Simon Brown

Cloud for Schools Pilot - 2

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:25:00 GMT

I ran session 2 yesterday where I introduced the students to looping and conditional statements. As with most things in IT, there are many ways to solve the same problem and, with that in mind, I started off by introducing Ruby's elegant syntax for looping.

100.times {
  puts "Hello again!"
}

Conscious that some of the students are also learning Python at school, we then looked at the more familiar "for" loop that you'll find in most other imperative languages.

for i in (1..100)
  puts i
end

To put all of this into practice, I asked the students to write a program that added all of the numbers between 1 and 100, printing the answer at the end. Although we'd covered some basic arithmetic operators, variables and looping this exercise took slightly longer than I had estimated. From a technical perspective they had all of the programming elements needed to solve the problem but the thing that almost everybody struggled with initially was the logic needed. Once we'd walked through the process though, the program came together quite quickly.

answer = 0

for i in (1..100)
  answer = answer + i
end

puts answer

The final topic was conditional statements and after a quick demo of what an "if" looks like, I asked the students to modify their programs to only add up the even numbers between 1 and 100. Again, it took a little while to figure out the logic needed and we did a quick maths detour through division with whole numbers and remainders. I'll probably tell them about "Integer.even?" next time when we talk about classes. ;-)

answer = 0

for i in (1..100)
  if i % 2 == 0
    answer = answer + i
  end
end

puts answer

A really interesting second session and the thing that struck me most was that although the technical aspects of programming are easy to learn, getting your head around the logic needed to solve the problems is where the real complexity often is.

Cloud for Schools Pilot - 1

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:24:00 GMT

I'm helping with the "Cloud for Schools Pilot" that has been organised by Julian Box of Calligo, which is a series of approximately 12 after school sessions where a small number of local software developers are teaching the students how to get started with computer programming. There's also a twist though. Since cloud computing is changing the way that we build software systems, the students will also gain some experience in this area too. As an ex-Hautlieu student, I'm really pleased to be running the sessions at Hautlieu and I'll be blogging about the sessions so that you can see what we're up to.

Since this is a pilot, we've all been given some flexibility as to what we teach the students, although the basic structure of the 12 weeks is the same; structured learning related to the basic programming fundamentals through to unstructured sessions where each student will be writing computer programs on their own. There's also a competitive element between the schools, but more about that later.

So then, what am I doing and what did we cover in session 1? Given my vast Java experience, I've decided to teach the students Ruby! Here's why:

It's free.
The installation is trivial; on Microsoft Windows we only need Ruby and Notepad.
The language is easy to get going with; we just write code and run it. No additional compilation steps are needed and there's no boilerplate code to write (e.g. public static void main, etc).
It's supported by the cloud environment we'll be using in later sessions.
It gives *me* a good reason to finally learn Ruby myself.

Each session is only an hour long and, as you'll see from the slides, we covered a number of basics including strings, numbers, variables, printing stuff to the screen and getting input from the keyboard. The final challenge I set during the session was to write a program that asks for your name and then says hello back. It's only a two line program but remember that we *are* starting from scratch here.

name = gets
puts "Hello " + name

Of course, this unsurprisingly ended up turning into something like the following! And that's all part of the fun. :-)

puts "Please enter your name:"
name = gets
puts "Hello " + name + " you are a legend!"

I'll be adding to my blog and the slides as we progress through the school summer term.

Questions for Digital Jersey Limited

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:53:29 GMT

Digital Jersey is running Digital Jersey Limited - Q&A on the 12th of April about the formation of the new industry body. Here are my initial questions, based upon my own experience of the local IT industry and the Digital Jersey 2011 ICT Survey - Full Results. We'll all see the benefits if Digital Jersey Limited is successful, but we do need to ensure that whatever is being promoted is based upon firm foundations.

1. Key strengths?

One of the questions in the Digital Jersey survey asked "What are the key strengths of the ICT sector in Jersey?", with the answers being varied and conflicting. In order to successfully promote Jersey's IT industry, Digital Jersey Limited needs to have a concrete view of what the key strengths are.

