23/Sep 2020
7 min. read
This is the writeup of a session I delivered at both the Hong Kong Computer Society EASIG Seminar and Cloud Expo Asia. It’s about how, at PayMe, we started by creating an API product but realized our goal should have been to build an ecosystem instead.
What is PayMe Wikipedia makes a decent job of explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayMe, although it’s a bit light on the products that are most relevant to this post: API and POS.
7/Jul 2020
5 min. read
I thought I’d share about a book I just finished reading… which I found memorable mainly because it provides a simple framework to understand what - at first look - seems to all of us working in big companies just corporate politics against common sense.
The book is “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, by Clayton Christensen.
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What about it? TL;DR successfull, well run companies that dominates industries and are on a trajectory of sustaining innovation (i.
19/Mar 2020
6 min. read
I was reorganizing some files today, and found some (handwritten! :) notes from years past… worth posting them, although they’re not very structured.
On the Role of the Architect If I look at how I spend most of my time… Technology Architects/ Technology Strategist do three things:
set directions make decisions solve problems (not my definition, by the way… David expanding on what this means)
On centralized “platform” teams Platform as a Service is very similar in the way most old style IT programmes were: you built a central reusable service because it’s cheaper to operate common services centrally than reinvent the wheel every time.
8/Nov 2019
1 min. read
In early October, a delegation from PayMe team went to Amsterdam to attend the Spark+AI Summit.
It was a productive week of sharing experiences, meeting practitioners, as well as learn what’s coming next in the Spark ecosystem…
We also had a chance to share our experience using data and Databricks to enable a Data Driven Roadmap for our #paymehk products (PayMe and PayMe for Business)…
…some say it’s worth 18 minutes of your time… see it for yourself :)
20/Jul 2019
2 min. read
In the past few months, as HSBC ramps up its digital investment and seek to reorganize the way it delivers digital products, I have been asked this question many times.
In some cases, people mean “Can you explain to me how your technology platform look like”. In other cases, the person asking was interested in how we built and organized the team, how we structure ourselves to be agile and lean, a “small startup inside a big corporation”.
9/Jul 2019
3 min. read
I thought I’d share about a book I am reading now… which I found memorable mainly for the type of teamwork and leadership it’s describing.
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It’s describing work practices from the Gemini and Apollo mission control teams. Now: those were the people who worked - together with the astronauts - on all aspects of the space missions. They were involved in definition of objectives, feasibility, planning, to the design of every single aspect of the flights.
6/May 2019
11 min. read
Context There were times (and till to date) when we build grand enterprise architectures with capabilities and alternatives for each: from business to technical to infrastructure viewpoints, followed by year long development cycles. While the adoption of agile (any flavor of agile) has changed the way we think about development and start delivering incremental value, the architecture itself has either been ignored (“agile don’t need upfront architecture!”), or continues to follow a waterfall development.
