Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Let's Get Physical!!!!




At Technology Radar Group, last night, TheHackerCIO presented on getting physical.

Physical.

Because it's been too long.

Seeing a lot of hardware hackers at the AT&T Wearables Hackathon, back at years end, was partially a reminder.

But as one member noted. Hardware is how we started.

Several interesting themes emerged from the roundtable. The crucial need to find new strategies for keeping up with technology. The Radar isn't enough. It need augmentation. The lab we have is a wonderful augmentation. We need to figure out ways to capitalize on it. Rick pointed out that with the advances in virtualization technology, we can now use a lab in ways that a decade ago simply weren't possible. We can practically learn/design/plan/test/build  a virtual datacenter with totally agnostic/fungible kit: cisco, dell, IBM, Oracle, Juniper, ... whatever. We can build it out with one set of physical & swap it later. And a major theme I raised was the crucial nature of fighting with the bugs.

The problems need to be highlighted, rather than worked-through. If anything, it's the problem areas where the learning/growth is going to take place. We need to figure out strategies in the lab to track the issues and problems, and get other to face them as well! That's counter to the way it normally happens isn't it?

But it's precisely the contesting with actual concrete problems that brings the abstract designs back to the reality-point. That's what "Closes the loop."

And that, by the way, was the other major theme of my presentation. Every time I've heard grand abstractions presented, and I've been able to force through an actual physical, concrete implementation example, the disconnect between the theory/abstraction and the concrete/implementation has been immense. Enormous. Totally surprising. So much so, that I now almost completely discount abstractions presented in the lack of any supporting test example or demonstration.

One of our further goals for The group, in conjunction with our partner Meetup, L.A. Cloud Engineering Group, will be our attempt to produce a crowd-sourced eval platform -- probably with a Geeky/Social approach -- where in my view, capturing such "proof points," "test cases", "demonstrations," or even "benchmarks" in a repeatable, verifiable way will be a central feature. I might even create a widget/button called  "Prove it, dammit!"

That might go a long way toward getting people to close the loop.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO
At Technology Radar Group, last night, TheHackerCIO presented on getting physical.

Physical.

Because it's been too long.

Seeing a lot of hardware hackers at the AT&T Wearables Hackathon, back at years end, was partially a reminder.

But as one member noted. Hardware is how we started.

Several interesting themes emerged from the roundtable. The crucial need to find new strategies for keeping up with technology. The Radar isn't enough. It need augmentation. The lab we have is a wonderful augmentation. We need to figure out ways to capitalize on it. Rick pointed out that with the advances in virtualization technology, we can now use a lab in ways that a decade ago simply weren't possible. We can practically learn/design/plan/test/build  a virtual datacenter with totally agnostic/fungible kit: cisco, dell, IBM, Oracle, Juniper, ... whatever. We can build it out with one set of physical & swap it later. And a major theme I raised was the crucial nature of fighting with the bugs.

The problems need to be highlighted, rather than worked-through. If anything, it's the problem areas where the learning/growth is going to take place. We need to figure out strategies in the lab to track the issues and problems, and get other to face them as well! That's counter to the way it normally happens isn't it?

But it's precisely the contesting with actual concrete problems that brings the abstract designs back to the reality-point. That's what "Closes the loop."

And that, by the way, was the other major theme of my presentation. Every time I've heard grand abstractions presented, and I've been able to force through an actual physical, concrete implementation example, the disconnect between the theory/abstraction and the concrete/implementation has been immense. Enormous. Totally surprising. So much so, that I now almost completely discount abstractions presented in the lack of any supporting test example or demonstration.

One of our further goals for The group, in conjunction with our partner Meetup, L.A. Cloud Engineering Group, will be our attempt to produce a crowd-sourced eval platform -- probably with a Geeky/Social approach -- where in my view, capturing such "proof points," "test cases", "demonstrations," or even "benchmarks" in a repeatable, verifiable way will be a central feature. I might even create a widget/button called  "Prove it, dammit!"

That might go a long way toward getting people to close the loop.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

At Technology Radar Group, last night, TheHackerCIO presented on getting physical.

Physical.

Because it's been too long.

Seeing a lot of hardware hackers at the AT&T Wearables Hackathon, back at years end, was partially a reminder.

But as one member noted. Hardware is how we started.

Several interesting themes emerged from the roundtable. The crucial need to find new strategies for keeping up with technology. The Radar isn't enough. It need augmentation. The lab we have is a wonderful augmentation. We need to figure out ways to capitalize on it. Rick pointed out that with the advances in virtualization technology, we can now use a lab in ways that a decade ago simply weren't possible. We can practically learn/design/plan/test/build  a virtual datacenter with totally agnostic/fungible kit: cisco, dell, IBM, Oracle, Juniper, ... whatever. We can build it out with one set of physical & swap it later. And a major theme I raised was the crucial nature of fighting with the bugs.

The problems need to be highlighted, rather than worked-through. If anything, it's the problem areas where the learning/growth is going to take place. We need to figure out strategies in the lab to track the issues and problems, and get other to face them as well! That's counter to the way it normally happens isn't it?

But it's precisely the contesting with actual concrete problems that brings the abstract designs back to the reality-point. That's what "Closes the loop."

And that, by the way, was the other major theme of my presentation. Every time I've heard grand abstractions presented, and I've been able to force through an actual physical, concrete implementation example, the disconnect between the theory/abstraction and the concrete/implementation has been immense. Enormous. Totally surprising. So much so, that I now almost completely discount abstractions presented in the lack of any supporting test example or demonstration.

One of our further goals for The group, in conjunction with our partner Meetup, L.A. Cloud Engineering Group, will be our attempt to produce a crowd-sourced eval platform -- probably with a Geeky/Social approach -- where in my view, capturing such "proof points," "test cases", "demonstrations," or even "benchmarks" in a repeatable, verifiable way will be a central feature. I might even create a widget/button called  "Prove it, dammit!"

That might go a long way toward getting people to close the loop.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

No comments:

Post a Comment