Holly, what can participants expect from your keynote at JavaLand?
I'll be sharing a historical perspective on cloud computing, some thoughts on where it might be going in the future, and also describing some of the things that can trip developers up when they switch to the cloud.
As a Java developer, what surprises you most about the cloud?
Like many of us, I used to struggle with the lack of permanence of things deployed in the cloud. On a desktop, logs stay where you put them, but on the cloud, logs tend to disappear along with the application that created them. It needs a new way of working, where we don't rely on local persistence.
You are technical lead at the only recently renamed IBM Cloud Garage London, that’s now shifting the focus to the cloud as well. How has the way of working changed along with the new technologies?
The cloud has changed how we work, so the Cloud Garage (formerly the Bluemix Garage) was set up both to take advantage of these new ways of working and deliver innovation faster, and to teach our clients how to work more effectively themselves. The cloud removes a lot of the cost with setting up and maintaining infrastructure, and that means businesses can respond more quickly to user needs. The flip side is that user expectations have also changed. Users want millisecond response times, zero downtime, and new features every week, and defect fixes within days. That means, as software developers, we need to ensure our processes can move fast, and also that the we develop with care and quality so that we know what we deliver is robust.
Can you tell us more about your work and the methods of the Garage?
The Garage method is something which came out of the work the Garage do with clients. It's got three main pillars; design thinking, lean startup, and extreme programming. Design thinking means we focus on the needs of users in order to identify the true problem. Lean startup means we focus on building just enough to validate business hypotheses. Extreme programming means using pair-programming and test-driven-development to ensure sustainability and rigour in what we deliver. All of these techniques are designed to shorten feedback cycles, both in the early product definition stages, and in the later development stages. The shorter the feedback cycle, the more able we are to ensure what we deliver is actually what the user wanted.
Speaking of innovation, what was in your opinion the biggest innovation of the last ten years?
We've had so many exciting innovations in the last years it's hard to narrow it down, but the two main ones for me have to do with accessibility of technology. The Raspberry Pi is so financially accessible that it has changed how we think about computers. That means we can take more risks in how we use it, and also more creative in where we put computers. I would never have put a laptop inside a ball and thrown it around a room. I also find the more recent explosion of machine learning services exciting. Statistics isn't my favourite subject, so I appreciate how it's now possible to 'do' machine learning without needing to dig too deeply into the underlying data manipulation. I get excited every time we do a project with Watson Visual Recognition in the Garage and we can see Watson learning to understand what's in pictures without me touching a single eigenvector.
Where and how do you get your best ideas?
I do all my big thinking in the shower, or while walking home from work. I know a lot of people work well on planes, too, and many tech products have been prototyped on planes. It's something about the removal of external distractions so that the unconscious can do its job. So often I've banged my head against a problem and then realised the solution as soon as I gave up and stepped away from my desk. We do try to take regular table-tennis breaks in the Garage, and they serve a similar mental function as a shower, just without all the water.
In the last years, the Java cosmos has undergone some major changes. What do you think, where will these changes lead and what can we expect to come?
It's been great to see Java modernising. I think we'll continue to see Java adapting to the requirements of the cloud, with more modularity and reduced footprint. There are also some interesting innovations on the horizon which take advantage of cloud capabilities, such as JIT as a Service. Higher up the stack, Microprofile has a lot to offer and I hope it will continue to be a source of innovation. I'm also loving the move towards open source, both with OpenJDK and also OpenJ9.
What do you think about the developments around EE4J?
I think it's really positive. There's so much community excitement about the move, and it's a chance to continue moving the enterprise specs forward and adapting them to the need of the community.
Anything you would like to add?
I'm looking forward to speaking at JavaLand. I hope the audience enjoy the talk as much as I've enjoyed preparing it.
Thank you, Holly, and have a great time at JavaLand!
