It's turkey time! In the US at least. There's a few pieces of my content below and some links. I'm hoping to just have two more trips this year, but we'll see what Q4 demands have.  I'll be at the Gartner AS&S conference in December. Come on by the Pivotal booth to say hi if you're there. One of our customers, from Home Depot, is speaking as well. It should be a good talk.

The long break is coming up - Thanksgiving and then Christmas, the holidays as it were. For sales people, Q4 of course is anything but a break, so hug your sales person. Getting paid, podcast editionI got a few offers sponsoring the Software Definded Talk podcast. It looks like we could get about $75 an episode (split three ways after costs). We're at just north of 2,000 downloads per episode (over a few weeks).

It’s the day before elections in the US. If you haven’t already, go out and vote. Kim and Cormac are up in Ohio block walking to get out the vote, which is amazing. In retrospect, I should have gone with them. I’ll have to remedy that for the next elections, about two year’s time I suppose. Help me finish this PDF Back when it was 37 pages. I’ve been posting some excerpt here and there from this PDF I’m working on: pulling together all the “so, how do we do better software here?

There's not much to say at the moment, just some travel here and there before Thanksgiving and then Christmas. The end of the year is fun, it cools down and you get to see family. I'm trying to wrap up my big PDF for this year, the "second edition" of my cloud native journey book, check out a new excerpt for y'all below. There's also some content of mine and, as always, fun links.

Make sure to go vote, early if possible! This issue is a round-up of some links and content I’ve been up to since last time. I’ve had the iPhone 7 Plus for several weeks now. I really, really like it. I was afraid it’d be too big, but I think it’d perfect. I just updated to iOS 10.1 which has the “portrait mode.” I’m eager to see how that works; hopefully I can finally take a new headshot photos.

Fall is finally coming to Austin, which means it’s nice and cool. With a long lull in travel, I’ve been working on a second edition of my “cloud native journey” PDF. See a fragment of it below, on outsourcing. Meanwhile, I’m reading through the DevOps Handbook to write a review. Outsourcing and DevOps, it's a problem An excerpt from the second edition of my cloud native journey booklet. This is from the second section where I cover the common questions and “barriers” to doing DevOps/Agile/cloud native/whatever you want to call it.

With summer over, there’s a new round of conferences, and my kids are back at school. My 6-year-old, Cormac, is starting 1st grade. We looked around at lot of schools for him and settled on the Lake Travis STEM Academy. I went to public school all my life - and a state college (I mean, a not too fucking shabby one) - so I’ve been really curious to see how private schools pan out.

Since last time, I was at SpringOne Platform and took a week off for beach-time. Both were fun. I have very little travel over the next few, well, months. I’ll be speaking up at DevOpsDays Dallas, Sep 15th and 16th. With this “downtime” - we’ll see if I actually do it - but I’m hoping to work on a second edition/sequel to my “Cloud Native Journey” book from last year. Over the past year I’ve collected a sort of FAQ that large companies us about DevOps, microservices, PaaS, continuous delivery, and agile (you know, “cloud native”).

I’ll be in Las Vegas two weeks in a row, which is a rarity. Las Vegas was a frequent destination when I was an analyst at RedMonk and 451: big vendors like IBM and Microsoft love to put on shows here. I suppose it’s cheap, easy to get to, and has rooms a-plenty. The perfect combination. Next week is Pivotal’s big, annual conference, SpringOne Platform. I’m speaking twice, my 5 minute Ignite talk on surviving BigCo corporate culture and then my DevOps/Agile/Everything stump-speech.

Last week I had a tiny tour of Poland, speaking in Warsaw and in Devoxx in Krakow. It was fun! I got to give the long version of my "Surviving and Thriving in BigCo's talk" and also the "Better Ways of Doing Software" stump speech, as it were. Tragically, I missed the pigs on a spit. Right now I'm up in Chicago at an EPA tech summit where I gave an overview of agile for orginizers such as theirselves.