Build IT Right 2020

Build IT Right online conference showcases the Dev community in the North East

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 08:00:00 +0000

The Build IT Right conference was scheduled for March 2020, but went ahead in a virtual format on 12 November due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dubbed Build IT Right 2.0 the online offering welcomed over 200 software professionals across the day with many more taking advantage of the on-demand option, having access to over 15 hours of content on replay.

Keynotes came from Sam Newman, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon and Liz Keogh, complimented by 23 breakout sessions from our regional and international speakers (and a guest appearance from Ade-Lee’s dog). A ‘Devs against Covid-19’ panel highlighted the huge contribution that the North East has made creating software to aid organisations, and the general public during the crisis. The hugely popular lighting talks returned for a second year with Ryan Greenhall from Gousto’s voted the most popular.

Fiona Hobbs, CTO from Opencast Software who is part of the organising committee, said: “Build IT Right is for ‘do-ers’ in the North East who are passionate about software development. It’s aimed at those at the coal-face of technology – the programmers and coders, the developers, testers and solution architects. After a hugely popular 2019 event, we were confident the region’s tech sector is worth showcasing at a conference”

“The conference supports and empowers the developer community within the region and provides delegates with a library of resources to expand their knowledge and be inspired by emerging trends, along with networking with software professionals they may not have seen since pre-pandemic!”

The conference had four tracks: Architecture, Dev Process; Dev Ops and UX and UR. Highlights included talks from Matthew Clark, Head of Architecture, BBC Digital; a session from the team at NHS BSA, and Hannah Foxwell from VMWare.

Build IT Right 2.0

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:00:00 +0000

Build IT Right 2.0

Having spent the past year preparing for the conference with our committee, speakers, exhibitors and event partners, we’ve taken the decision to move from ‘IRL’ to Virtual for BITR 2020, as the experience and safety of our community and everyone involved in the event continues to be our top priority. With that in mind we are re-writing the script and seizing the opportunity to deliver an all-improved BITR 2.0.

We are building a better conference for our attendees including:

Exciting New Keynotes & Panel Speakers (To be announced soon!)
Additional tracks added to highlight ‘Devs in the fight against Covid-19’
Personalised swag bags delivered to your office/home
12 months of replay to catch up on sessions you missed

The call for papers is now open again to submit your new papers before the deadline on 15th September. Submit here.

We would like to thank everyone who helps to make the event possible and recognise that the BITR Conference does not happen without your support. The conversations we have had over the recent months have proven how lucky we all are to be part of this North East Community.

EVENT POSTPONEMENT

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 08:00:00 +0000

EVENT POSTPONEMENT:
Build IT Right 26 March

We have taken the difficult decision to postpone the upcoming Build IT Right conference in light of the global impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are pleased to announce the conference will now be held on 12th November 2020.

The health and well-being of the Build IT Right community is our main priority and given the increasing number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK, we considered it inappropriate and unwise to hold such a gathering in a confined setting. The opportunity to meet and interact with the software community is at the heart of Build IT Right and whilst disappointing, we feel it is the right decision to postpone in order maintain the quality of the conference, whilst giving you enough notice to plan.

We’re aiming to put on the same great speakers, but you might notice a slight change in line-up but you’ll be the first to know.

All conference passes will be automatically transferred to the new date. If you are unable to make the new date please contact bitrconference@gmail.com

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. We’re looking forward to welcoming our speakers, supporters and community to the event in the autumn.

Meet the speaker: Chris Howe-Jones

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 08:00:00 +0000

The Build IT Right meet the speaker series caught up with Chris Howe-Jones. Ahead of his talk, we spoke to Chris about his own experiences and what the future holds…

What is your current role?

That’s a harder question to answer than you might think! Five years ago I left my role as CTO of Opencast to start my own independent IT Consultancy, DevCycle. Since then I’ve worked with many clients from international organisations to start ups, mainly helping them with Software Development and Architecture with a bit of agile/lean coaching thrown in.

What does Building IT Right mean to you?

Building IT Right means understanding which small decisions have large impacts and which large decisions can’t be ignored. I am a strong advocate of a number of development practices and approaches that I think are useful but there’s no one size fits all ‘silver bullet’. That’s one of the reasons I’m a consultant.

