Serverless Craic Ep34 What is Value Engineering with BMK

ServerlessDays Belfast 2024.

ServerlessDays Belfast is back at Titanic Hotel Belfast on Thursday 23rd May 2024

Our theme is 'Building Beyond Boundaries: ServerlessDays Belfast celebrates the spirit of Innovation'. Find out why you should come to the birthplace of Titanic and what you can expect from this year's ServerlessDays Belfast.

From the 100-year-old Drawing Offices at Titanic Hotel Belfast, we will celebrate how the Serverless Mindset enables engineers and organisations to break barriers and build like never before. We ask our speakers to speak of the courage, ambition and resiliency needed to build big. We will showcase international and local speakers, attracting interest across Europe and the US. Most importantly, we want to inspire Engineers in Ireland, the UK and the local tech community. 

Serverless has transcended technology and is now a synonym for Digital Transformation. Engineers working for large and small organisations need a dedicated space to hear and share innovation stories, with Serverless First as the enabler. Senior executives sense that Serverless is at the intersection of technology and business. Everyone needs a network to access the playbook for the Modern Cloud.

Everyone is welcome, especially:
Engineers who are curious by nature are excited to explore new technologies and ways of working.
Leaders seeking the latest solutions and innovations, including product managers, programme directors, and CTOs.
This event is a dedicated space for you to network, share, learn and become inspired about Serverless and Modern Cloud. We look forward to seeing you there!

What’s on offer
Food and Beverages
ServerlessDays Speaker Agenda: Listen to renowned experts on Serverless
Network with fellow attendees

ServerlessDays Belfast 2024 Call for Papers
We’re looking for speakers who can share their stories about how serverless technology has helped them achieve amazing things.
The theme for this year’s event is “Building Beyond Boundaries”. We want to celebrate the spirit of Innovation and share stories of real change. Tell us about something incredible that happened, how you felt and how the tech helped out.
If you’re interested in speaking, submit your talk by March 31st!
We will cover travel and accommodation expenses for speakers living outside commuting distance.
Take advantage of this opportunity to share your knowledge and experience with the serverless community on the island of Ireland.
Learn more and submit your talk on Sessionize. 

serverlessdaysbelfast.com/
twitter.com/BFSServerless
linkedin.com/company/serverlessdays-belfast

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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The Software Development Lifecycle - how does it apply to modern cloud?

We are kicking off this episode with the term modern SDLC. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is changing. When you get into this new way of working, you start differently. It's no longer a straight waterfall/ABCD, or starting with an established system like SCRUM and iterating. So how do you get into a fast flow state? We have discovered a lot of things over the past couple of years. In this episode, we talk you through the phases of the modern software development lifecycle.

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We talk about what we would like to see announced at this years AWS re:Invent 2023 looking at Observability, Generative AI, PartyRock, Developer Experience to name a few.

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Team Engineering with SCORP - there are practices we do like SCORP, which is our agile way of doing well-architected in every sprint with teams. Our practices are connected to engineering excellence, looking at what you're doing and constantly improving. And HP (high performing engineering), as a way of capturing key metrics to define good engineering or architecture, and then talk about it as a team.

Even though the practices are out there, it's really just a mindset.

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There were a few stories in the news about working remotely from another country. We talk about the pros and cons of working remotely versus returning to work. We work remotely and are globally distributed, but we've worked for many years in the office to, so we have experience of both to make a fair analysis.

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Developer Productivity and discussions on developers and productivity have never gone away. You heard people talking about this in the 80s and the idea of paying developers by lines of code. And it was even rubbished in the 80s as a foolish thing to do. 
There's a famous story about developers removing bad code from the code base and having negative numbers by the end of the week and then asking if they have to pay the company back money. It's never been a good idea. It strikes me as strange that in 2023, we are having the same discussion.

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How important is Resilience Hub, Chaos Testing and Well-Architected?
We attended the AWS Resilience Day at the Titanic Hotel. We were sitting in the same room where the ill-fated Titanic was designed and drawn! We discuss what we learned. Including the tools and strategies that help software engineers build resilience that were not available for the Titanic engineers. And we talk about the fact that it isn't just one thing that leads to disaster for ships or workloads.

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Bringing mapping to your org. 

