I’ve gone a bit meetup happy in the past two weeks. Last week I headed along to the Pivotal offices in London for the first London Cloud Foundry User Group meetup organised by one-time colleague Duncan Winn. First to speaker was another ex-Hursley employee, Glyn Normington. He gave a fascinating presentation in to the work that he and his colleagues are doing to replace the backend of Cloud Foundry’s Warden container with libcontainer (now split out from Docker). More on this over on Glyn’s blog.
Next up was London based Tammer Saleh, Director of Products at Pivotal Cloud Foundry Services. You can see the recording of this session from the Cloud Foundry Summit where they talk about the different models for stacking server instances. Finally, James Watters (Vice President of Product, Marketing and Ecosystem for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal) talked about the roadmap for Cloud Foundry in 2014 (including what’s out of scope). See James Bayer’s session from the summit for similar information.
The next meetup was my first at Agile South Coast. If nothing else, this gave me an excuse to have a nose at the new(ish) Ordnance Survey offices! I can’t claim to have been welcomed with open arms to the group (no-one even commented on the fact that they hadn’t seen me there before) but that’s fine by me. Most notable to me though was the fact that I was the only one there who wasn’t a scrum master by profession. Have developers lost interest in agile?
As one would expect with this audience, it wasn’t long before the post-it notes were out and we were collaborating on choosing subjects to discuss. My heart sunk when topics such as “should spikes be given points?” were selected but I was glad when the resounding response from the group seemed to be “it doesn’t really matter – whatever works for you”. Oh, and apparently PSM is more through than CSM but the latter gets more CV points! As I’m part way through reading Kanban in Action, the discussion on Scrum vs Agile in a BAU environment was interesting. I may yet make it to another of these meet ups.
The American style pizza and good selection of beer certainly helped make the trip into town worthwhile although I’ll not mistakenly pick up the 7.2% Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA in future!
Lastly, I returned to Developer South Coast for a session entitled “NoSQL vs SQL… Fight!”. Actually, there wasn’t much of a fight to be had as the speaker (Tony Rogerson) is an SQL Server DBA. He gave a thorough although halting coverage of the theory behind relational and NoSQL databases though which sadly meant he ran out of time before reaching the potentially more interesting topic of NewSQL databases.
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