QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.
Rob Strange, TweetCTO, Sphonic.com
Biography: Rob Strange
Rob started his career in the Army leaving in 2007, moving from there to a small consultancy delivering solutions to support, among others the UK MOD, at an operational and strategic level.
Recently as the CTO of Sphonic he has been focused on delivering a market leading solution focus on anti fraud market, supporting merchants manage the risk of Cardholder / Card not present transactions, delivering high volume low latency tx using a raft of new technologies.
He has keen interest in finding the right technology more recently this is focused on Cassandra, Scala and Mongo with a bit of Rails and Postgresql.
Presentation: TweetSprints, Scala, Scale & Serendipity: Blue sky thinking and washing the pots on the road to success at a Technology startup
The talk recounts the journey and relationship of a Tech start-up and its software development partner, with the milestones and millstones (but no tombstones) along the way:
- The Technology Trigger and the helter-skelter ride up the slope of enlightenment, and down into the trough of sorrow;
- Frequent releases of improvement, minimum feature sets and MVP (ideas to code to data);
- Wiggles and pivots into continuous deployment and business model testing;
- Customer acquisition and validated learning (build-measure-learn);
- The dark-arts of innovation accounting and risk-based pay-as-you-go investment models.
Framing the technology bet, the business and financial risk together and how to avoid the arms race to out-innovate and out-spend everyone, the talk outlines the challenges faced, the learning and the success of the journey, and a take-away based on the premise that you can't do innovation sat behind a desk.