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.

I’m in transit between Minneapolis and San Francisco right now. The MSP airport is delightful, with a long mall at the base and concourses reaching out, it seems civilized. Follow-upI had lunch with one of you today who said, “looks like you started up the newsletter,” to which I replied, “well, if I can send one more out and then not do it the third time, then yes.” So, here’s number two.

It’s been forever since a memo! Here’s this week’s. I’ve tried to craft a work-flow that will allow me to collect links I want to share, in addition to shameless self-promotion and the occasional commentary in here…and actually send these out weekly. We’ll see what happens. TravelI’ve been traveling a lot recently and have more coming up. The main thing is going to lots of DevOpsDays. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to speak at them, but the main part I like is talking with old friends and meeting people who are trying to sort out what exactly DevOps is and if/how it applies to them.

View this on the web In this episode: who comes up the ApacheCon booths, a seemingly coordinated conversation about tech bubbles, and “how to eat.” The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th, in Santa Clara. It’s a great chance to dive into Cloud Foundry ecosystem both on the technology side and to hear how organizations are using Cloud Foundry to become Software Defined Businesses. Register now with the discount code COTE and get 25%, which will bring the price down from $250 to about $187.

Follow-up, Follow-forwardThe column I excerpted from last time is up, over at FierceDevOps: Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments. Tell me what you think; they asked me to write a monthly piece, so I’d love to get some ideas for topics going: got any? I got some good feedback on the podcast sponsorship meanderings. Apparently, there’s pretty good money in tech podcasts. The next thing I’m curious about is if the advertising actually works…or how people even measure it.

View this on the web There’s few links today, just some pointers to now published material that I’ve alluded to recently, and some moaning on needing to be a better team-player. Follow-upWe got up to 100 subscribers, so good job there, y’all ;) As several people wrote, the word I was looking for in that discussion of lower case letters is “semiotics”, the study of symbols. The podcast I excerpted from on the operational needs of cloud platforms (and people who don’t capitalize words) is now up.

Tech & Work WorldPodcasting RatesBrandon shared some podcast revenue estimates with me from the Hot Pod newsletter recently. I’m all for there being lots of money in podcasting, but they seem bonkers high: Then there’s Standard Broadcast Co., independently produced shows that hang a banner under the same ad sales network. This includes three of the most popular tech podcasts: John Gruber’s The Talk Show; Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa’s Accidental Tech Podcast; and CGP Grey and Brady Haran’s Hello Internet.

Tech & Work World“What kind of company do you think we are?”Here’s some excerpts from a FierceDevOps column I submitted yesterday. Quick tip: if you’re in a room full managers and executives from non-technology companies and one of them asks, “what kind of company do you think we are?”…no matter what type of company they are, the answer is always “a technology company.” That’s the trope us in the technology industry have successfully deployed into the market in recent years.