The Future of Application Development

Apologies for the hiatus in the blog – we don’t get much summer in the UK and holidays and work commitments have prevented any recent updates. Anyway it’s been an interesting few months for Brownfield.
First of all I was the leader of a track for IBM’s Future of Application Development conference held in Somers (pictured above). Somers like the nearby IBM HQ Armonk is an amazingly large and attractive campus, completely unlike our locations in Europe (except IBM Hursley of course)!
IBM frequently has internal conferences run by its Academy of Technology to bring together technical leaders from across IBM to share thoughts and best practices. Here's me (third along, inspecting Peter Coldicott's shoes for some reason) on a panel with some very distinguished experts talking about what we should do about legacy applications.

This conference was unusual for two reasons:
First we were looking into the future rather than sharing best practice
Second we were joined by senior IT staff from HSBC, including its Head of Architecture, Peter Cook.
We also had some very august speakers including:

• Grady Booch (co-creator of UML, OO and pattern visionary, who joined us from Second Life)
  
• Martin Nally (CTO of Rational)
  
• Linda Northrop (Director, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute)
  

Grady pictured below in Second Life (where he is nearly as handsome as real life) is part of the Brownfield Study and kindly name checked Brownfield again (thanks Grady!).

Unfortunately as the conference is still communicating its findings to the sponsoring Executives inside IBM, I can’t discuss them here. But I can tell you that the Brownfield presentation was (narrowly) the highest scored presentation of the conference!