jamie oliver

It’s Only Television But I Like It

Peter Cripps education , ,

Yes I know it’s a television program and yes I know they are playing up to the camera and yes I know we only see the ‘edited highlights’ but Jamie’s Dream School on Channel 4 last night was an exemplar on how to deliver motivational talks to a disinterested audience. As I discussed last time the ‘teachers’ (actually people at the leading edge in their field) are truly inspirational, passionate individuals who use every trick in the book to engage with and inspire their students. Not only that they are incredibly humble, as typified by one of the pupils asking Robert Winston if he “had ever cured anything” to which he replied he “thought they had helped with some advances, yes”. As well as all this inspirational and motivational teaching you will see there is not a single PowerPoint slide in sight. It’s all about naked presenting (well, apart from the odd prop or two) and story telling.I’ve recently been reading Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate which looks at how storytelling as done by great writers and film-makers can be used by presenters to really engage with their audience. If you want a book that helps you with presentations that is something other than the boring ‘how to’ guides on structuring PowerPoint presentations then it’s definitely worth a read.

So what’s this got to do with IT architecture? Nothing and everything! At one level architecture is just a pile of models and diagrams describing ways for solving business problems. However architecture also needs to be ‘bought alive’ if the ideas it encompasses are to be explained and the costs of implementing it justified to non-technical people. Explaining and presenting architecture is probably one of the most important aspects of the architects role and communication skills should definitely be up their as one of the key competencies possessed by architects. Without these architectures will just remain a bunch of ideas gathering virtual dust in a modeling tool.

On Lego, Granularity, Jamie Oliver and Architecture

Peter Cripps architecture, creativity , , ,

There’s a TV program running here in the UK called Jamie’s Dream School where the chef, entrepreneur, restaurateur and Sainsbury’s promoter Jamie Oliver brings together some of Britain’s most inspirational individuals (Robert Winston, Simon Callow, Rankin and Rolf Harris to name but four) to see if they can persuade 20 young people who’ve left school with little to show for the experience to give education a second chance. The central theme seems to be one of hands-on student involvement and live demos, the more outrageous the better. The highlight so far being Robert Winston hacking away at rats and pigs with scalpels and a circular saw resulting in several students vomiting in the playground.This set me thinking about how best to demonstrate software architecture to a bunch of students of a similar age to those in the Jamie Oliver program for a talk I gave at a UK university last week. Much has been written about the analogy between LEGO (R) and services (see this article from Zapthink and another from ZDNet for example). Okay it may not be quite as imaginative as pig carcasses being hacked about but LEGO was the best I had at hand! Here’s how the demo works:

  1. First I give them my favourite defnition of architecture, namely: Architects take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways. (Seth Godin).
  2. Then I invite an unsuspecting candidate to come and assemble the body (importantly excluding the wheels) of a car out of LEGO (actually Duplo as its bigger) making a big thing of tipping a bag of bricks out onto the table. This they usually do without too much hassle, the key learning point being that they have created an “interesting” construct out of “existing components”.
  3. I then ask them to add some wheels and tip out a bag of K’NEX (R). As I’m sure even non-parents know K’NEX and LEGO are essentially different “systems” and the two don’t (easily) connect to each other. This usually ends up in bemused looks and a good deal of fiddling around with wheels and bricks trying to figure out how to make the two systems connect to each other.

Depending on how much time and energy you have as well as the attention span of the students there are lots of great learning points to be made here. In order of increasing depth these are:

  1. LEGO (components) have a well defined interface and can easily be assembled in lots of interesting ways.
  2. K’NEX is a different system and has been designed with a different interface. K’NEX and LEGO were not designed to work with each other. One of the jobs of an architect is to watch out for incompatible interfaces and figure out ways of making them work with each other. This is possibly done using a third party product e.g Sellotape (R). I guess an extension to this demo could be a roll of this.
  3. It may be in the component providers interest to use different interfaces as it results in vendor lock-in which means you have to keep going back to that vendor for more components,
  4. Granularity (i.e. in the case of LEGO the number of “nobbles”) is important. Small bricks (few nobbles, fine-grained) may be very reusable but you need lots and lots of them to do anything interesting. Conversely LEGO have now taken to quite specialized pieces (not “bricks” any more but large-grained pieces) that perform one function well (the LEGO rocket for example) but cannot be reused so easily. The optimum for re-usability is somewhere in-between these two.
  5. LEGO may be aimed at children who, with relatively little expertise or training, may be able to assemble interesting things but they are not about to build LEGOland. For that you need an architect!
  6. Finally, if you are feeling really mean, disassemble the lovingly built construction of your student then ask her to re-build it in exactly the same way. Chances are that even for a relatively simple system they won’t be able to. What might have helped was some type of document that described what they had done.

I’m sure there are other interesting analogies to be drawn but I’ll finish by saying that this is not quite as trivial as it sounds. Not only was this a good learning exercise for my students I happen to know a client who is using building blocks like LEGO to help their architects architect systems. The key thing it helps demonstrate is the importance of collaboration in assembling such systems.