Software as strategy
Making software a core capability in financial organizations
I really liked how this first talk in out three part series came out. I wanted to talk as much as possible about actually strategy, business-think, so to speak, when it comes to how financial enterprises do software. All of us cloud native people spend a lot of time talking about the general benefits of cloud native stuff: better developer productivity and getting closer to the agile, deliver once a week (or daily!) dream; resilience/uptime; security blah blah; and etc.
These are good business outcomes/value, but I like getting deeper into what the actual apps are doing and how they’re helping create new types of business, products, and so forth. So, here, it was fun working with Darran (who’s actually worked on all this stuff at banks, most recently UBS) to talk about all that. Plus, I got to learn a couple new case studies from out customer base.
Anyhow, you should check it out. Sure, it’s a webinar, so you have to sign up for it, but: come on, no problem, right? You’ll enjoy it. Tell me what you think.
There’s two more in the series as well, next Tuesday and then Tuesday the week after that.
Changes in the streams
This week’s Tanzu Talk podcast: Ben and Ed try to help Coté understand what the changes in RHEL open source development mean. We don't figure it out completely, but get close enough. Also, Ed tells us what Crossplane is. Finally, we briefly discuss two new reports from Gartner and Forrester that seek to define the cloud native application stack.
Lost Videos
I found two videos I made that I’d forgotten about:
Depending on how you count them (are live streams of podcast recordings included?) I’ve made around 200 videos for work in the past three years. I started with some little goofy ones I made during paternity leave, then a lot more during COVID, and now it’s just a normal thing.
It’s not easy to make videos all on your own - it’s a multi-tool skill. Plus, you have to act, figure out the content, and promote them. The secret is that I was thrown into video making back in 2007 when I was at RedMonk. Or maybe it was 2008. Who knows. CIRCA &co.
We had a totally ridiculous (in a good way) contract with some early internet video startup whose name I forget. I think most of those videos are lost. Our boss was Steve Gillmor! His early podcast, The Gillmor Gang, was a huge inspiration for my own podcasting, general tech world thought leadership craft, along with Jon Udell, both who had shows on IT Conversations.
That didn’t last long (it was, after all, ridiculous). But, it lead to RedMonk starting up a video business, which I ran soup to nuts (except for sales, that was shared among the three of us). You can see those videos still in YouTube. As you’d expect 12 years later, their videos are insanely better now-a-days, not just a dork with a tripod in an poorly Las Vegas conference room and hallways.
Anyhow. I like making videos.
I’ve more or less come to accept that I both can’t and don’t want to put in the effort to get “famous” in the video world, which has sort of lessened me making videos more frequently. When you see that you only get, like, 150 views with only about 5 people watching all of the video, you start to think: why am I doing this? That’s in YouTube: the numbers in LinkedIn and Twitter are higher…but the people who drop off early on seem the same. I envy people who code in their videos: they at least are doing something instructional and there seems to be no end of content for them. I have to just talk in mine, and I’ve kind of said all I know to say.
Of course, there’s all the non-tech videos I make too, which are definitely worth it just for the fun:
I was thinking of all of this when I noticed I almost have 200 subscribers on my YouTube channel. Things are gonna start changing once I get over that hump!!
Upcoming
Talks I’ll be giving, things I’ll be doing, places I’ll be going.
July 4th, July 11th Cloud Native for Financial Services talk series. August 21st to 24thSpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar. Oct 3rdEnterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht.
Logoff
It’s almost July! My mother is coming for the summer which is always great. The kids, of course, love seeing her; she loves seeing the kids; Kim and I like seeing here; and, I won’t be coy: we finally get some free time from the kids!
I’ll probably roll up the links next episode.