Monki Gras 2015

Monki Gras happened again! Though, in its Monki Gras 2015 incarnation, it acquired a heavy metal umlaut and a ‘slashed zero’ in its typeface; an allusion to its Nordic nature: Mönki Gras 2Ø15

What is Monki Gras?

Well…

And Ricardo makes a good point, explaining why I, and others, just keep going back:

There’s a single track of talks so you are saved the effort of making decisions about what to see and you can just focus on listening. The speakers entertain as well as inform, which, I really like.

While it is a tech conference, there’s little code because it’s about making technology happen rather than the details of the technology itself. So there are talks on developer culture, design, and data, as well as slightly more off-the-wall things to keep our brains oiled.

In James’ very own distinctive words:

Why go all Nordic this year?

All the speakers this year were Scandinavian in some way. It was probably the most rigorously applied conference theme I’ve ever seen (mostly, conferences come up with a ‘theme’ for marketing purposes which usually gets mostly forgotten about by the time of the conference itself).

James talks a bit more about this on the Monkigras blog. A surprising amount of tech we know and love comes out of the relatively sparsely populated Scandinavian countries. For example:

And, apparently, Finland leads the EU in enterprise cloud computing:

Are the Nordics really that different from anywhere else?

Well, this graph seems to say they are, if only for their taste in music:

Which suggests there is at least something different about Nordic cultures from the rest of Europe, let alone the world.

So several of the speakers delved into why they thought this led to success in technology innovation and development. For example, there’s the attitude to not recognising when you’re failing and giving up so that you can be successful by doing it another way:

A Swedish concept, lagom, which means ‘just the right amount’ was credited with the popularity of the cloud in the Nordics. And, indeed, with pretty much anything we could think of throughout the rest of the event.

Similarly, you could argue that lagom is why Docker is popular among developers:

One fascinating talk, by a Swedish speaker based in Silicon Valley, was about the difference between startups in the Nordics and Silicon Valley. For example, the inescapable differences between their welfare systems were credited as being responsible for different priorities regarding making money. (Hopefully, videos of the talks will be put online and I’ll add a link to it.)

Obviously, all this talk about culture can, and did, drift into stereotyping. I did get slightly weary of the repeated comparisons between cultures, though interesting and, often, humorous.

Developer culture

One of the things I’m most interested in is hearing what other companies have learnt about developer culture and community. For example:

There’s more about this talk on Techworld. And Spotify have blogged some funky videos about the developer culture they aspire to (part 1 and part 2), which are well worth watching if you work in software development.

Something that I’m working on at IBM is increasing the openness of our development teams so, again, I’m always interested in new ways to do this. This is something that Sweden (yes, the country!) has adopted to a surprising extent:

Innovation and inefficiencies

One important message that came across at Monki Gras 2015 was that you have to allow time for innovation to happen. It’s when things seem inefficient and time is not allocated to a specific activity that innovation often occurs.

A nice example of this is the BrewPi project. At Monki Gras 2013, Elco Jacobs talked about his open source project of brewing beer and using a Raspberry Pi to monitor it:

I bumped into him this year and what had been a project now occupies him full-time as a small business selling the technology to brewers around the world. A pause in his education when he had nothing better to do had enabled him to get on with his BrewPi project and, after graduation, turn it into a business.

Data journalism

There’s a lot talked about open data and how we should be able to access tax-funded data about things that affect our lives. The Guardian is taking a lead with data journalism and Helena Bengtsson gave a talk about how knowing how to navigate large data sets to find meaning was vital to finding stories in the Wikileaks data.

She started out in data journalism in Sweden where, in one case, she acquired and mapped large data sets that revealed water pollution problems around the country, which triggered a several stories.

It’s not just having the data that matters but the interpretation of the data. That’s what data journalism gives us over just ‘big data':

Also, I found out a fascinating fact:

Anyway, that’s about as much as I can cram in. We also found out random things about Scandinavian knitwear and the fact that Sweden has its own official typeface, Sweden Sans. And we ate lots of Nordic foods, drank Nordic beer and (some of us) drank Akvavit. And, most importantly, we talked to each other lots.

The thing I really value about Monki Gras (on top of the great talks, food, drink, and fun atmosphere) is the small size of the event and all the interesting people to talk to. That’s why I keep going back.

P.S. A good write-up of the talks

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At ThingMonk 2013

I attended ThingMonk 2013 conference partly because IBM’s doing a load of work around the Internet of Things (IoT). I figured it would be useful to find out what’s happening in the world of IoT at the moment. Also, I knew that, as a *Monk production, the food would be amazing.