Why should Build IT Right visitors attend your talk?

I hope that my talk ‘Prerequisites for Evolutionary Architecture’ will have a message for everyone involved in Software Development from business focused-delivery people through user experience experts to experienced software architects, that their actions impact software architecture as much as software architecture influences their actions. I hope that my talk will give everyone food for thought while providing a load of approaches that give them more options to cope with change.

What innovations in the industry impress you the most?

For the early part of my career I believed that any reasonably high level programming language that was Turing complete could be used to solve most problems and the differences between them were not significant. Over the last decade or so I’ve realised that the very materials we, as software professionals, use have a huge impact on the way our software turns out. Therefore, I tend to try and read as many white papers as I can on language theory, typing theory, systems theory and distributed systems algorithms. I think the recent emphasis on event streaming, microservices, functions as a service, etc. give a lot of options for evolutionary architecture but I am hoping that some theories from mathematics, like linear logic and progressive typing, will change the materials we use in software development for the better.

What do you think will be the next big thing in software?

I’ve seen the same approaches cycle around in a new guise every 8-10 years so I expect we may see new approaches in database technologies (we are already seeing immutable temporal aware databases like Datomic and Crux). Immutability has become a hugely useful approach in source control (Git), messaging (Kafka, Blockchain), databases (Datomic) and programming languages (Elm, Clojure) and I wonder if this emphasis will mean even more organisations moving away from controlling state by encapsulation and therefore less use of Object Oriented Programming and more Functional and Declarative Programming, or even, Logic Programming. To be honest, the change I am most hoping to see is a pragmatic progressive typing system that allows developers to start with weak typing and move, over time, to stronger typing as the problem stabilizes and becomes better understood.

Catch Chris Howe-Jones’ talk at 4.10pm in the Northumbrian Room on 26th March 2020.

Meet the speaker: Hannah Foxwell

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 08:00:00 +0000

The Build IT Right meet the speaker series caught up with Hannah Foxwell. Ahead of her talk, we spoke to Hannah about her own experiences and what the future holds…

What is your current role?

I work for Pivotal Labs (now part of VMware) in Platform Services. We help our customers build successful Platforms that delight developers!

What does Building IT Right mean to you?

For me Building IT Right means delivering value to your users and your business through technology. Regardless of the product you’re building or the technology you’re using there are some principles and practices that will help steer you towards success.

Why should Build IT Right visitors attend your talk?

In my talk I’ll introduce the basics of Site Reliability Engineering through a human lens. I’ll looks at the benefits of tools such as Services Level Objectives and Error Budgets for both end users and for the teams building and running those systems. It’s a great introductory talk which covers “Why should I care about these practices?” and “How do I get started?”

What innovations in the industry impress you the most?

It’s not exactly a recent innovation but I have been a believer and champion of the DevOps movement from day 1 (it’s now 10 years old)! I think a lot of teams and organisations are still adopting a very siloed approach to Dev and Ops and could deliver greater value to their end users if they embraced a DevOps culture.

What do you think will be the next big thing in software?

There are so many things I could put here! For me personally I’m just starting to see the benefits of IoT products in my day to day life – for example being able to answer my doorbell via an app when I’m travelling, or turn on the heating when I’m on my way home! I think it’s still in early adopter phase at the moment but pretty soon we’ll see all homes and businesses equipped with internet enabled devices.

Hannah Foxwell is speaking at 10.15am in the Invicta room, with her session ‘Reliability Engineering for Humans’

Meet the speaker: Amanda Colpoys

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 08:00:00 +0000

The Build IT Right meet the speaker series caught up with Amanda Colpoys. Ahead of her talk, we spoke to Amanda about her own experiences and what the future holds…

What is your current role?

I work as a freelance Business Agility Coach & Consultant. I support SMEs and scale-ups to adopt lean and agile working practice, both within technology and across the broader organisation.

I believe that the most successful organisations are those that recognise thattechnology is a strategic capability, not a service delivery capability. Integrating technology and business functions aligned around common objectives supports the speed and innovation that is critical to success in today’s competitive environment.

What does Building IT Right mean to you?

