Spreading the happy-sauce - Coté Memo #24
Hello, as I like to do every six or so months, I moved some publishing infrastructure around. This time, back to Revue from the fully automated Mailchimp. Yay me.
Links
Here's a mix of things I've done recently and other items I liked.
The Frontside Podcast: 10 Pounds of Dirt in a 5 Pound Sack — frontsidethepodcast.simplecast.fm
Charles and I talk about the job I do, how industry analysts work, and other tech marketing tactics.
My April Register column: Scaling DevOps in large organizations — cote.io
My The Register column this month is on scaling DevOps/cloud-native teams to the entire organization. It’s easy to build one team that does software in a new and exciting way, but how can you move to two teams, five teams, and then 100’s? It goes over the amalgamation of a few case studies and plenty of over-the-top gonzo analogies, per usual.
Amazon eats lunches for breakfast — www.beyondvc.com
A brief outline of the point that Amazon will deploy "upper case 'D'" Disruption on whatever category it thinks it can make money at. On the other hand, if you're not being disrupted, it's a great set of tools. Like any tech vendor that's cornered the market (like Microsoft and Apple in their ecosystems), they're your friend until they're your crushing competitor.
Survey sees tech M&A heading up and to the right – 451 Research
A good read-out of a survey of M&A people, largely predicting more tech M&A, e.g., "Slightly more than half of the respondents (52%) forecast that deal flow will top last year’s level, more than three times the 15% of respondents who indicated that year-over-year activity would decline in 2017."
The full report has many more good details, including Trump's effect on M&A: " Four out of 10 (41%) indicate that President Trump's economic policies have stimulated dealmaking, almost twice the 22% that said his policies have slowed M&A." However, that's just for US-based deals. Given the Trump xenophobia, transactions involve non-US companies look worse.
I spend a lot of time in airports, with almost 12 years of business travel now. I was in DFW earlier this week and wrote this small piece on taking advantage of the trapped state you're in at airports.
Pivotal Conversations: How Microservices Enable DevOps, with Josh Long — soundcloud.com
It seems like microservices and DevOps go along with each other well. In talking about Josh Long's talk at DevOpsDays Atlanta, I end up discussing this idea with him. He, of course, wisely didn't talk about any of this in his actual talk, but it was fun chatting about it anyhow.
Are tech H1-B visas actually that big of a deal? How we even evaluate the question? — cote.io
I had great fear of being replaced by cheaper, off-shore labor in the 2000's. It's a large part of why I stopped being a programmer and shifted to being an analyst and the subsequent jobs I do. I don't know what to think of H1-B visas. It's a blip in the overall radar of jobs and it's hard to sort out the moral way to think about it.
Crafting the Cloud-Native Organization
The Road
I'm delightfully in Austin for all of May, having just wrapped up some drips to DevOpsDays Atlanta and an internal Verizon devops event.
I'll be speaking at DevOpsDays Austin (May 4th and 5th) and hanging out at OSCON (May 8th and 10th).