We are doing a wee series on Wardley Mapping, with some practical items. The last two episodes were: 'Wardley Mapping 101' and 'Can Wardley Maps Predict the Future?'. So I thought it would be good to answer a common question: 'That's a cool technique, but how would I do that in my work?'. If you follow Simon Wardley, on Twitter, and you've started experimenting with Wardley Mapping, we tell you how you to bring Wardley Mapping to your place of work.

We talk about using the Northstar exercise to facilitate mapping. And about finding like-minded people to sit and practice with. There is a way of talking about mapping. You're better to start with the outcomes. And then see if people are interested to get back into the map, as a way of sensemaking complicated areas. It's great to make sense of something and share that thinking with peers. And once you get into that language, you open up a common way of thinking and the idea of evolution to access things you want to talk about it.

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Can Wardley Maps predict the future, is our topic this week.

In our last episode, we talked about Wardley Mapping. We did a 101 last time, explaining the basics.

One of the things that we say is that Wardley Mapping is a superpower that helps you predict the future. What do we mean by that? It's like a fortune teller. But it doesn't tell you when exactly something's going to happen. It's the state of mind that it puts you in. We run through a couple of examples, to demonstrate how we've done it in the past.

1. Conversational Programming
2. Generative AI
3. Well-Architected
4. Serverless
5. CDK (Cloud Development Kit)

If you have good situational awareness, you can wait until the appropriate time. You don't have to go off and waste energy, cycles and money trying custom build something. Wait three months and you'll get what you're trying to achieve.

When you map this stuff out, you can start to think about how your sensing engine can get intel on whether these things are going to happen or not. There are lots of different ways you can do that. Like following Twitter feeds and looking at blogs. And looking at who they're hiring and following the industry experts. They're points of information that can help you see how things will evolve. To predict the way things are going to go. There are multiple levels of maturity in your map and how you think it's going move and where the evolution is going to happen.

Wardley Mapping can be used to predict the future but it's not going to give you an exact date. What it can do is give you an example of this is what it will look like if it happens. So you prepare yourself for when it does. And then when the press release comes out, you're like, boom, we're ready. We saw that coming. So it's the no 'surprise approach' to building situational awareness. 

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Wardley Mapping is a core part of our book: 'The Value Flywheel Effect'. And it's a topic that people always ask about it. It's a difficult thing to learn. We've spent many years thinking about it, stumbling around, and then practicing. So we figured we would do a quick series on Wardley Mapping.

We have spent almost 10 years mapping, give or take. For me, it has been an absolute game-changer. One thing that's come along recently is the Wardley Mapping canvas by Ben Mosior @hiredthought. It's a nice canvas with six steps on how to map. Before I started using the canvas, I used to find that maps could get big and go off in 60 different directions.

Purpose and scope are the first two steps. And then the third one is users. The fourth one is user needs. And then the fifth step is the value chain. It can be difficult to keep things abstract. And not go too deep. But it is good to be as abstract and high-level as possible, even just to start to get something down.

Once you have the value chain of the user, a need, and a couple of dependencies, that's when you then bring it across to the map. And I would usually put them in the middle of the map. Drop them all into Product, to get you started. So you've got them all in a vertical line on your map and canvas. You start moving different components from left to right. And you might work out that one of the dependencies is Commodity or Custom. And you can see how that interaction goes. That's when you start to add in dependencies because you've got more room in the map.

This is where the conversation really starts to kick into gear. And this is where people start to challenge each other's context and think about where that component belongs or what's missing from the map. So it makes for a very collaborative exercise.

If you are planning a mapping session, you need to be a good facilitator. If a participant feels something is in the wrong place. Don't say no, you're wrong. It's in the right place. You want the individual to explain why they think so. If it is something that's blatantly just them for raising the challenge. The last thing you want is an unsafe environment where nobody wants to speak.

It doesn't need to be too fancy. You might map for an hour. And if you're facilitating, five or 10 minutes off the hour, you take a couple of notes, If someone says we should move that component from x to y that's an observation, You're not committing to do it but just taking a few observations. Always just keep it simple.

So here are a couple of really good links. We talked about Ben Mosier @hiredthought. He's got a brilliant site called LearnWardleyMapping.com. Ben created the Wardley Mapping Canvas, which is on Creative Commons Open Source.

Simon's also got a couple of links. There's a site on GitHub called Awesome Wardley Maps. It is by John Grant on List.WardleyMaps.com. Simon's original book is on medium.com/wardleymaps. Simon's content is great but deep. 

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