Question for Digital Jersey Limited: What are Jersey's key strengths in the IT industry and, if these are currently unknown, how will you determine what they are?

2. External promotion vs inward investment?

I think all of the discussion about Jersey's IT industry is great but we may be ignoring the elephant in the room when it comes to price and quality of service. This answer from the "What are the key strengths of the ICT sector in Jersey?" survey question mirrors some of my own experience of what I've seen in Jersey over the past 3+ years since moving back from working in London's IT industry.

I find IT providers in Jersey to be sub standard to UK providers that I have worked with at my previous firms in the UK. The breadth and depth of experience is just not there. Very expensive, prohibitively so, and against UK standards customer service very poor due to the lack of choice of alternative providers.

To put this in context, I've seen a number of local software development projects that have been delivered late and over budget, with the resulting quality being poor. Given the lack of local choice and the often insular thinking, this seems to be accepted as the norm by many people and there's a limited incentive to improve. Of course, this isn't the case across the whole of the local IT industry but it is a real issue and I know of companies that have outsourced to the UK for exactly this reason. Promotion is important, but so is having a solid and competitive starting point.

Question for Digital Jersey Limited: Is Digital Jersey Limited only about external promotion or will it also look at inward investment?

An interview with InfoQ about the state of software architecture

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:23:00 GMT

Following my recent blog entry called The frustrated architect, InfoQ.com have published a brief interview with me about the current state of software architecture. You can find the interview at Frustration with the Role and Purpose of Architects on Software Projects.

The interview is also available in Japanese.

Using Evernote in training courses

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:17:15 GMT

Last year I started using Evernote to create a digital alternative to the printed slide packs that you typically get when you attend a training course. There are a number of reasons for doing this and instead of repeating them, I'll refer you to the blog entry that I wrote last year entitled Using Evernote for training courses.

This week I had the pleasure of attending David Laribee's excellent Leading Lean/Agile Teams training course in New York and this provided a good opportunity to see how Evernote works when you're on the receiving end of training. I set up the initial Evernote notebook as usual (one note per slide, created using AppleScript) and then added to it throughout the course. Here are some screenshots so that you can see what sort of stuff ended up being captured in my notebook.

Everything from my own notes about each slide through to PDFs, web clippings and photos taken after the exercises have been included to create a really rich collection of content related to *my* experience of the training course. Oh, and beforehand, the notebook also included the logistical details of the course, street maps, the New York subway map, flight details, hotel details, etc.

If you're attending a training course or conference, give Evernote a whirl because it excels at capturing stuff that your standard notebook just can't.

Software Architecture for Developers - the book

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:05:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that "Software Architecture for Developers" the book is in-progress and available for purchase as an ebook through Leanpub. In a nutshell, Leanpub is a service that allows you to self-publish your book iteratively and incrementally, which is exactly what I'll be doing over the coming months.

The agile and software craftsmanship movements are helping to push up the quality of the software systems that we build, which is excellent. Together they are helping us to write better software that better meets the needs of the business while carefully managing time and budgetary constraints. But there's still more we can do because even a small amount of software architecture can help prevent many of the problems that projects face. Successful software projects aren't just about good code and sometimes you need to step away from the IDE for a few moments to see the bigger picture.

This book is about that bigger picture and its role in delivering better software. It's a collection of essays that together form a practical and pragmatic guide to software architecture, with the overall goal being to demystify what it means to be a software architect and provide guidance on how to do software architecture effectively.

The book is aimed at software developers that want to learn more about software architecture as well as those that are new to the role. It fills the gap between software development and high-level architecture that probably seems a little "enterprisey" for most developers.

You can buy it now as an book in PDF, ePUB and MOBI formats, with all future updates being free of charge. A sample is available to download. Stay tuned for updates about new content and don't forget I also offer a 2-day training course that covers the same material in a more practical way.

Speaking about IT on an international stage?

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:32:54 GMT

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?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:25:24 GMT

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

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:53:00 GMT

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

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:16:40 GMT

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.