MDRx

I'm absolutely thrilled to be named one of Management Today's 35 Under 35! Honoured to join the ranks of leaders including Stella McCartney, Martha Lane Fox, and Karen Blackett. 🌟 It's only possible to win awards like this with the support of brilliant colleagues and inspirational mentors - you know who you are - thank you. #35Under35 #Leadership #WomenInBusiness 

Yesterday, our team had another Learning Day, this time on data pipelines and orchestration using Dagster! 🧑💻✨ Throughout the day, we had a few sessions peeking into the world of Dagster and explored its capabilities for building and managing data workflows. 🧑🏫 Here's a glimpse of what we covered: 🔹 Core: We kicked off with Imane Hafnaoui working through Dagster's core concepts. Data assets, ops, graphs, jobs, resources, sensors, asset groups, code locations, workspaces, the lot. We learned about how we're using Dagster as a core component of some next level data science and ML client work at MDRx 🔹 History: We touched on the lineage of data orchestration to better understand how Dagster provides an often preferred, data-centric approach to orchestration. 🔹 Code: After a quick break we returned to Alistair Divorty who guided us through our first Dagster implementation, demonstrating how to set up a development environment, how this applies to production and a tour of the python APIs used to do the damn thing. 🔹 Exercise: We finished with a hands-on exercise analysing ecommerce purchase patterns using a sample dataset from 2019. We built a pipeline that triggers on an SQS event, loads and cleans data, extracts relevant features and performs some insightful analysis of our choice. We implemented software-defined assets, sensors, sequential and parallel execution and a bit of DevOps. 🌟 Key Takeaways: 🔸 Dagster is great! This is a tool that would have made a number of data-related tasks much easier to wrestle with throughout my career, and I'm in no way a data professional. Maybe overkill in some cases but that's never stopped a dev from sleeping good at night! 🔸 Vibes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) CDK meets NestJS, strangely. An open door to imperative definitions with v. slick use of decorators that _feels like_ reflection-based dependency injection, massively boosts DX. Productivity!!!! 🔸 Good data science is able to solve so many problems relating to product, strategy and engineering. Avoid hype traps, see the reality of your business. It's as accessible as ever and should be the starting point for small to large enterprises looking to maximize value delivered to their customers, employees and stakeholders. Thanks to everyone involved in organising. 🫡 #DataPipelines #Dagster #Data #ML #ContinuousLearning

A huge thank you to Women of Web3’s founder Lauren Ingram for hosting an outstanding event for women pioneering the #nextbigthings in technology at Curve Club. The rebrand is fabulous, and your continuous questioning of “Why do we care about any of this tech anyway?” remains necessary whatever the #nextbigthing is. It was great to connect with so many accomplished individuals who are shaping the future of technology. Looking forward to seeing what comes next from this brilliant community!

Another fantastic morning spent at ‘Founders Rules’ today, hosted by Sharmadean Reid MBE and The Stack World 👏 At MDRx, we are lucky to partner with founders and start-ups across diverse sectors - so hearing from Mercedes Benson about her multi-faceted career and experience founding SOCIALFIXT was incredibly insightful. There were three takeaways that resonated with me: 1️⃣ Don't chase cool - prioritise customer impact over trends Clients often ask us, ‘what should we do first?’. In the pursuit of innovation and rapid growth, it's easy to lose sight of what truly matters: delivering value to your customers. Stick to the problem you’re trying to solve, do it brilliantly, and the rest will follow. As Mercedes shared, ‘a moment in time came where there was a need for Social FIXT - and we were already ready to meet that need and deliver’. Ruthlessly sticking to your north star will not only help you to build lasting relationships with your customers but also attract partners who share in your mission. 2️⃣ Learn from the experiences of others - especially their mistakes Mercedes emphasised the importance of learning from, and leaning on, the start-up community and her wider network when navigating her journey as an entrepreneur. By studying the missteps and challenges that other peers (both current and aspirational) have made - you can leapfrog from their experiences and deliver value more efficiently. 3️⃣ Community trumps fans - customer intimacy is the greatest way to sustainably grow your brand In today's hyper-connected world, building a community around your brand is more important than ever. We heard from Mercedes about the huge impact that cultivating deep and meaningful relationships with her core customers, versus amassing a large number of fans or followers, has had on her business. By fostering genuine connections and intimacy with your audience, you will yield a loyal customer base, invaluable feedback and sustainable growth. In other words....authentic customer relationships drive success! Really looking forward to the next one The Stack World

Ever looked at an array and thought: "Hey, awfully strange that the first thing in the list is at 0"? const first = myThings[0] const last = myThings[myThings.length - 1] Make it make sense!!!!! So we did. It ends today. Counting from 0 is not normal. I've published a JS/TS array implementation that uses 1-based indexing. Count like a human once more. #typescript #javascript #opensource #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment

“Good Enough” and tech’s diminishing returns 📉 We spend a lot of time chasing “perfect” in tech. ⬆️ 100% uptime ✅ Every user journey completed successfully 🎯 Perfect #AI accuracy We hold our IT systems to a *way* higher standard than their human counterparts. I make mistakes every day. Most of them really silly and avoidable. At some point my Partners decide that these mistakes are outweighed by the value I can bring and so, on balance, let me keep my job. I really encourage our clients to focus on identifying the tipping point at which, on balance, the tech adds value. We always want to beat and exceed this to add LOTS of value, of course - we’re too competitive not to..! 🏆 Diminishing returns are real in tech. Closing the last 10% tends to cost more than the previous 90%. This is sometimes worth it (hey, nuclear missile programmes globally 👋🏼) but in almost all private and charity sectors, it’s probably not. If we are doing it right, we are always focussed on getting the “biggest bang for buck” at the outset, and then being really disciplined in our prioritisation and measurement of further effort/benefits 💡 When organisations do it right, they can really punch above their weight and achieve brilliant things at speed and at a modest budget 🏎️ As my friend Kingston Myles over at Birmingham Museums Trust has said to me a number of times: “Good enough for now; Safe enough to try.” Here, here! I’ll drop a few examples of organisations I’ve seen do this really well in the comments. If you have any examples (feel free to brag if your example is yourself/your organisation 😉) drop them in the comments or DM me #technology #consulting 👇🏼👇🏼

