There’s lots of opinions on Cloudera’s IPO today. Here’s some that I’ve collected in my notebook. Not valued high enough? Despite the share-price being up 20% at close, some negative commentary focuses on their valuation dropping from Intel’s funding round, e.g., from Brenon at 451: The chipmaker paid up for the privilege, putting a ‘quadra unicorn’ valuation of $4.1bn on Cloudera. Altogether, Cloudera raised more than $1bn from private market investors, making the $225m raised from public market investors seem almost like lunch money.

With DockerCon this week, there’s no end of Docker quotables and items. Here’s my collection General momentum Once landed in an account, Docker usage grows their CEO says: There has also been expansion within customers, with organizations that start with Docker expanding their usage on average by five times within six months Way back in 2015, the (now annual?) DataDog study of Docker usage among their customers said that 2/3 of companies that try Docker adopt it.

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.

I reviewed two books on automation and digital transforming this month: The Wealth of Humans and Silicon Collar. These two books go well together because the first describes how automation is lowering the need for labor, leading, likely, to less jobs, while the second provides a compendium of examples of such software-driven labor change. Vinnie’s book has the optimism of a technologist, while Avent’s is much more fraught. Both accurately describe how IT is optimizing and replacing “analog” labor and businesses, leaving the core problem of devaluing human labor, perhaps to the point of eliminating millions of jobs, permanently.

This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s updates on this topic and more in my book, Monolithic Transformation. Every journey begins with a single step, they say. What they don’t tell you is that you need to pick your step wisely. And there’s also step two, and three, and then all the n + 1 steps. Picking your initial project is important because you’ll be learning the ropes of a new way of developing and running software, and hopefully of running your business.

I cut the below montage-y overview of the history of enterprise open source from a Register piece I’m working on. Here it is! For me, the dawn of enterprise open source was somewhere around 2001 when IBM committed billions of dollars to shoring up Linux. Around this same time, the Eclipse Foundation (also launched by IBM) started it’s IDE market re-rigging, and the Apache Web Server was climbing the hill to market dominance piloting the way for the rest of the Apache Software Foundation.

While HPE is getting $2.5bn in cash, the whole deal value is more like $8.8bn, the non-cash being stock. More details: The Numbers “Under the deal, HP Enterprise shareholders are expected to end up with Micro Focus shares currently valued at about $6.3 billion. Micro Focus will pay HP Enterprise $2.5 billion in cash.” (WSJ) There’s about 12,000 people in HPE Software. (WSJ) HPE Software revenue: “HPE’s software unit generated $3.

Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson asked me recently for advice on working with legacy applications. Check out her piece on it. Here’s the full reply I sent to her in email: Her topics: - The steps someone could take to get themselves up to speed on their employer’s legacy software. - How this knowledge can make them indispensable (I know that term is relative) - Why this type of expertise is so necessary, especially when it comes to integrating said software with new and/or evolving products.

tl;dr Recently, I’ve been in conversations where people throw some doubt on DRY. In the cloud native, microservices mode of operating where independent teams are chugging along, mostly decoupled from other teams, duplicating code and functionality tends to come more naturally, even necessarily. And the benefits of DRY (reuse and reducing bugs/inconstancy from multiple implementation of the same thing), theoretically, no longer are more valuable than the effort put into DRYing off.