My Key Takeaways from APIdays Australia 2016

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Graham Lea

On March 1 & 2, 2016, I attended APIdays Australia in Melbourne. (Actually, I also spoke! I’ll write more about that later.) I’m a chronic note-taker at conferences and I like writing my notes up afterwards both for my own reflection and so I can share them with others. Here are the key platform and API takeaways I’ve pulled out of my notes from #APIdaysAU16.

Innovation

Innovation has been established as the main driver of economic change.

If people have to fill out an application to innovate, it’s not going to happen.

An innovation model for organisations based on the way ants achieve the colony’s goals:

Powerful central mission with loose structure
Maximise learning and sharing of learning
Constant experimentation
Freedom to look for the next horizon

Elon Musk: “Failure must be an option. If you’re not failing, you’re not experimenting enough.”

People in your organisation who think differently to others may well be key innovators. Don’t shut them out of the organisation.

Building Platforms

“Platform” is chiefly an idea to expose the core of your business in a way that can be used to compose new business ideas more easily, either by your own business or by others.
Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Simon Brown on ‘Agility and the Essence of Software Architecture’

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Graham Lea

I attended YOW! Sydney 2014 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Simon Brown (@simonbrown) spoke on “Agility and the essence of software architecture”. (Slides, Video)

He started with a great Dave Thomas quote:

“Big design up front is dumb.
No design up from is even dumber.”

Software Architecture Agility

He went on to tell us…

Delivering software in an agile way doesn’t guarantee that you’ll develop an agile architecture.

A good architecture enables agility.

He asked “Are monolithic architectures agile?” and proposed the answer, “Well, they could be. Just because you have to deploy it all at once doesn’t mean it’s not agile.”

Which naturally lead into a discussion of what does agility mean? Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: From Monoliths to Microservices at REA

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Graham Lea

Beth Skurrie (@bethesque) from DiUS, Evan Bottcher (@evanbottcher) from Thoughtworks and Jon Eaves (@joneaves) from REA group spoke about migrating realestate.com.au to a microservices architecture. (Slides, Video)

Why REA migrated to microservices

They started by talking about why they started doing microservices:

They had a long release cycle,
they were doing coupled releases,
with coupled rollbacks,
and they had a long defect fix time.

How do you get self-empowered teams to change the whole architecture?

However, there was a realisation that changing things at REA is a bit hard, partly because the teams are very self-empowered, they’re trusted, and they value their independence.

In order to convince teams that trying a new architecture was a good idea, they came up with a vision of where they wanted to go, which included: Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Troy Hunt on Security: ‘Hack Yourself First’

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Graham Lea

Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) spoke about “developers building up cyber-offence skills and proactively seeking out security vulnerabilities in their own websites before an attacker does”. (Slides, Video)

Hackers Are Security Experts

He started out with the obvious but perhaps too often forgotten observation: “You can’t defend your app unless you actually understand how the hacker’s technology works.”

He described how hackers only need to “get it right” once. Those developing and deploying the system need to get it right every time. (This is sometimes called the “Fortification Principle”. Apparently DARPA are working on evening out the playing field.)

Know Where Security Applies

He asked: If your company has a Twitter account, who chose the password? The marketing intern, or the Security team? Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Ed Kmett on ’Stop Treading Water: Learning to Learn’

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Graham Lea

Ed Kmett (@kmett) started by asking: “What is the cost of using the wrong solutions, integrated over your entire career?” (Slides, Video)

Then he revealed that the topic he’d chosen for the talk was…

“How to be a genius”.

He talked about a strategy for solving big problems described by famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (pictured):

Keep a bunch of your favourite problems in your head.
Every time you hear a new idea -> test it against one of your problems to see if it helps.
If it does, tell people about the breakthrough, and they’ll think you’re a genius.

Note that, in Feynman’s approach, genius is attributed not necessarily to those that come up with new ideas, but often to those who figure out where to apply them.

Developers and Researchers

He noted that developers are in the business of solving problems, searching for solutions, while researchers often have solutions, but are searching for the right problems to apply them to. As a developer, it can be good to keep abreast of what researchers are discovering in hope of finding a solution to one of your favourite problems.

Memory Retention

He discussed human memory retention and the need to revisit topics over time to retain knowledge about them. The brain remembers far better information that is used or revised repeatedly. Knowing this, you can hack the brain by intentionally repeating material that you want to remember. (For example, after going to a conference, you could write a blog about the important points from each talk you went to.)

He chatted a little bit about jargon, saying that if you’re going to use jargon, you should always be willing to explain what it means.

Image credit: Richard Phillips Feynman (1918 – 1988) (unknown)

Notes from YOW! 2014: Scott Shaw on ‘Avoiding Speedbumps on the Road to Microservices’

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Graham Lea

Scott Shaw (@scottwshaw), Head of Technology at Thoughtworks, spoke about “three of the biggest issues that microservice teams encounter”. (Slides)

Scott began by listing the following as “Basics”:

DDD
REST
Automation
Cloud
DevOps
Logging (aggregation and centralised architecture)
Monitoring
Resilience
Testing with consumer-driven contracts (also check out Pact)
Conway’s Law
Postel’s Law

He said, “If you don’t know about these things you should at least google them before you start doing micro services.”

The speed bumps he talked about were:

Data aggregation
Access Control & Security
Managing Change

Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Cameron Barrie on ‘Mobile at Warp Speed’

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Graham Lea

Cameron Barrie (@whalec), Managing Director and Principle Mobile Consultant at Bilue, spoke on “how to apply solid engineering practices to your mobile applications by understanding common mistakes made, and how to mitigate against the risks.” (Slides)

Mobile: Move Fast

He said it’s crucial to be able to move fast. If you’re not disrupting, you’re probably being disrupted.

You need to be honest about what moving fast means for your organisation: you can’t start with crappy code and processes and just start moving fast. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Mary Poppendieck on ‘The (Agile) Scaling Dilemma’

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Graham Lea

Mary Poppendieck (@mpoppendieck) spoke about scaling agile teams. (Slides)

She started by saying:

“There’s a big assumption that if agile is good, scaling agile must be good.”

Which made my jaw drop. I make that assumption. It had never occurred to me. Maybe agile techniques don’t work in a larger organisation?

She talked about four constraints on scaling: system complexity, organisational mindset, multi-team communication, and the time and energy of bright creative people. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2014: Gojko Adzic on ‘Make Impacts, Not Software’

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Graham Lea

Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic) spoke about the trouble of aligning strategy and the desired impacts of projects with the implementation of the software.

Palchinsky Principles

He spent some time discussing the Palchinsky principles, from Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky as documented in Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’.

The principles, intended to guide the development of innovations, are:

Variation: We should seek out new ideas and try new things.
Survivability: We should do things on a scale where failure is survivable. (This is why stories should be small. Not so that we can finish them in an iteration, but because they might be wrong.)
Selection: We should seek out feedback and learn from mistakes.