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 :)