James Governor
James, aka @Monkchips is co-founder of RedMonk, the open source analyst firm, which specialises in developer advocacy and analytics.
Atomist–making software development observable, programmable
I recently sat down with the cofounders of Atomist Rod Johnson and Ryan Day to discuss the state of software development today and how their platform meets the needs of companies undertaking digital transformation and replatforming projects. Organisations are being told to break down monoliths into hundreds, if not thousands, of services but […]
On putting together better keynotes and conferences – stretches and petting zoos
Major tech conferences and their keynotes are often grueling rather than enjoyable. By the time you’re 2 hours into a keynote and there is no sign of an end it becomes an endurance contest. We all have our favorite examples – “oh my god do you remember that time we thought we were done at […]
Rancher Labs: Treating Cattle like Cattle
Rancher Labs recently ran an analyst day in San Francisco. The event had thirteen customer speakers, which, given Rancher claims to have 200 paying customers, is a pretty decent chunk of the installed base. The talks were high on signal and low on noise – every speaker had interesting technical insights to impart. Rancher […]
Kubernetes won – so now what?
One of the questions my colleague Stephen is adept at asking and answering is of the form: “You won, so now what?” On the flight home from Kubecon 2018 recently it struck me that this frame is appropriate for a discussion of the state of the union. Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container […]
On Hortonworks, data management and mind blown by GDPR. First notes from Dataworks 2018
At its DataWorks Summit 2018 in Barcelona this week Hortonworks set out its stall for the next stage in its evolution. A year ago it was looking like the Cloud would simply eat the Big Data market, but geopolitical concerns, and enterprise inertia, have combined to create a somewhat more nuanced picture. Hortonworks argues the […]
Monki Gras 2018: what happened?
We came, we saw, we celebrated craft jeans. I am really proud of the work we did this year. Well… apart from the sound proof curtains. Spoiler alert- they don’t work. From the perspective of a curator I always hope to see resonances between talks, shadow and light and interplay between different ideas, emergent themes […]
Sustaining Craft – quick roundup on Apache, BTC, Pineapple, IBM mainframes and FutureGov
When you’re curating a conference you tend to see everything through the lens of that event. At the moment I am in full Monki Gras mode. The conference is on the 1st and 2nd of February 2018 in Shoreditch, London. The theme is Sustaining Craft. Where last year we examined packaging, convenience and disposability, this […]
When sustainable fashion jumps out as a theme at ur tech conference
When I started looking for talks and examples of sustaining the craft for Monki Gras I didn’t have fashion in mind. But Mazz Mosley, lead backend engineer at Unmade proposed a talk, and now a few other examples have emerged. The Unmade story is cool. Not least because I was thinking just this morning how personalisation […]
On AWS and Pivotal, opinions and overlaps
After a couple of back to back weeks in which I attended AWS re:Invent and SpringOne Platform, with a little time since to think about what I had learned, I got to thinking about the nature of Opinion as Code. Frankly we shouldn’t expect AWS to be too opinionated. Just consider Amazon’s heritage. It began […]
Convenience is the killer app: on consumer choices and developer experience
A couple of weeks ago I gave the closing keynote at the MongoDB Europe conference. I was there to talk about the awesome power of convenience. When we’re making decisions, that hit of dopamine doesn’t just give us a nudge, it grabs, puts the seat belt on, and drives us from A to B with […]
