The MonkCast

Rachel Stephens (RedMonk) and Diya Wynn (Senior Practice Manager, AWS) discuss why responsible AI practices matter. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 9, 2022.

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. London has evolved into a thriving tech hub, attracting investment and fostering innovation in deep tech and finance, as exemplified by companies like DeepMind. The Fastly Xcelerate event in Shoreditch highlights this dynamic environment by focusing on enhancing the developer experience and democratizing access to powerful technological tools, aiming to spur diverse creativity and innovation. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 31, 2024.

Amazon Web Services is not always known for its engagement with open source communities, but there are dedicated teams within AWS trying to change that perception. Listen as Tom "Spot" Callaway discusses building open source culture at AWS with Rachel Stephens of RedMonk. Learn more about AWS' open source teams, how AWS thinks about both adopting and releasing open source projects, and some of the ways that they assess project and community health. This The New Builders episode was originally pubished in video form on June 3, 2024.

As open source did decades ago, AI is now taking the technology industry by storm. This has led to questions of how open source applies to AI, and how open source can be used to improve the results businesses can expect from their investments in AI. To explore these and other questions, we sat down with Matt Hicks, the CEO of Red Hat, and Ruchir Puri, Chief Scientist for IBM Research. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 29, 2024.

Another RedMonk Conversation, this time between RedMonk co-founder James Governor and Ably CEO Matthew O'Riordan. They talk about the rise of real time, the power of WebSockets, the value of product led business models, serverless, and of course, the really big question - why are applications so terrible at handling the apostrophes in Irish names? So what's in a serverless stack anyway? Compute, cache, database etc. What's missing? The problem Ably is working on is a great developer experience for creating a stateful connection back to the client, so you can create a live connection. It's about doing one thing well. Composing services that scale with a great DX to make developers more productive. Why not just use Kafka, for real time? What's the difference? And why WebSockets again? This video delves into all that. Is it worth building your own real time architecture using AWS services? Lots of questions and in this episode you'll get some interesting answers. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on September 14, 2022.

In this episode of The Docs Are In, the excellent Alyssa Rock (Staff Technical Writer, VMware; Community Manager, The Good Docs Project; Coordinator, Write the Docs Quorum Program) drops in to chat with Kate and Kelly about the many, many hats she wears. Alyssa discusses her pathway into tech writing (it led through film studies!), some of the good things happening with The Good Docs Project, and her work on the Salt Project as part of her day job with VMware. Also of interest: how to empower folks who are not technical writers to produce effective documentation (while teaching them about tech writing along the way), and how to make open source “sticky” by helping contributors to get started with projects while also creating supportive communities around them. This Docs Are In episode was originally published in video form on January 19, 2023.

In this Docs are In conversation, RedMonk senior analysts KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Kate Holterhoff chat with Dr. Rebekah Greene, assistant professor at the University of Rochester School of Nursing. Dr. Greene elaborates on her responsibilities in this role and how her as a scholar of 19th century literature actually dovetails and supports her work in clinical nursing. They also discuss the importance of technical communication to the medical profession, and share some strategies and best practices for fostering patient-medical professional communication. This Docs Are In episode was originally published in video form on May 9, 2024.

In this RedMonk Conversation with Keri Olson, IBM VP of AI for code, we discuss IBM's approach to generative AI, focusing on domain specific use cases, such as AI-driven application modernization for IBM's Z Mainframe platform with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z. IBM is training dedicated models for these use cases, to give customers something they won't find with competitors' models. For example COBOL to Java conversion, with models trained to support all of IBM's mainframe subsystems such as CICS. Olson explains why IBM will allow customers to use AI for specific use cases while maintaining data privacy, security and customer trust. IBM also offers IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, to enable operators to be more productive in using Ansible infrastructure as code for large scale systems. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 8, 2024.

RedMonk's Dr. Kate Holterhoff and Dr. Kelly Fitzpatrick (who each have a Ph.D.) kick off a new series where they sometimes talk to other docs and sometimes talk about documentation. In this video Kelly interviews Kate about Kate's excellent research on certifications in the tech industry. This is an older recording. This Docs Are In episode was originally published in video form on July 28, 2022.

We hear a lot these days about developer success, productivity, and happiness, but what about developer anxiety? Dr. Carol Lee stops by to talk about her research as Principal Scientist at Pluralsight's Developer Success Lab, and how her training as a clinical psychologist comes into play. Kate and Kelly also learn how Carol created an Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Pluralsight to clarify processes around the creation and maintenance of ethical standards and to enable scientific rigor. Also of interest: a research project on code review anxiety, and the creative process behind Carol's webcomic, Thriving Blobs. This Docs Are In episode was originally published in video form on April 25, 2024.

