In the Guardian development team we continually talk about the naturally increasing complexity of our codebase — there are always new features to add, so it always gets more complex. On the hardware side, a couple of articles recently ([1], [2]) have pointed out the ubiquity of smartphones, and how a business’s IT function might … Continue reading
A couple of things happened recently bringing home something that I’ve found increasingly important: technology decisions are social. Social decisions in software architecture The other day in conversation about team structures the Guardian’s lead software architect, Mat Wall, mentioned that architecture is social. This is a good, and often disregarded, observation. In that context he … Continue reading
We think software is soft, but that isn’t always true. I was speaking recently to a friend with a large system he was struggling to scale. I was saying while the Guardian does have to spend tangible time (and sometimes money) to ensure its systems scale, we do tend to deal with the issues successfully. … Continue reading
In the first part of this post I considered four ways a technology roadmap might come about. I dubbed them the bureaucratic, the defensive, the directive and the aligned. The aligned roadmap in particular is the ideal way to deliver the overarching organisational goal. Now in this post I’m going to suggest that… Maybe you … Continue reading
This is a post in two parts, inspired by a recent conversation with a colleague. In this part I’ll set out what a technology roadmap is and circumstances in which it would be useful. In the next part I’ll set out why it might be best to go without. Introduction Let’s first make sure we … Continue reading
I’m amazed and disappointed that it’s still acceptable for people who run major companies to show wilful ignorance of technology. And I don’t mean what firewalls do or how to get wifi working on your laptop. I mean what it means to the companies they run, how it impacts their people and their customers, and … Continue reading
Today I attended the launch of something weird and wonderful: a new musical instrument, the Eigenharp. And although this is a hardware device the event, and the run up to it, brought to mind the launch of our own Open Platform six months ago. By seeing some commonalities between the two it gave me a … Continue reading
A quick thanks to the folks at ProgrammableWeb for making my Guardian Tag Bubbles app their Mashup of the Day. It was terrific to see it up there with the likes of the imaginative The Sheep Market and Again But Slower — to pick just two at random.
I’ve spent a while learning JavaFX and developing an application which is now live. I’ve written about the application itself over on the Guardian’s Open Platform blog, because it makes use of the Open Platform’s Content API. But in this blog post I want to write less about the application and more about my experiences … Continue reading
[I don't usually post very technical material here, and apologies if you're after higher level discussion, but it seemed the most appropriate place for this.] I was quite thrilled last night to have solved a really frustrating bug in a piece of open source software. First the background, then the problem and finally, for the … Continue reading
