The MonkCast

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.

For this episode of The Docs are In, Dr. Eli Thorkelson, software development engineer at Workday, catches up with Dr. Kate Holterhoff, analyst with RedMonk. Related Resources: https://decasia.org/academic_culture/ (Dr. Thorkelson's blog) https://rip-my-academic-career.decasia.org This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on May 22, 2023.

Anne Gentle's Docs Like Code was first published in 2017; the third edition came out in December 2022. Anne (who is also Global Leader, Developer Experience at Cisco) joins Kelly and Kate to talk docs-as-code/docs-like-code processes, how the landscape has changed in the last five years, resources for getting started with docs like code, and what changes AI and large language models might bring for docs processes. This Docs are In was originally published in video form on May 16, 2023.

James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk talks to Gerald Venzl about Oracle Database 23c Free. RedMonk is all about developers. As industry analysts we occasionally provide a quote for a press release and for the launch of 23c Free I described it as a “radical departure”. This video is about why. The influence of developers on technology decision making is greater than it ever was. So we moved from a model which was the historical top down purchasing led adoption of technology into one where the engineers were the practitioners, much more influential in those choices. Oracle 23c Free is a radical departure because for the first time Oracle has given developers, rather than enterprise IT buyers, the bits first. The model here is let's take all of the new bits, all of the new functionality, get it in the hands of developers first and let them make the market, for example it might be -- a Spring Developer needs to understand how the database is going to work with the applications they're building. Framework support is so important in developer ecosystems. So someone in the ecosystem can really be building before they even think about any purchasing decisions. How significant was the decision to lead with the developer edition? In the end it had to be approved by Larry Ellison, himself. We also talk about JSON support, and Oracle's attempts to make JSON a first class citizen in its architectures, enabling great support with common management models for both document/hierarchical and schema oriented SQL applications. The question is will a free database that supports both document and relational models, with high performance and maintainability, turn the dial for new developer adoption? This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 23, 2023.

When it comes to highly opinionated marketing, driving the outrage button, we can't think of a more resonant recent campaign than Humanitec's DevOps is dead, long live Platform Engineering! In this video though we come to discuss platform orchestration and dynamic configuration management. So - a conversation between James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, and Drew Oetzel, senior customer success engineer at Humanitec. What's the interplay between platform orchestration and platform engineering? Why should platform engineering care about this? What even is wrong with the current state of the art in configuration management? The truth is everybody does some platform engineering; everybody has some form of platform engineering. And at companies like Adobe or Google it can be really slick but at medium sized organisations, it might just be a couple of people clicking around in AWS. As Corey Quinn calls it “ClickOps” Congratulations. You're the platform engineering solution. You get to manually set something up as you go through tickets. According to Humanitec, at the heart of what a platform orchestrator does is it shuffles config files. So it's shuffling Terraform scripts, it's shuffling Helm charts, it's shuffling Kubernetes, YAMLs. Essentially undifferentiated heavy lifting. We discuss the current state of the art, but also what kind of tooling might offer a better, more automated experience for platform engineering teams. How we can avoid config file and script sprawl and focus on our jobs, automating the tedious interactions between dev and ops. Platform Engineering is about standardisation by design, and that happens as part of the process. Golden paths, platform orchestration, and dynamic configuration management. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 24, 2023.

In this RedMonk Conversation between Stephen O'Grady and Anurag Gupta, founder and CEO of Shoreline, the focus is on the potential impact of generative AI on infrastructure. "It's gonna be a game changer." They highlight the challenges faced by those responsible for maintaining operational stability and incident response, such as the lack of reliable and up-to-date information available on platforms like Stack Overflow and Confluence wikis. They also discuss how generative AI can address these challenges by synthesizing data into short, accurate answers, and enabling follow-up questions. The conversation also emphasizes the risk of hallucinations or incorrect responses, while ensuring the reliability of generative AI systems through testing. Anurag concludes with an explanation that curation can help enhance confidence in generative AI and unlock its full potential in infrastructure management. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on June 22, 2023.

In a world where it is increasingly important for organizations to have well-built software, why is it that the industry tends to look down on the traditional role of the software architect? Amir Rapson, co-founder and CTO of vFunction, joins Rachel Stephens to talk about the future of software architecture, how we can make the architecture role more relevant and grounded in reality, and how we can help organizations make more sound architecture decisions. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on July 10, 2023.

In this RedMonk Conversation between Stephen O'Grady and John Amaral, CEO and co-founder of Slim.AI, the two discuss the idea of “shifting left,” or moving security tasks earlier in application development workflows. In particular, they examine not just the perceived benefits, but the costs to “shifting left” and what to do about it. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on July 12, 2023.

In this conversation, RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff discusses Embrace's State of Mobile Experience Engineering Report with Andrew Tunall, VP and Head of Product at Embrace.io, and Virna Sekuj, Product Marketing Manager at Embrace.io. They review Embrace's research detailing mobile end users' and builders' perspectives of performance issues and app experiences. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on July 26, 2023.

