The Devil of Distributed Development

There is gold in them thar hills!

Over the last six months, I have been working on a model for distributed, Agile Scrum development. This has been in response to on-going issues on software projects where development (front end, back-end and testing) is done in an offshore office. The issues have been around areas such as relationships, quality, communication, profitability and client satisfaction.

In addition to these common trouble hotspots, I work in a creative led Digital Agency which, due to the nature of the beast, presents even more challenges around establishing dedicated teams with the right skill-sets, consistent delivery methodologies, adhering to best practices and educating internal and external stakeholders into rationale behind them.  The last point around education is probably the biggest overarching challenge since if everyone knew what the right thing was to do, they would do it.

The best example of an education challenge is explaining the tax of distributed development. From a financial person's perspective distributed development is a no brainer.

"What? You mean one expensive onshore developer can fund almost five cheap offshore developers. These margins are massive! Well get on the phone to any country with a slightly f*cked economy and round up developers. Ideally it should be a country that has been oppressed by a communist regime guaranteeing optimal economic exploitation combined with a decent level of education. Yeehaaa! There is gold in them thar hills!" said fictitious Financial Person.

The Raspberry Pi Phenomenon

Originally Published on POSSIBLE.COM 
http://www.possible.com/perspectives/raspberry-pi

Growing up in the eighties was a very exciting time for a young boy with geeky inclinations. It was the birth of the computing age, when for the first time in history, you could own your very own console or PC for an affordable price and use it for games, word processing or, best of all, tinkering.

I first learned to program on a clunky looking IBM XT, and although my first few programs were largely rubbish, it was an enchanting experience making a machine do things that you tell it to do. My DIY tinkering wasn’t limited to just consoles and PCs. I remember playing with electronics, chemistry sets and Meccano kits that my father still had from his childhood. Making things out of bits of technology was the ultimate pastime for me, as it was for other likeminded geeks. My disposition hasn’t changed very much over the years, which is why the Raspberry Pi phenomenon is one that delights me and brings back fond childhood memories.

A better way to spend your commute

It was about two years ago while sitting on a London Underground tube firing small birds at towers, that I felt a strong pang of discontent. I’ve spent so much time, I thought whilst pulling back yet another bird in the catapult, to and from work playing time wasting apps like Angry Birds on my iPhone. How much time has this all amounted to over the last few years? I wondered. How could I use this time better? What could I do with this time instead?

Ideally it would be something off my Bucket List, but the Tube was severely limiting to many of my aspirations like swimming with dolphins or fire eating. 

Cloud Talk : A walk through the clouds

Thanks @syzygyuk for hosting the EPiServer meetup.

I've uploaded my slides from my talk on the Cloud to the Cloud:

The Cloud and Microsoft Windows Azure - A Walk through the clouds from Mark Rodseth

Angry Customer Twitter Campaign #Fail

Have you seen @lostbag

There comes a time in every customer's life when they are served injustice. This dish comes from all industries and in all forms and leaves its victims with raised blood pressure and the acidic burn of righteous indignation.  I recently was a victim and the perpetrator was Lufthansa Airlines WHO LOST MY BAG AND STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN ME MONEY BACK FOR IT!!!!!

(Breathe)

So, I went on a business trip and Lufthansa lost my bag on the return leg. After a painful journey back home and trying to get into my house (my bag had my keys and my wife was away) I began the process of trying to get my bag back. After a few weeks of unsuccessful bag finding I realised that I was in a Kafka'esque world of bizarre bureaucracy where no one knew anything and nothing made sense.

Living in the 21st Century with social networking and Apps, I realised I could challenge the status quo. I was an empowered consumer! Their inefficient call centres and surly staff could do nothing to stop what was to become the greatest social media campaign the airline industry had witnessed since that guy made a song about an airline which broke his guitar and went, like, totally viral on YouTube.

119 tweets and about two months later I had 10 followers. Sadly, my @LufthansaBad campaign never went viral and MY BAG IS STILL LOST AND THEY STILL HAVEN'T GIVEN ME MONEY BACK FOR IT!!!!!

What is Dev Ops and why is it important?

We have recently been recruiting for a new role in our company: that of a Developer Operations role, or Dev Ops. This initiative has mainly been inspired by other companies who have identified the need for a separation between Development and Operations, and the need for development skills in the operations sphere.

An example of an Application Life-cycle Process without development operations would look something like this.

The work flow would go as follows:

Application Hosting Types Demystified

As a technology consultant, there are certain conversations which seem to always get confused. One of these conversations is around hosting. There is a lot of variation in understanding and agreement of what types of hosting there are and what they are called. I've become quite confused by this myself.

This post is my attempt at providing a crystal clear definition of the types of hosting and what they mean to you (a user of hosting services) and the hosting provider.

I've broken down hosting into these the following categories: Onsite Servers, Offsite Servers, Offsite Virtualised Servers and Cloud Services.

Below is a matrix which lists these types of hosting and what aspects you have to look after (marked with ‘C’) and what parts the hosting provider looks after (marked with ‘H’).

Cloud recipe: Standing up an Enterprise, Solr Search Server on Azure in fifteen minutes

I recently saw some Twitter activity around a new on-line Community called VM Depot. From the website: "VM Depot is a community-driven catalogue of preconfigured operating systems, applications, and development stacks that can easily be deployed on Windows Azure."

One of the VMs which caught my eye was an Linux VM with a fully configured instance of Apache Solr 4: a lightening fast, enterprise Lucene search engine built by the Apache community.

In this Cloud Recipe we will deploy a fully configured Linux VM running Apache Solr and write some C# code to talk to it.

To complete this recipe, you need the following:

• A Windows Azure Subscription. 
• Node.JS and node package manager (NPM). This can be downloaded and installed here.

You should be able to complete this recipe in under 30 minutes.

The most important part of Agile is education. Ongoing education.

Agile is a widely adopted methodology across the software devevlopment industry. The two main frameworks of Agile are Scrum and Kanban, both similar variants to each other but which both address the same set of problems with software traditional waterfall development, such as slower and more problematic delivery.

They address these problems through more collaboration across disciplines to ensure decisions are made with all relevant viewpoints taken into account, more frequent release cycles to ensure early exposure of the product to the client and the ability to adapt and change course where necessary, and a commercial structure that understands the reality of complex, software development with many integration points by agreeing to either fixed price or fixed scope, but not both.