FLOWCON 2025

So You’ve Built It, Now Support It. From Chaos to Happy Customers - Doing the Gardening At Bloom & Wild

Humans make mistakes, it’s a fact of life. Despite our best intentions, and no matter how many checks we put in place, sometimes things go wrong. It’s no different with software. To move at speed then it’s inevitable that production issues will happen. Sometimes it’s your code that doesn’t work as expected, sometimes dependencies break, sometimes infrastructure breaks. Sometimes that once in a lifetime event happens. Again.

This talk is a story about support. It’s a real life story of how what was a chaotic situation, with unhappy customers and developers, has been turned around to something that keeps our customers happy, and is even fun to be a part of.

Sum up the session in only 1 sentence
All teams should support their systems in production and I'm going to explain what I've learnt about doing that, with added flowers :)

What are the 3 top takeaways from your session or workshop?
1. Why they’ll always be some need for production support, why needing it isn’t a indication of failure and how we can make it a nicer experience
2. The different ways that we've supported our systems at Bloom & Wild and what we've learnt as we've rapidly scaled the team
3. A little about flowers and a lot about learning

No Code, Low Code, Machine Code

What level of abstraction is just right?

Everything looks solvable if you ignore most of the complications. Many things look impossible if you’re stuck in the weeds. The current fashion for low/no code solutions heralds the cyclical return to looking for solutions that require softer skillsets. When is this appropriate and when is it a recipe for disaster?

Sum up the session in only 1 sentence
There is no silver bullet (reprise)

What are the 3 top takeaways from your session or workshop?
- Essential complexity cannot not be simplified away - No code/low code solutions are only beneficial in limited domains - AI and ML are tools not solutions

Seeing the world through a different lens

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences. This is probably obvious to most, but what is probably less apparent is that we also carry a coherent mental model of how we expect the world around us to behave. A preconceived notion of what to expect in any given situation, one that even goes beyond the basic laws of nature and common human behaviour. It is so ingrained that we do not know we even have it until made aware of it. Like do you assume predictability because science assumes determinism, or do you accept unpredictability because everything is contextual?

In this talk, we will have a look at some of these lenses, called world hypothesis, and we will explore how profoundly different we interpret the world by choosing one over the other. How does it play out assuming social systems behave like machines, like when blindly copying an approach from others; or trying to create a canonical data model when all have their own context; or how about giving a team orders and designs and then expecting them to self-manage?

We shall see that the lenses are complete and should not be mixed as we constantly seem to do; to our detriment, creating massive confusion and dysfunction. Awareness of these world views and understanding their fitness in any given situation can take us a long way to make the world a better place. Imagine that.

Sum up the session in only 1 sentence
To collaborate and codesign better we need to understand other peoples world views and how they compare and contrast with ours.

What are the 3 top takeaways from your session or workshop?
You need to understand at least the four different world views, seeing how they differ, and understand the issue of mixing them.