Gordon Haff - Issue #3

Revue

Gordon Haff

I'm a technology evangelist at Red Hat where I deal with topics such as containers, DevOps, cloud strategy, and IoT. Those will be the primary focus of this newsletter but I'll also use it to highlight generally interesting links and to provide updates on my comings and goings. Blog: http://bitmason.blogspot.com

Upcoming

My next event of note is CloudExpo in New York City on June 8. I’ll be speaking on The New Platform: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. The focus is on the containerized deployment platform that is emerging from a Cambrian Explosion of innovation associated with containers, orchestration systems (e.g. Kubernetes), DevOps, microservices, and more. It probably speaks to the ferment in this general area that, even though I’ve given variants on this presentation before, I seem to end up rewriting significant chunks of it each time.

I’ll be in the city for a few days so if you want to get together, let me know. (For some reason, my trips to New York always seem to come in bunches; I just got back from a weekend there.) To my somewhat annoyance, I’m going to have to drive down this time–which I don’t really like to do–as I’ll be heading for a reunion at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management right afterwards.

Otherwise, last week I made a systematic effort to nail down potential events through the fall. My ultimate schedule will depend somewhat on which speaking proposals get accepted but at least it’s a start.

At the end of June, I’ll be off to DevOpsDays Silicon Valley and, by no means least, Red Hat Summit at the Moscone in San Francisco. Summit’s always a very busy but very fun weak and I hope that you’ll be able to join us.

I’ll be presenting at Summit on Getting Started with DevOps with Todd Barr as well as co-hosting a DevOps metrics BoF with William Henry. I’m also the overall captain for the IT strategy track which will focus on people, processes, and technologies crucial to long-term business objectives. In this track we have a couple of “lessons learned” talks from Red Hat IT as well as Product and Technologies operations. I always learn a lot in these kind of sessions so I’m particularly looking forward to them myself.

Regcode INcrowd16 saves $500 on a full conference pass!

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium 2016

Yesterday, I headed into Cambridge for the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. For the amount of travel I do, I’ve been fortunate enough to typically be around when this event takes place as it’s always a good place to get both academic and business perspectives on important technology trends. It also not only has good individual speakers but is one of the few conferences in my experience to consistently do a decent job with panels which are so often just deadly.

I also had the pleasure of hosting a luncheon Birds of a Feather session on getting value out of IoT. Great perspectives focused on the value of data from both a couple of startups and a former Otis elevator CIO.

I’ll be doing more detailed writeups of the event but, to get you started, here’s a piece from The Enterprisers Project by Red Hat’s Carla Rudder about the opening digital ecosystems panel.

Links

Corporate Inequality Is the Defining Fact of Business Today

hbr.org – Share

The best-performing companies seem to be pulling away from the rest, according to a growing body of research, and that fact explains a large part of the growth in inequality between individuals. The result, at least in developed nations, is a highly unequal corporate landscape, where some firms are incredibly productive and the amount of money a person makes is tied to the company they work for, not just the job that they do.

I Quant NY - The NYPD Was Systematically Ticketing Legally Parked Cars for Millions of Dollars a Year- Open Data Just Put an End to It

iquantny.tumblr.com – Share

The NYPD Was Systematically Ticketing Legally Parked Cars for Millions of Dollars a Year- Open Data Just Put an End to It New York City is a complex place to drive. And when it comes to parking, there…

Nice use of open data to flag parking tickets being systematically issued for legal spots. (And nice response by the NYPD as well.)

Daring Fireball

daringfireball.net – Share

Under the new Alphabet organization and Sundar Pichai’s leadership, Google has focused itself on the things Google is actually good at, and which people will actually want to use. No more pie-in-the-sky stuff like Google Glass. Google is clearly the best at this voice-driven assistant stuff. Pichai claimed that in their own competitive analysis, Google Assistant is “an order of magnitude” ahead of competing assistants (read: Siri and Alexa). That sounds about right. This might be like Steve Jobs’s 2007 claim that the iPhone was “5 years” ahead of anyone else.

I strongly believe that an AI virtual assistant that’s at least as good as an even somewhat sub-par admin is a real killer app. With the caveat that the Star Trek computer has been “just around the corner” since, well, TOS, it does seem as if we could be getting close. It’s certainly easier in a lot of ways than creating AIs that have to interface with a complicated, general-purpose physical world.

From the vaults

Connections: The new distributed application development platform: Breaking down silos

bitmason.blogspot.com – Share

This piece was essentially version 0.9 or so of my thinking around how platforms are developing (i.e. my CloudExpo talk I alluded to earlier). I’m planning to come up with an updated and more fleshed-out version of this after CloudExpo. I may even expand it into something more in-depth if it makes sense to do so.

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