Software Defined Interviews

I've had a theory that the hard-line philosophy of open source has softened in recent times. Rather than thinking closed source is to be avoided at all costs, I think most developer types are a lot more willing to accept closed source bits mixed in with open source bits. That is, open core has "won." I discuss this topic with my long time pal, Barton George, while at SpringOne Platform, plus the work he's doing in the developer and OSS worlds at Dell.

We also talk about Hawaiian food.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 219.

Special Guest: Barton George.

Introducing cloud in a large enterprise can be challenging, and the technology is usually the least of your worries. Matt and I talk with Brian Gregory of Express Scripts who's been working on transforming Express Scripts to a more cloud native approach to IT and tell us some the history and some of the tactics that he and team have been working through.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

Special Guest: Brian Gregory.

Matt and I talk about lessons learned from almost a year of helping transform IT at Allstate. When it comes to scaling up agile and cloud-think the real challenges are in functions other than development, like budgeting, planning, training, hiring, and how the overall IT department is organized. We discuss those topics - esp. budgeting! - and also how to set one's personal expectations about going on the transformation journey. Then we discuss an upcoming column on mine in The Register on the benefits of small batches thinking.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 477.

Ernest Mueller has worked helped introduce DevOps in several organizations and has been talking about those stories at two companies he's worked for, National Instruments and BazaarVoice. Matt and Coté hear these stories (mostly at National Instruments) and we discuss how Ernest and others helped transform these companies to the new way.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 655.

Special Guest: Ernest Mueller.

You don't hear too many stories about microservices in "normal" companies. In this episode, I talk with Nate Foreman about microservices-driven work he's been doing with a large enterprise recently. We discuss the goods and the bads of this approach and, overall, how it's working out. It's a good discussion of how all the usual "cloud native" concept actually play out in the real world.

(As you can guess, it's not actually an "action figure" company, we just used that example to mask the actual company.)

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

What organization could be larger than the US Federal government? Not only that, the chance to transform how software is done in the government has perhaps one of the largest possible impacts of transforming any "IT department." In this episode, Matt and Coté talk with Diego Lapiduz who works in the GSA's 18F organization helping government agencies develop their software in new, more agile and cloud-driven ways. We discuss the background of 18F and the broader government initiatives to transform how software is done and also walk through some of the learnings 18F has had in trying to make such a huge transformation.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 458.

In this first part of a new series, Matt Curry and I discuss many of the problems with transforming how a large company uses IT. From dealing with businesses cases, the finance department, and changing how the business thinks about using IT, there are numerous organizational change problems to chew on. This launches a new series of episodes in Lords of Computing where Matt and I will talk interview various folks out there who are going through transformation at their company. We're interested in hearing what's work and not worked for them.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 558.

After catching up about movies and OpenStack, John and I discuss how difficult it is to properly integrate acquired companies into the larger company. We also discuss what VCs are looking for to say yes now: a good team, it seems.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 500.

We discuss how you (slowly) introduce new technologies into the market by looking at past tech cycles John has gone through. We also catch-up on the Craft conference and John’s travels in Europe.

Show-notes and Links

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 337.

It can take a long time to get "the mainstream" to use new technologies. One would assume that this would be true in supporting the government, as Robert Brook does in his day job. In this brief episode, over the din and bottle collection activities at Monkigras, I catch up with him on just that topic and how he tries to manage being a change agent for the benefit of the UK Parliament.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 289.