RedMonk October 2024 Update
A small, sharp research firm focusing on developer-led technology adoption and developer culture. We help folks understand the industry by understanding you.
It's gourd season, the leaves are gold and red, if not falling off the trees. What does that mean? It means it's Q4 and there's a lot to do, but it also means it's the most wonderful time of the year. It is, or just was, Monktoberfest.
What's so great about our conference Monktoberfest, held last week? It’s a forum for the kinds of conversations that you don't find anywhere else. It gets people in their feelings. It’s a kind of third place - neither work, nor home, but familiar and community oriented. Not enough events and spaces do this in tech, or in society more broadly. There's an absence, often, of intimate, face to face social spaces, which is ironic and sad in the age of increasingly algorithmic social media. There's something magical about being able to convene on a regular basis—in our case, annually—with a vibrant community.
Probably because of our keen focus on diversity and inclusion, one of the really noticeable dimensions of the conference is that we're not, as a community, graying out. While some attendees are in the middle stages of their careers and in middle age with a few (ok, a lot) of gray hairs, there were also plenty of newbies, and younger return attendees, that have perhaps joined us through the Diversity and Inclusion program before. A special thanks to MongoDB for sponsoring the program, year on year. It's extremely pleasing that newer entrants into the industry consider coming back to join us again. But, of course, if you put a premium on being truly welcoming then folks will tend to respond to that.
Monktoberfest provides food for the soul, and we need that nourishment at a time when there's, frankly, a fair bit of stress in the air. The talks were uniformly excellent, as ever, and I hope attendees will go off into the next couple of months rejuvenated.
We made new friends, and reenforced the bonds of friendships made over years. So many of us love the tech business because of the human aspects, not just the technology. That's what we focus on at Monktoberfest. In fact, it’s something that we focus on in all our work at RedMonk: think developer experience, community management, open source, the human side of tech processes.
Talking about the human side, some attendees weren’t able to make it to Monktoberfest because of Hurricane Helene, and frankly today, with Hurricane Milton barreling down upon Florida, our thoughts go out to people living in all of the geographies affected. RedMonk is going to be making some charitable contributions to organizations on the ground that can help out with these somewhat unprecedented weather events. Our thoughts go out to everybody affected. Stay safe. When you do an event on the Eastern Seaboard, in beautiful Portland, Maine, which, frankly, is no stranger to weather, it certainly concentrates the mind about people that are dealing with a hurricane a little bit further south.
So it’s Q4 again, deals will be done, new clients will be won. Hopefully there will be straightforward renewals. Good luck to all of the folks out there with quotas to make, and businesses to grow and sustain. Event season is now surely upon us. Kelly Fitzpatrick is at Fastly Xcelerate in NYC this week. We've got a few other trips ahead, including IBM TechXchange, GitHub Universe, KubeCon and of course, the biggest event on the calendar - AWS re:Invent. Almost all of the Monks will be there in Vegas and will, of course, be hosting RedMonk beers again - that'll be on Wednesday evening, in collaboration with the Duckbill Group.
Have a great Autumn or Fall season. We look forward to hearing from you, and let us know if we can help you sharpen your messages or get your product, community or IP strategy right for the end of the year and into planning for 2025. After Monktoberfest it's not long before Thanksgiving and then, of course, the Holidays and Christmas season. So yeah, get that skeleton hung up, get those gourds on the doorstep. And yeah, look forward to the next newsletter. Get your friends and colleagues to sign up, too. I am sure you’ll want to after reading this one - the links roundup is great as ever, and we’ve been cooking in the RedMonk kitchen - there are so many stories and new pieces of research below, including our regular Programming Language Rankings. Do you want to find out about Ballerina, Bicep, Grain, Moonbit and Zig? Of course you do.
Definitely read to the end of the newsletter if you’re looking for talent. We have a brilliant technologist and communicator, Anne Gentle, profiled, who is looking for a role and could definitely help you if you’re looking to scale communities around your APIs.
For me it’s time to start planning and earning in earnest for Monki Gras, the London-based sister conference of Monktoberfest. It will be in London on March 27th and 28th, the week before Kubecon. I told you we all had work to do! So that’s me, signing off for this month.
James Governor
Links Roundup
We really like this graphic, and also we think this is an excellent example of ways that people are doing successful LinkedIn content.
How to Monetize a Blog: "If we are not writing to make money, what are we writing for? To teach? To freely impart this trove of wisdom that we have spent an ongoing lifetime to harness? Free information does not put socks on feet. Respect doesn’t put cheeseburgers in refrigerators."
This article outlines an innovative (and sometimes disruptive, especially at larger orgs) strategy for shipping significant features or platform charges quickly - kicking management out and calling them back in later, after the “hands on keyboards” contributors have handled the Jobs To be Done.
Pick Your Distributed Poison: "One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency."
“In real life, as with our simulation, when we start to prioritize prevention, the situation starts to rapidly improve.” The Google Blog on how interoperability is the new rewrite.
In case you missed Write the Docs Atlantic 2024: talk recordings and sketch notes are now available, as is this event recap.
Recent RedMonk Research
The latest RedMonk Programming Language Rankings dropped (sponsored by Amazon Web Services). Stephen O’Grady has the June 2024 rankings and analysis.
Also be sure to check out Rachel Stephens’ data and analysis on the RedMonk Top 20 Languages Over Time: June 2024.
James Governor talks OSS, foundations, and trust in an age of forking and relicensing rug pulls: Open Source Foundations Considered Helpful RM clients mentioned: Amazon Web Services, IBM, Elastic, Hashicorp, GitLab, Google, Microsoft, MongoDB, Oracle, and Redis Labs
James also drops his most recent thoughts on the observability space in Observability as a Day Zero Operation RM clients mentioned: Dynatrace
Why Kelly Fitzpatrick headed out to Toronto to talk DevX: RedMonk at Atlassian Developer Day Toronto 2024 RM clients mentioned: Atlassian
Recent Videos and Media Appearances
James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, discusses SAP TechEd 2024 in this quick take video.
