Tech & Work World

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Big news for the company I work in this week. Sadly for my desires to write about and link to interesting stories on it, I have to take a pass. It’s bad form for employees to comment on any of this stuff; and since I worked at Dell on strategy and M&A for software and cloud, it’s double a bad idea. There’s a lot of good write-ups out there, enjoy them.

Slack Behavior

I complain about Slack a lot in the SDT podcast, but, really, it’s a good, effective collaboration tool. The more technical people use it at Pivotal: we’re waiting for the sales and corporate marketing people to get in there. Once everyone gets in, I think it’ll be great. The idea that it not only cuts down on email but speeds up decision making (and, thus, action) is very true, anecdotally for me at least. Daily I find myself about to send an email and then thinking, “I should just write to the person in Slack or put this in the channel.” In that respect, it’s much like instant messaging, to be sure.

In the marketing/evangelism groups I’ve been in, we don’t do much with the integrations - early on we played with things like Trello integration. The integrations clog the channel up a bit.

What I’d like to see more of, in our use, is thinking more about how we use: making the implicit explicit, as it were. For example, we had a discussion about what the “available”e icon means. Does it mean someone will respond back quickly? Nope, not in out Slack “culture”: it doesn’t really mean anything, people will reply when they reply.

The other thing we should try to do more is create channels for ongoing “threads” of conversation. For example, we have a #DevOpsDays channel to discuss our participation on those conferences.

Anyhow, it’s a good tool. Slack is at that difficult point now where they have to balance throwing in new features and changing nothing at all. It’ll be fun to see what they come up with. I’d love to have a Google Hangouts/Skype/Zoom that works perfectly and seamlessly. They used to call it “unified communications,” and it’d be nice to have another go at that.

Travel

I’ll be at several events this Fall and Winter:

• DevOpsDays Charlotte - I’m speaking.
• DevOpsDays Silicon Valley - just boothin’
• DevOpsDays Detroit - I might be speaking.
• Gartner AADI Summit,

If you’re at any, I’d love to meetup and talk with you.

Recent Podcasts

• Software Defined Talk #45: Are there ways of being paranoid without being an asshole? Or, All your hot takes are belong to us
• Lords of Computing Podcast #8: “The concerned citizen super coder,” or, transforming how the US government does software, Diego Lapiduz
• Software Defined Talk #46: Vegas blinders, re:Invent, Curious George, and Dell/EMC

Recent Posts &co.

• Cloud Native Journey Series - I finished up my four part series on IT transformation. Tell me what you think!
• Business people need to understand how software development works
• Tips on using social media from analyzing how celebrities manage their brands -

Quick Hits

• Nordstrom Continues To Innovate In The Physical Goods E-Commerce Space -
• Why you should start work at 10am (unless you’re in your 50s) - “The 10-year-old and 55-year-old wake and sleep naturally at the same time.”
• Microsoft Launches Azure Container Service with Mesosphere DCOS, Drawing its Distinction with Google
• IBM wants to put Bluemix everywhere
• Insider: Oracle has lost interest in Java
• Puppet Labs Rolls App Orchestration Tool
• What My Uterus Can Teach You About Being a Tech Leader - “You know, I’d love to get coffee afterwards with anyone — man or woman — who wants to talk about raising kids while working full time, but right now I think the audience really wants to hear about how I’m leading a revolution in robotics.”
• Legacy IT budget cuts boost data center investment plans
• American Airlines Launches Real-Time Baggage Tracking Service For Travelers
• HP Enterprise To Sell Exclusively Through Channel Outside The Fortune 500 - HP strategy is focusing on just large accounts, letting partners sell to smaller folks. Makes sense.
• Building a better government design team -
• Lessons learned from Adobe’s shift to digital marketing
• Partnering with Docker - when they might do anything, partnering can be hard to sort out.
• Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did - “In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces.”
• The War of Independence for Enterprise Architecture - Good thinking on what the EA does in the cloud native world.
• Dell Files Confidentially for IPO of Cybersecurity Unit SecureWorks - “Dell bought SecureWorks for $612 million, looking to beef up its services business and expand beyond its core computer hardware offerings.”
• SolarWinds Halted, Jumps 9%: Reviewing Strategic Alternatives - Someone’s interested in buying Solarwinds.
• If nearly 40% of Americans aren’t working, what are they doing? - “Unemployment held steady at 5.1%, but only 59.2% of Americans have a job.”
• VMware, New Dell Unit, Refreshes Cloud Platform -

Fun & IRL

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO - HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services - interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

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