RedMonk June 2024 Update
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Hi all y’all. Kelly here, writing to you from the road because the spring tech travel season is still in full swing. Since our last update we’ve had Monks in Colorado for SW2Con, Boston for IBM Think, Seattle for Microsoft Build, San Francisco for LaunchDarkly Galaxy, and NYC for the kickoff of PagerDuty On Tour.
This week most of the team was in San Francisco for some very productive face-to-face advisory sessions and a well-attended RedMonk Beers. We also serendipitously caught up with folks in town for Snowflake’s user conference, including our friends at Observe. Many thanks to Continue for letting us borrow some meeting space (and for the excellent chat about AI code assistants). Our trip also coincided with the kickoff of Pride month, which meant that some of us ended up in the middle of a Pride-themed street fair on 2nd St. featuring a giant disco ball.
This past week marked the 10th birthday of Kubernetes. I wrote a bit about the ways folks have been marking the occasion (and I still can’t quite come to terms with the seemingly contradictory feeling that it was both a very long and very short decade). Our own Kate Holterhoff managed to get the CNCF’s KuberTENes celebration in Mountain View, and you can catch some of her initial impressions here.
RedMonk also kicked off The New Builders—our latest video series—this week. Check out the inaugural episode, where Rachel Stephens and Tom “Spot” Callaway discuss building open source culture at AWS.
As you may suspect, many of the conversations we’ve had this month involved generative AI; it was a theme at virtually every meeting and every conference. The research and media below capture many a RedMonk take on the latest AI trends, and this month’s featured piece from Stephen O’Grady on AI Patterns is a great place to start. I’d also like to call out Kate’s post on the shift in framing AI assistants as individual tools to organizational enablers.
The upside of this spring’s unusually heavy travel season is that we’ve had many wonderful and useful in-person conversations. As James Governor noted in our May newsletter, “Zoom is a powerful tool, but trust me, our in person brains trust can definitely add a lot of value in terms of the strategic advice we bring,” and indeed many IRL conversations have been with our clients and the larger RedMonk community. The RedMonk team has also had more opportunities than usual to meet up with each other in person, and to my mind the level of useful collaboration that these instances yield assure me that there will be some aspects of collaboration that AI (like video conferencing tools) will never quite displace.
In this spirit, I leave you with one of my favorite selfies of the year (so far): Rachel and I at Atlassian Team ‘24 holding an impromptu collaborative writing session as we wait for our flaming skull at CHICA:
Links Roundup
This is very cool. "Freeman and Forrest — a company dedicated to helping tech creators get paid what they're worth."
Portland (OR) friends and/or folks at Monitorama (June 10-12), check out this happy hour with our friends at Embrace and Grafana Labs.
The dates and venue for Write the Docs Australia have dropped; CFP and ticket information are still in the works.
If you are a tech writer and/or fantasy fan, take a look at this High Fantasy Map of Technical Writing from Splunk’s Fabrizio Ferri-Bennedetti.
Do you love the Postgres community and want a reason to visit Ibiza in September? The CFP (Deadline: June 23, 2024) is up for Postgres Ibiza (September 9-11, 2024). Top of mind topics include systems design and engineering; containers and distributed systems; and infrastructure security and data protection and privacy.
If you have not yet seen the Thriving Blobs webcomic from Dr. Carol Lee, we suggest starting with this gem on AI skill threats and fairness gaps.
Recent RedMonk Research
Happy 10th Birthday, Kubernetes! A very happy birthday to Kubernetes! 6/6/2024 marks ten years since the project’s first commit.
Anyone following the enterprise AI space can't help but notice recent shifts in marketing AI tools from targeting individuals (code assistants, GPT chatbots, image generators) to teams (Microsoft Team Copilot, GoogleWorkspace, Atlassian Confluence). Why are the keywords “team” & “collaborate” heard on nearly every keynote stage in recent months? What does this evolution bode for individual contributors, and developers specifically? Kafkaesque nightmare or superpowered productivity boost? AI Assistants are Now Organizational Accelerants RM clients mentioned: AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and Salesforce
Steve O'Grady had a lot of conversations about InstructLab at the Red Hat Summit & AnsibleFest 2024. We got some answers, but still have a lot of questions. The biggest one for us: what if it works? InstructLab: What if Contributing to Models Was Easy? RM clients mentioned: IBM and Red Hat
Featured Article
Like everyone else in the industry, we've been having a lot of conversations about AI. Here are a couple of patterns from those conversations that don't seem to get as much attention as they should. RM clients mentioned: AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oxide, Red Hat and Salesforce
Recent Videos and Media Appearances
Join James Governor and Simon Wistow, Co-Founder at Fastly, in a short discussion on why you should come to the Fastly Xcelerate event in London on June 18.
Rachel Stephens joins Lauren Hanford (Tidelift), Shaun Martin (BlackIce), Josh Bressers (Anchore), Jordan Harbrand (HeroDevs), and Terrence Fletcher (Boeing) in a Tidelift Upstream panel on Life after the xz utils backdoor hack.
Introducing The New Builders, a new RedMonk series brought to you by AWS. In this first episode, Rachel Stephens chats with Tom 'Spot' Callaway about his work in building an open source culture at AWS. For more updates on open source at AWS, follow @AWSOpen on X. The New Builders: Tom Callaway talks about Building OSS Culture at AWS
As open source did decades ago, AI is now taking the technology industry by storm. Hear from Stephen O'Grady, Matt Hicks (CEO of RedHat), and Ruchir Puri (Chief Scientist, IBM Research) -- live from IBM Think a couple weeks ago -- on how open source applies to AI. A RedMonk Conversation: The Intersection of Open Source and AI
This is a cool demo of how IBM is enabling customers to modernize and maintain their mainframe applications with generative AI using IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z. What is watsonx Code Assistant for Z and How to Use GenAI to Modernize Mainframe Apps
RedMonk senior analysts KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Kate Holterhoff chat with Dr. Rebekah Greene about the importance of communication and documentation in nursing. The Docs Are In: Communication and Nursing Education (with Dr. Rebekah Greene)
RedMonk Recommends
This part of our newsletter introduces those of you looking to hire talented people to individuals we know who are looking for new opportunities.
This month RedMonk recommends Heidi Waterhouse, who you may know from her work as a marketing advisor and coach, her expert developer advocate work with companies like LaunchDarkly, or because of Heidi either delivering an amazing talk and/or doing an absolutely magical job of making everybody feel welcome at many a tech conference. Heidi is also an author (check out RedMonk’s writeup of Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing), and, in her own words, a storyteller. She notes, “A lot of things that get classified as different jobs, like content marketing, technical writing, partnerships, product marketing, and pitching, are all just ‘telling the story’ in the end. I'm a really good storyteller about the value of a technology.”
Heidi is looking for full-time or fractional positions doing product marketing or developer advocacy, especially for developer tools companies. She is a good fit for earlier-stage companies who need someone with a broad range of experiences and is willing to dive into the problem. You can read more here about why you should chat with Heidi about how she can help you tell your story.
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Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
CriblCon 2024: 6/10/2024, Las Vegas, NV
Splunk .conf24: 6/11 - 6/14/2024, Las Vegas, NV
Render ATL: 6/12 - 6/14/2024, Atlanta, GA
Events we'll be hosting:
The Monktoberfest 2024: 10/3 - 10/4/2024, Portland, ME
Our mailing address is:
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