Welcome

It’s not often I interview someone who has been the founder of a major tech company, an accomplished novelist, and describes containers and chatbots as "pasé," but Lucas Carlson is an intriguing individual. In this interview, we talk about his role at Automic, recently acquired by Computer Associates, who aim to bring DevOps style automation and practices to anyone in a business, no matter their role. We sat down to discuss why the company hopes to achieve, the flaws in modern DevOps techniques, and much more.

Flexera offers tools for producers and consumers of open source software to help them along this journey, one that, with increased reliance on open source components, is becoming increasingly necessary and relevant. I spoke with Jeff Luszcz to discuss how their tools help, why they are needed now more than ever, and how to secure the Internet of Things.

Around me are dozens of vintage cars in an old warehouse, tucked into a corner of Berlin’s north west. Those into cars are in heaven, dashing around the vast building, snapping photos of shiny vehicles as old as most attendees. I on the other hand head straight to the coffee and snacks.

HashiCorp is a company that feels like it’s always been around. Quietly plugging away just out of the limelight working on awesome products and every now and then releasing something groundbreaking that you wondered how you worked without it. I attended a couple of meetups The Docker API has allowed for a plethora of options for interfacing with Docker, your containers, and images to emerge from CLIs to desktop applications and web-based management tools. I am a fan of graphical user interfaces and thought it was time to survey the current landscape of GUIs for interacting with Docker.

I listen to hours of developer-focused podcasts each week covering tech, current affairs, board games, and general geekery. I even started my own podcast, which I have a lot of fun making. Hundreds of developers have written blog posts recommending thousands of different podcast series. There's no shortage of such recommendations for software engineers, so I won't subject you to another one of those lists. Instead, I'll idenfity specific podcast episodes that I think nailed a particular topic and were extremely engaging and fascinating from a developer's or technologist's perspective. For some of them, the interview subject or guest was especially interesting, or a discussion cropped up that was really compelling. For some reason, these episodes were very memorable, and that's why I think each one is worth your time.

Now in its second year, the Chatbot Summit has grown into a series of international events that span cities. We attended the Berlin summit to find out more on a tech trend that is growing at an unprecedented pace.

When you think of wearable tech, a wristband, watch or at a stretch, ring most likely springs to mind. Despite the hopes of early predictors that tech embedded clothing would become a useful, functional component of our wardrobe, we are largely left with a series of functional sports and exercising clothing for the super athletic and a bunch of creative one-off prototypes and made for show catwalk couture that spends its life languishing in museums and galleries. Where is the wearable tech that we thought might come to fill our wardrobes? I spoke to Alexander Gruber, founder, and CEO of Colorfy who recently attempted to kickstart their first shirt, to find out what the lived experience is for people working in wearable fashion.

One of the things I love most about interviewing the people behind tech projects is coincidentally discovering your subject is a bonafide technology visionary. Brian Behlendorf was one of the key developers behind the Apache Web Server and is a Mozilla and EFF board member, three projects I respect massively. For this interview, we only had time to cover his current role, as Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation, a project that aims to bring blockchain mainstream.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed a renewed interest in wearable glasses. Sure there’s plenty of mask-like goggles on the market for game playing, but glasses have emerged as a product in development by a number of tech companies. There’s been plenty of rumors that Apple glasses will be with us by 2020. The rumors have been given stronger credence by a leaked Occupational Health and Safety report at Apple that referred to "After BT4 user study, user advised study lead, that she experienced discomfort in her eye and said she was able to see the laser flash at several points during the study. Study lead referred her to an optometrist and secured prototype unit for analysis.”

In garages, parking lots, and maker spaces, a quiet revolution has been taking place. As electronics gradually take over the mechanics of vehicles, car hacking is gaining a growing number of enthusiasts, all wanting to understand what their car can do and could do with modifications to its hardware and/or code.

I sat down with Pravin Halady, product manager at NodeSource, to discuss why enterprise developers might need a safer and more secure version of Node.js and npm and what it's like running a business where your biggest competition is the creator of the product you sell.

Cate and Chris discuss the latest news, tech developments, and events from the past couple of days. Including Chat Bots, Ethereum, Petya and Cats writing Physics papers.

In this podcast, we first explore the flourishing community of technical writers in Poland, discussing why the tech writing scene in Krakow is taking off so quickly and what trends this young tech writing community is embracing. We’re joined by special guest Pawel Kowaluk, a Polish tech writer who runs SOAP (a tech comm conference based in Poland). We also talk about automation and robot takeovers of tech writing jobs. How are machine-assisted technologies enhancing or displacing technical writers and their work? Given the increase in automation, is tool expertise becoming more or less essential to thrive as a technical writer?

Sometimes I hear people say that they were initially fans of open source tech as a means to gain free resources only to realize that they were entering into an environment that champions openness, transparency, and the power of collaborative development. In the last couple of years, I've seen a number of interesting commercial and community IoT products that celebrate the benefits of open source hardware and facilitate open source development.

I’d almost succumbed to ‘peak-startup-conference’ fatigue already this year, but dragged myself through flight delays to Vienna and the Pioneers conference, where I not only had a wonderful time, but it restored my faith in startups. Here are some of the companies I spoke to and what they’re working on.

Running applications in containers is an increasingly popular way of maintaining large, distributed stacks that change based on demand. The Java VM heritage makes it an ideal language for container-based infrastructures. With many moving parts and components, monitoring Java applications in containers requires planning and choosing the right tools to monitor the aspects that matter to you.

As open-source becomes increasingly mainstream, communities are growing with people from all around the world who are passionate about code. There's a load of unwritten rules (not to mention insider jokes). New collaborators can butt heads with the old guard, creating conflicts within communities, or worse, driving software forks. Or, in extreme cases, they can kill a project.

I recently switched back to freelancing full-time, and whilst I am lucky enough to have clients who don’t ask for precise hourly breakdowns, I have always been intrigued to know how much time I was spending on work tasks, especially those tasks that I didn’t directly bill for.

HashiCorp is a company that feels like it’s always been around. Quietly plugging away just out of the limelight working on awesome products and every now and then releasing something groundbreaking that you wondered how you worked without it. I attended a couple of meetups recently that covered HashiCorp tools and felt the time was ripe I dug into all they have to offer a CI workflow.

When I hear about a successful startup with founders from Estonia, I tend to take notice. It’s a country that’s birthed a range of interesting tech companies including Skype, TransferWise, pipedrive and Jobbatical. It practices open governance. Data is open to citizens via the Internet, you can start a business, pay your taxes, and vote online. Even if you’re not from Estonia, you can still benefit — with the option to become an e-resident to enable non-EU members to do business in Europe.

In this episode Cate and Chris talk with Jessica Lovegood, a UX designer with a passion for understanding how people in the tech industry learn.

This talk with Cloud Foundry's Chip Childers covers the company's history, its tools, and how organizations are using them in production environments.

In this article, we explore a video game that requires players to code in JavaScript in order to make any progress in the game and interact with other players.

The WearIt Festival put the incredible work going into wearables on display, with looks at the latest consumer and IIoT clothing as well as skin implants.

Like any modern citizen, I love my smartphone, but I wouldn't describe myself as a power user, my phone is supplemental to my computer, not a replacement for it.