BRIEFING: ThoughtWorks TECHNOLOGY RADAR Vol 22

Last week was the briefing webinar for the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Like many of us, this was the first time they had gone through a process remotely which appeared as the pun/theme "the elephant in the zoom". It is interesting to hear from experts in specific technology areas discuss the latest trends and techniques. This time I was struck by the story behind how the Tech Radar came about. 

It didn't start as a external "thought leadership" or sales device, It was a reaction to business growth and internal knowledge management issues. I think it's the bi-directional process of the teams feeding in the ideas, the advisory board then collating and debating them to pull out patterns and asses the different maturity levels makes it powerful. Also this is based on actual experience from their projects, rather than desk analysis that you might get from a report like Gartners.

They also offer advice on how to make your own, which is great to get people sharing experience and what lessons about work in an organisation. It's like harnessing the power of multiple retrospectives in an easy to consume format.

On the actual content, Some takeaways for me were the concept of GitOps and tools like Argo CD, who in their own words:

Argo CD follows the GitOps pattern of using Git repositories as the source of truth for defining the desired application state

The ecosystem around Kubernetes is developing rapidly, tools like this making visualise what is happening a lot easier during a deployment. The recommendation to adopt tools like Cypress and Figma both of which I've heard good feedback on. Figma in particular has been great with collaborating with a designer, and sharing with the customer, on a project that I've been working on this year.

There are also emerging tools in Experiment tracking tools for machine learning where like Argo CD, different domains are getting similar tools to more traditional code, it sounds great in reliably productionising models.

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