The MonkCast

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.

Simon Willison, founder of Dattasette and co-creator of Django, speaks about the AI prompt injection vulnerability. They discuss major industry players, confusion between moderation and security, and the challenges in addressing the vulnerability. Building AI systems with security in mind is crucial.

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.