Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #27: Engineering Infinity (w/ Julien Machon)

Transcript

Reality Bytes #27: Engineering Infinity (w/ Julien Machon) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it Change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it. Hello, everybody, Welcome back to the Deck Shows
• 0:12
  show within a show within a show, which is of course one of those
• 0:15
  very special additions of Reality Bites where we get to speak to a Next Thinker
• 0:21
  or a fascinating colleague of ours who will shed light on not only what they
• 0:26
  do and what makes Next Thinks so special, but I think shed light on
• 0:29
  on the nature of the modern tech vendor, on all the different parts that
• 0:35
  go into making a successful, effective product. Very very excited to welcome him
• 0:40
  to the show momentarily, but first of all, I just want to welcome
• 0:44
  Dina to the show. It's just Dina and I today. We're a two
• 0:48
  personal reality bites team. But it's lovely to be with you. Dina.
• 0:51
  How you doing? Hello, I'm all good. How are you? I'm
• 0:55
  great? I'm great. Everybody, of course is on holiday. That is
• 0:59
  the we can we can start to envy them a little bit tried that they
• 1:03
  are on the beach somewhere having some fun. Maybe you can, but I
• 1:10
  will be going away for week. Oh okay, no envy. Then if
• 1:18
  you don't mind, you got you got anything planned yourself dinner for this summer
• 1:21
  um, not yet, but maybe in autumn. I'm gonna go snorkeling in
• 1:26
  Egypt, so that should be fun. That sounds pretty fun. You can
• 1:29
  have my MV then you can come and come. Excellent, excellent, So
• 1:34
  let's let's welcome our guest. He's Julian Mason, engineering manager here at Next
• 1:42
  think. I'm so excited to having them a show. Julian, welcome to
• 1:45
  reality. But it's how you doing today? Thank you very much. I'm
• 1:49
  very good. Thanks for having me. Quite excited by that. Excellent.
• 1:53
  We're excited too. I think we've we've kind of had when it comes to
• 1:57
  the product itself. We've had had sort of strategic leaders, We've had people
• 2:02
  test talking about testing the product. We've had people talking about like very sort
• 2:07
  of user interface and user experience. I think this is the first time we've
• 2:13
  really have the opportunity to delve into the engineering side of it, and so
• 2:17
  doubly excited to have you on for that reason. But I guess a good
• 2:21
  place to start, Julian is tell us. Tell us about your role,
• 2:23
  tell us about the specific areas of the next Thing platform. But your team
• 2:28
  has responsibility for yeah sure, so yeah, my name is Julian injuring manager
• 2:34
  and next thing, and as an injuring manager, I'm working with several teams
• 2:39
  and one of the team is in charge of the main web applications. So
• 2:43
  when you basically load Infinity, that's the team that is in charge of the
• 2:47
  main applications loading the other feature teams applications. I'm also working with the team
• 2:53
  that is in charge of the like UI consistency, making sure that we have
• 3:00
  sharable you know, UI components, the same drop downs, the same tables,
• 3:02
  et cetera across all applications UM and I also work with the Live Dashboard
• 3:08
  team, so where you can create all your custom dashboards, which it's with
• 3:13
  nkul, etc. So that's the these'm in my main areas of focus.
• 3:20
  Great, great, so much for dinner and I to dig into right now.
• 3:23
  How big is your specific team, Julian out of interest, The teams
• 3:28
  are usually we try to try to keep like, you know, five six
• 3:31
  people maximum per team, So that's kind of roughly what I have free times
• 3:37
  six basically cool. Cool, and uh, let's hear something about you and
• 3:44
  your story be it's obviously a day. It's no walk in the park.
• 3:49
  I expect your your role in your skill set. So be intrigued to know
• 3:53
  what the major milestones have been in your education and career leading to this point.