What is the Internet of Things?

If you’re reading this, you’re familiar with using devices to access information, communicate, buy things, and so on over the Internet. The Internet of Things, at a superficial level, is just taking the humans out of the process. So, for example, if your washing machine were connected to the Internet, it could automatically book a service engineer if it detects a fault.

I say ‘at a superficial level’ because there are obviously still issues relevant to humans in an automated process. It matters that the automatically-scheduled appointment is convenient for the householder. And it matters that the householder trusts that the machine really is faulty when it says it is and that it’s not the manufacturer just calling out a service engineer to make money.

This is how James Governor of RedMonk, who conceived and hosted ThingMonk 2013, explains IoT:

What is ThingMonk 2013?

ThingMonk 2013 was a fun two-day conference in London. On Monday was a hackday with spontaneous lightning talks and on Tuesday were the scheduled talks and the evening party. I wasn’t able to attend Monday’s hackday so you’ll have to read someone else’s write-up about that (you could try Josie Messa’s, for instance).

The talks

I bought my Arduino getting started kit (which I used for my Christmas lights energy project in 2010) from Tinker London so I was pleased to finally meet Tinker’s former-CEO, Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino, at ThingMonk 2013. I’ve known her on Twitter for about 4 years but we’d never met in person. Alex is also founder of the Good Night Lamp, which I blogged about earlier this year. She talked at ThingMonk about “the past, present and future of the Internet of Things” from her position of being part of it.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, @iotwatch
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, @iotwatch

I think it was probably Nick O’Leary who first introduced me to the Arduino, many moons ago over cups of tea at work. He spoke at ThingMonk about wiring the Internet of Things. This included a demo of his latest project, NodeRED, which he and IBM have recently open sourced on GitHub.

Nick O'Leary talks about wiring the Internet of Things
Nick O’Leary talks about wiring the Internet of Things

Sadly I missed the previous day when it seems Nick and colleagues, Dave C-J and Andy S-C, won over many of the hackday attendees to the view that IBM’s MQTT and NodeRED are the coolest things known to developerkind right now. So many people mentioned one or both of them throughout the day. One developer told me he didn’t know why he’d not tried MQTT 4 years ago. He also seemed interested in playing with NodeRED, just as soon as the shock that IBM produces cool things for developers had worn off.

Ian Skerrett from Eclipse talked about the role of Open Source in the Internet of Things. Eclipse has recently started the Paho project, which focuses on open source implementations of the standards and protocols used in IoT. The project includes IBM’s Really Small Message Broker and Roger Light’s Mosquitto.

Ian Skerrett from Eclipse
Ian Skerrett from Eclipse

Andy Piper talked about the role of signals in the IoT.

IMG_1546

There were a couple of talks about people’s experiences of startups producing physical objects compared with producing software. Tom Taylor talked about setting up Newspaper Club, which is a site where you can put together and get printed your own newspaper run. His presentation included this slide:

IMG_1534Matt Webb talked about producing Little Printer, which is an internet-connected device that subscribes to various sources and prints them for you on a strip of paper like a shop receipt.

IMG_1550Patrick Bergel made the very good point in his talk that a lot of IoT projects, at the moment, are aimed at ‘non-problems’. While fun and useful for learning what we can do with IoT technologies, they don’t really address the needs of real people (ie people who aren’t “hackers, hipsters, or weirdos”). For instance, there are increasing numbers of older people who could benefit from things that address problems social isolation, dementia, blindness, and physical and cognitive impairments. His point was underscored throughout the day by examples of fun-but-not-entirely-useful-as-is projects, such as flying a drone with fruit. That’s not to say such projects are a waste of time in themselves but that we should get moving on projects that address real problems too.

IMG_1539The talk which chimed the most with me, though, was Claire Rowland‘s on the important user experience UX issues around IoT. She spoke about the importance of understanding how users (householders) make sense of automated things in their homes.

IMG_1587

The book

I bought a copy of Adrian McEwan‘s Designing The Internet of Things book from Alex’s pop-up shop, (Works)shop. Adrian’s a regular at OggCamp and kindly agreed to sign my copy of his book for me.

Adrian McEwan and the glamorous life of literary reknown.
Adrian McEwan and the glamorous life of literary reknown.

The food

The food was, as expected, amazing. I’ve never had bacon and scrambled egg butties that melt in the mouth before. The steak and Guinness casserole for lunch was beyond words. The evening party was sustained with sushi and tasty curry.

Thanks, James!

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