AI-based solutions are cropping up in every portion of the tech stack and at every stage in the SDLC. From chips to applications, from the instantiation of code to running it in production; when new AI solutions are available across the board, how can enterprises consider where to place their investments in this new and evolving space? Join RedMonk's Rachel Stephens as she discusses these questions with Himanshu Singh, who runs AI Product Marketing at VMware by Broadcom. VMware created their Private AI solution to help address these enterprise AI concerns. Join Stephens and Singh as they discuss how enterprises are adopting this technology, how VMware thinks about privacy and risk when it comes to AI, and how enterprises can orchestrate AI workloads to be part of their broader technology solutions. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 22, 2024.

RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick and Ember Stevens (Technical Writer, LaunchDarkly) discuss technical writing and documentation (docs as code; what it's like being the lone tech writer at an organization vs. working on a team; working with SMEs) as well as their respective tech industry origin stories in public higher education. Ember also shares some tips on how to get started with technical documentation--tips that mirror approaches to piecing together jigsaw puzzles. This Docs Are In episode was originally published in video form on August 26, 2022.

Join RedMonk's James Governor and GitGuardian CEO Eric Fourrier for a discussion on the role of large language models (LLMs) in secrets management. DevOps processes and microservice architectures continue to drive application development towards a landscape that is more complex, distributed, and fragmented. This increases the prevalence of secrets such as database credentials, API keys, and tokens--which are used to connect all these pieces together--and increases the chance that such secrets may be inadvertently leaked, especially through code. This is where GitGuardian comes in, specializing in helping developers and their organizations with secrets detection and remediation at scale. This conversation focuses on potential advantages and challenges that the rise of generative AI technologies such as LLMs have introduced into the code security space and what this all means for the future of secrets detection and management. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 4, 2024.

Beginning in the 1990's, the term “edge computing” was used to describe a variety of compute services that were placed geographically closer to end users. In the ensuing decades, the term came to describe an ever broader array of compute services, and the services at the edge became much more robust. In this video, RedMonk and Cloudflare explore what “edge” means today, and how the evolution of edge services is forcing users to rethink what's possible at the edge. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 2, 2024.

The industry has centered around Kubernetes as the abstraction layer that promises portability. Helm charts are great for packaging, but are they enough? Senior RedMonk Analyst Rachel Stephens talks with Replicated co-founder and CTO Marc Campbell about the challenges of shipping software into heterogeneous environments. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on March 29, 2024.

Join RedMonk analysts James Governor and Kate Holterhoff as they chat with Dan Moore about Hacker News, the social news website for developers. This conversation digs into significant questions concerning this network that include not only what makes it unique, but also the special sauce that makes developers flock there. Moore suggests strategies for vendors hoping to successfully engage this community, and more general best practices for becoming involved. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on March 28, 2024.

Join Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk and Ed Anuff (Chief Product Officer, DataStax) in a conversation about application development and databases in 2021. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 27, 2021.

In this RedMonk Conversation Kate Holterhoff, senior industry analyst with RedMonk, talks all-things developer certifications with Justin Wheeler, AWS Community Builder, Senior Software Developer at Bravo LT, and developer certification expert. In addition to passing every AWS certification, Justin is also a CNCF Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate; Google Cloud Certified Cloud Digital Leader; and Oracle Certified Associate. Justin talks about his experience and enthusiasm for certifications, explaining the benefits and pitfalls of these tools for furthering both general tech education and career advancement. Justin weighs in of what study materials and exam prep makes a vendor's education portfolio successful, and speaks to the role employers should take in supporting continuing education for software engineers. Find Justin on socials: https://linktr.ee/wheeleruniverse This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on March 21, 2024.

What's VMware up to with multicloud? Find out in this interview with Betty Junod. She's pretty awesome. "Did multicloud eat hybrid cloud? What's happening with the customer?" This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on September 7, 2021.

Kate Holterhoff, analyst with Redmonk, and Carl Sverre, creator of SQLSync and founder of orbitinghail, discuss database management for frontend engineers: an issue that has never been more pressing. Carl expands on the subject of client versus server side data caching, explaining how SQLSync uniquely addresses the data management problem on the frontend. He explains the importance of “offline-first,” meaning that applications are intended to function offline, and lays out his optimism about the future of WebAssembly (Wasm). This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 29, 2024.

