Change is a constant

Introduction

It’s with a heavy heart to say that this will be the last TechRadar post that I’ll publish as I head off to pastures new after today. Rest assured however, the TechRadar will continue in my absence. Over the past year the initiatives that have come on the back of this have resulted in us getting much more familiar with tech stacks that align very closely with our GDS-aligned clients which will undoubtedly help us continue to be very attractive to the public sector. There has been a lot of new information, technologies and approaches for us to get our head around but don’t let that daunt you - we have people all around the company, even more so now with being Civica Digital, that can help you along the way. We must remember that change is a constant within our industry - we must continually inspect and adapt ourselves, our approaches and the way we work to respond to opportunities!

Backend & Modern Architectures

Muhammad gave a good talk on what’s new with SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database recently. Particularly with the GDPR on the horizon, understanding different mechanisms for storing and encrypting data will be paramount (see also SHA1 being decrypted. This month has seen the release of Visual Studio 2017 and a start of improving tooling support for .NET Core by allowing csproj projects to be built in VSTS. .NET Core 2.0 is expcted in the next few months. The Kotlin language also got it’s first major new version release in 1.1, which adds experimental support for Co-Routines (similar to async/await as in C#), as well as a variety of other new language features to make code easier to read and support for Java 8 and 9. As a result I now see this as ready to adopt, and are actively promoting this at JVM-based opportunities. We also got a glimpse into what PHP 7.2 has in store, and some musings about Python. We’ve also been playing around with TestCafe more this month, and Simon has put together a Wiki page detailing more about its promise. It would be worthwhile trialling this further. Finally, Thoughtworks’ TechRadar highlighted an interesting, lightweight approach for capturing architectural decisions on agile projects.

DevOps

We’ve started a trial of Windows 10 Anniversary Update which has been rolled out to 5 staff. There’s been a couple of posts detailing the experience of using Bash for Windows Subsystem for Linux. There’ll undoubtedly be a few teething issues with this but it should provide better support for running the myriad of DevOps tooling that was built with Linux in mind. We continue to see a lot of work with the Home Office so understanding how Docker and Kubernetes work will be crucial to ensure we are credible with them.

Front-end

With the MOD project about to come to a close, watch this space for a Front-End JavaScript Dojo in the next couple of months. We’re seeing quite a bit of work for Angular at the moment both within Digital and across wider Civica. Also with platforms such as the SharePoint framework also supporting these libraries it’s a good opportunity to share and learn!

User Centred Design

In just 2 months, our UX community has grown substantially. We’re now 13 people (Adam, Amrit, Becca, Ezra, Helen, Jason, Kyle, Matthew, Nuno, Richard, Sarah, Therese and Toni)! You can catch-up with us on the “User Research and Design” Yammer group. We thought it would be a good idea to introduce our team members over the next monthly updates.

Meet Adam, Helen, Jason and Kyle: Adam Hopkins graduated in 2014 from UWE with a degree in BSc Multimedia Computing which allowed him to study a wide range of multimedia technologies of which UX was a significant part and then joined IPL in October in 2015 and have been expanding his UX knowledge ever since. He’s an avid gamer (PC/PS4) and very much enjoy all sorts of food and enjoy cooking and baking! He’s also an avid theatre-goer and have actually performed in a few shows. Gotta keep the interests broad!

Helen Shore joined SFW 6 years ago from central Government (she previously worked for Defra and DECC). She joined as a business analyst, though she was in a different role in Government. She’s worked as a business analyst on various projects with the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales and Urdd Gobaith Cymru. More recently, She’s also fulfilled the role of user researcher on a couple of projects for the Environment Agency and the Vehicle Certification Agency.

Jason Cooper is the Head of UX Practice and is both passionate and enthusiastic about all elements of user experience and digital transformation, with 10 years’ experience of user research, interaction design and user testing Jason is highly capable, confident and knowledgeable. Look after a team of user researchers, interaction designers and visual designers in both public and private environments. He enjoys sushi and chilli sauces :-)

Kyle Macdonald-Wallis is a Lead User Researcher within Civica Digital’s consultancy practice. With a PhD in Social Network Analysis, and a career spanning academic and user research environments, he enjoys using mixed method approaches to understand human behaviour and decision making processes. His research covers a broad range of topics, from young people’s health and the government’s Change4Life campaign to modelling the behaviour of light aircraft pilots, horse betting and energy markets.

Therese Gruneberger will be leaving Civica at the end of the month and we would like to thank her for her great and early commitment to our UX Community and wish her luck to her new ventures.

A SINGLE APPROACH TO THE DISCOVERY PHASE ACROSS CIVICA DIGITAL One of our missions as a community is to build a shared vision, inclusive of all team members’ inputs and ideas.

We have discussed the Discovery process in our UX Community meetups and we came up with similar decks and the idea that the outputs will be always tailored according each project’s needs. You can see our decks on Yammer

Snapshot of the radar