It’s the end of the year - might as well be over once I wrap up today. On the other hand, if you’re in sales, it’s hardly the end of the year. It might be the most white-knuckling two weeks left. I’m sure glad I don’t do that work.
Infrastructure Software in 2016 summerized
Coté Content
In the last episode we make whacky predictions (not too whacky, actually) for 2017. Also, we discuss GitHub financials, I go on an “AI” rant, and Brandon gives advice for the family IT help desk.
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We don’t have enough people, and the people we have don’t have the right skills. That’s a gasp oft heard during the machinations of digital transformation. To investigate this sentiment, the Cloud Foundry Foundation recently fielded a survey to probe into both sentiment around developer skills and how organizations are addressing it. The findings were actually optimistic, but there’s still work to be done. In this episode, we dig into this survey and what the findings mean for how IT departments need rethink their approach to training and hiring. To do so, we invited Abby Kearns and James Governor.
Links!
The new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is out. It has a whole slew of updates across the board, including some “servless” shenanigans.
Anne Thomas and Aashish Gupta at Gartner give advice on choosing an application platform (a platform) for new development: “The application platform market is morphing in response to digital business requirements. As Java EE and other three-tier frameworks, such as ASP.NET, fade in relevance, application leaders must build a strategy to shift to alternative platforms that support cloud-native applications.” Obviously, it favors Pivotal (and other “cloud platforms”). Check it out if you leadgen yourself. Meanwhile, JEE people are not happy with this report.
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Once again, the key metric of new software license sales was off—falling 19% to $1.35 billion compared to last year, and missing analysts’ expectations of $1.44 billion. On the other hand: “Our cloud revenue will be larger than our new software license revenue next fiscal year, when the transition will be largely complete.”
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Some tactical advice, with some small survey figures: It was a small survey of 79 people, which isn’t particularly surprising since there aren’t that many developer relations roles.
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Books I'm Reading
I haven’t finished this yet, but it’s good listening. The mechanics of Mencken’s profesional life and his, let’s say, “approach” to criticism is interesting. I think it’d fit well into todays “Twitter-driven” news-cycle. It’s also a reminder that “the news” has always been a chaotic mess.
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This book is like Adventure Land (only) for adults
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I finally got around to reading this, finishing up last week. I some “what does it mean?” analysis, which is fun, but all besides the point. It’s just about raw life-as-nihilistic-insane-driven chaos. Which, of course, makes for good reading.
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I’m reading this to pair up with a book review of The Wealth of Humans. So far it’s a forced march of vignettes of how awesome computers are. I’m hoping there’s some more analysis of the situation and recommendations rather than just a catalog on data points, good and broad as they are. The challenge us tech people have before us is: while we improve how businesses operate, our work tends to get people - lots of them - fired without a care towards retraining or generally assuring that people aren’t left behind by Awesome Computer Tricks™.
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For more books I hang out with, check me out over in Goodreads where I all-too-obsessively track my reading, page by page.