In October 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) invited RedMonk analysts Kelly Fitzpatrick, Kate Holterhoff, and Rachel Stephens to Austin, TX, so that they could report on AWS technology in action at relevant Formula 1™ events (AWS has an existing partnership with Formula 1™). In this the analysts discuss their initial impressions, the technology they saw in play, and their overall takeaways from the events. This Quick Take was originally published in video form on February 26, 2024.

In this RedMonk conversation James Governor catches up with Boris Bialek, Field CTO at MongoDB on industry solutions and scalability. Given the story of the company includes one of the most well known memes in database history - “MongoDB is web scale” we felt it might be time to take another look. Bialek has been working on database scale for decades, including work on IBM's venerable relational database DB2, so he's seen it all. He's enjoying life at MongoDB working on customer problems at scale with MongoDB, and that's what the show is about. The conversation looks at ACID compliance and transactionality, something MongoDB isn't known for, but which it has supported for some time. It explores the complexity and scale of managing ecommerce financial transactions at scale with Black Friday events.. From luxury brands to real-time data management in cars, Boris highlights MongoDB's real-time integration functionality. The discussion also touches upon scalability and optimization in database systems for real-time decision-making. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 22, 2024.

As generative AI drives demand for training and inference workloads, the tech industry has turned to innovations in chip, board and server design to provide the infrastructure and compute power to meet these demands. Annapurna Labs, which Amazon acquired in 2015, plays a key role in AWS's ability to innovate in this area, having developed the Nitro, Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium families of processors. As a follow-up to RedMonk's tour of Annapurna Labs in Austin, TX, Senior Analyst Kelly Fitzpatrick sits down with Chetan Kapoor (Director of Product Management for the Amazon EC2 Accelerated Computing Portfolio) to discuss how the custom silicon developed at Annapurna Labs is a differentiator for AWS, some of the differences between the infrastructure needs of training and inference workloads, and what AWS is doing to support developers building genAI applications. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 20, 2024.

Dr. Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, drops in for a discussion with RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick on Web Assembly (WASM), philosophy, and Matt's intersecting interests in the humanities and technology. Topics covered include analytic vs. continental philosophy (and what Descartes has to do with them); Baudrillard on hyperreality; a TL;DR intro to Web Assembly; and how Kant figures into the chapter Matt would write for a book on WASM and Philosophy. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on February 16, 2024. Related Resources: Learn more about Web Assembly: https://webassembly.org/ Information on Fermyon: https://www.fermyon.com/

Software quality and engineering metrics is a big topic in the industry right now, as companies seek to become more effective and competitive, and better understand how their engineering teams are performing. In this conversation Emilio Salvador, VP of Development at GitLab, and James Governor from RedMonk talk about the impact on generative AI on these topics, and take a look at GitLab's own framework for better understanding productivity - focusing on Task, Team, and Time dynamics. What is developer productivity, after all? What is team productivity? What does writing code 25% faster actually mean? What if you save an engineer an hour a week - what is that worth? What is breakthrough productivity? What if we could build 10 times as many things as we could before. What are the implications? Measuring, managing and understanding developer productivity requires us to consider these kinds of questions. The discussion delves into the complexities of measuring developer productivity, emphasizing that it cannot be reduced to a single number. The conversation explores the challenges in measuring performance, including the need for a combination of data sources and addressing cultural differences within teams. Emilio argues that we must recognise development as a team sport, with a focus on matching skill sets to internal transformations, always fostering collaboration within development teams. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 6, 2024.

AI is changing how software is written so it's no surprise that GitLab is investing accordingly. In this conversation with chief product officer David DeSanto we examine the company's strategies and approach to large language models (LLMs) and AI, with a particular focus on trust, security and transparency. GitLab sells to many regulated industry customers, which put a premium on responsible governance. The company's journey began with ModelOps to build, train, deploy, and version AI models alongside software. More recently GitLab has moved into the generative AI space by launching GitLab Duo, an AI platform, which touches all different facets of the software delivery workflow - for example automatically generating detailed issue reports. GitLab's focus on bringing AI to self-hosted customers in air-gapped environments really underscores its commitment to privacy and transparency, and is a significant differentiator in a market which has been defined by the You Only Live Once (YOLO) just ship it approaches of the likes of OpenAI. We talk to DeSanto about GitLab's pledge not to use customer intellectual property for model fine-tuning. We also discuss the company's collaboration with Google Cloud on the security side of DevSecOps lifecycle. It's a good show. Let us know what you think. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 6, 2024.

