ATO2014: Modern Applications & Data
Dwight Merriman from MongoDB was up next to talk to us about modern applications and data.
We’re not building the same things that we were before – we’re building a whole new class of applications that just didn’t exist before. When creating an app these days you might use pieces from 12 other applications, if you had to do this with a closed source project this would be very difficult. Open source makes the modern applications possible – otherwise you have 12 other things to go buy to make your application work.
We’re in the midst of the biggest technology change in the data layer in 25 years. We talk about big data and this is all part of it. One of the differences is the shape of the data. It’s not all tabular data anymore. The new tools we’re creating today are very good at handling these new shapes. Saying ‘unstructured data’ is inaccurate – it’s dynamic data – hence the word ‘shape’.
Speed is another aspect of this. Everything is real-time now – you don’t want to wait overnight for you report anymore. As developers as we build systems we need to start with a real-time mentality. While this sound logical – it’s actually a big change in the way we were taught which was to do things in batches. These days, computers are a lot faster so if you can do it (real-time) it’s a lot better.
We also need to think about our approach to writing code these days – this has changed a lot from how we were taught years ago. It’s not just about writing the perfect spec anymore, it’s a lot more collaboration with the customer. Iteration is necessary now – look at how Facebook changes a tiny bit every day.
Dwight then shared with us some real world examples from John Deer, Bosch and Edeva. Edeva is doing some interesting things with traffic data. They have built a technology that will see your speed when you’re driving over this one bridge in Sweden, if you’re going over the speed limit it will create speed bumps specifically for you. That’s just one say they’re putting their data to use in a real life scenario.
“There’s new stuff to do in all domains – in all fields – and we have the tools to do them now.”
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