Replacing human agents with AI, matching it to the right sales workflow: > “So we watched how this was going very closely,” he said. “We’d review transcripts from the early customer interactions, verbatim transcripts, to see how people are reacting in a conversation with Watson – because they didn’t know it was Watson.” > > Kalinsky found reassurance in particular from a Watson-customer conversation that occurred one night at about 2 a.

> The same HBR survey found that 61 percent expect software release cycles to be three months or less, but only 27 percent of their companies actually achieve that goal. The takeaway is that executives aren’t hands-on enough to know how much time software development takes. Without a deeper understanding, they are prime targets for salesmen pitching digital transformation nirvana. thenewstack.io/add-it-up…

> The strength of our IT department is that IT is fully integrated in our organization. About 400 IT people or engineers work at bol.com, and they are organized as much as possible in about 70 small, multidisciplinary and self-managing teams. We see that that works best. These teams build features for our customers or partners. These innovation teams are supported by an IT ecosystem that facilitates them in the flexible and fast construction and running of software.

> Thus we’ve seen a bunch of Kubernetes services spring up, run by the same people who brought you all the other Infrastructures-as-a-Service. Google (from whence Kubernetes emerged originally) has Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon has Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft has Azure Container Service (AKS), VMware has VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE), you get the idea. Pivotal has Pivotal Container Service (PKS) that can run on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, VMware, and (as of its recent PKS 1.

> The unending chasm describes a mode in which an infrastructure company must function as both a product company and a consultancy. Your consultancy is necessary to integrate your product into the enterprise, and ensure that your software actually gets used. But it reduces the appealing economics of a pure software company. softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/01/2…

> my company is based in Oakland. This is like being based in San Francisco, but with fewer microclimates. Rolling up to work in a company hoodie, jeans, a t-shirt from your last company, and a pair of Tevas is A-OK. But the further east you go, the more formal everyone’s business wear gets. Jeans turn into chinos somewhere around the Mississippi, and then into actualfacts slacks. T-shirts become button-down plaid, and then long-sleeve with ties.

Why you’d use it, what it does, the parts, and the additional stuff you’ll need. www.infoq.com/presentat…

> As a scheduler of containers, Kubernetes does a pretty good job. If you keep it focused on that key task, it can take you miles. As a manager of a large scale distributed infrastructure, it’s not so good. twitter.com/danvelope…

> The microservice architecture, which breaks complex applications into sets of single-purpose networked components, can be a challenge to manage, as each microservice must be instrumented, secured and locatable in a dynamically reconfiguring network. In addition, multiple copies of microservices may be run in parallel, to meet the demands of a growing demand. Their traffic must be managed as well. > > A service mesh, which attaches a sidecar to each microservice, standardizes and moves the development of these tasks from the individual developer.

> The microservice architecture, which breaks complex applications into sets of single-purpose networked components, can be a challenge to manage, as each microservice must be instrumented, secured and locatable in a dynamically reconfiguring network. In addition, multiple copies of microservices may be run in parallel, to meet the demands of a growing demand. Their traffic must be managed as well. > > A service mesh, which attaches a sidecar to each microservice, standardizes and moves the development of these tasks from the individual developer.