
Shifting cost optimisation left: Spotify Backstage Cost Insights
Spotify is very much an engineering led company. It is also a product led company. Therefore when it decided it needed to get a better handle on its cloud spend, it decided to build an internal product designed to be used by its engineers. The result is Cost Insights, a plugin for Spotify’s Backstage developer […]

Fly Less, Write More: the future of Developer Relations, and maybe, well, everything else
I have been self isolating since early March. For the first week and a half the kids were still at school, which was actually more stressful than having them at home. But we’ve all been doing the Stay at Home thing for a few weeks now. What a great time for my eldest to prove […]

RedMonk comes to the USA: Thingmonk in Denver
Over the years we have been asked many times to run more events in the US. One of the reasons we haven’t done more events in the USA is that it’s hard work to run events outside your home city, without a local network in place, and we can’t do everything in Portland, Maine. So […]

Going Up the IoT Stack with ThingMonk and The Business of IOT, Shoreditch London Dec 2,3,4
Never knowingly under-ambitious I decided to build on the success of Thingmonk last year, but adding another day, dedicated to business issues and industry transformations led by the sensor/Big Data/automation IoT revolution. So now we have a hackday, followed by a day of technical talks, followed by a day of talks for people that normally […]

It’s the Real (Internet of) Things- Software is Drinking The World.
I recently had a jam-packed week in San Francisco, attending Dreamforce and running IOT at Scale. For the one or two of you that weren’t actually at Dreamforce, it’s kind of hard to sum up a conference with so much stuff going on. With that in mind it’s probably best not to try. I will […]

Salesforce and the New Bucket of Bits. Phoenix, Ashes.
When Salesforce.com and Oracle announced a renewal of their vows last year I was kind of surprised. Why would Salesforce deepen its reliance on the Oracle database at a time when others across the industry were lessening their reliance on that venerable and not inexpensive platform. To be fair Oracle database has excellent high availability […]

Remaking Pulse, Bold, Impact: the defibrillator
Pulse 2014 was a couple of months ago now, but given that I am on a plane to the next big IBM conference of the year, Impact 2014, I figured a quick write up of the last one would make a good preview for this one. IBM is currently undertaking a major overhaul of its […]

Monki Gras 2014 – Craft Culture and Tech. A conference about Language and Making Stuff
And so, dear readers, it’s been over a month since Monki Gras and I am only just getting around to writing it up. Of course writing up your own conference is always kind of odd- it’s pretty hard to be any kind of objective with something you pour so much love, energy and resources into. […]

SAP Consigns Everything Pre-HANA to history. In-memory First Development
This week at SAP TechEd we got the clearest statements yet that the software giant is embarking on another fundamental architectural revolution. The core message – from now on everything the company builds will be designed to take advantage of in-memory computing, based on the company’s HANA architecture. I like to describe the history of […]

On The Importance of Design at IBM: Love and Margins.
At the end of last year my founding partner dropped a quite outstanding post – The Importance of Software at IBM. In it Stephen analysed IBM’s 2011 financial results through the lens he has been using for most of the year (the end of the age of Software-only business models). It should surprise nobody that Software is […]