{"id":53814,"date":"2021-12-30T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newed.any0.dpdns.org\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/?p=53814"},"modified":"2022-02-10T20:37:30","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T19:37:30","slug":"computing-is-at-the-centre-of-the-biggest-news-of-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newed.any0.dpdns.org\/en-gb\/industry\/blog\/technetuk\/2021\/12\/30\/computing-is-at-the-centre-of-the-biggest-news-of-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Computing is at the centre of the biggest news of 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An<\/p>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic and our response to it remains humanity’s biggest event in 2021, with over three million deaths<\/a> attributed to the disease and its immediate complications this year. Computing is deeply involved in our response: public-health tracking, epidemiological modelling, the extraordinarily rapid roll-out of effective and novel vaccines, and the automation technologies involved in production of monoclonal antibodies are all visible countermeasures, feasible only with the help of cheap and reliable computing.<\/p>\n

As much as those technologies fascinate and motivate me, though, I see that true change operates at the cultural<\/strong> level, and computing in 2021 has quite a story to tell there, too.<\/p>\n

Commercial society has transformed itself enormously, on the fly, in the last two years. Then, shifts of work, entertainment, and socialising from in-person to remote were the province of futurists<\/a>. Now, they’re irreversible commonplaces: plenty of workers, for example, are going back to their offices either never<\/a> or only on special occasions. The CEOs planning a return to “normality” are often just revealing that they feel safer in their personal comfort zone. Researchers have accumulated plenty of evidence by now that distributed workforces can be at least as creative<\/a> and cohesive<\/a> as conventional commute-sufferers. For better or worse, a majority of first-world romantic partners now meet each other online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And digital technologies enabled all this! Plenty of mass-market articles already focus on the tools to use when working remotely<\/a>. The aim of this posting, in contrast, is to shine a light on implications specifically for developers, and how we adjust our workflows and “soft skills” to make the best way forward in this new world. That story has only begun to be told – and it starts with our approach to collaboration.<\/p>\n

\u3164<\/h3>\n

Plan for asynchrony<\/h3>\n

The single biggest step you can make is to embrace asynchrony<\/a>. Learn to work productively without the luxury of instantaneous responses. Help your collaborators keep moving forward, even in your absence.<\/p>\n

Synchronous communication has its place. One of my own roles is to consult with teams that provide support to development projects. There, we have specific service-level expectations at the level of responding to questions like, “why is $SOME_HOST rejecting my ssh request?” within two minutes.<\/p>\n

While we’ll return to that example in a moment, the need for rapid response applies in a minority of cases for software workers. For the most part, creatives like programmers, designers and architects do well to “microservice” their intellectual contributions to be loosely coupled. Figure out what your own best rhythms are; if you’re like most of the professionals I see, “day” or “hour” is more likely than “minute”. Work out expectations with your team. Maybe you’ve had the habit in the past of apologising when you take a call or a walk for thirty minutes; it’s time to leave those apologies behind as distractions. Train your colleagues that you’ll take care of their questions, but over a day or a week, rather than in a few seconds. Focus on being fully present when you do address a particular matter.<\/p>\n

\u3164<\/h3>\n

The centrality of git<\/h3>\n

The one central “hard” technology for the current shifts in programming culture is git. Its usual description as an “open source distributed version control system” underplays the extent to which git has become a platform for development activities of the world’s 25 million programmers<\/a> as well as a growing number of non-programmers<\/a>. This is how we program now:<\/p>\n