AI for Business with BCN

Understanding Full Stack Development

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Pete Filitz is joined by Steve Byrne and Mark Rotherham to discuss BCN's Full Stack development services. 

BCN offers a wide range of services, including full stack development, low-cost solutions like Power BI and SharePoint development, and AI integration. Full stack development involves designing, creating, testing, and deploying entire applications using various technologies and tools.

Pete, Steve and Mark dig into some BCN case studies - from developing an information sharing platform for maritime security and creating a back-office system for a window cleaning business -  and provide practical of examples of how businesses can use these services,. 

They also highlight BCN's comprehensive approach to cybersecurity and discuss future trends in full stack development, including the incorporation of AI and the use of low code platforms.



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Peter:

Hello and welcome to the BCN podcast. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Steve Byrne and Mark Rotherham. Gentlemen, welcome. We'll be discussing the BCN full stack development. But before we dive into details, why don't you introduce yourselves? Steve, let's start with you.

SPEAKER_02:

Hi Peter. Yeah, I'm Steve. I'm head of the full stack development here at BCN. My team focuses on delivering custom bespoke applications for our external clients.

Peter:

Excellent. Welcome Steve and thank you for joining us today. Mark?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, afternoon, everyone. Mart Rotherham, I'm BCN's chief technology officer. So I oversee all of our tech strategy and help Steve with positioning some of our software development and how we bring in some of the innovation around data and AI.

Peter:

Excellent. Mark, thanks for joining us. As always, a pleasure. So I think let's start with what is full stack development. Maybe one for you, Steve. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02:

So full stack development is the process of designing, creating, testing, and deploying complete applications from start to finish. So it's a very creative process. We're not using any kind of existing building blocks, we're creating stuff from scratch. So it involves working with various technologies and tools, including front-end development, back-end development, and database development. So my full stack team has to have skills across the entire stack. The type of applications that we create include web applications, line of business systems. We also do mobile applications and API creation as well.

Peter:

And I I guess for our audience's sake, what sort of makes BCN service unique?

SPEAKER_02:

I think we offer quite a few unique solutions across the entire business. We've not just got full stack development, we've also got low-co solutions like Power. We're into SharePoint development and also Power BI as well. So we're quite unique in that we can offer quite a wide service offering.

Peter:

Could you maybe elaborate on some practical applications where businesses can use the service?

SPEAKER_02:

So we've developed an iOS platform. Now, the problem originally faced with this, the idea for the platform came from security concerns. So it's to address maritime security issues such as piracy, human trafficking, drugs, and also weapon smuggling in the Indian Ocean region. And that goes back to 2018. The idea was to build an information sharing platform, a maritime solution.

Peter:

Great. And uh I guess what were the key benefits from that that we saw?

SPEAKER_02:

The solution was created to create like a user-friendly maritime information sharing tool. This allowed um regional agencies, navies, coast guards, and other partners to communicate via a secure encrypted online environment in real time. So its primary function is to provide maritime centres, organizations, and agencies and means to analyse, plan and coordinate maritime operations. Now this solution's grown massively over the last few years. So it's a platform that has advanced mapping, it controls vessel intercepts, has the ability to put custom markers, and we make use of a number of advanced features such as nautical mapping, um, EEZ, that's exclusive economic zones, that's the area, area of the sea where sovereign states have exclusive rights to the resources for wind and water energy production. The chill also has a number of features, things like um AIS integration, and that's for live vessel tracking, which track over 120,000 vessels worldwide.

Peter:

That's super interesting. It's quite exciting to see the scale and I guess the breadth of the possibilities that that the service can bring to the table. Now, that's obviously probably not something a lot of our customers or audience will be using it for. I understand that we're doing a lot of work also in the utility sector as well as in the healthcare, which we'll touch on in in a little bit. Tell us a little more about what we're doing with Cadent and what some of the challenges they faced.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so Cadent Gas is the largest distributor of gas pipelines and gas in the UK. So their problem that they faced was around pipeline safety. And a Cadent approached us to look at how we could utilize available technologies to present a sort of modern and easy-to-use platform that landowners and field workers could use. So it was a fantastic opportunity to look at a pipeline alerting system. That's where there is like a real threat of danger to life when farm machinery or plant is excavating the air gas pipelines. We looked at creating a system for them which would allow them to alert workers. And this was born out of the previous platform, the IRS platform, because we have a lot of mapping expertise within our team, and we built a mapping engine into this cadent mobile application.

Peter:

Fantastic. So I can see from just the two case studies that you referenced there, you know, it's got application potentially in manufacturing, in building and construction. So ultimately, you know, whatever business or industry you're in, there's an application for something like this. If if you can't get a product or piece of software off the shelf, you can essentially create that from the ground up, something that's tailored and more bespoke to the business needs. And then we've got another case study that I know you're quite keen to talk about today, which is um Ladders Free. Do you want to tell us a little bit about their challenges and what the solution was there that we provided?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so Ladders Free was a um a window cleaning business, and they didn't have an existing system. So what we've done is we've built um a back office liner business system. It runs our entire business. Primarily, it gives them access to scheduling window cleaners going out on site, and we built a mobile application as well, which the cleaners can actually do, and they can schedule their own work, they can turn up on site, they can say they've started the job, they can get signatories, take pictures of the work as they progress with it. So it's a back-end line of business system and a front-end mobile application.

