Episode 130: Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #2

31/05/201731/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

Craig and Tony are roaming the conference floor again at Agile Australia in Melbourne talking to more interesting people in the Australian Agile community:

Sarah Pollard (Super Retail Group) on the talk by Margarette Purvis on “Creating a kaizen culture proves transformative for Food Bank For New York City” and Richard Weissel talk on “The Heart of Agile is in your Local Primary School” and in our organisations understanding what we need to change
Joanne Robertson (Tatts Group) on her first Agile conference, Luke Hohmann’s “Awesome Superproblems” keynote and Innovation Games book
Cathy Tang (Westpac) and the journey from event management to Agile and the Jennfier Frahm talk on “Enterprise agility through OCM and Agile”
Keynotes from Steve Krug and Luke Hohmann
Stewart Gleadow (Bilue) and the balance of design thinking, feasibility and business value in mobile development, Kate Darling robotics keynote

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Episode 129 – Agile Australia 2016 Vox Pop #1

31/05/201731/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and do a lap of the convention centre floor:

Keynotes from Peter Halacsy from Prezi, Jeff Smith from IBM and Kate Darling on robots and human interaction
Daniel Fajerman and Anubhav Berry from Australia Post and how they have dealt with business disruption, Cameron Gough talk “Scaling as the Tide Turns”
Daniel Ginn (Tatts Group), Daniel Pike and Brett Barber (LGIAsuper) on the digital transformation in their respective industries

The Agile Revolution-129 (13 minutes)

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Google Cloud Data Pipeline Patterns

05/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

At the recent YOW! Night in Brisbane (as well and Sydney and Melbourne), Lynn Langit, and independent software consultant and cloud expert presented “Google Cloud Data Pipeline Patterns”. It was great to meet her, here are my notes from the event:

Lynn Langit

Storage is so simple you don’t need to think about it – data lake architecture
Simply select how much memory and how many cores and it computes the cost
Google is quick because they are laying their own fibre and using their own infrastructure – less than a minute to spin up a VM, with no local data centre
Chrome has a RDP client – who knew
Google philosophy is you shouldn’t have to hire someone to manage the pricing
Bioinformatics is new to the cloud and they are in great need of engineers, Google is having a stab at a genomics API
BigQuery is NoOps, has been evolved to be a data warehouse, with no servers,
Big Relational if you just want SQL, Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing cloud database, Google has released Cloud Spanner, first database to truly meet CAP theory
BigQuery is column store, Cloud Spanner is OLTP
MQTT seems to be coming the defacto standard for IoT
IoT uses BigTable first and BigQuery second in Google reference architectures, because it is cheaper
Python is the emerging ML language for some reason
Teaching Kids Programming

Episode 128 – Elabor8-ing the Agile BA with Ryan McKergow

04/05/201704/05/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig chats with Ryan McKergow, a Business Analyst and Agile Consultant at Elabor8, at the YOW! West conference in Perth about being an Agile BA:

Business Analysts work with business people to understand the problem they want to solve and then work with developers to take those expectations and help them build the system
Writing stories and requirements is the boring part of the job – the exciting part is getting different people problem solving together
Paul Rayner’s YOW! West “EventStorming” keynote and Craig’s brainwave around Value Stream Mapping
Ryan’s talk “Don’t Be A Zombie Reading Your Stories…” at YOW! West
Story Kickoff – having a conversation at the start of a story (one of the three C’s), get the whole team in front of a whiteboard and drawing it out
Reduce the amount of time between analysis and development as much as possible…

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Agile Australia 2017 (AgileTODAY)

01/05/201727/12/2019 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

AgileTODAY is a publication associated with the Agile Australia conference. In the May 2017 edition I was mentioned in the thank-yous for helping Agile Australia behind the scenes as a reviewer and a shepherd (as well as in the picture for the Agile Australia dinner).