One of the “tricks” you learn in programming - “soft skills,” apparently they used to call them - is that you should match the style and formatting of the code you’re editing. If you’re starting with your own code from scratch, no problem, go crazy. But if you’re like most developers in the world and maintaining an existing code base with incremental improvements, you’ll more often than not be editing and adding to existing code.

I’m just about the give a short presentation on developer relations and marketing at our HCTS conference. For those who didn’t make it, here’re the slides and the “script” I typed out. As you may recall, I wrote a large report on this topic published back in August. It’s been fun talking with people about over recent months. Lost presentation: Selling to Hoodie and the Sticker-Festooned - Building a Developer Relations Program to Win Over Developers as Paying Customers

This is the common OpenStack meme for coverage. Each Summit there’s more and more users - “customers” - but it will take a while before OpenStack is suddenly us an “overnight success.” Looking at it from a different perspective, OpenStack is one of the biggest, new model for open source development: they’re iterating on the concept and mechanics of open source in new and novel ways, deep in bazaar mode vs.

Oracle announced that it’s putting OpenStack into Solaris, which is good fun. James Niccolai asked for my thoughts on the topic for his story. I hadn’t been briefed, so it was just speculation, but here’s the full text of what I sent over: Solaris was always - and no doubt still is - technically advanced. For example, the zfs filesystem, dtrace, and zones were always tasty looking for Linux folks.

A few weeks ago, I talked with Chris Kanaracus for his story on Infor moving parts of their application portfolio to Amazon Web Services. Chris said this looked like a pretty strong endorsement for using AWS, and asked for my thoughts, which were: Yes, this a nice vote a confidence for AWS. However, I think most SaaS companies would look at AWS as capable of being used like this. There might be questions about pricing long-term, but technologically it’s just a stack of middleware running on a bunch of servers.

I spoke with a couple of reporters earlier this week on the partnerships between Google and VMware and Google and Citrix around supporting Windows XP on Chromebooks. VMware has $200 off Chromebook discount for business buyers, and Citrix has a discount as well. Both are deep into vying with each other around the Desktop-as-a-Service market and interested in dominating that market which is looking to be driven by a pretty simple need: providing a way to use Windows applications on non-Windows devices.

As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a vendor talks about themselves is actually important for analyst work, and the good press releases are more like media kits that line up all the relevant facts and links to other sources…and there’s all the bad stuff too, that’s still floating around.

Paul Krill asked a few questions about the future of PaaS last month for an omnibus appdev article of his (it’s a nice round up!). Here’s the only slightly edited full reply I sent him: Q: Does 451 Group see 2013 as a banner year for PaaS? If so, why? PaaS has always had the issue of being “big next year.” The nature of PaaS has shifted around so many times that it’s little wonder it’s yet to achieve escape velocity.

GitHub Traffic Analytics service gives developers insight into interest in their projects Paul Krill asked for some quick input on GitHub’s newly released analytics. Here’s what I sent over for his story: As the blog post says, it does look like fun, though pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. GitHub has been a major driver of getting the development community to care more about social interactions and collaborations, here, tracking who’s looking at your code and where they’re coming from - standard web analytics stuff.