• 3:59
  Yeah. I mean I think everybody next week is you know, it's
• 4:01
  pretty it's pretty amazing. Um So, I don't know if my story really
• 4:06
  stands out, but so I studied computer computer science back back in France where
• 4:13
  where where I'm from. Um And after my first two years of university,
• 4:16
  I had the opportunity to do an exchange in Europe. We have this thing
• 4:20
  called Erasmus exchange. Um, so I moved. I moved to Scotland because
• 4:27
  you know, I wanted to learn English. Uh. And you know,
• 4:30
  there's no greater places that I shouldn't say that it's not easy. It was,
• 4:39
  you know, I think I was. Yeah, it was. It
• 4:41
  was a bit surprising. But to be honest and in anywhere anywhere that had
• 4:44
  been a bit difficult. You know, my by I was pretty bad.
• 4:47
  Um So it was it was double challenge, you know, trying to finish
• 4:50
  my studies but also trying to learn a new language. Um and uh and
• 4:56
  after my my bachelor which I finished in Edinburgh, I got to my first
• 5:00
  my first job as a as a developer. I was working for a digital
• 5:05
  agency, so it was really customer focused, which really improved my communication skills
• 5:10
  because you know, always different customers being customers and and it was great and
• 5:15
  we were building you know, websites and crns and stuff like this. Then
• 5:18
  I moved to the consultancy side, where i've basically you know, worked with
• 5:23
  different kind of organizations financial companies, banks, et cetera, UM and uh.
• 5:30
  And then I also worked for a lottery actually, which was a yeah,
• 5:35
  yeah, fantastic, it's you know, it was it was really really
• 5:40
  it was people postcal Lottery, which I think is you know, it's quite
• 5:44
  quite a thing in the UK and uh and it was great. I mean
• 5:47
  it was fantastic experience, you know, working with lots of data, et
• 5:49
  cetera. And uh. And it's also it's a Dutch company and the Netherland
• 5:55
  they're massive and I don't know if you know this show called Deal or No
• 5:59
  Deal, which I thing we have in most countries. Yeah, in the
• 6:02
  Netherlands it's actually attached to Postcale Lottery, so you know, we had to
• 6:06
  make sure we have the right infrastructure in place when you have a live TV
• 6:10
  show, it was it was fantastic experience, you know, Okay, and
• 6:15
  so that was my my when I started to get my first experience from the
• 6:17
  cloud, really proper experience. Um. And then I my wife actually got
• 6:24
  an opportunity, she got transferred to Switzerland. So I full of her and
• 6:29
  uh and yeah, I write the next think back in twenty twenty, I
• 6:33
  believe I didn't expect it to be so sort of British. Its work,
• 6:38
  istory, Julian and so many, so many things I know about, and
• 6:41
  maybe maybe the audience doesn't necessarily postcode lottery without work in America. It's like
• 6:46
  your area code in America basically, and you can win if you if you
• 6:50
  enter as a community something like it. I certainly know what it is.
• 6:54
  But one thing it reminded me of Julian. You're a football fan, not
• 6:58
  quite no, not quite, but you know you perhaps know who Alex Ferguson
• 7:02
  is, right of course, of course, a famous manager of Manchester United,
• 7:08
  one of the most famous football managers of the last century. And it
• 7:13
  was always funny because he has a really strong um accent, a really strong
• 7:17
  Scottish accent. And of course it is as an international football club, so
• 7:23
  you know, it would have so many players from around the world, and
• 7:26
  you'd always have them a signing a new player. You'd always have them like
• 7:29
  looking profoundly confused as they try to adapt their perfectly good English to a very
• 7:35
  strong Scottish accent. It was and I always wondered how he even managed to
• 7:41
  do it, because you know, even as an Englishman, I was like,
• 7:43
  what's he say? Well, what was? I have no idea,
• 7:46
  but m sorry, and I know, I know, I know Dina now
• 7:49
  is gonna I wants to ask you a badder your time at Next being specifically,
• 7:54
  so I should hammer Mica. That's a very impressive story, Joan.
• 8:00
  Really, how much of transition was it when you first came on board and
• 8:05
  when did you join Next Link? And mostly what was the principal challenge of
• 8:09
  joining the organization? Um? The I mean, I guess it was.
• 8:18
  It was kind of a natural transition, I would say to to to join
• 8:22
  the next Link for me a similar you know area of work, et cetera.
