AI Isn’t Magic — It’s a Stack

Artificial Intelligence. Two words that trigger everything from excited coffee chats with my mates to boardroom FOMO to outright apocalyptic fear. AI has dominated every conversation I’ve had for the last six months. Everyone wants a slice of it. It shows up in product roadmaps, vendor decks, job specs, and shareholder updates. But when I scratched beneath the surface, I found a messy pile of buzzwords and vague ambition.

I don’t know about you, but I like simple. So here is my attempt to make AI simple.

If you’re leading digital delivery, managing platforms, or just trying to figure out what AI means for your portfolio, this is your practical intro. There are buzzwords, but I explain them. There is no hype because I don’t have to impress anybody. It is just a clear look at how AI is structured, what matters now, and what’s coming.

Continue reading

Make BlackOps development the Corporate Standard – Embrace Microservices

Contrary to how they are perceived in the media as lumbering dinosaurs, most large organisations have loads of clever people and good ideas.The trouble is these organisations can’t deliver against the ideas. The answer is not “Blue Sky” R&D departments or “BlackOps” teams. The answer is to make the BlackOps approach standard; create an innovation platform built from microservices with new services deployed swiftly into production.
Continue reading

Test driven architecture – use your tests to inform architecture

As test-loving development teams, we are all painfully aware of the complexity of getting an application into the zen state of development – quick, test-driven red/green feedback for developers, software designs that are functionally on-the-money from a test-led, “outside-in” approach (from BDD), and a nigh on seamless continuous delivery process as a result. Very few teams achieve this, and those that do are frequently gifted a green-field project in which to engender them.

As test-savvy teams, when tests start to hamper the release process, we often assume our approach to testing needs an overhaul, but that might not be the case. Here we look at the role of architecture in test-driven applications, and examine whether we should listen to our tests to examine our macro design.
Continue reading

Scale and Performance Suggestions for High Usage Websites

I work at the BBC and scale and performance is a big deal. After talking to Mark Gledhill (one of the Senior Software Engineers) and Andy Macinnes (head of ops) I put together some notes on scale and performance. It isn’t rocket science; just good common sense.

The general message is to avoid unnecessary repetition. If you’re a scalability/performance problem then you could explore …
Continue reading