Peter:

Wow, so there we can see, you know, the variation across industries and sectors and scale, which shows how versatile this the service and and application can be. And then I guess, Mark, we're doing a lot of interesting work in the in the healthcare space. I know you're quite keen to elaborate a little more around what we're doing with public view and the AI side of things on that front.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is where we're starting to break new ground using current AI technology. I say current, because if we go back two years, it wasn't available then. And we're starting to reimagine some of the things that we've been doing for years using generative AI to kind of give it new features, uh new capabilities that we just couldn't do before. So PublicView's a really good example where we've got a structured data set. In this case, it's uh data from all of the English NHS trusts. Um and it's all the data that they publish monthly, all their metrics, and we we kind of grab all that data, we normalize it, we put it into a really great front end, and and we give it people to consume. So for a long time we've been at the leading edge of providing that data in a dashboard. And uh it's a really slick front end designed for C-suite type consumption. Now, the challenge that I gave to the team earlier this year was let's look at this database, this SQL data set full of structured data, and let's see if we can hit a couple of use cases that are a bit different to just looking at the data in charts. And the use case we challenged the team to go and address was can we develop an application that will automatically create and write a report about a trust's performance? So in the past we'd created these reports manually. It took quite a lot of effort and time to go and understand and and write up all of the different areas where you're overperforming or underperforming, all those different things. And what we effectively did was use generative AI and um a kind of technique around doing prompt engineering to go and query the data and and actually uh write a nice polished report at the back end. The the main tricks that we had to break the back of here was taking generative AI, which does uh like to create new content and combine that with very accurate data that cannot be got wrong. So we can't get any of the numbers, the metrics, or the actual detail behind uh what we're writing. Uh we can't allow that to be wrong. So effectively what we did was join the large language model, generative AI, to the dataset in such a way that we could provide a fully written, formatted report automatically comparing the trust performance year on year or against uh the national standard and things like that. So it's a really cool way of taking a data set and wrapping that up with current technology using our full stack capabilities to come out with this kind of new capability that we couldn't have done a year ago. Um really a fun example of uh, I guess a practical use of generative AI against uh structured data set.

Peter:

Yeah, and and no doubt saving the National Health Service time and money, significant amount of time and money where you know historically people would have to be involved and performing and creating those reports manually. It's now all done automatically, which is, I guess, a game saver in a lot of respects for them. That's super exciting. And I guess something that we always touch on with every product and every service is obviously the security that one needs to take into consideration because obviously these services are more than often hosted in the cloud. Businesses have some concerns around the security of their data and their systems. I guess, Steve, can you talk a little around BCN's approach to cybersecurity in in this space? Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02:

So security of any platform now is paramount. Yeah, we have a comprehensive security framework, and this includes uh initially a code security framework. So during development, we always make sure we consider the um OWASP top 10 security and web application security concerns. So that's when we're doing the actual development. We also use Sonar Cube to add some security checking of the code as we're doing it. Once the code's been built, we use a tool code OWASP Zap, and that's the most widely used open source web scanner. So we use that tool and we'd run that against the platforms in an unauthenticated and authenticated testing manner, and then we review the reports that are produced on those and then we fix and remediate any security issues. Also, when we build applications, we use something called an OWASP dependency checker. That checks the built assemblies for any kind of outdated components and any security issues with those. Once the product's going live and it's in an operational environment, uh we use Cloudflare. You know, that enhances security providing a range of security features like DDoS protection, a web application firewall, and SSL encryption. We also, on a weekly and also monthly basis, we've got a tooling set called Nessus that does vulnerability scannings. So we're always on top of any kind of new and upcoming security issues. We also use a tool called Logic Monitor as well. So we have full logic monitor setup that monitors platforms and gives us alerts if there are any security issues or any kind of security threats or any kind of platform altitude straight away.

Peter:

Fantastic. So it is really an end-to-end service that BCN provides. You know, it's it's the build, the design, the implementation, and then obviously looking after it on an ongoing basis from both a security perspective as well as an ongoing development uh requirement side. Now, I I guess preparing our audience and and giving them some information in terms of advice and if this is something that they're looking at, what should businesses be considering if they're looking to adopt full stack development?

SPEAKER_02:

With full stack development, I mean you've got to consider there is a large overhead in application development efforts. It's not like a low-code environment where you're using existing building blocks. You you're building things from scratch and you've got to consider security during that development. There's a large testing cycle as well because you're building not just the front end and the back end, you're actually building the database schemas and all the associated hosting elements. And if you've got quite a complex application, there's going to be a big overall development effort. So that's just something to consider if you're going into this kind of development environment, the not small pieces of work, you know, to build a line of business system. I would say you're looking at a hundred days plus in some cases to build an application.