Rachel Stephens interviews Niki Manoledaki (Software Engineer at Grafana Labs) on her work on the CNCF's Environmental Sustainability TAG. They discuss the Kepler project, the SCI standard, and other efforts to help engineering teams understand the carbon intensity of their cloud workloads. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 24, 2024.

Kate Holterhoff, industry analyst at RedMonk discusses Frontend & Prototyping with Stephane Rodet, UX Engineering Manager at IBM. Rodet shares his experience working with the frontend, design, and UX teams at IBM. We discuss trends in this domain in terms of career opportunities, team roles, testing, and tooling. The landscape of frontend and prototyping is shifting fast, and Rodet explains how IBM fosters creativity and innovation in this space. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on July 26, 2022.

In this conversation we caught up Anant Jhingran, CEO and co-founder of StepZen, a GraphQL platform. His experiences make for strong, well justified opinions about the role of GraphQL, its present and future. He's worked in core database technology, he worked at Apigee during the original API Economy wave, he worked at Google after the acquisition. What should the GraphQL experience be like, and how are folks going to take advantage of it? This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 17, 2022.

An in-depth conversation between RedMonk analyst James Governor and Spotify engineering leaders including Saunak "Jai" Chakrabarti, Meera Srinivasan, and Tim Hansen about Spotify, cloud infrastructure cost management, FinOps, and empowering engineering teams to optimise infrastructure spend by shifting decisions left. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on April 28, 2021.

In which James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk discusses Observability with David Cramer Co-founder and CTO at Sentry. David brings an opinionated view on what he sees as some misconceptions about the market for management tooling. We discuss developer experience, what it actually means in practice. How to build tools for developers and why that matters. David wants to cut through the hype about Observability, with a focused view on content, debugging, and dealing with errors in software. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on June 15, 2022.

In this Docs are In episode, RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff speaks with Dr. Ryan Feigenbaum, Developer Experience Engineer at Ghost. They discuss the state of DevX in 2023; transitioning to the software industry after a career in academia; and documentation best practices. Dr. Feigenbaum draws parallels between his university work in a philosophy department with the research, communication, and pedagogical aspects of his role as a developer. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on January 3, 2024.

Kate Holterhoff, analyst with Redmonk, and Simon Willison, founder of Dattasette, co-creator of Django, and expert in AI technologies, speak about the AI prompt injection vulnerability. Simon lays out what prompt injection is and why it is so difficult to mitigate. They also cover major industry players (OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google), and the common mistake of confusing moderation, in the sense of not letting the model say bad things, with security, not letting an attack trigger the model into performing an action that leaks private data or triggers tools in the wrong way. Prompt injection is a security issue, and not one that can be solved through moderation alone. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on December 20, 2023.

Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk and Vincent Danen (Vice President, Red Hat Product Security) discuss security, open source and the intersection of the two. How should customers be thinking about security and open source in a world of seemingly endless incidents? What can and should they expect from their commercial suppliers with respect to security? And how do vendors think about their responsibilities with respect to securing the open source they provide and rely on? This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on December 20, 2021.

The term “platform engineering” is all the rage right now, but for many organizations the road to building their platform capabilities is years in the making. Join Rachel Stephens as she interviews Johan Marais, the Senior Platform Service Manager of Discovery Limited. Hear about Discovery's path from moving from a traditional IT org to building their own platform to finding their way to VMware Tanzu. The discussion of both the tools and culture changes required is informative to anyone trying to build out platform capacity in their company. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on December 13, 2023.

As we've made our way through the Great Resignation to what some have labeled the “Great Reshuffle,” competition for top tech talent has remained fierce. Retaining such talent can be even trickier, especially in the tech industry, where promotion by job hopping is a common strategy. Under such conditions, how do organizations find and keep exceptional developers and other technical practitioners? How does leadership balance the needs and priorities of technical talent with those of customers, products, and even open source communities? What part might non-managerial leadership opportunities play in keeping developers happy? In this video Chris Wright, CTO and SVP of Global Engineering at Red Hat joins RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick for a conversation on these larger industry challenges and how Red Hat approaches them. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 10, 2023.

In this The Docs Are In conversation, Kate Holterhoff, industry analyst at RedMonk, and Sam Kleinman, staff engineer working in distributed systems, discuss documentation: the good, the bad, and how to improve the documentation ecosystem. Sam talks about his experience as a technical communication specialist at MongoDB, as well as his "spicy takes" on what makes the documentation strategies of some companies more successful than others. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on October 20, 2022.

