Innovation in Software

Over the last couple of weeks I have spent more time than usual on the road. I have met some extraordinary people, heard some superb ideas and eaten some truly lousy food.

My notes run long, and would be hard to write up and do justice. I thought instead I’d offer some quick points and revisit the subject areas in depth at a later stage:

• Amazon consider themselves very much a technology business and their event at the British Museum convinced me that even if their tools are not the future of computer architecture, their thinking is: assume everything fails all the time; build resilience, not just redundancy; scaling is something you need to think about now, not when it’s too late; being able to pay for computing at a transactional level might feel 1960s, but who cares if it reduces capital outlay up-front?
• The Hadoop project along with MapReduce and Hive are likely going to be amongst the most important technologies in the next few years. They will do to the back-end operations of the web what Ajax did to front-end user interfaces. Start getting familiar with how they can be of use to you.
• Instead of carrying a phone, a laptop, a 3G dongle, power adapters, and all my other paraphernalia, I have recently resorted to nothing more than an iPhone and sometimes a notepad with pens. Even with an iPhone charger in the pocket, this is the future. Trust me, netbooks are so dead when people work out the right way to go to a conference even if they go for an Android device instead of an iPhone.
• The security guards at Longsight train depot are awesome. Don’t ask how I found out, but the guys at Alstom Transport get to play with the biggest kit going, and are bloody nice people to boot, especially regarding cough lost property.
• Everybody says SELinux is a pain in the backside to configure. Once you spend some time working it out, it’s actually not that awful – you just need patience and a plan.
• The whole “newspapers are dying thing” is getting old. It’s simple: this is a bubble that is bursting, just like the dot.com bubble did 10 years ago. It might be a bubble that took nearly 200 years to get here, but burst it will. News needs to move to a “post-industrial” model, and from what I can see journalists are amongst the first to get this. Interesting times.
• I’ve found when panicking about issues on deadlines that Oblique Strategies really helps. There is an iPhone app if you want it.
• Freedoma are having their launch party on the 13th (i.e. on Wednesday night) at Dough in the Northern Quarter. Just e-mail party [at] freedoma.com if you want to go along. Sounds like fun, and I’m trying hard to get out of a prior double-booking to make it.
• Strangest tweet of the last fortnight by me: “Drinking G&T from a can. This is what the Orient Express would be like if run by industrial manufacturers of sex toys.”

Oh, and Kagtum is getting a kick in the pants. All I’ll say now is that there are clues as to what I’m doing in the above notes – watch this space.

Last night Sarah Hartley announced the closure of the Mancunian Way blog that I’ve been contributing to for a couple of years now.

Sarah explains on her own blog that she is on to new adventures.

I have slightly mixed emotions about this myself. I won’t miss the mild panic when Sarah’s email goes around asking for a blog of the week and I have to think smartly as I realise I haven’t contributed in a while, but that’s about the only thing I’ll miss.

The highlight for me will almost certainly be the the write-up I did for the Tony Wilson Experience last Summer, which the council liked so much they shoved it in their own press section and asked for permission afterwards. Always nice to have your writing enjoyed by an audience, and the feedback I got from the MEN blogs in particular was fantastic.

I also managed to cover b.tween, the anniversary of the Baby, several Northern Startup events, and managed to riff about things I thought of as interesting and useful.

So, I will miss it, quite a bit. A significant part of my online identity was “blogs for the MEN”, however it gives a little more space and time for other things in my writing life, and I’m off to do some new writing adventures of my own – all will be announced soon.

I will also watch with interest what the MEN decide to do in future post-Sarah. I don’t know of another regional newspaper in the UK that has as well developed a blog section (and for that Sarah should definitely be commended), so it would be a huge shame for it to lose momentum now. I have no idea what comes next over there, my only contact at MEN was Sarah.

Good luck to Sarah, those of you finding me via that blog please stay tuned for my next projects, and let me just say: The blog is dead. Long live the blog.