Simon Brown

Speaking about IT on an international stage?

I've added a page on itjersey.com where I've started pulling together a list of people that are speaking about IT on an international stage. Currently the list is Aonghus Fraser and myself but I'm sure there are more. If you're based in Jersey/Guernsey and are speaking at a conference/event/etc off-island, please drop me a line and I'll add you to the list at http://www.itjersey.com/speaking/.

As I've said before, we need to start showing the world what we have to offer.

Jersey has an IT industry?

There's been a lot of discussion in Jersey recently about growing the local IT industry through things like Gigabit Jersey and improving the way in which ICT is taught in schools. Specifically, there's also been discussion about how to attract IT businesses and local IT graduates back to the island. This is all excellent of course, but it's worth stepping back for a second.

The external view of Jersey's IT industry

For those that don't know me; I graduated in 1996, worked in London for around 12 years and moved back to Jersey towards the end of 2008. I'd looked at moving back to Jersey prior to this point but the thing that stopped me was that, from an external perspective, I couldn't see that Jersey *had* an IT industry. For example, the local recruitment companies didn't seem to understand much about IT and most of the IT consulting companies that I contacted (through their websites) didn't even respond with an acknowledgement. Even now, it's relatively hard to find evidence of the local IT industry and this isn't helped by Google presenting search results for "New Jersey" unless you qualify your search appropriately. Try it ... see what you can find out about local IT through Google.

I regularly travel around Europe to speak at software development conferences or teach people how to build better software and you'd be surprised how often people ask me whether Jersey really has an IT industry and whether I'm it. Seriously. :-/

Do you know what's happening locally?

Now that I've been living and working back in Jersey for 3+ years, I have a fair idea of what's going on from an IT perspective but it's not been easy. And if it's not easy for somebody living here to understand what the local IT industry looks like, is it fair to assume that the rest of the world understands what we have to offer?

Things are changing though and we now have BCS Jersey and Digital Jersey building and driving the local community. I've also recently made some updates to itjersey.com and one of the reasons that I created the site in the first place was so that *I* could keep up to date with what was happening locally. More and more people involved in the local IT industry have been creating blogs and jumping on Twitter over the past few years, which is great. But on the flip side, we've been having some excellent discussions on (for example) the Digital Jersey LinkedIn Group but they're more or less hidden from public view, which I think is a shame. Again, it's not helping get across the fact that Jersey does have an IT industry.

Getting the word out

So then, how can we better publicise that Jersey has an IT industry? As a starting point, we need to get out there and talk about what we do. More blogging and speaking in public will help, as will having an industry representative body (as discussed in the Digital Jersey ICT 2011 survey).

Growing the local IT industry is important for our future, but we need to show the world that we *have* an IT industry; particularly if we want to attract businesses, IT professionals and school-leavers to Jersey rather than the Silicon Roundabout.

itjersey.com updates

I've made a number of updates to itjersey.com over the past few days and here's a quick summary¹.

I've added a community page that lists the most active local IT communities.
I've added an events page where you'll find a list of local IT related events.
I've added a "speaking" page where you'll find a list of international events in which local speakers are taking part.
I've fixed the RSS feed, which allows you to subscribe to all of the local blogs in one place.
I've improved the "following" page so you can see exactly who itjersey.com is following.
I've improved the look and feel of the site, using profile information from Twitter accounts where possible.
I've added a search facility that will allow you to search across all of the blog entries that are aggregated.

I hope you find the updates useful and please do let me know if there's anything specific you'd like to see added. And if there's anybody missing from the site, again, please let me know.

¹ For those of you interested in the technology behind the site; it's a combination of Java, the ROME library, twitter4j and Apache Lucene running on Apache Tomcat and Linux. And, depending on your definition, it's on "the cloud". ;-)

Software development for school-leavers

There's a thread on the Digital Jersey LinkedIn group called With Jersey looking to grow the technology industries - how good is technology education in the islands schools? What could be done to improve it? with some interesting thoughts on how the current ICT curriculum can be improved. Although I'm personally not sure about what the current curriculum includes and the term "ICT" is relatively broad, here are my thoughts on what I would like to see from school-leavers (not graduates) with relation to software development.

An understanding of basic computer science concepts; data types, data structures, concurrency, etc.
An understanding of the different approaches to building software systems; object-oriented, functional, service-oriented, etc.
Some basic hands-on experience in at least one of the current mainstream computer programming languages (e.g. Java, C#, Ruby, etc).
Some basic knowledge of data storage approaches; such as relational databases, NoSQL stores, etc.
Some basic hands-on experience of how to put together a website, using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
An awareness of different types of architectures, from desktop and client server through to distributed systems and cloud.
An awareness of software development in the real world, including best of breed techniques practiced by software teams today (e.g. automated testing, continuous integration, etc).
An awareness that there are large bodies of work out there that aim to improve the way that people build and communicate software designs such as design patterns, UML, etc.
An awareness that there are many different ways to structure software projects; from traditional waterfall techniques through to others that are more iterative, incremental and agile in nature.
An understanding that, while software development *is* technical, the human and business aspects are hugely important.

At school-leaver level, I'd like to see a good amount of breadth rather than depth in any one area. And, of course, you'd need to factor in the other areas of ICT such as hardware, networks, business intelligence, etc.

It's worth pointing out here that some schools do offer a number of IT related courses at GSCE level. For example, Hautlieu School in Jersey is offering "GCSE Computing" and "GCSE ICT" so it's worth bearing this in mind when reading the various articles in the press about the backlash about the generalist "ICT" courses.

That said though, put simply, we will have failed if our school-leavers come out of education thinking that software development is just about programming.

Speaking engagements in 2012

I'm pleased to say that I'll be speaking at a number of software development events in 2012 across Europe, including...

	QCon London 2012 I'm running a 1-day tutorial called Are you a software architect? that explores the role of the software architect and its importance in all types of software projects.
	DevWeek 2012 I'm presenting an extended version of my The Frustrated Architect talk along with a 1-day post-conference workshop called Effective Sketches that focusses on how to communicate the architecture of your software using a simple collection of effective sketches.
	Skills Matter "in the brain" I'm running an "in the brain" session called How much up front design is "just enough"? that will be looking at the vague gap between waterfall's "big up front design" and agile's "emergent design".
	GOTO Copenhagen 2012 I'm hosting the software architecture track and presenting a session called Master-builder; the original generalising specialist? that looks at the software architecture role in modern software development.
	GOTO Amsterdam 2012 I'm repeating my Master-builder; the original generalising specialist? talk in Amsterdam.

I'll post any further updates to my blog and my speaking page. And if you can't be there, slides from my past presentations are available to download and/or view online and some videos are also available.