College of Technology: { develop: BBC } conference, behaviour driven development, loudness

The BBC College of Technology website is a relatively new site launched last year to provide resources around broadcast technology, software engineering and business systems. Andy Wilson, the head of the College of Technology wrote about the website launch in a previous post.

At the tail-end of last year the College of Technology ran the { develop: BBC } 2013 event bringing together the best developers from the BBC and companies like Google, Facebook and the Financial Times. It seemed obvious to take advantage of the fact that we had a group of world class speakers assembled, so we made some films with them and their equally talented BBC counterparts.

Kevin Goldsmith is Spotify's director of engineering

Kevin Goldsmith (Spotify's director of engineering) presented his insights into building a culture of excellence in engineering. He shares his secret ingredients for running successful engineering teams. Kevin believes that if you set bright, creative people on the right path and let them go, they will deliver something better than you could ever have imagined. On the importance of communication skills the BBC's Nic Ford chimed in with a lovely observation: "You can be Einstein but if you can't communicate Relativity, you're gonna be stuck in a patent office."

As we move towards a world where everything is mobile and the challenge of internet connectivity to access content becomes increasingly important, we thought it would be good to explore the difficulties and possible solutions to making the web work offline with Jan Jongboom, a Firefox OS Contributor, and Jake Archibald of Google Chrome. Why do developers love building apps for different platforms when they could build a single website with friendly URLs and easily updatable content? Well, It's all about caching and with apps it is easier to simply display the most recent content and only fetch new content when a connection is available. But what is needed on the web is a way to give developers control to judge, on a connection by connection basis, whether or not they need to go to the internet or not. Jake and his colleagues are working on just that.

The third film in the develop: BBC series focuses on optimising content for different browsers and breaking the 1000ms barrier. It features Google’s Ilya Grigorik and will be published soon.

If develop:BBC was all about bringing the best minds together at a single event then sharing the BBC and wider industry's best practice is a core aim of the website.

Demonstrating best practice in areas like Behaviour Driven Development is a crucial part of that mission. In our film about improving software testing Rebecca Salsbury, head of core engineering at BBC News & Knowledge, explains how BDD focuses on application behaviour from the user point of view and helps teams to translate the business requirements into a clear and simple language that developers can then implement.

Finally, it's all about loudness. The BBC Academy have been presenting a series of events around the UK to raise awareness of loudness and audibility issues in TV sound among BBC staff, indies, freelancers and external suppliers. Sound is a massive issue and as the single biggest topic of viewer complaints, we made a short film with broadcast engineering trainer John Heraty to support the cause of maintaining consistent sound levels that don't irritate our audience's ears. Sound advice indeed (other lame loudness puns available on request).

I'll report back here when there are any significant updates to the website and if there's anything you'd like to see more (or less of) please leave a comment below.

Jim Downie is a senior producer within the BBC Academy and is responsible for the development and commissioning of content on the College of Technology website.