Twenty nine – Ansible London

‘Can I have your name please?’

I told the smartly dressed man at reception my name, knowing that I wasn’t on the list.

I was standing in a huge reception hall of a spectacular modern building that was a five minute walk from Angel underground station. There was a substantial queue of people behind me, which I thought might work in my favour.

I had joined the Ansible London group an hour earlier, and I had been immediately put on a waiting list, but knowing that some people don’t tend to show, I decided to take a chance.

‘What’s your name again?’

I told him my name again, but a bit more slowly.

‘You’re not on the list’ said the receptionist a moment later. ‘What you need to do is to show me some kind of electronic communication or evidence that you’re registered. I’ve been given strict instructions not to let anyone through who hasn’t registered. Have you received an email?’

I had received an email, but it said that I was on a waiting list.

‘Hold on. Let me just check’ I said.

I reached into my jacket, pulled out my phone, found the ‘you’re on a waiting list’ email and scrolled the email down the screen just enough so the 'on waiting list’ bit was hidden.

‘Here we are’.

I gave the security guard my phone.  He looked at it for a moment. He asked for my name for the third time. This time he wrote it down, and then said I could go through. A second security guard who looked profoundly bored waved me through, towards the lifts.

I was going to a technology event hosted by a company that I had never heard of, but I soon found out that it was a part the Expedia group. The company had a spectacular office building which had an impressive view of Islington. Inside, everything was white and sparkling. I found people milling around in a presentation area, where two smartly dressed catering people were giving everyone beers and glasses of wine. I could smell take away pizza. I grabbed a beer, found a paper plate and loaded it with pizza.

‘You got in then?’ said Janos, chuckling. I had confided in the next chap in the queue that I might have trouble getting past reception. Janos was from Estonia and studied at the Technical University of Tallinn, a place that I had been to (also pretty randomly) a year earlier. I told Janos that I had no idea what the software was all about. He chuckled again, but didn’t offer me any explanation. From the programme that was being projected on the wall at the back of the room, I saw that there were going to be three presentations. I was hoping to learn something.

After a few minutes exploring the impressive balcony area and chatting with other people, the first presentation began. It was utterly unfathomable. The presenter presented a sequence of slides before moving to give a ‘live demo’ of the software. All I could see was a set of bar charts. Some bars were in red, others were in green. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I liked the pizza. The presenter hit a few buttons and the graphs moved a bit. Everyone clapped. That was the end of the presentation. I took a sip of my beer, inwardly hoping that it wouldn’t all be this baffling.

‘So, let me get this right…’ I said, turning to someone on my left, ‘this software is all about monitoring how servers are doing and presenting data to system administrators, right?’

‘Not exactly… The next presentation should make it a bit clearer’. Nobody wanted to tell me what the software was all about. I took another sip of my beer. I started to wonder whether anyone knew what the software was about.

The second presentation was fractionally more understandable, but was packed filled with names of products and phrases that I had never heard of before. This rammed home the point that software technology had moved on and I hadn’t; a reflection that the ‘software ecosystem’ that I implicitly inhabit as a part of my day job is continually changing.

‘Who here uses Puppet?’ asked the presenter.

A small number of people put up their hands. I didn’t understand the question. Another phrase I remember was ‘playbook management’.  I remember people saying that data was communicated using Jason and that ‘yammel can be a pain’.

The third presenter was the best. His name was Russ, and he was American. Rather than showing us a sequence of meaningless coloured graphs, he shared something about the ethos of his company; what they were doing to ‘develop product’.  After a short two minute introduction, he asked if anyone had any questions.

When all the questions were done, he then asked the audience one really simple question: ‘what do you really hate about the product?’ Russ started to make a note of everyone’s answers in a notebook that had to retrieve from his rucksack that was situated at the back of the room. It was all charmingly shambolic.

By the end of Russ’s talk, I had a vague idea what Ansible was all about. Ansible was an open source software business that built something called configuration management and orchestration software. The configuration management bit helps you to define what software should be running on your servers (which, in turn, makes your business function). The orchestration bit (if I’ve got this right) is all about changing what is running on your servers depending upon sets of conditions. For example, if everyone wants to order products at the same time, it’s probably a good idea to share the ordering process between different computers that service your business; if all orders went to the same computers at the same time, things would go slow and customers would get angry.

During the Ansible event, I heard names of a number of other products that could be used to solve roughly the same problem. I sensed there was a fight going on: a Darwinian struggle based entirely around software code. The fight takes place on a number of fronts: the extent to which the software perfectly matches the problems that need to be solved; if the software is difficult to work with, then the programmers are going to be frustrated. Secondly, there’s a fight for the hearts and minds of the software developers and engineers who have to do their stuff.

The whole event seemed to be part requirements gathering, part public relations. It was thought provoking. Although I didn’t get much from the Episerver event, I got quite a lot more from this event; not so much in terms of the technical content, but in terms of understanding the changing landscape of software, specifically how much had moved on, and how little I now knew.

There were a couple of other things that struck me. The Meetup app said that there were one hundred and ten people who would be attending. Bearing in mind that I’ve been to events that had only five or six people, this was a very impressive number. Interestingly, I counted only three women.

When Russ finally stopped talking, everyone clapped. He had done a good job; he was a great salesman. I picked up my bag and looked around. People had started to drift past the reception area. I saw Janos; we chatted for a couple of minutes. The last thing I remember was walking through the huge white atrium area and onto the streets of Angel.