• 8:28
  Um, one of the main challenge I mean, obviously without mentioning the
• 8:33
  fact that we were in full pandemic, so this, this has this whole
• 8:35
  sort of set of challenges. Um, but yeah, we uh, I
• 8:41
  guess that was the beginning of you know, the transition from the on prem
• 8:46
  I mean at the beginning we were like, you know, the early month
• 8:50
  of the transition between the on prem products to the cloud products that we had
• 8:56
  just started working in the experience on Experience, and I guess one of the
• 9:00
  main challenge was, you know, to get your head around it. You
• 9:03
  know, the product is very powerful, has lots of functionalities or just that
• 9:07
  in itself. You know, you need to you need to get up to
• 9:11
  speed, but also you really you need to get your head around you know,
• 9:13
  what is VSICS and what is experience. And then shortly after, you
• 9:18
  know, we we started working on what we now called Infinity. So so
• 9:22
  I guess, you know, that was the more of the main challenge.
• 9:26
  And yeah, of course all of this during you know, pandemic no office
• 9:31
  and which brings this one set of challenges in the sense because you only interact
• 9:35
  mostly with people you work with closely, so there's no coffee machine chats and
• 9:41
  stuff like that that you know might bring you some external I don't know,
• 9:45
  knowledge or things like this. And yeah, so I guess, I guess
• 9:50
  that's it interesting times, but we've made it. Hey. Yeah, So
• 9:56
  from your perspective, what are the main challenges facing IT professionals today and where
• 10:01
  is um where is the best opportunity to help them? Um? Well,
• 10:09
  I guess interestingly, I think I can probably make the parallel with some of
• 10:13
  the challenges we have as as engineers. UM. And it's probably you know,
• 10:18
  the size of your couple or like had had had to scale. Um.
• 10:24
  You know when as a software engineer, when you're like by yourself and
• 10:30
  you're writing one piece of software that you have, you know you can keep
• 10:35
  an eye on it and you know how it behaving, and you know you
• 10:39
  can you can instantly see issues because that's your main focus. But as soon
• 10:43
  as you start having hundreds of micro services in different clusters in the clouds,
• 10:48
  then it becomes really difficult. You have this kind of like single picture.
• 10:52
  UM. So for me, I would I can make I can make the
• 10:56
  pallet with the the in the IT world where if you're part of a company
• 11:00
  that has thousands of employees, how do you how do you keep an eye
• 11:03
  on you know, how they're doing, how their machines are is behaving.
• 11:09
  How do you maintain all of this? And so this probably kind of like
• 11:13
  the scaling issue, I guess probably one of the most challenge Yeah. True.
• 11:20
  And what is the key to building successful dashboards and how do you measure
• 11:24
  that success? Um? Yeah, So I think I think building successful dashboards
• 11:31
  is I mean you need to that's a good question. Actually, I think
• 11:37
  I think for me, a good dashboard should be readable, I mean the
• 11:41
  information. You can have a lot of information on the dashboard and you should
• 11:46
  quickly get a sense of you know, our things okay, our things not
• 11:50
  okay. And that's the first thing. I think that a good dashboard should
• 11:54
  also allow you to, uh, you know, drill down if you if
• 12:00
  you suspect there's an issue somewhere. Uh and uh. And I guess in
• 12:05
  a sense, the dashboard should be actionable, you know, a good dashboard,
• 12:09
  Yeah, should be actionable and beatable. This is how would define a
• 12:13
  good A good good dashboard. And in terms of measuring that success this is
• 12:20
  this is hard. I mean, you know, QP has a heart skill
• 12:22
  work for it. Um. I guess you could, you know, keep
• 12:28
  track on how many incidents were you able to proactively fix, you know,
• 12:31
  by you know, with with this dashboard, how much time do you actually
• 12:37
  spend on that dashboard, et cetera. UM I think sometimes, you know,
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  if you can create a dashboard to get a quick understanding on how things
• 12:43
  are, but you don't necessarily go back to it, and therefore maybe it's
• 12:48
  not the best dashboard. True, true, But I think the dashboards,
• 12:54
  whether like live dashboards as we have them now, they are becoming very very
• 12:58
  powerful, and the fact that we're able to correlate and measure success from like
• 13:03
  you just mentioned different KPIs, it makes the dashboard very vivid, as in
• 13:09
  it's actionable, you're able to drill down, you're able to measure actually how
• 13:13
  many have been fixed, whether that will go to an ICSM tool or just
• 13:18
  clearly states how many minutes have been saved, how many hours have been saved,
• 13:24
  or even the avoided time of an issue to take place. So I
• 13:28
  think that's one of the most brilliant things that we have right now. So
• 13:33
  thank you and thanks for the team for everybody who who's really working hard for
• 13:37
  that. We really enjoy using it in the day to day life in the
• 13:43
  field with our customers. So we really enjoyed seeing you and many of your
• 13:46
  colleagues respond to those customer reviews, and I was interested in what if any
• 13:52
  idea you otherwise have of customer experience, real world usage, feedback, etc.
