[Coté Memo #8] @CAinc's board wears no ties, Hangouts.biz, cleaning data with Excel
Meta-data
Hello again, welcome to #8. Not so brief today with all the typing, I know.
Today we have still have 22 subscribers. I'd love to hear what you like, dislike, your feedback, etc.: memo@cote.io.
See past newsletters in the archives, and, as always, see things as they come at Cote.io and @cote.
Sponsor
451 Research has our big cloud conference this October 6th to 9th. I'll be there giving talks on developer relations and marketing; most vendors and service providers getting into cloud need to start catering to this core set of decision makers and buyers. There are other talks targeted at users and vendors of cloud along these lines too.
Also, if you come you can schedule a 1:1 meeting with me (and any other 451 analyst) included in the price: it's like some "free" consulting time (yeah, yeah, more like "included" in the registration price). It'd be great to talk with you!
I have a discount code you can use to get $200 off the registration price: go to the registration page, and enter the code MC200.
Follow-up
CoreOS
I got some good feedback on the CoreOS text I had a while back - thanks! It looks like it'll be published (behind the 451 paywall) tomorrow. In the meantime, Jay Lyman on my team has report up on CFEngine.
Tech & Work World
CA continues it's DevOps quest
As I've mentioned before, CA has made DevOps one of it's core, corporate-wide strategies. That's a big deal for a company like CA. I listened in on this morning's annual shareholder meeting which had this nice DevOps momentum quote from their CEO:
We're getting close and close to the developer, where we used to just focus on operators.
It's just a minor blip, but curious to watch nonetheless.
Some dude (rather, "shareholder") asked the board why they weren't all wearing ties (around 21:00 in the recording): "I think they should be able to afford a tie!" And the chairman of the board gave a serious, lengthy answer! I shit you not.
So the meeting had that going for it.
Google Hangouts to become a real boy
The news that Hangouts will become an independent, business friendly service is great. The video conferencing in Google Hangouts is nice, and the hope that one day they'll actually integrate with Google Voice and IM is alluring. More importantly, when I've met with Google people, the video conferencing services they used (hopefully Google Hangouts) was great. We'll see.
It's also important to remember that you can share your screen in Hangouts and record the session (most of my podcasts are done this way)...meaning we could perhaps do away with the usual lot of presentation screen-sharers. I suppose I don't care either way, but at least Hangouts seems more interesting than GoToMeeting and WebEx.
Needs more programmers case study: mid-year performance reviews
We're just the right size of company at 451 where we have very few formal processes. We certainly don't have mid-year performance reviews. I've been doing those for my team and they're interesting to walk through in a DIY fashion. Getting a hold of the raw data needed to run the reports (content published, consults done, webinars, etc.) is dicey and esp. time consuming when it comes to cleaning up the data.
It's another good example of the maxim that you should never assume IT is being used in obvious ways. Which is to say: needs more programmers.
I'll likely use it as a good excuse to finally dust off my programming skills and start messing around with CSV manipulation and some hacked up uses of the exercises from Exploring Everyday Things in Ruby and R. Or, at the very least, just loading it all into MySQL and finally being able to run SQL queries.