#ayb14

I've spent most of my week continuing to build out the new tag management interface in the Collections Publisher app. I've been pairing with Richard a bit, which has been nice.

On Friday, Dai, Matt and I went to All Your Base 2014, a conference in Oxford about data and databases.

My favourite talk was Jeni Tennison's keynote about an impending Data Reformation analogous to the Protestant Reformation, made possible not by the dissemination of scriptures, but open data. I found her thoughts on equality interesting: in a world where people are empowered by access to data, the 1% are the people who know how to analyze and make things from it, and we have a duty to make it easier for everyone else to be able to.

I also enjoyed Laura Thompson's talk on how Mozilla monitor their complex infrastructure. It had a good run-down of what you may want to monitor for each function of your service, and had some good comments on how services should be designed degrade gracefully in response to issues, so that the critical core functionality keeps running. It's probably a good primer to anyone new to monitoring - worth a watch when the videos go online.

I was impressed at the diversity of the speaker line-up. As a community we mainly seem to call out bad examples of speaker diversity, so it's worth recognising when a conference does this well.