• 14:00
  And how is it able to influence your work in the day to day
• 14:03
  life. I mean I am, of course, I'm always interested in customer
• 14:09
  feedback. I mean, of course I'm engineering. We always say engineering and
• 14:13
  products, but for me, engineering is products or product is engineering. I
• 14:18
  don't know, We're We're just one thing. You know, we don't do
• 14:20
  things without customer in mind. So for me, this is this is this
• 14:24
  is key, and this feedback, these feedbacks are are super important. Um
• 14:31
  And uh yeah, I think I think, you know, I always you
• 14:35
  know, I have a really good partnership with the product managers of like dashboard,
• 14:41
  for instance, and so I'm always interested in all the different customer feedback.
• 14:46
  And I think one of them is that I think life dashboards are are
• 14:52
  very powerful and you know, they get they get better and better every every
• 14:56
  release. Um And and you can probably say the same with with other part
• 15:01
  of the products. UM. But the one thing that is very important where
• 15:05
  I think where I know we're putting some a lot of effort on as well,
• 15:09
  is how do we link all these things together? Because I think you
• 15:15
  get great experience in each of the features, but sometimes it takes a bit
• 15:20
  of gymnastic, you know, to go from one to another. And you
• 15:26
  know, this is for me, this is a really important feedback and this
• 15:30
  is something I you know, really try to prioritize as well, Um,
• 15:35
  in terms of I mean, of course I don't necessarily I always have an
• 15:41
  input in in you know, maybe the product decisions that that that we're that
• 15:45
  we're taking, but I also make sure that from an engineering point of view,
• 15:48
  we do things so you know, things things, things are linked,
• 15:50
  things correlates, things are compatible. Because this is this is really important,
• 15:56
  It's really key, um, Julian. You you mentioned you're involved. This
• 16:02
  is a curveball for you, but you mentioned your involvement in the development of
• 16:06
  Infinity and it coming kind of relatively soon after you joined the organization, which
• 16:10
  I'm sure was no small undertaking. And we know from having Sam Gantner on
• 16:15
  the show, like you know, his sense of pride in Infinity is is
• 16:18
  really inspiring and something you can't really miss. And I'm sure you feel something
• 16:22
  like that yourself about it. UM talk to us about that process a little
• 16:26
  bit, if you would. When you came on board or when it was
• 16:30
  first introduced to you, how was it framed and and also what were the
• 16:36
  what were the biggest challenge you encountered him A production of that. Oh,
• 16:41
  that's a yeah, So that's a tough one. It feels like a while
• 16:45
  ago. Actually, I'm trying to remember what's framed. But I think,
• 16:49
  you know, we the message was we want to you know, we want
• 16:56
  to be a Clair native company. And right now we're nineteen nine. I
• 17:00
  mean, when I joined, we were one hundred percent on prem. The
• 17:04
  message was pretty clear, we want to be on on prem uh in a
• 17:11
  client company. But at the same time the decision, you know, I
• 17:17
  think we really wanted to make sure that the transition was as smooth as possible
• 17:21
  for for our customers, UM and uh and and for me. This that's
• 17:26
  kind of message I remember, UM And I guess one the main challenge during
• 17:33
  that process was always are we are we trying to recreate exactly the feature we
• 17:41
  have? Well? Are we trying to build something new? Um? And
• 17:47
  uh and and I think you could probably say that this is still a bit
• 17:51
  of a challenge in the sense that even though the platform is quite mature and
• 17:53
  powerful now, Um, it's I think it's because it's in between in the
• 18:00
  sense, you know, we're not trying to create something new. We're still
• 18:03
  trying to solve the same problems. Um, but we're trying to solve it
• 18:07
  in a different way, in a better way. And therefore it means that
• 18:11
  well, you're not you're not. It's not it's not a matter of parity
• 18:15
  of just blindly recreating what we already had. It's kind of like rethinking it
• 18:21