A RedMonk Conversation: WASM Component Model with Fastly: Luke Wagner (Distinguished Engineer at Fastly) joins Rachel Stephens of RedMonk to talk more about comparing and contrasting how code executes in a WASM module vs a container; the power of the WASM component model, with an animated explainer of how calls run through the stack; a discussion about the ByteCode Alliance and the standards they are helping implement.
The Role of Observability in Day Zero Operations: In this conversation, James Governor of RedMonk talks to Adrian Phillips and Angela Kelly of Dynatrace about the growing importance of Observability, earlier and earlier in the software development lifecycle. Observability isn’t something you need to think of after production deployment, but rather it needs to be a consideration from the earliest phases of development, right through to production and onto the next iteration. This video discusses the factors shaping this change, as companies strive to ship software faster, safely, with ever tighter feedback loops.
Exclusively on the MonkCast:
A RedMonk Conversation: Natalia Venditto and Igor Minar on the Future of Frontend Workloads: In this conversation about the evolving landscape of front-end development, Natalia Venditto, principal owner of JavaScript developer experience for Azure and Code extensions at Microsoft, and Igor Minar, senior director of engineering at Cloudflare, chat with Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. In addition to discussing the future of JavaScript, the significance of server-side rendering, and the potential of WebAssembly, they speak about the challenges of migrating from client-side to server-side architectures, the role of micro frontends in managing organizational complexity, and the importance of open source foundations like the OpenJS Foundation in ensuring sustainable development practices. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast belong to the speakers, and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers.
A RedMonk Conversation: CRMs and Codifying Business Processes with Steve Bussey: Steve Bussey, Co-Founder and CTO of Supered, talks all-things CRMs with RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff. They discuss the complexities of onboarding and user-friendliness in CRMs, the role of professional help in setting up and maintaining CRMs, the potential of AI in automating certain CRM processes, and the importance of privacy in CRM data. Steve also shares his journey from software engineer to co-founder and offers advice on finding mentors and fostering relationships.
A RedMonk Conversation: Andrew Boyagi talks Atlassian’s 2024 State of Developer Experience Report: Hear RedMonk’s Kelly Fitzpatrick chat with Andrew Boyagi, Head of DevOps evangelism at Atlassian, about the critical topic of developer experience. They discuss findings from Atlassian’s 2024 State of Developer Experience Report, highlighting the importance of understanding developer satisfaction, productivity, and the misalignment between developers and their leaders. Andrew emphasizes the need for open communication and the role of AI in enhancing developer productivity. The conversation also touches on the concept of ‘Developer Joy’ as a key objective for organizations to improve developer satisfaction and overall productivity.
A RedMonk Conversation: Luis Villa on the AI Compliance Dumpster Fire and Doing the Right Thing: In this RedMonk Conversation, Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, speaks with Luis Villa, co-founder and general counsel at Tidelift, about new challenges in security and privacy in the AI era. The conversation focuses on the legal and compliance implications of AI which Luis highlighted in a spicy LinkedIn post that inspired this episode. Villa discusses the tension between in-house counsel’s responsibility to protect the company and the desire of workers to embrace new technologies. He highlights the disconnect between Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for AI and the concerns of the general public. The conversation also touches on the ethical considerations of AI, such as the need for transparency in data usage and the responsibility of companies to protect customer information.
RedMonk Recommends
This part of our newsletter introduces those of you looking to hire talented individuals to people we know who are seeking new opportunities. This month RedMonk recommends Anne Gentle, who wrote the actual book on Docs Like Code (and stopped by The Docs are In to talk docs with us).
A developer experience (DX) leader, Anne has a proven track record of leading global teams, organizing API governance, and advancing developer advocacy at a large company with a varied API portfolio. Of her teams’ accomplishments she notes, “Our NPS score on hundreds of developer tutorials was over 60, and my teams assessed 15 APIs where more than half the teams achieved a score of 80% in a year’s time and the other half were armed with plans to raise their scores. The developer portal housed thousands of OpenAPI Specification files and hundreds of API documents.” (Note: if you do not know what any of these terms mean, you should definitely be talking to Anne.)
Anne is interested in leadership positions in developer relations, developer education, or API documentation. She is driven to improve developer portals with API documentation, docs automation, and interactive developer education, and can handle complex, high-impact projects with executive visibility and communications. She would like to work at a large to medium sized “tech-forward” company that values innovation in API documentation and developer advocacy.
Learn more about Anne and her projects via LinkedIn, Docs Like Code, and JustWriteClick.
Thank you to our Monktoberfest Community and Sponsors!
A huge thank you to everyone who made it out to Portland, ME for the 2024 Monktoberfest--it was great to see you all! Many thanks also to our sponsors--we could not put on an event like this without you.
Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
Fastly Xcelerate 2024: 10/09, New York, NY
GraphSummit Europe 2024: 10/16 - 10/17, London, UK
IBM TechXchange: 10/20 - 10/23, Las Vegas, NV
GitHub Universe 2024: 10/28 - 10/30, San Francisco, CA
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024: 11/12 - 11/15, Salt Lake City, UT
Supercomputing24 11/17 - 11/22, Atlanta, GA
Connect.tech 2024 11/18 - 11/22, Atlanta, GA
AWS re:Invent 12/2 - 12/6, Las Vegas, NV
Events we'll be hosting:
Monki Gras 2025: 27 - 28 March, London, UK
Our mailing address is:
RedMonk
411 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101
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