‘The Irish are coming’ screams the blog for the Red Monk Brew: The Monki Gras in London on 1 February. The organisers say there’s a steady stream of talented Irish software architects and developers signing up for the event.
RedMonk is holding the developer day, which focuses on social and app development as well as social and data science and operations, on 1 February in Conway Hall. The Conway Hall Library holds the Ethical Society’s collection, which is the largest and most comprehensive Humanist Research resource of its kind in the UK.
The event will feature such speakers as Joyent co-founder and CTO Jason Hoffman and Matt LeMay, platform manager at Bitly.
“There are already any number of conferences for entrepreneurs out there, but we wanted to give developers a voice,” explained James Governor from RedMonk.
“That’s the key to conference. So we’re relevant to architects, developers, development managers – but also innovation managers at corporations, because the developers we’re featuring are changing industries.”
The new kingmakers
Governor says that unlike most tech conferences today, which focus on entrepreneurship and start-ups, this conference is for founders with software on their minds.
“Sure, many are company founders, but that’s not the focus. The reason ‘our’ founders are speaking is because they are engineers. Software developers are the new kingmakers, in an age where we’re beginning to appreciate the primacy of practitioner talent in development and operations.”
Governor said that going through the Eventbrite billing engine for the conference he was stunned to notice the significant – and talented – Irish contingent that signed up for the event, including Oisin Hurley, co-founder of Vigill; Darach Ennis, chief solutions architect at Push Technology and Tara Simpson, CEO of Instil.
“My business partner is called Stephen O’Grady. One of our first hires is called Tom Raftery. My gran was Irish. You get the picture. More seriously – there are tremendous developers and architects in Ireland – it’s a hotbed of talent, in Dublin, sure, but also Cork and other areas. A highly skilled, highly motivated workforce, and yes, call it national stereotyping but the Irish tend to be great communicators and storytellers. Which is perhaps why they gravitated to us, and us to them.”
Governor said he believes we’re at a tipping point in terms of governance and how software is built.
“Open source is now so commonplace, that some younger developers argue we don’t even need open source governance anymore – just throw your code onto Github, and away we go.
“The rise of Github does change everything, but we still need governance – that’s likely to come through clearly at Monki Gras. Technical architectures for development and ops don’t replace social architectures, they augment them.
“Open source contributions are increasing massively from all sides, and increasingly the value of companies is in the data, not the code. We’ll home in on that,” Governor said.