  and making it better. So so that's you know, I guess that's it's
• 18:25
  the constant, constant challenge that for me for sure, it was a big
• 18:30
  challenge. Um. Sorry, no, it's like one one very typical example
• 18:37
  with life dashboards was we had in V six we had the concept of metrics,
• 18:45
  you computed metrics, and when bood the dashboard project, in my mind
• 18:52
  it was as well, we need you know this, it's real time,
• 18:53
  and I think most people you know had real time in mind. We have
• 18:57
  in pure we can query the data as it is right now, and that's
• 19:03
  the dashboards we have, so we don't have to wait the next day to
• 19:04
  get the data on my dashboard and you know, and we were so excited
• 19:10
  about this, et cetera. And uh but then you know, we started
• 19:14
  thinking, well, maybe these are there are performance limitations, and maybe we
• 19:18
  have to actually come maybe the metric solution is the solution. Why do we
• 19:22
  start really like maybe we shouldn't reinvent something new, et cetera. And so
• 19:27
  there was a large moment of time where we really investigated the computed metrics or
• 19:33
  the trends, et cetera. Um, and you know, we were we
• 19:36
  were kind of like balancing the two. And you know what we have to
• 19:40
  do is we're just using n QUL. It's real time data. We have
• 19:45
  dynamic filtering, et cetera. Things that we were not able to have in
• 19:48
  VSIC. So in the sense, you know, we have this new element
• 19:51
  super powerful and we have tons of new ideas. By the way, but
• 19:55
  interestingly enough, we're you know, we're still thinking of bringing the trends,
• 20:00
  but more you know, to cover some different use cases. UM. So
• 20:04
  yeah, it's always always in between. I think I just thought would be
• 20:11
  an episode title. I think Julian Engineering Infinity. It sounds about as complicated
• 20:17
  as it presumably was um. Speaking of which, where'd you get your your
• 20:22
  most satisfaction and pride from from your role? Um um? I probably as
• 20:32
  any engineer you know, solving problems this is like super satisfying, But most
• 20:37
  importantly, it's probably the getting something done, like knowing that someone is using
• 20:45
  something you've created or something you've participated. This is a super satisfying knowing that
• 20:49
  you know you're you're making someone's lack at least one person's life easier somewhere on
• 20:55
  the planet. This is this is cool. Yeah, that's very cool.
• 20:57
  And the last word for me kind of related to that a little bit.
• 21:02
  But what do you like most about being a Next Thinker? More generally about
• 21:06
  the culture, about the company? I mean the people. I would say,
• 21:12
  I'm pretty sure everybody replies to people, but it's so true. Honestly,
• 21:19
  you know, we're all from different countries, we have different backgrounds,
• 21:25
  but we're all passionate. We love you know, I've never worked somewhere where
• 21:30
  everybody loves what they do, like they love their job. But also,
• 21:36
  you know, we really believe in in in in the product we're building,
• 21:40
  and so this is like a super nice cumbos Like I like my job,
• 21:44
  and I like what I do, what I build, And yeah, sometimes
• 21:48
  you have conversations and and or meetings et cetera. With it's it's not it
• 21:53
  doesn't really feel like work. It's more like, you know, passionate people
• 21:56
  trying to solve something and get something done. So so I really like that,
• 22:00
  I like I like the people in the culture. We have super cool.
• 22:04
  Well, we've liked talking to you very much, Judian, and it's
• 22:07
  been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming on it look sincere.
• 22:12
  Thanks for being behind the scenes making such an amazing, amazing product.
• 22:17
  It makes everything Dean or I and so many other colleagues do possible. We
• 22:21
  really appreciate you absolutely. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
• 22:25
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• 22:37
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• 22:44
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• 22:48
  head over to next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
• 22:52
  Until next time,