I’ll be at the OpenStack Summit in Austin this week, meandering about talking with folks, at the Cloud Foundry Foundation booth a few afternoons, getting some pancakes and breakfast tacos with The New Stack folks, visiting with some analysts and other in-town, and moderating a panel on developer marketing Thursday morning. Also, I got my second hair and beard cut from Abby Gapko. She does great work here in Austin and ain’t too expensive.

Hello again. It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Austin, worse over there in Houston. We lived in years of draught, so downpours are always miraculous. I think the lake is even full now, after God knows how long of being way under. Conferences The Spring conference season is on. You know if someone says “conference season” they go to (too many?) conferences for work. I’ve had to miss out on DevOpsDays London where I would have been speaking this week, but will be at all sorts of other conferences over the next few months:

Things are thin this episode as I took some time off for family. "An ongoing battle""Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle." From Authority, delightfully "new weird." Coté ContentDevOps isn't just about the new: It's about cleaning up the old, too — www.theregister.co.uk My monthly DevOps column at The Register, here on dealing with legacy IT. I'm way too happy with myself about the eating cereal over the sink part.

Hello there, welcome to the second re-birth issue. Go to a conference on the cheap! Discount Codes I round up all sorts of discount codes for conferences and such, here’s what I got so far: Get $50 off DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 20th and 21st, with the code SDT2016. I’ll be getting some for Chicago and Seattle sometime too. Get 20% off registration for the Cloud Foundry Summit, May 23rd to 25th, with the code CF16COTE.

Hello there! Let’s be honest, the highly manual-driven newsletter of mine was mostly dead. I stumbled across Revue.co which looks like the exact level of automation needed to make me more successful at sending out newsletters. I’ll try for every few days and first and see what happens. I imported the 107 existing subscribers I had in tinyletter, apologies if you don’t like this shift, feel free to unsubscribe, of course!

Come to the Austin Docker Meetup this Thursday (Jan 7th) to see me and some much smarter people talk about “The Container State of the Union.” See below for some of the “prep” work I’ve done. Also in this edition, new types of disruption theory, compliance in DevOps, books, and a smalll, interesting link round-up. Tech & Work WorldResetting PricesDisruption theory follows a template: a new competitor starts with an inferior product at a lower price, finds success, and eventually takes over the market from the leaders.

Tech & Work WorldHow Microservices Fixes the Slow Train ProblemI write little columns for the internal Pivotal newsletter we have sometimes. Here’s one that’s about to go out. The ideas of “dependencies” and “coupling” are important touch points for understanding and conveying the software delivery benefits of a microservices approach to architecture. “Coupling” between services means that changes to one service have a big impact on another service. Coupling is considered bad in software architecture.

This week is a lull in travel. I’m closing out the year by going to lots of DevOpsDays (Charlotte, where I’m speaking, and Silicon Valley next week), a few internal summits, and my first Gartner show, where I’m speaking in a sponsored slot. Tech & Work WorldShameless Self Promotion“You should put that on The Slide” – Software Defined Talk #47 - us three are pretty busy now so our schedule is irregular, but here’s the latest.

Tech & Work WorldNo CommentBig news for the company I work in this week. Sadly for my desires to write about and link to interesting stories on it, I have to take a pass. It’s bad form for employees to comment on any of this stuff; and since I worked at Dell on strategy and M&A for software and cloud, it’s double a bad idea. There’s a lot of good write-ups out there, enjoy them.

Tech & Work WorldI was at Spiceworld, briefly, last week. This is Spiceworks’ big user, annual conference in Austin; they have one in London as well. I’ve followed Spiceworks for many years (from RedMonk to 451 Research) and have always liked their IT management approach: their business model is to be the Facebook of IT by giving away the systems management software for free and then selling access to the users to advertisers, vendors, and others.