This episode of the Docs are In features the most docs (and Georgia Tech references) yet, as Dr. Liz Hutter (Assistant Professor, University of Dayton) and Dr. Halcyon Lawrence (Associate Professor, Towson University) stop by to discuss some of the crucial work they are doing on the academic side of technical communication. Topics include a critique of the “grand narratives” common to the ways we talk about technical innovation (such as AI), a case study documenting Georgia Tech's CS Tech Comm course sequence, and a little backstory into how both Liz and Halcyon landed on their career paths. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on July 25, 2023.

In The Taylor Swift Episode of The Docs Are In, Kelly speaks with Dr. Casey Alane Wilson: a former Georgia Tech colleague and current Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University (and also, clearly, a Swiftie) about her first-year English course on “Taylor Swift as Text”. If you've spent hours on a virtual queue for Eras Tour tickets, pondered the literary references in Swift's songs, wondered why Swift is re-releasing her albums, or just want to hear how LLMs are affecting university classrooms, this episode is for you.

In this RedMonk Conversation, analyst Kate Holterhoff speaks with Tracy Lee, CEO at This Dot Labs, about trends in the frontend space. They discuss the JavaScript Ecosystem, focusing on frameworks and runtimes, as well as the future of Developer Relations, including an overview of This Dot Lab's DevRel City. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on November 6, 2023.

In this episode of The Docs Are In, Dr. Lisa Tagliaferri (Senior Director, Developer Education, Chainguard; Adjunct Professor, Rutgers University) drops in to chat with Kate and Kelly about her experiences working at tech startups and in academia. Lisa discusses her work in Digital Humanities (or DH--where digital technologies and the humanities intersect), her research into medieval communities of learning (do we have any Catherine of Siena fans out there?), and how this all relates to open source communities. Also of interest: Lisa's experiences with her DH graduate seminar, her work at Chainguard, and how academic training can translate to a career in tech. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on July 31, 2023.

In this conversation, RedMonk senior analyst Kelly Fitzpatrick and Rob Hirschfeld (CEO/Founder of RackN) discuss their top takeaways from a recent NYC technology roundtable on the challenges tech leaders face with infrastructure automation. Some challenges discussed: making automation repeatable/reusable; dealing with increasing complexity (and how this can be a cultural as well as technological challenge), and the ongoing battle with organizational silos. Also of interest: why some organizations who have moved workloads to the cloud are moving them back to bare metal. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on August 3, 2023.

RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff and Allen Romano, co-founder of Logoi, chat about their experiences as academics turned tech industry professionals. They discuss the discipline of digital humanities; how founding a startup both resembles and diverges from PhD work; and the future of AI. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on August 18, 2023.

In this RedMonk Conversation, analyst Kate Holterhoff chats with Vincent Mayers, who works in Community, DevRel, and Productivity Engineering at Gradle. They discuss the challenges and opportunities afforded by arranging tech events, focusing particularly on Vincent's experiences organizing the Devnexus and Connect.tech conferences, as well as the Atlanta Java Users Group (AJUG). This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on September 26, 2023.

There is so much hype around Generative AI right now, but what does that mean for Predictive ML? Senior RedMonk Analyst Rachel Stephens talks with Tecton VP of Marketing Gaetan Castelein about the challenges of getting ML models into product, the role of feature stores vs. feature platforms, and the overlaps and distinctions between Generative AI and Predictive AI. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on September 11, 2023.

With so much buzz (and noise) in both the observability and generative AI spaces, how should SRE and Ops teams navigate emerging standards and promises of potentially transformative tooling? Join RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick and Elastic's Gagan Singh (VP of Marketing) as they talk about the present state and potential future of AI and observability amidst increasingly complex systems. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on September 19, 2023.

Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and his team at the Duckbill Group help their clients control their spend with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS). Corey has also amassed an impressive following across different media platforms, including his newsletter, podcast, and socials such as X (fka Twitter) and LinkedIn. In this DAI episode, Corey joins Kate and Kelly to discuss his communication style (best characterized by terms such as “snarky” and “$#@!posting”), his vehement support of technical documentation, and why you want to hire well if you hope to get to 500 podcast episodes. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on October 30, 2023.

For many years, the enterprise approach to security has been scanning vast seas of manifests for open source software and then dumping alerts on developers. But how much of that software being scanned is used? How much time does it take for a developer to investigate an incident, and thus how much time could be saved if they only worked on what software in usage? In this conversation with Endor Labs' CEO Varun Badhwar we'll explore those questions and more as we rethink the traditional approach to enterprise security. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on October 12, 2023.

Kaete Piccirilli (Director of Product Marketing, Red Hat Ansible) joins RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick for a conversation on Red Hat Ansible's domain-specific approach to generative AI. Also of interest: the concerns Kaete and Kelly are hearing from customers around generative AI; an overview of Ansible Lightspeed--a generative AI tool accessed from within VS Code that helps accelerate the creation of automation content such as playbooks; and a discussion of what the intersection of generative AI and IT automation might mean for technical practitioners and their teams. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on October 23, 2023.

RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff and Tobias Wilson-Bates, Assistant Professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, dig into the history and future of AI. Dr. Wilson-Bates discusses examples of artificial intelligence in Western culture including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Karel Čapek's Rossum's Universal Robots. They speak about how large language models and machine learning are disrupting the domains of education, labor, and the commons. This Docs Are In was originally published in video form on October 17, 2023.