Speaking
I speak a lot at conferences, internal events, and meetings here and there for work. You can see a selection of my past talks here. Usually, I’m talking on the topic of doing better software at large organizations. Many of these talks are based on and draw from my books.
Here are two talks I’ve been giving recently:
Escaping the Legacy Trap
Sadly, older applications and services too often slow down and stop business innovation. Yet, 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change. They’re caught in the legacy trap! Organizations simply can’t figure out how to prioritize this invisible work over adding new features and apps. But today, there’s no room to avoid modernizing core systems if your business wants to keep up. No more new features can be added to software and no more progress can be made on transformation journeys until this fear is faced. This talk will cover one mindset and methodology that’s been used with several large organizations for escaping the legacy trap, SWIFT.
See my legacy trap page for recordings of this talk and related stuff.
Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms
platform engineering, platform as a product
Abstract: This talk covers best and worst practices for Platform engineering. The trick is, we didn’t always use this phrase, so we actually have many years of experience to learn from. Who are you? You’re in a DevOps, wait, I mean SRE…nope, scatch that…“platform engineering” team. People are coming at you to get kubernetes up and running and then build some kind of platform on-top of kubernetes. But you just got a build pipeline in place! Getting kubernetes ready for developers may be a new problem, but building and running developer platforms has been going on for at least ten years. This talk will cover the lessons those organizations have learned such as: product managing the platform, attracting and retaining developers, seeding trust and skills, re-skilling existing ops staff, and more. Examples are drawn from organizations like Mercedes-Benz, the US Airforce, large insurance companies and banks, and more.
This talk evolves each time I give it, For example, there’s a newer version done with co-presenters as well.
Also, see all the stuff I say about platform as a product on my platform page.
This can talk be presented in 30 or 50 minutes.
Bio and picture
Here is a short bio of me:
Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.
Here are two pictures, feel free to use whichever you think is appropriate:
