What does it take to upgrade an old tool that’s now helping us save millions? An eagerness to learn new technology. Here's how the Gate team did it. 

When gas traders make decisions on what markets Equinor sells to or where to adjust production, they get decision support from a mathematical model named sing. Until now, this data was presented in a standard dashboard application. 

While it got the job done, the times are a-changin’ and more functionality is needed. Which is why Gate has seen the light of day. 

Eivind is the team lead for the merry band of 8 and has been part of the team since May of 2019. That’s when work on Gate started, but it’s been something that’s been talked about and requested for many moons. 

A production time of a little over a year isn’t all that impressive you say? It is if you count the fact that no one in the team had any experience working with Microsoft Azure cloud technology. 

Are you, like us, curious to find out what they’ve done and how’d they do it? And what tech went into solving this kind of challenge? Then you’re in luck - it’s time to find out!

While Gate is the new app the team developed, they’ve also been working on supporting Sing - the mathematical model that delivers the data visualized in Gate. Sing is a collaboration with SINTEF and has been our good friend for close to 15 years. 

Developers are just like people - they come and go, so naturally Sing has had its fair share of different ways of solving things and technical debt.  

“We knew that we would face some challenges when moving everything over, but we also knew that we would be able to upgrade everything and have it done properly - and that it would be worth it in the end,” Tom Arne Sivertsen explains.

While working on Gate, the team had two main challenges: speed and security. Gate takes data from the Sing model and displays them in different windows. With Sing delivering updates almost constantly, they’re going to need some power to help them out. 

“One of the first windows we created, called Overview, was simply put extremely slow. But during a course I picked up on different ways of caching that we ended up trying,” Rune Kristiansen Kvamme explains. 

Rune has worked on Gate as an architect and has been a part of the Sing-team for 5+ years. When receiving new data from Sing, the data is immediately prepared for display and placed in a distributed cache. This way, when users request new data, it’s returned instantly:

Audun Arnessønn Sæther is the youngest addition to the team and joined them after graduating 3 years ago. Before joining, he was a little worried that he might have to spend all his time on just supporting legacy applications. 

He was new to Azure technology as well, and a natural place to look for answers was Microsoft’s own documentation. But discussions with the rest of the team were just as fruitful. 

We’ve heard with the developers themselves, but what’s it like to be one of the people who are going to use Gate in their daily work? We struck up a conversation with Griff Owens, one of our London-based gas traders, to find out. 

He tells us that just by logging in and opening up Gate he quickly gets an overview. 

When discussing development of Gate, there’s a key player that we still haven’t gotten our way around to - until now. He’s been mentioned in every single interview we’ve done as an almost irreplaceable piece of Gate puzzle; it’s project owner Sigve Sivertsen. 

“Sigve has really been one of the key ingredients to why Gate has become the success it’s become. Everyone in the team is in daily contact with him, and he’s crucial for us developers to get the job done,” Rune says. 

“I don’t understand how he has so many seemingly hours in the day to help us, but I’m glad he does,” team lead Eivind laughs.

Sigve himself says that he thinks it’s key for someone to represent the business side and their challenges to the developers and being available is an important factor.

“It’s been fun too, especially seeing how positive the team has been all the way! They are super enthusiastic and there are a lot of high-fives going around when we solve a problem or two,” Sigve smiles. 

Currently, Gate only displays data on a shorter time span, but they’re working on an expansion named Horizon that would display key information for much longer timeframes.

“The newer features are more tailored towards planners than traders. A lot of the technical aspects are the same, but there’s much bigger amounts of data to handle. We’re also working on different visualization windows,” Audun explains.  

Why is it that they were successful in learning these new techs? Rune Kristiansen Kvamme tells us that there’s three main reasons why they’ve succeeded:

“We’re all capable developers and eager to learn, but we also have a lot of experience in the world of natural gas. And lastly, we have a product owner who’s incredibly dedicated and always ready to help us out,” Rune says.  

There’s a saying that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” - which doesn’t apply to these guys. Not that they’re dogs or even old, but they’re not fresh out from school.

“We’ve been working on maintaining these legacy apps for so long, but we’ve also been able to learn all of this and “upgrade” ourselves. It’s really been a lot of fun,” Rune smiles. 

“There’s a high level of trust in each other as part of the team. As long as you’re doing your best, you’re always allowed to fail. I think that has played a big role in why we’ve been able to do this,” he adds.

It’ll be exciting to see what’s next on the horizon for both Sing and Gate - especially when looking at their work so far. 

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Until next time - stay safe and take care!