In this episode we talk to Red Hat's Holly Cummins about modern Java runtimes and how they can make your software and systems more efficient. Small, lightweight Java runtimes and and frameworks like Quarkus and GraalVM can be a game changer in right-sizing your applications and indeed your cloud instance choices and Cummins has brought the data to prove it. Java can be faster, cheaper and more energy efficient. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on December 15, 2022.

In this episode RedMonk talks to Red Hat's Holly Cummins about sustainability, the imperatives for greener software, and how to achieve it with modern Java architectures. What is the relationship between workload and hosting choice - is the cloud always greener, and will all workloads move there? Red Hat is doing some engineering to make it easier to run Java workloads more sustainably, and in this conversation we outline why and how. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on December 15, 2022.

Abigail McCarthy (Staff Technical Open Source Communications Manager at VMware and Kelly's former colleague from their time at Apprenda) joins Kelly and Kate in a conversation that leverages all the civil engineering metaphors: documentation as an avenue into open source projects; Abbie's own pathway from OSS documentation lurker to active participant (her current titles also include Kubernetes SIG Docs Localization Subproject Lead); docs as an essential part of the bridge work needed to meet potential contributors (and even maintainers) where they are and get them comfortable engaging with such projects. Abbie also drops some best practices and recommendations, including the creation of a “culture of docs”. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on January 25, 2023.

It's not all that often that specific technologies are standards are called out by the White House, but that's exactly what happened with SBOMs. But while there's a lot of chatter on SBOMs, many people still have questions about what they are, what they're for and how to use them. Josh Bressers of Anchore joined us to answer just that question. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on November 30, 2022.

While centralized storage systems have been an industry standard for years, decentralized storage options are beginning to emerge. To answer the question of “why distributed storage?” we spoke to two Storj Customers, Anthony Dutra of Zerto and Morgan Littlewood of IX Systems about their experiences. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 18, 2023.

As organizations look to improve their operational velocity, one of the things they're increasingly looking at is their developer experience. To understand how that can be improved, however, you have to understand what makes developers happy, and what makes them unhappy. Zenhub explored just this question in a recent survey and founder Aaron Upright joined us to talk about developer likes and dislikes, and where that intersects with the developer experience gap. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 25, 2023.

In which James Governor discusses low code use cases and platform requirements with Matthias Steiner, Chief Product Officer of Neptune Software, a low code platform that emerged out of the SAP ecosystem. Matthias wants to break down some misconceptions about low code, and that's what he does here. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 25, 2022.

Join Rachel Stephens (Senior Analyst at RedMonk) and Narayanan Raghavan (Senior Director, Red Hat Site Reliability Engineering) for a discussion of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discipline at Red Hat. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 18, 2022.

In which Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of RedMonk discusses Cloud Development Environments with Ketan Gangatirkar, Vice President Of Engineering and Product at Coder. Ketan has strong opinions on the future of development environments - specifically that they're in the cloud. We discuss the rise of cloud based services, developer preferences for and reliance on local IDEs and where those two things intersect. And we ask the question: is your next workstation in the cloud? This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on June 29, 2022.

As the number of services, APIs and projects used within the average enterprise grows, the challenge for the developer and operational staffs of managing all of the above increases right along with it. How should enterprise SREs and DevOps staff tackle the problem of the DevOps experience gap? This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on February 8, 2023.

Kate Holterhoff, industry analyst at RedMonk discusses upskilling, reskilling, and cross-skilling with Angela Andrews, Solution Architect at Red Hat & Co-Host of the Compiler Podcast. They get into a range of topics including Upskilling's Greenfield Problem, whether certifications are enough to secure an entry-level job in tech, the value of bootcamps, and how Red Hat is meeting the needs of learners. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on April 12, 2023.

Rachel Stephens, Senior Analyst at RedMonk speaks with Michael Jacobs, Sustainability & Social Innovation Leader at IBM. In this talk Mike provides an introduction to the IBM Sustainability Accelerator. Learn about how IBM partners with NGOs and governmental agencies to further water management projects. Interested participants should visit https://www.ibm.com/impact/initiatives/ibm-sustainability-accelerator. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on March 10, 2023.

OpenAI will be a winner, but not the only one. A concept you'll be hearing a lot more about is Retrieval Augmentation – in terms of improving models. Again we cover that in the conversation. So dive in! In the meantime I will leave you with a story from deepset about a gentleman in his 80s that runs a legal publishing firm in Germany. He called deepset just before Christmas last year to insist on a meeting before the end of the year to discuss ChatGPT's potential implications on his business, and how he could do something similar but without giving his own information away. ChatGPT only launched on November 30th 2022. That's the scale of the challenge, and the opportunity. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on April 26, 2023.