Overview and resources

- [Instructor] When working in technology, one of the important things to understand are trends. This is because industry trends have an impact on technology trends and vice versa. Once you've determined what some of the technology trends are, how do you figure out what to do with it? Well, the technology radar created by ThoughtWorks is a super helpful tool to put some structure around this process. ThoughtWorks is a global software consultancy. Over the next few minutes, we're going to be looking at their technology radar. We'll then be creating our own technology radar that's relevant to you. This will allow you to understand some of the trends and determine what are the technology areas you need to be working on. The radar is split into four quadrants. These are platforms, techniques, tools, and languages and frameworks. You'll notice the radar has four concentric rings, going from the outer ring to the inner ring. They're, hold, assess, trial and adopt. Hold means hold off for now. So these are technologies that are too new to reasonably assess yet. You can use it on an existing project and see how it compares to the current solution for example, but you should think twice about using this technology for a new project. The next ring is assess. So what you're seeing is this technology is worth exploring to see how it will affect you. So if you're at a conference or seeing an online session on it, go ahead and attend it. Check out how this might impact the work you do. The next inner ring is trial. And these are technologies that you should get your hands dirty with, so you understand how it works. Have you done a similar project before? And can you re-implement it with this technology? One of the differences between assess and trial is that at the assess stage, you would have only seen the marketing spiel and so you only know the benefits. In this trial stage, because you're working hands on, you get an idea of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the technology. Ideally, implement an actual project that you've done before. This way you can effectively compare and understand the technology because you've got a baseline. The inner most ring is adopt. And this means this needs to be your go to technology where it makes sense. These are the industry standards for known use cases. Let's take a look at an actual tech radar that ThoughtWorks have made publicly available. You'll need a Google account. So go head to the link that you see on your screen and follow the Google Sheets link on the page. Now go ahead and copy the Google Docs URL, and head over to radar.thoughtworks.com and paste that URL link in the box below. Then select Build my radar. And there you have it. You have the radar with the four concentric rings and the four quadrants. Each of the blobs corresponds to a technology. It's helpful to know if there are any changes in the technology since we last looked at our tech radar. So if it's a triangle, that means it's new or moved since our last tech radar assessment. A circle means that there is no change. Now you can pick any technology and when select it, you can drill down a little bit deeper. Now all of this information comes from that Google Sheets document. So the more detailed you are there, the more information you will have here. A couple of things before we wrap up this section. You don't have to go with the four quadrants that ThoughtWorks have put together. But if you haven't done this before, it's a good starting point. You'll probably want to do this exercise about twice a year. Now we're going to use the technology radar and merge them with the industry trends. Over the next few videos, we're going to look at three industry trends together. Multicloud, software architecture and development, and automation. We'll map these industry trends to different quadrants of the radar. So the platform quadrant in the technology radar is based on the Multicloud industry trend. The languages and frameworks quadrant is based on the software architecture and development trend. The techniques quadrant in the tech radar is based on the automation industry trend. And finally, the tools quadrant is not based on any of the industry trends, but rather it's to be used for useful tools that you've identified that you will think will help you in your area of work. Using these strengths as a starting point, we'll work together to determine what your area of focus should be and why. I'll give you an example of what I would do in my area of work so that you have a working example.