Peter:

Great, thanks. But am I right in saying though, that if some businesses are looking to get on board with this, they could start small and develop the app over time as well to sort of spread costs as well as time needed from their side to invest on these sort of solutions?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, you could take a phased approach, you know, start with a minimum viable product and then just get your basic features and then build on that through different phase developments.

Peter:

And Steve, what's our typical approach in terms of say a customer comes to us and says, you know, this is my particular business need. I'd like to understand the approach we should take, what the sort of effort and cost is likely to be. What is the sort of consultancy process that we undertake with those businesses?

SPEAKER_02:

Our initial engagement with a customer will be with our B8 team, where they try and capture the initial kind of high-level requirements. We then give the customer some indication, a rough order of magnitude about what the size of the development would be. If they're happy to proceed, we then go into a more detailed discovery phase where the BA team will go out, may even go out on customer sites and do the discovery with the customer, or maybe just do it over Teams if that's applicable. But then we'll capture a large backlog of requirements. I'll then take that back to my team and we'll estimate those requirements in detail and then present those back to the customer.

Peter:

Perfect. So I guess a message to our audience is if the business has a requirement for an application of sort that an off-the-shelf product can't fulfill, then full stack development is certainly something that could deliver that. And by taking a phased approach, it's something they could implement fairly cost-effectively and quickly, obviously, subject to the requirements. I guess, Mark, maybe one for you. What are we seeing in terms of future trends and what should businesses be aware of?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I think the trends are quite interesting. So we've seen a lot of AI appear, and I think it's interesting that AI can actually be used to help and augment, in some cases, full stack development, but we're not at the point where it can in any way replace a full stat development team full of experienced coders. So th there is a general trend to incorporate AI in practical means into existing applications, which is quite interesting as we see things as simple as autocompletion, just bleed from what you would see on your smartphone into these applications over time. The other thing that I think is quite interesting is now that the low code platforms have reached quite a nice maturity, we're able to make really good decisions around what should go into a low-code approach, which is typically internal facing to a business, versus what should be guided towards a pro code approach, you know, using full stat development where a different level of scale or complexity is required. So we're at this point now where one of the first things that we do when we we get a challenge from a customer around a new application or a new requirement that doesn't exist today is to be able to triage that and guide it into the right place. And not everything ends up as a full stat developed application at that point. What we want to do is make sure that we are guiding our customers down the right path. Yeah. And that that's a kind of fundamental principle of making sure that we consider all the different options and get the customer on a journey that they're happy with strategically going forward. Now, where we do end up with full stat development is again quite interesting. The the trends towards hosting it in the cloud are are well and truly cemented now, and pretty much every development we undertake is either there or moving from on-prem to the cloud as we go forward. Effectively, what I see is a bit of a, I guess, uh an increase in the unique value that Fullstat brings because of the recognition that that is why it's there. It's kind of bringing unique value to people and businesses that's really going to add to their bottom line or make a big difference to the way that they do business. So yeah, there's a lot going on in in Fullstat world, and I think we're seeing that that AI interest kind of peak in now, which is uh, I guess, some of the fun stuff that we're we're getting to play around with.

Peter:

Indeed. And I guess the combination of obviously full stack development and the generative AI, you can create some fairly powerful applications for businesses, which you know, in yester years simply just wasn't possible in the first instance, or it would cost, you know, uh significant amounts of investment.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the the key word I'd use there is accessibility. So for a long time, intelligence and AI and analytics to a degree was quite an expensive game to play with the uh emergence of generative AI and large language models. We're able to do things much more effectively than we were able to before. And uh there's two key things that are needed. One is a good concept of data, where the data is, what the data is, how we can get more value out of it, and then good use cases. Yeah. And then it's our job to bring the right tech to join those things together in a way that adds a lot of value.

Peter:

Absolutely. And I think that sums things up nicely for us right there, because you know, if you're a business out there and you have a requirement but you're not quite sure how to fulfill it, then please get in touch with um us here at BCN. You know, we're more than happy to have a free, non-obligatory call or meeting to understand your requirements and challenges and see how we can marry up the appropriate technology and approach to meeting your needs. I think it's also a good opportunity just to remind everyone, and we've spoken about this before in our previous podcast, is we've recently launched a number of AI Kickstarters as well, which incorporates development, full stack development as well as low-code development with AI, which can really show you the art of the possible at a very reasonable cost entry point. So if you'd like to know more about what we're doing here at BCN with our partners at Microsoft, feel free to visit our website www.bcn.co.uk, and there you'll find a wealth of information. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe to our podcast. We've got some really exciting podcasts coming up in coming weeks and months, which uh we look forward to sharing with you. Thanks again for tuning in. And gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me today. As always, a pleasure. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Peter.