The One with a Tech Radar
Last Tuesday I went to the Technology Radar Presentation at ThoughtWorks Cologne. I had read previous editions of the Tech Radar before but had never managed to go to one of their presentations. The Technology Radar is a publication that is done twice a year where ThoughtWorks gathers all the technologies and techniques that they have had good or bad experiences with in the past 6 months with their client projects, divided into four categories: Programming Languages and Frameworks, Tools, Platforms and Techniques. Usually, the blips on this radar are either newer things or things that have gained traction since the last edition. They are qualified in four rings: Adopt, Trial, Assess and Hold.
At the event, blips from all four categories where presented and talked about. I liked that the presenters mentioned how they got to working with a few of these and why they found them particularly interesting or would not recommend. After they had talked about 4–6 blips from a certain category, the audience could ask questions about others they were interested in and even though they said at the beginning that there would be blips the presenters wouldn’t be able to say much about, they always provided at least some context (and in two cases, someone from the audience had some more insight).
After about 90 minutes of presentation, there was a lot of time for talking to the other attendees. I met someone who is working in a company that used to be next to our office when I was with a startup a few years ago. And I met someone who knew Studitemps because of us using Elixir! That’s pretty cool. In terms of the blips, some that I am interested in now:
- Flagr could be useful for our feature flagging
- Four Key Metrics: I would like to work on measuring these better for
- Chaos Engineering: I haven’t fully understood what this means but it sounds interesting.
- Ethical OS, ties back into Think About