AJ Bell at the Manchester Tech Festival

My experience of the Manchester Tech Festival was very informative, thought-provoking and enlightening. To see the tech community put together such a well-attended event not only illustrates the willingness to evangelize the latest technological trends, but also the increased desire to break into tech from new entrants.

To kick off the week, Amy Pridding's presentation on life as a UX apprentice illustrates how open we are as an organization to give new entrants the chance to break into tech, and provide that vital professional experience needed to start a career in technology.

Lee Summerfield's talk on UX at AJ Bell illustrates how far we've come as a business in the UX space, and the fantastic team we've built to cater for UX needs across the business.

His phrase "think big: go small" certainly resonates with the software agile methodology of delivering customer requirements in small, testable and deployable units.

Then came the talk on the psychological triggers that are employed by developers to get people using their apps; how specific design elements and interactions influence users' behaviour, including the use of "compelling triggers" to get users to buy into the product.

This certainly provided sufficient fuel for the panel debate that followed. It was interesting to see that the crowd shared similar views on a need for increased awareness of the side effects of rapid digitalization and social media, as well as the need for increased government oversight to better regulate the industry.

Another polarizing debate was the discussion on "Should DevOps Teams Exist", with opponents proposing that the term be defined as a culture rather than a team or role. My personal view on this is that it depends on the organization – its size, the maturity of its infrastructure and the experience and skill of its employees.

To define DevOps only as a culture will require at least 90% of our applications to be hosted in the cloud, with their infrastructure defined as code. Furthermore, engineers will have to upskill in the various platform technologies as a mandatory requirement.

For our organization, it should exist both as a culture and a team, with the team delivering initial setups, specialized requirements, and cross-cutting solutions across the other tech teams, while other engineers adopt the culture (both DevOps and DevSecOps), and drive requirements from the software's perspective. This will require increased sensitization via blog posts, tech briefings and codes of practice to gradually improve knowledge and awareness.

In some of the discussions, it was useful to see that we already did implement many of the aspects that were being discussed – notably the talk on Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD, using similar tools to the ones we use (AWS CDK and Jenkins) – as well as the adoption of various cyber security practices. This certainly highlights the progress we've made over the years, and gives assurance on the direction we are taking as a tech company.

Going into the software architecture side of things, the discussion on 'How to Transition from Monoliths to Microservices' pointed out a key technique that most articles I have read on the subject fail to mention.

This involves the setup of an intermediary 'Modular Monolith' to help model the appropriate domain seams which will serve as boundaries for the future microservices. Setting up microservices also requires robust continuous delivery practices and the use of bounded context mapping to identify the domain boundaries. The talk went on to highlight the fact that in some cases, a well-structured 'Modular Monolith' could be as good as a set of microservices. The London Software Craftsmanship's events page, which goes further into some of these practices, is highly recommended.

The final theme focused on the cloud, its data and the ever-looming security threat that it poses. The talks on big data left an overall appreciation of the challenges faced by data engineers when mining useful information while ensuring 100% accuracy, thereby providing seamless operations on critical systems such as airport landings and tram networks.

And the talk on 'Spurious Correlation' (worth a google) left attendees rather amused as to how data mining revealed two seemingly unrelated products, services or events having a direct influence on one another.

Overall, the need for continuous security awareness and data privacy will always be a recurring theme in this rapidly-evolving digital age.

To conclude with this quote from one of the presenters,

Security security security... Expect failures. Don't trust users. Keep data private. Assume anywhere you send data is public. Security is simplicity.

By Neba, Engineer III