Quality is about “when” not “if”. Speed and flexibility are critical in industry today; successful organisations are able to meet their customer needs faster than their competitors. Within technology, quality is critical to speed. Investing in quality technology reduces your cost of change and allows you to react quickly.

However, today’s competitive environment also requires businesses to experiment - to explore different solutions with their customers before investing in long term initiatives. Experimenting at high tempo necessitates a pragmatic approach to quality - there is little point investing in automated testing, logging or monitoring on a piece of code that may only live for a matter of weeks. Good developers always invest in quality. Great developersunderstand their customer needs and the commercial context; they know when to make trade-offs and when not to compromise.

Why should Build IT Right visitors attend your talk?

I’m going to talk about “Building the right IT” (working title!). Despite the Lean Start-Up movement, we still work in a very output, solution-focused world. Ultimately we write software to create impact, to create value. We don’t write code for the sake of code. So long before we think about any solution, we need to think hard about the problem we’re solving.

I’m going to talk about how the software development community can help drive an outcome focus, how developers can engage with conversations about customer problems and help drive better, simpler solutions. And ultimately this approach leads to better quality software. As someone very wise once said, “the best code you write is the code you don’t write”. By being clearly focused on the problem usually results in much less complex solutions - and much less unnecessary code to maintain!

What innovations in the industry impress you the most?

Naturally I’m a bit biased, so I’m most excited about the level of innovation in how we work. The way organisations operate is changing from a 20th century “carrot and stick” approach to a much more employee-centric world view. More and more organisations recognise the power of intrinsic motivation and are seeking to create great working environments - empowering people and enabling them to do great work. This is great news for all of us - more rewarding work, better work life balance and greater productivity.

What do you think will be the next big thing in software?

From a technology perspective the trend in machine learning and AI will clearly continue to grow. I’m curious to see whether the T-shaped developer of the future means we start to blur the lines between software engineers and data scientists. I’m sure we’ll also be hearing a lot more about blockchain and will see more innovation in that space.

From a people perspective I hope we’re going to see more and more organisations recognise the potential of their software engineers - not merelyas people that deliver solutions but as a creative power house that are brilliant at solving problems. Too many businesses chronically under use their software developers and in doing so they limit their power to innovate and drive growth. And this is definitely something I’ll be covering in my talk!

2020 Call for Papers open!

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 08:00:00 +0000

We are looking for developers, testers, software architects with an opinion on how tobuild software ‘right’. Calling all agile/lean coaches, scrum masters and product owners, if you have something to say it’s time to speak up! If you work for an organisation developing software, work at computer science or software engineeringresearch institutions, or promote software related activities please submit your paper!

On 26th March 2020, Build IT Right will offer a full programme of keynotes, lightning talks and panel sessions. In 2019 we hosted keynote speeches from Dave Farley, Timandra Harkness and Simon Brown, alongside 27 global speakers selected from our 2019 call for papers. All selected speakers will gain a delegate pass for the event, plus a discount for colleagues.

Our breakout sessions are 40 minutes in length, with the option to also submit for a lightning talk. Our streams include Architecture, Development Process, Development Technologies, and UX & UR, and we are looking forward to your cool ideas for 2020!

We encourage you to submit a topic you are passionate about, but we can accept multiple submissions from an orgainsation or individual.

Call for papers will close at 9am 13th January, and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us on bitrconference@gmail.com

Submit your paper here.

We can’t wait to welcome you for BITR 2.0!

BITR: A Review

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 08:00:00 +0000

MORE than 200 delegates from the region’s leading tech companies attended an inaugural conference aimed at the sector’s ‘do-ers.’

The first Built IT Right (BITR) conference was held Thursday, April 4 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Newcastle.

It was aimed at anyone in the north east building software and had two keynote speakers, Dave Farley, author and founder of Continuous Delivery Ltd, and Simon Brown, author of Software Architecture for Developers.

Presenter, writer and comedian Timandra Harkness, who is currently presenting the BBC Radio 4 technology series Futureproofing, hosted the event and Timandra was also one of the conference speakers.

The conference had four strands: Development Process; Development Technologies, Architecture, and User experience/Research. It started with a speech from Dave Farley who spoke of the advantages of the continuous delivery process.

