The New Stack Podcast

No matter what you call this role — developer community manager, developer evangelist, developer advocate, developer relations, or, cheekily, developer avocado — it's got two things in common. It's one of the most expensive, travel-heavy roles in a tech org and it's one of the hardest to measure. That combination means metrics often make or break your job.

But first, what is this role? Good question to which there are many, many answers. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Camunda's Director of Developer Relations Mary Thengvall talked about her definition. And she should know, she wrote the book on the business case for developer relations.

To her, the DevRel arena is "anyone who is responsible for enabling developer audiences and making them successful.

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, The New Stack Founder and Publisher Alex Williams spoke with Ayesha Mazumdar, senior UX designer at Optimizely, during Node+JS Interactive in Montreal about what needs to be done — and why human-centered designs are becoming not only nice-to-have features but technical requirements.

Oftentimes, when developers and engineers think about human-centered design, there is a “very prominent tendency to go around designing for humans like us,” Mazumdar said. “This is subconsciously something I think we all fall victim to, but I think [human-centered design] is becoming this technical requirement,” Mazumdar said. “We’re realizing certain users aren’t able to interact with the application we’ve built in certain ways, because we never accounted for that use case in the first place.”

The main issue is that a design might be accessible for some people, but not necessarily for the end user, Mazumdar said. “Accessibility has to be continued down the line, and show up in the developers workflow so that we can ensure the final product is actually usable by absolutely everyone in all aspects,” Mazumdar said “And so I think, making it a technical requirement involves making it part of your development process,” including making it part of GitHub and Q&A processes, for example. “Inserting accessibility checks along the way ensures that we don’t lose it at any point during the development cycle,” Mazumdar said.

This week, we chat with Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO at Puppet, about the announcement that Goldman Sachs will no longer go public with companies that have no female or under-represented minority board members.

Late last week Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon announced that the investment firm would not underwrite IPOs by companies that have no diversity on their board of directors, and that the policy would specifically focus on women. This could be an important turning point for our industry, as it may bring about a change in how tech companies are run and advised in the future. The announcement came just after California passed a law that fines companies $100,000 for going public with all-male boards.

Wassenaar draws from her experience not only as a member of the Puppet board, but also as director for a number of other boards, including Forrester Research, Anaplan, and Harvey Mudd College. We asked her about what role the new laws will play in the policies that companies and investors are taking going forward. We also asked about the challenges of increasing the diversity in large corporations.

Then, later in the episode, we discuss some of the top podcasts and news posts on the site, including a discussion with Zeit founder Guillermo Rauch about distributed systems, a new serverless integration provider called TriggerMesh, SaltStack's plan to help developers minimize the amount of YAML they need to write, and why IBM turned to Humio to scale up its ELK deployments.

Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this episode, along with TNS Publisher Alex Williams and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Prisma, by Palo Alto Networks, sponsored this podcast, in advance of its Cloud Native Security Live, 2020 Virtual Summit Feb. 11, 2020.

For many organizations, becoming a software company hinges on making a successful shift to cloud native platforms. This makes sense as a rapidly growing number of organizations, both in the private and public sectors, can achieve very tangible benefits by making the transition. The ultimate goal is typically being able to vastly improve the digital experience for the end-use customer.

In this, The New Stack Makers podcast, Morello and Aqsa Taylor, a product manager for Prisma Cloud Compute, discuss what organizations should know about security before making the cloud native native shift. The themes covered include, among other things, what a cloud native security platform should offer and the evolution of security in the cloud native era.”

In this The New Stack Makers podcast, Guillermo Rauch, founder of Zeit, and co-creator of Next.js, said much of his work today involves network synchronization. More specifically, he described his work with state and how it’s synchronized over networks and how that has affected his creation of policy structuries for applications. He also described his ambitions to help improve the groundwork for coherent and consistent systems for data consistency models.

The theme of interconnectivity is also “a great segue into how our deeper thinking has gone into building a resilient systems from both a service architecture perspective but also within the context of front-end applications,” Rauch said.

Specific to the evolution of Next.js, the JavaScript library remains an interesting tool “but what we’ve seen really is that with the rise of Jamstack, the architecture of right your front-end application with .js gets distributed by a global network that gets served to the device and then runs on the device querying an API,” Rauch said.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week, we chat with Catherine Paganini who leads marketing at Kublr, about her recent ongoing series of posts that explain IT concepts for business leaders. We discuss the process of writing about technology, and the sometimes arduous process of learning about DevOps-driven cloud native computing. Then later in the show, we chat about the week's top stories.

Libby Clark, editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this episode, along with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

In this latest, The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at IFX2019 in Downtown Las Vegas, Matt Taylor, senior vice president, worldwide sales and business development, Ampere Computing, a semiconductor technology provider, discussed how the options for server components, especially processors, are widening and the underlying business needs for why that is the case. “Those options are starting to become much more real, across the entire landscape and more accessible,” Taylor said. “They are more accessible for developers and end users, and I think it is becoming a lot more common.”

If there’s a sign something in IT has moved past the hype, it’s not that digital organizations continue to adopt it, it’s that they continue to see better and better results. Both the most traditional and the most forward-thinking, DevOps organizations are seeing continually improved outcomes.

This is especially true for so-called DevSecOps orgs. You know, the ones that bake security right into their people, processes, pipelines and code.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, publisher Alex Williams sits down with Alanna Brown, director of product marketing at Puppet, and Charles Betz, an analyst with Forrester, to talk about the current state of security in DevOps. Brown is the co-author of 2019 State of DevOps Report — and of the previous six reports — while Betz is co-author of Top 10 Trends That Will Shape Modern Infrastructure And Operations In 2020.

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. This week, we chat with The New Stack's Linux correspondent Jack Wallen who writes regular tutorial articles for us and covers the latest Linux and security news. We chat about the recent comments from Linux chief maintainer Linus Torvalds about the ZFS file system, as well Red Hat's recent decision to pull the Docker software from its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, replacing it with its own Podman software.

Libby Clark, the editorial and marketing director of The New Stack, hosted this episode, with the help of TNS founder and publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

During this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Daly about how you can go beyond the buzzword of open source toward true public collaboration, reaping all the benefits to your business that can come with it.

First, while open source is a decidedly nice PR move, why would a company want to risk their trade secrets going public? And if it’s open source, couldn’t people use it in ways you don’t want them to?

Daly argues that open source is an excellent asymmetrical strategy that (starts to) even the playing field between behemoth software corps and the little startups that could go global.

She also says open sourcing software leads to easier patent and legal review. And that having a good patent will shield you from ne’er-do-wells. During this interview, Daly breaks down the two kinds of open source software patents, which differently allow people and organizations to read and use your open-sourced code: