Innovation in Software

Yesterday I travelled to London and back to give a talk at Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Centre as part of their (Startup Essentials Meetup)[http://www.meetup.com/StartupEssentials/]. There were around 60 people in the room, and it felt slightly odd being back in a scene where my face was pretty much unknown. In Manchester, it seems every event I go to has at least a half dozen people I know.

My presentation was about what I’ve been helping clients do recently: firm up process around software delivery. Some of my clients don’t consider themselves to be software companies, but they are because they are delivering a significant chunk of their revenue through bespoke web applications. This poses a problem – they don’t know how to manage software development, and it can’t be managed the way you manage a sales team or a marketing strategy.

That’s where I come in. In my highly-opinionated, bombastic, but oh-so-cuddly way, I beat developers into submission with big sticks marked “Interface first” and “TDD” and so forth. I still write code sometimes but that’s because without doing so, how else can I appreciate architecture decisions and help developers make sure their decisions are aligning perfectly with business needs?

Below is the handout from last night.

I’ll provide explanatory notes if asked.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. It was a realisation that came to me whilst travelling back from London on the last train about how that room of new faces looked to me, compared to the Manchester/Leeds/Liverpool/Sheffield scene.

The simple reality is that the Northern scene is far more close-knit than I had realised before last night. I’m not saying the London scene isn’t “as good”, just that my brief dalliance with it last night made me realise a few things about the Northern scene. Specifically, the reason the Northern scene is so close-knit is probably social media.

Here’s what generally happens to somebody approaching the scene these days: they start out by joining the GeekUp list. Many unsubscribe after a few days, but some stick around. Quite a few make it along to a GeekUp near them. They meet other people, find that there is this wide community of people like them. Then the really weird thing happens: we start adding each other as friends on Facebook or as contacts on LinkedIn, and following each other on Twitter.

This does something strange. No longer do we act as a group of people who see each other once a month at a GeekUp, chat on a mailing list and catch up with each other occasionally: through Twitter and Facebook we effectively live and work together. I know out of the crowd I follow who is most into Wispa chocolate bars, who is having problems with their kids right now, who is reading what in the blogosphere and how things are going for people in general. This isn’t just business networking – we’re existing with each other.

As I reflected on this, I realised this meant that others probably knew me more than perhaps I’d realised. Followers yesterday would have watched me admit my tears as I saw my sister fly off to Canada with her family for two years, prepare for my talk last night, travel down, move across London, and exhaustingly travel back to Manchester before having a nightcap in my local pub in the early hours of the morning. What does that say to my potential customers? Well, it makes me pretty transparent for starters. I think that’s a good thing.

And here is where I think the North is going to get an advantage. As a community we’re small enough to pretty much know each other to a reasonable degree (although we’re going to have to think about (Dunbar’s number)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number] eventually), and yet because we are effectively working and living as one weird amorphous unit we have the ability to work together in ways unthinkable before social media.

I don’t know what the true consequences of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing if we allow it to bloom.