ANZ Pied Piper

After a frenetic 6 weeks rush, where 10 team members sacrifice lots of sleep hours and family time, the Tech Summit had arrived. This is an event where all Australia and New Zealand DellEMC presales community get together, along with partners and some international speakers and guests, including most of the global management team, for a total of 350 people. This year was hosted at the Cypress Lakes hotel in the Hunter Valley, a wine producing region in the state of New South Wales ... I have always said that wine and hacking go very well together ! Despite all the preparations we had to cram lots of activity at the last minute: All components of the architecture (except the "Time Keeper") seen in the diagram below relied on the Mongo database. Since Pivotal Web Services currently doesn't offer a production grade Mongo database in their Marketplace we decided to move our database to an external provider. We bought the lowest tier of clustered Mongo database (aka M1

We are entering the final stages of the Pied Piper program, the team project. At the end of last years program we run an anonymous survey looking for feedback. A common observation was the lack of team work. Participants got to work on their own personal projects in a competitive fashion but no chance to collaborate and work together. One of the responses in the survey even described this lack as the desire to "experience what working in a start-up feels like" So for this year we devised a plan. We would spend the last 2 months working together to improve upon the app I developed last year for the presales conference. We generated lots of good ideas about how to improve it during the Hackathon . Modern Agile development use the term "backlog" to refer to this list of features waiting to be implemented. During the Cloud Native workshop we covered Agile development. There are two main Agile methodologies, Scrum and Kanban: Scrum goes through a series of short