Last night I went to a BCS (British Computer Society) event on DevOps with the title "Fast Forward - Catch the Buzz!". The speakers were mainly from a company called Infinityworks. As was to be expected with anything to do with DevOps, this was a popular event with a good turn out and a diverse audience.
They presented 2 case studies on assignments they are working on for clients. In the first, they had taken over the management of a legacy website and its associated app to support engagement with a sports betting site. This they moved from dedicated hardware to a cloud platform, upgraded and then modified to produce different versions for new european markets, all in a matter of months. It was a great exposition on how modern tooling and automation, combined with agile and DevOps approaches can be used to do things quickly, safely and at scale. They also had interesting things to say about how elastic a cloud platform really is, if your loading is massively peaky on, say, 1 day per week. A key message which came across is how the culture of modern professional service providers is aligned to working intimately in genuine partnership with their customers.
The other example, discussed an unloved legacy application within the NHS, which had been delivered under a controversial national programme, had been taken in house, re-platformed and co-developed with them to make it more economical, performent and fitter for purpose using DevOps style techniques and some automation. The interesting thing being that the application did not need to be moved to a cloud platform to get these benefits and that suitable investment in tooling could achieve identical cloning and continuous integration. One of the salient lessons coming out of the exercise was that design decisions should favour the optimisation of operability over ease of development as applications spend more time in operation than they spend in development and this is where the value is delivered.
It was also good to hear afterwards, in discussion with some of the presenters that the NHS is genuinely engaging via patient workshops in understanding the "customer journey" and using insights to feed into product management of its key applications. This is huge sea change from the previous central government driven approach which mandated things for politically dogmatic reasons.
Anyway, today as I was still reflecting on last night, I opened my email Inbox to discover an invite from the iconoclastic people at "The Register" to a lecture enticingly called "Sex, AI, Robots and You". Tbe format being a talk, Q&A and networking event. As this obviously has some overlap with digital topics, wearable technology and (wo)man machine interfaces, I just had to investigate a little further. When I followed up on the speaker, it turns out that she is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and this is one of her research areas. Interestingly, she has started to hold hackathons called the SexTechHack. There were links from a review ( see: https://www.girlonthenet.com/2016/12/21/amazing-inventions-from-the-goldsmiths-sex-tech-hack/ ) to Youtube posted videos on presentations from the various groups at the hackathon. Overall they were surprisingly innovative and wide ranging. The content, however, only served to reinforce my thoughts discussed in my last posting on Post Digitalism. The key issues to address in the next generation of post digital technology are cultural, psychological and legal.
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