Software Defined Interviews

Large organization are desperate to become “tech companies.” They drool at these tech companies ability to grow and change quickly. Despite mastering agile over the past 20 years, IT as a whole is too slow and unreliable. “It’s the culture,” everyone says. Changing culture for a team of 10 people is easy - changing a department of 20,000 developers is another challenge entirely.

Based on case studies and interviews over the past five years, this talk describes how large organizations are getting over that challenge. First, the talk covers moving from a project to a product mindset and the associated practices. Second, it covers how DevOps and cloud platforms enable that product mindset. Third, it goes over how leadership and management change to support this new approach. Finally, the talk catalogs tactics, patterns, and organizational structures that large organizations are using to improve how they do software which leads to improving their business.

This talk is based on my book Monolithic Transformation (O’Reilly, Feb 2019).

You can download the slides if you like, and they pop-up as chapter art if your podcast app supports that.

Chris Aniszczyk is the CTO of the CNCF. We discuss how he got into open source, what it's like to work at Twitter and how he helped start the CNCF. Plus, Chris gives us an overview of the different kinds of CNCF projects and offers advice on how to get started with Kubernetes.

Special Guest: Chris Aniszczyk.

Matt and Brandon interview Adam Jacob the co-founder of Chef. We discuss Adam's career, what led him to start Chef and Chef's recent decision to open source 100% of its Software. Plus, Adam give us some tips on Dungeons & Dragons and transitioning from being a founder to an executive.

Follow Adam at @adamhjk

Check out the Software Defined Talk Podcast for the latest news in Enterprise Tech.

Special Guest: Adam Jacob.

Jeff Meyerson is the host of Software Engineering Daily. We talk about his career and what led him to start a daily tech podcast for software engineers. We also talk about current trends in cloud computing and Jeff recounts his career as professional poker player.

Special Guest: Jeff Meyerson.

Version control has changed a lot over the past 15 years: we’ve moved from a centralized to a distributed model at the basic level. But the practices people follow have changed and grown as new methodologies like DevOps and continuous delivery have relied on version control for operational stability and reliability. In this interview, Coté talks with Plastic SCM’s Pablo Santos to get the low-down and some tips on doing version control better. We also discuss Plastic SCM and how their approach to semantic merging and mergebot-driven automation addresses version control toil.

This episode is sponsored by Plastic SCM, that is, it’s a paid interview.

Special Guest: Pablo Santos.

Sponsored By:

• Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a version control to help teams focus on delivering work, one task at a time. Signup today for a 30-day free trial and get a sassy T-Shirt.

Brandon interviews Umair Khan about his experience working in AI Ops and Cloud Security. Umair recently joned Scytale and he explains how the SPIFFE open soruce project can help secure communication between cloud services.

Special Guest: Umair Khan.

Jake Moilanen started and sold two companies and is now joining the ranks of Venture Capital. We discuss his career, his approach to investing and he explains what it is like to bringup the Linux Kernel on a supercomputer for the first time.

Connect with Jake:

Special Guest: Jake Moilanen.

Zane Rockenbaugh specializes in working with early stage startups. Most of the time his clients are boostrapping their new compnay and need someone technical who can help build version 1.0. In this episode, we talk about Zane's career and what it's like to be a "Startup CTO." Most importantly, we talk about his experience of taking raw ideas and turning them into real products.

To work with Zane contact him at Liquid Labs

Special Guest: Zane Rockenbaugh.

Coté talks about his job being an "evangelist," a word people no longer seem to use but everyone understands. Brandon interviews Coté about what the job is, what the work's like, and some examples (other than himself) of people who do it well. Call it "developer advocacy," "developer relations," being a "thought leader," or just a straight up hustler - it's a job that most companies in the computer industry have at least one of. Most of the successful software and projects out there get a big boost from key evangalists.

Brandon interviews Coté about what the job is, what the work's like, and some examples (other than himself) of people who do it well. As the two discuss, it's a weird job.

Links:

• The Man Who Would Be Khan

When Coté says he doesn’t know how numbers work, he actually means it. To help out, he talks with Rachel Stephens, from RedMonk, who not only explains ratios, but also finance numbers.

Fine more from Rachel on her RedMonk blog, and in Twitter.

Special Guest: Rachel Stephens.

Links:

• Five Minute Finance