In this episode Andrew is flying solo! Paul is away on a long weekend and has left Andrew holding the fort. To be more accurate, Andrew is recording from his kitchen for a change. This episode is a recap and reorient episode – giving a sense of why we’re picking the subjects we are picking and what’s behind the episodes that are coming up in the future.
I’ve been wanting to do this episode for a while now, to place some context around why we have chosen the subjects we have, and where we have come from in terms of our thinking. Paul being away for the weekend has given me an ideal opportunity to sneak in with this one!
345 as an organisation stemmed from a great kickass dev team that the founders used to be in. When that particular team disbanded we left to form 345 and continue our good work. The specialisms we had adopted over the years did give 345 a particular focus on the following areas:
- Business process automation. Call it what you will – Straight Through Processing (STP), Business Process Management (BPM), Integration, Orchestration – all of these terms mean a similar thing. We spent a lot of time writing software that automated business processes.
- Microservices. When you’re automating business processes you need to link steps of a process together, and each step can be expressed as a separate service. Microservices are borne from a set of architectural principles that require any such service to be independent from its peers. This was a natural follow-on from the work we did in step 1.
- IoT. Internet of Things – thousands, millions of devices connected over the Internet. Each transmitting and receiving data, which can be aggregated, transformed, stored, munged and mined to do a whole array of amazing things.
We also look at what we do as a set of “pillars”, i.e. areas that define how we work:
- Method. This pillar is all about how we build technology, and is the accumulated wisdom regarding how to build software, what you should think about to make sure you’ve covered all your bases, and what constitutes success. We focus on practice over process, because the right people doing the right things with the right goals will get you 90% of the way to your result.
- Automation. This is how we remove the drudgery of repetitive tasks from creative people so that can focus on what they do best: using their brains to imagine a better future. We let the robots do that they are best at: consistently working at repetitive tasks.
- Technology. We create stacks of technology that form the bedrock of proven solutions. Having pre-baked stacks helps us to focus on using technology to solve problems instead of worrying about whether we are using the right technology in the first place.
In this episode we go through the previous episodes and show where they fit into the three pillars, and talk about what’s coming up, especially what’s in the pipeline with regard to single page applications and IoT!
You can watch the video here:
You can listen to the audio here:
