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.

ChicagoI’ll be at DevOpsDays Chicago in a few weeks, August 26th to 27th. If you want to go and haven’t registered yet, you can use the code PIVOTAL10 to get 10% off, which gets it down to like $170 or something. It’s excellent value for a tech conference, plus you can see me speak and staff a booth! While I’m up there, on Aug 26th, I’ll be speaking at the local Cloud Foundry Meetup.

Follow-upThe piece on “cloud journeys” I excerpted from last time is now posted. Tech & Work WorldCloud NativeI’ve been writing some pieces on “cloud native” of late. It’s a term we’ve been using at work to describe what we’re all about. Here’s an excerpt from an internal newsletter piece I drafted today: You’ve probably coming across the term “cloud native“ frequently. James Watters has an excellent post on the topic, but I wanted add some background for y’all here.

Get your lurn on - this weekend!Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off! Follow-upW AustinAs I mentioned last time, we stayed at the W in downtown Austin last week.