“Out of a study of 6,000 large projects, 17 per cent went so poorly they threatened the continuation of the company. So the process to drive change in your organisations, or your clients’ organisations must be right.

“Continuous delivery can be very difficult to do, and can only be done through thousands of little steps – but the good news is that every little step improves things. It’s certainly seen as state-of-the-art in the software development industry and at its root is humanity’s best problem-solving strategies.”

More than 15 other speakers included: Jesse Carey, Head of Application Architecture at Bede Gaming; Chris Price, Software Engineer at Scott Logic; Jon McNestrie, Coach and Trainer at Northern Shore Consulting; Nate Sterling, Design Strategist, Grid Smarter Cities; Chris Howe-Jones CEO and founder, DevCycle Ltd; Peter Grainger, Senior Engineer at Sage and David Boyne, Application Architect at CompareTheMarket. Speaking after the conference Timandra said she’d been impressed by the energy and concentration of delegates: “I’ve done lots of these tech events, but have never had so many delegates who clearly wanted to be there and wanted to learn.”

She said the region’s IT sector appeared to be thriving and growing, and needed to be recognized further afield.

“It’s a region which seems to work together and the IT sector here has an ecosystem that supports and promotes growth. The size of the region helps – large enough to be sustainable, easily identifiable, but small enough to be one community. And it’s clearly not just about the larger companies and organisations, many of the smaller, newer firms have innovation at their core. It’s a community with the right number of innovative companies.”

“The region’s IT sector is a good news story that deserves wider recognition.”

Fiona Hobbs from Opencast Software, who led the organising committee, said: “We were delighted at the response to our first BITR conference and I’d like to thank all of the delegates and speakers for their time and commitment.

“We wanted a conference that would expand delegates’ knowledge and share emerging trends and hopefully that’s what we deserved. Of course, it was a great networking event, but it wasn’t a talking shop and I’m sure every delegate took away a new idea, a new way of working or new inspiration.

“We’ve had some great feedback and we’re already thinking about next year’s event.”

Sponsors for the inaugural event include Opencast Software, Sage, Dynamo North East, Grid Smarter Cities, Accenture, Bede, W@aterstons and balsamiq, and the conference was also supported by the European Regional Development Fund.”

Take a look at the action on the day here.

In Conversation with Peter Grainger

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 08:00:00 +0000

Our next in-conversation is with Peter Grainger, from Sage, providing software and solutions for every business from their base in Newcastle upon Tyne.

What is your current role?

Senior Engineer at Sage.

What does Building IT Right mean to you?

To me it means thinking ahead of time, being deliberate in your actions and basing your decisions on data rather than bias or office politics. Always think “how is the user getting value from this?” and challenge the status quo if you don’t think something makes sense. Most importantly, you should think your work is interesting and you should be having fun!

Why should Build IT Right visitors attend your talk?

If you are involved anywhere in the software lifecycle (writing issues, coding, deploy) and have any tasks that are boring, repetitive or time consuming you will definitely pick up something from the talk that you can apply. If you don’t use Github, it might convince you to, actions are a game changer!

What innovations in the industry impress you the most?

The amount of PaaS (Platform as a Service) companies popping up are really making it easy to create a solution to a problem and get people using it immediately. Code sharing platforms like codepen, glitch and code sandbox are blurring the lines between storing, sharing and deploying your code by writing it directly in the browser and making it easy to share with the web community.

What do you think will be the next big thing in software?

I’m keeping my eye on WebAssembly. The power to run any language precompiled in the browser at a much higher efficiency than is currently possible seems really powerful and I’m looking forward to seeing the libraries the web community creates that we can all build on.

Peter Grainger from Sage will be bringing his session titled ‘Continuous integration using Github actions’ to Build IT Right at 3.10pm on 4th April at the Crowne Plaza Newcastle

Understanding the basics of inclusivity

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 08:00:00 +0000

Inclusive design and its power to create meaningful interactions

At Fjord, we have the opportunity to design the world we want to live in – one that propels us forward, one that works with us and for us. We’re passionate about rethinking how things operate, every day. There’s always a better way, and we make it our business to look for it.