Let’s face it, the future health of the UK is tied to the health of our public services 🇬🇧 Today I attended Reform Think Tank’s Reimagining Whitehall conference to discuss how central government needs to reform to meet future challenges, how AI can drive performance and how government can embrace an innovation mindset. I found the panel discussions particularly insightful, especially hearing the tension felt by SCS to innovate vs. be compliant vocalised and the fear of what might happen if you don’t get the balance between the two right. This is why MDRx exists, to help private and public sector organisations bravely innovate whilst operating within the law. Get in touch if you’re finding it a challenge to strike that balance. My top three reflections: 🧠 The private sector must help the public sector understand how to use technologies ➡ Through public sector adoption of technologies developed in the private sector  ➡ Through better procurement and recruitment of specialist expertise ➡ Through giving small, innovative businesses a voice and making it easier for SMEs to help 📵 The public sector needs to create an environment where there is a safe balance between innovation and risk ➡ Through improving skills, knowledge and understanding of emerging technologies  ➡ Through changing attitudes towards failure and experimentation ➡ Though breaking down systemic issues into business problems that, when solved, deliver value or learning  ➡ Through learning from start ups; deliver the minimum needed to add value and maximise collaboration 🥪 Eating lunch whilst rotating at the top of the BT tower is pretty disorientating, but worth it for the incredible view. Thank you Reform Think Tank, BT Group and PA Consulting for hosting a brilliant event. It was great to make some new connections and catch up with some familiar faces. It’s always a pleasure to hear from Frazer Bennett, and finally bumped into Catherine Davies at work! 

What Big Consulting can learn from Legal: Acting in Client’s Best Interests ⚖️ I have been thinking a lot about this recently. Some lawyers, at their worst, can be uncommercial, pedantic and unnecessarily sceptical and adversarial. They can exhibit toxic cultures and practices. They can do everything in their power to resemble the worst Bleak House stereotypes. They can however be brilliant. At their best, they are the opposite of all the things I list above. I think Big Consulting can learn a lot from #legal 💡 1️⃣ Acting in Clients Best Interests The recent Post Office scandal, and commentary from the likes of Jenifer Swallow, has had me revisiting the SRA’s Standards. Principle 7: You act in the best interests of each client. This is such an obvious no-brainer, right? It speaks to everything from quality of work to conflicts of interest. Generally, consultants deliver good work - even if the death-by-PowerPoint, not-actually-knowing-anything-about-anything, Ivory-Tower-thinking can drive me and many others to absolute distraction 😡 Big #Consulting exhibits gross conflicts of interest every day though. Consultants should be brought in to bring expertise the organisation doesn’t have, do the job, and leave 🧥 BUT THEY DON’T LEAVE Big Consulting is too often vampiric. They don’t properly hand-over, get clients hooked on “value-add”, and operate in a black box. They latch on, and never leave. It sickens me 🤮 Imagine a company being unable to operate its newly acquired business without a crack team of corporate #lawyers to cross reference their transaction bundle 🤦🏼♂️ This is one of the reasons Mishcon de Reya LLP and I set up MDRx - we want to help clients use data and tech, equip them to thrive without us, and then leave 🚀 Acting in their best interests, always 👊🏼 I can feel a mini-series coming over the coming weeks…

$1300 spent in 24hrs on an empty S3 bucket, with an option to ingest 20GB of data that doesn't belong to you, per minute. 💰💸 TLDR: You're charged for unauthorised S3 bucket requests and the author used a bucket name that happened to be the default bucket name of a popular software product's backup config. A story with many pitfalls of cloud and software management, activated by both provider and customer! Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working on a pricing model fix to protect cloud users from Denial of Wallet attacks stemming from unauthorised requests, but configuration of software alongside the protection and observability of your network, data and billing are firmly in your hands as cloud customers. It's not always easy but always important. 1. Know where your systems access the internet and why a. Access should be known and approved, not discovered and blocked 2. Enable and monitor logs, even on simple blob storage access requests 3. Set budgets and visible, actionable alerts a. Use notifications to reach fixers where they are, without having to open a cloud console first. 4. Use unique cloud resource names a. Not sure UUID is absolutely required but own your cloud resources and name them with detail b. Much simpler with Infrastructure as Code tooling like HashiCorp Terraform 5. Read the complicated pricing documentation once more 6. Configure software with explicit intention, incl. important but often skimmed over crisis prevention features like backups. Original Medium post: https://lnkd.in/eiNKtpg2 Substack: https://lnkd.in/eM4gjnkG #cloud #security #aws

“As the public sector’s digital transformation accelerates, a strong partnership between buyers and innovative suppliers is vital.” 🏆 Thrilled to celebrate MDRx being recognised among the fastest-growing technology consultancies in the UK public sector in Tussell and techUK’s Tech200. 🚀 It was a privilege to connect with fellow innovative suppliers and award winners today, fueling our commitment to innovation in the public sector. 🥂 Thanks for hosting us techUK.