It has been over a week since I visited the Qcon conference in London. It was a great experience that gave me lots of new thoughts and inspiration.
Here are my Top Quotes and Thoughts over the three days of sessions:
If you tie a quote or idea to a session, I’ll tag you a star!
A while ago I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a project called “Many Eyes” that is hosted (and sponsored?) by IBM alphaware. That project was featured on IT Conversations. Not only the title of the project, but also the goal, reminded me a lot of the article that I got published during the last year of my Software Engineering study. The article was called “So many users, so many perspectives, sharing glasses and throwing remote controls”. It was about visualizing (dynamic) datasets and sharing the visualisations (using the glasses metaphor) with other online users, to aid collaboration between them.
The Many Eyes project does something similar: upload a (static) dataset (a text, or excel sheet, …) and choose a kind of graph to analyse the data. Then you can share this graph with others, publish it, and discuss it online.
The similarities in name and goal struck me…
I wonder if you can hook up some cloud processing on big datasets and then presenting the results with Many Eyes…
Resources:
Since I read in “The Myths of Innovation” that one way to generate new ideas is to look at other fields, I often try to relate new concepts to computer science and software. It is always fun to run into a new metaphor for software development.
Triggered by a newscast of social innovations I started to compare recent developments in the food industry with the software business.
There is a trend from industrial food towards ‘organic foods’. Foods that are grown slowly, without pesticides, on local farms, where animals are treated well.
People are getting more conscious about the food they are eating. And what is more: conscious food consumers are willing to pay more for food that they know is better for the body and environment. See the growth rate of the Whole Food Market in the States. People want more information about what they are eating: how is it grown, where does it come from, can I see a picture of the farm? Information technology makes this possible.
There is a market for artisan foods.
Back to the software. If we consider the big industry projects that people are ‘just using, for instance office and windows. You can question whether this is good software that makes you happy, makes you feel healthy. It is the one size fits all kind of software, made by big corporations you do not know much about, and where you, as a customer, are one of thousands.
The source code is hidden and stored in big vaults. As a consumer, you ask yourself: Is the code well maintained? Is it treated well? Is it written in a healthy environment? You simply cannot tell.
The new style of software, lets call it organic software, is coming from single developers, small companies and little social networks.
The development is out in the open and gives the consumers insight on where it comes from.
The source code is treated well, at least you can see how well it is taken care of. The organic software is put into freely accessible storage and published via tools such as fisheye to make their whole history available and shows the activity related to that code. No hidden additives!
These software projects grow organically, putting in features only when there is a demand for it: new releases are discussed in open communities. This is grass fed software, as it lives in the open field! The automatic builds with unit tests nurture the code base continuously.
Here comes the artisan software: made with joy and care!