Every year, Fjord organizes a series of discussions and workshops that give us access to more than 1,000 brilliant design minds we have spread across our 28 different studios around the world. As a result of this process, Fjord creates a report covering trends that we believe to be relevant to us as a business and as individuals, but also for our clients, friends and families. It’s called The Fjord Trends.

In this year’s report, we highlighted seven trends that we believe will represent new opportunities to both redesign existing interactions and design new ones. Success will depend on providing value that’s relevant not only to individuals, but also to the world.

Organisations must aim for inclusive design that ensures meaningful interactions for all customers that bring tangible long-term value, both to users and to the organization’s bottom line.

“Value creation will not come from simply growing bigger, but by being better. In busy lives and on a crowded planet, only the relevant will remain.”

One of the trends I am particularly passionate about is the Inclusivity Paradox. This identifies how people expect organisations to see them and engage with them, and how they expect this to be done on an individual level.

The organisations that can achieve this are those that truly appreciate the importance of understanding their customers’ mindsets, rather than driving their efforts based only on classical marketing segmentation.

We discuss how the combination of qualitative and quantitative data might be able to generate better insights, help support deeper interpretation of the customer mindset and in doing so bring to light their real needs and motivations. This will enable us to generate meaningful interactions and experiences to drive business differentiation in a crowded, commoditised world.

In my humble opinion, the key takeaway of this trend is that:

“Organisations must aim for inclusive design that ensures meaningful interactions for all customers that bring tangible long-term value, both to users and to the organisation's bottom line.”

As a designer, I believe that when we design our interactions and experiences, we need to take great care to understand the size of the responsibility we bear. We hold the power to define who will be able to participate.

And when we exclude someone from an interaction or experience, we may hurt them on a personal level and risk losing them as a customer forever. So how might we design more inclusive and meaningful interactions?

The answer to that question is far from simple. However, part of the answer lies in the importance of understanding the concepts of an inclusive design mindset, and how to apply it to design meaningful interactions and experiences.

Before explaining what inclusive design is, it’s important to demystify a few myths about it:

Inclusive design is exclusively for minorities, extreme users or for those with a disability. Inclusive design is about understanding and embracing the differences between people, their mindsets, needs and motivation and applying this understanding as part of the design process
You mean accessibility, right? No, accessibility is commonly misunderstood as being the same as inclusive design. However, accessibility comes from the qualities that make an experience open to all – it provides minimum ways to allow everyone to use your product/service (e.g. colour contrast). In contrast, inclusive design is a methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity
It’s nice to be inclusive. Inclusive design is not about being nice; it’s about being smart. When you apply the inclusive mindset during your design process, you are able to generate more meaningful interactions and experiences and therefore extend them to a larger number of customers, with a more diverse range of needs. This generates differentiation and innovation

What inclusive design definitely doesn’t mean is designing one thing for all potential customers. The inclusive design mindset is about designing a variety of ways that allow a diverse range of customers to participate in interactions or services. And it’s based on three key principles:

Recognise exclusion: It happens when we try to create experiences based only on our own biases. Designers are quite good at doing that, they call their biases ‘assumptions’
Learn from diversity: Diversity is something that changes over time. We, as humans, have an amazing power to adapt to different situations. However, it’s important to understand why people need to adapt to our interactions and services, instead of the other way around
Solve for one and extend to many: Focus on what is important to the customer mindset you are designing for and their ‘sense of belonging’. When the solutions are ready to be tested, you can identify the opportunities to extend those interactions/experiences to others

Applying the three basic principles of inclusive design enables you to understand user mindsets and, as a result, you can create more meaningful interactions and experiences and drive innovation to other customers you haven’t initially considered.

“It is important to understand that inclusivity is both an opportunity and a challenge for a diverse range of organisations, from national governments to start-ups.”

The organisations that understand the importance of adopting the inclusive design mindset in their design process may gain more than just a few extreme customers.

I hope you can join me at Build IT Right, where I will share more details about the inclusive design mindset and how important it is in generating more meaningful interactions and experiences.

Bruno Perez is the service design lead for Fjord, Design and Innovation from Accenture Interactive