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.