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EP 3 – The State Of Dev Ops With The New Stacks’ Alex Williams
Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack has been a tech journalist since the 1980's. He runs through the history of tech journalism and how dev ops opened up as a new niche which The New Stack is catering towards. He also answers questions about tech journalism career advice and better-developing audiences focused on software engineers.
Podcast Transcription
Vahe Arabian: Welcome to the State of Digital Publishing Talk. State of Digital Publishing is an online publication covering media technology trends, perspectives, and news for online publishing and media professionals. We help our audience better develop audiences by encouraging others and sharing knowledge, experience, and practical advice, and act as the bridge between startups and established companies. This is episode three. I'm speaking with Alex Williams, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack.
Vahe Arabian: How are you, Alex?
Alex Williams: I'm great. I'm great. Thank you for having me on your show.
Vahe Arabian: Awesome! You mentioned that you were on the road. Hope that everything is going well.
Alex Williams: It's been a good trip. Came up to Seattle from Portland and met with some people. I'm a journalist by trade, so I always love having chats and talking about things. I find I learn so much by being on the ground.
Vahe Arabian: That's awesome. Yeah, I think being on the ground always helps give you a more clear perspective on things. For everyone who doesn't know about the New Stack and about your background, do you mind just explaining your background?
Alex Williams: Yeah, great. I'm a journalist by trade. I started working in daily newspapers in the late '80s and went on to work for magazines, one magazine, in particular, then went into the broadcast for a little bit, and moved online. I think I started getting really interested in technology back in the mid-'90s and had a journalism career and then went into marketing for a little bit just to help keep the household funded, but that was a great experience in itself. Then in 2003, 2004, I started doing webcasting. I did an event called RSS Winterfest. That was an online event and it was all about RSS and it crossed between a webcasting environment, and IRC, and a WIKI. Tommy Love at Asynchronous Communications helped me better understand why social media did have such big impact on all our lives because this is really something that came out of that early work on the ReadWrite web.
Alex Williams: But I went into technology blogging as a full-time kind of way in 2008, 2009. I covered the enterprise and I was really interested in writing about how these new ways of thinking about the ReadWrite web were affecting the way that IT was managed. I found, pretty much, it wasn't really in consideration. Then I realized later that, really, the developers were really the ones who were making the shift here, or they were the one commanding the shift.
Alex Williams: That kind of carried me through a lot, through the work I did at ReadWrite web, and later at TechCrunch. TechCrunch is a great publication, but it's a lot about breaking news, and I thought, "There's an opportunity here to do more explanation analysis about these technologies because they're evolving so rapidly and they do speak to why there are so many startups out there." There's just so much disruption in technology stacks. I thought, "Well if I was going to start something, would it be an enterprise blog? Would it be a cloud blog?" I thought, "Those terms don't really cover it."
Alex Williams: I was asked to start a publication and I thought about it, and thought about it and wrote this plan for it. I'm like, "The New Stack makes sense as a name." That helped kind of crystallize a lot because what we were really tr...
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By Vahe Arabian
5
11 ratings
Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack has been a tech journalist since the 1980's. He runs through the history of tech journalism and how dev ops opened up as a new niche which The New Stack is catering towards. He also answers questions about tech journalism career advice and better-developing audiences focused on software engineers.
Podcast Transcription
Vahe Arabian: Welcome to the State of Digital Publishing Talk. State of Digital Publishing is an online publication covering media technology trends, perspectives, and news for online publishing and media professionals. We help our audience better develop audiences by encouraging others and sharing knowledge, experience, and practical advice, and act as the bridge between startups and established companies. This is episode three. I'm speaking with Alex Williams, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The New Stack.
Vahe Arabian: How are you, Alex?
Alex Williams: I'm great. I'm great. Thank you for having me on your show.
Vahe Arabian: Awesome! You mentioned that you were on the road. Hope that everything is going well.
Alex Williams: It's been a good trip. Came up to Seattle from Portland and met with some people. I'm a journalist by trade, so I always love having chats and talking about things. I find I learn so much by being on the ground.
Vahe Arabian: That's awesome. Yeah, I think being on the ground always helps give you a more clear perspective on things. For everyone who doesn't know about the New Stack and about your background, do you mind just explaining your background?
Alex Williams: Yeah, great. I'm a journalist by trade. I started working in daily newspapers in the late '80s and went on to work for magazines, one magazine, in particular, then went into the broadcast for a little bit, and moved online. I think I started getting really interested in technology back in the mid-'90s and had a journalism career and then went into marketing for a little bit just to help keep the household funded, but that was a great experience in itself. Then in 2003, 2004, I started doing webcasting. I did an event called RSS Winterfest. That was an online event and it was all about RSS and it crossed between a webcasting environment, and IRC, and a WIKI. Tommy Love at Asynchronous Communications helped me better understand why social media did have such big impact on all our lives because this is really something that came out of that early work on the ReadWrite web.
Alex Williams: But I went into technology blogging as a full-time kind of way in 2008, 2009. I covered the enterprise and I was really interested in writing about how these new ways of thinking about the ReadWrite web were affecting the way that IT was managed. I found, pretty much, it wasn't really in consideration. Then I realized later that, really, the developers were really the ones who were making the shift here, or they were the one commanding the shift.
Alex Williams: That kind of carried me through a lot, through the work I did at ReadWrite web, and later at TechCrunch. TechCrunch is a great publication, but it's a lot about breaking news, and I thought, "There's an opportunity here to do more explanation analysis about these technologies because they're evolving so rapidly and they do speak to why there are so many startups out there." There's just so much disruption in technology stacks. I thought, "Well if I was going to start something, would it be an enterprise blog? Would it be a cloud blog?" I thought, "Those terms don't really cover it."
Alex Williams: I was asked to start a publication and I thought about it, and thought about it and wrote this plan for it. I'm like, "The New Stack makes sense as a name." That helped kind of crystallize a lot because what we were really tr...