The MonkCast

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.