SoCS students enjoyed a productive and informative day at BBC Media City in Salford last week. The theme of the event was latest trends in software development at the BBC.
Spokesperson Sam Newman outlined one of their key issues: “We have lots of information available about our systems. CPU, disk IO, orders placed, error rates, users logged in. But typically all these pieces of information are collected, aggregated and stored in very different ways making correlation difficult. What if we could treat all of this information as events? Then we could aggregate, store, and report on all of this information and make real use of the information using nothing more complex than some free, off the shelf Open Source software”
Talking about the event, final year Computer Science student Matthew Bright said “The Develop: North conference was a very interesting and enjoyable day overall. Media city is a brilliant location for this sort of thing, everything you could ask for was on site (you could even see Old Trafford). The speakers gave a really clear insight towards the industry that we as students are trying to work our way into. Having never really given a thought to how large organisations store and use the data they acquire, each talk described not only how the databases they use worked but why they used NoSQL in particular to manage huge amounts of data. ”
Final year Computer Information Systems student Robin Oliver said of the talks “it was very interesting to hear how these professionals at the top of their fields use these systems in the modern workplace. I understand everyone who attended, enjoyed the whole experience. ”