Twitter’s data is growing at a rate of half a gigabyte a second - and that mostly in 16 bit chunks.

I have extensive notes from the Twitter talk, detailed numbers and code examples, and you know what, I don’t think much of it is very interesting.

A Whole Lot of Process, Not a Lot of Punch

The philosophy of lean, according to our first speaker today, is to concentrate on flow, to deliver value through process and to use your vision to inform the whole.


Our first speaker believed that traditional projects delivery starts with requirements generating a team selection to which people are added and the project is completed. At the end of the project, the team is disbanded and the team members are spread out again into new teams.
Doing this releases the capability the team built up during the time it  was working together and every project starts from uncertainty and a lack of team spirit.



Black Swans and Serendipity.

Jurgen Appelo wins a lot of awards from me. Best Thinker of Conference is probably the one that encapsulates the whole. His talk "Complexity vs Lean - the big showdown" was entertaining and interesting. Worth downloading the slides. If only for the "wtf" moments. Some presentations are readings of powerpoints - these were mercifully few at QCon - but the stand out "presentations" are those which cannot be reverse engineered from the slide deck.
I recommend especially slide 24 as a stand out WT.... F!

Miyagi have hope for you

Thursday.

Google first thing in the morning, Twitter later.
Lean and Kanban for the rest of the day.

At the start of the day, my thoughts on Lean and Kanban are full of excitement. My colleague went to a Lean Anarchy talk on Wednesday and came back totally psyched. I first heard about them when I did my ScrumMaster course, but haven’t had the opportunity to listen to and learn from people who have actually turned their workplaces Lean.

Talk number one. Kanban.

Waterfall of cool

And at the end of the first day, we all filed back in to the Fleming Room here at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference room, 800 scruffy geeks and a guy standing at the front in a suit watching Wall-E on the big screen.

A fellow delegate sitting not too far away from me made a comment about talks by guys in suits. I called out "He's from NASA. He's cooler than you".

And what do you know?  He was. I'm afraid, I didn't take notes, but I did tweet a bit.
Basically, this guy has budgets in the billions to make toys with. Really expensive, very important sciencey toys. Like deep space communicators and mars rock vapourising lasers. And he loves it.

Well, you would, wouldn't you?

Oh, and remind me to tell you the story of the Mars Bunny some time :)

The Kiev Experiment

"Contemporary software development is built on communication"


With probably the most intriguing title for a presentation, this presentation sounded promising.

In short, it was the history of UBS's quest for the perfect software engineering solution, the problems they experienced and the lessons learned.

Development at UBS started as one team releasing good quality software very slowly. As the team succeeded, they got asked to do more and more by the company and they grew with the work load.
The first attempt at expansion saw the introduction of functional groups, and by 2008 all the teams were single competence teams working at different rates. Hard, difficult times.

The Evil Hat

"It's ok to get things wrong if the cost of putting it right is cheap"

I liked this quote. Even if the English sucks.
I didn't like anything else in this talk - Learning and Perverse Incentives: The Evil Hat by Liz Keogh.

Liz has clearly had bad experiences with Project Managers, and Everything Is Their Fault.

I'm first in line when they announce sign up to a Manager Free Universe. But you will never get me to say that "managers" or indeed "management" is always wrong or unnecessary.

I am being unfair to Liz? Oh, possibly.

You Know It When You Visualise It

I didn't find out until afterwards that Erik Dörnenburg is one of the ThoughtWorks boys and girls we have working with us in Berlin at the moment. He's helping them to design a new API for our RESTful services. Now I like this kinda acronym soup anyway, but, for a front-end dev, on a day-to-day basis, I absolutely reply on these things being good (and having a jsonp interface, of course), so I like Erik. He's going to help the awesome back end folks upon whose shoulders we stand to be even more awesome.

So, Erik is going to tell us all about Software Quality - you know it when you see it.

He starts off by showing us a million different ways to gather data on our software quality and I tweet rather prematurely that...

Why Don't We ...

And so the conference starts. Decisions must be made. Do you pick a track which interests you and sit on one room all day (near the coffee and a power output, of course), or better to spread yourself around?

Well, all days are different. Today, there is little which directly affects me as a front end developer, but plenty which interests me as a generalist and wanna-be polymath.

First up, "Why don't we learn" by Russ Miles.

Russ is also the guy who put this track together, so I'm expecting this to be a motivational romp through mind maps, learning techniques and self-hypnosis.

Thursday Keynote

Today's morning keynote (they bookend the day) was a slight departure from the planned and programmed one; Thursday and Friday flipped so we had Patrick Copeland, the man who saved Google 700 years of engineering. Whatever that means.
It was slick, entertaining, started with a far better joke than yesterday's keynote, and a full report will come. My notes are copious and time to type them up is limited. Still, no freebie beer party this evening, so I shall see what I can do then. Not from the hotel, though. They want 15quid a day for internet.
Phone call for the Marriott County Hall, this is 2012 calling. Please pick up.


This is not that report. These are the answers to the questions you have been asking yourselves. It would be easier to ask me directly, but it's ok, the psy abilities are stronger in my homeland.

1. Yes Google really do encourage you do to your own stuff. All of the time. They hunt out innovators and reward them.
2. Yes, they are a bit scary and you might have to recalibrate your morality before you go and work for them
3. The typeface of choice for the presentation was Courier New.

Courier new. We're so high tech we come out the other end.

Craig Larman - Opening Keynote Part 2

It's non-stop geeking around here and no mistake.
We're in the conference halls from 9am to 7:30pm. I hoped to be able to get more typed up between talks, but the generous-looking half hour between keynotes and tracks and presentations turns out to be little more than enough to grab coffee. So, sorry for the interruptions to the posts. I guess it helps to keep them shorter.

So, when we left Craig, he was introducing us the design pattern for scaling Scrum teams.
Several ground rules. Number one - co-location.
Steven Elop has certainly identified a Nokian anti-pattern (if you will) for Scrum teams where team members are spread over thousands of miles and several timezones. At Nokia, it will be stopping from about RIGHT NOW and never happening again. Craig Larman would be proud of him. Absolute number one no no.
Like I said, Craig has mastered the art of reminding you of the simple stuff in a sensible way. Simple should never be neglected and never taken for granted.

Craig Larman - Opening Keynote Part 1

Craig Larman has been geeking since before most of us were born. Maybe not me, but most of us.

Now, he travels the world helping massive projects to adopt Scrum methodologies. Craig specialises in large, multisite, distributed and offshore teams. He is not a tall man, but in with his ultra-micro goatee and shoelace tie to match, he strides to and fro, no notes, brimming with confidence. He da man.

And then he launches the presentation. He starts with a weak joke and, horror, Papyrus as his presentation font. Red, all lower case papayrus.

Moving on.

Presentation of Tracks

QCon is streamed into "Tracks" - thematic groups of talks and presentations.
Every day starts with an overview of that day's tracks by the track hosts.

Today, we have:

Charles Humble: The future of Java.

Firstly, I could have sworn he said his name was Chris, but he's down as Charles in the programme. So we'll go with the programme and call him Charles. This Track is going to focus on Java the language, not the platform and is going to be highly technical. Apparently the language is changing in ways I don't understand.
I want to get a lot better at Java, but I am a total noob at it right now. Not the track for me!