The Evolving Technologist: Adventures of a Recovering Software Generalist
A favorite joke of mine that I remember from the wall of my computer lab in college goes "There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don't." (Get it? "10" in binary is 2. Okay, moving on.) Of course, there are many more types of people than that. (It's just a joke.) There are also many more than two types of types . Blood type. Type A personality. Type 1…
One year ago today, I started at Moderne. It was the week just following the inaugural Code Remix Summit. One week ago today, I gave a talk at the second Code Remix Summit . It was my first conference talk since 2019. So last year I missed Code Remix by one week. But this year I was on the schedule. When I joined Moderne, it was pretty clear that it was the right move for me, and I shared my…
I've found there to be plenty of variance in the industry around job titles, so I usually don't put a ton of weight on them. I've had titles that weren't very descriptive of my actual role. I've had titles that seem to imply something that isn't even true about what I do. I've seen junior-sounding titles for people who seemed pretty senior, and senior-sounding titles for people who acted more…
When I last left off , I’d done the unthinkable. I resurrected my college senior project from 2003— the Help Desk Scheduler . It was running again as a Java 8 web app on Tomcat 4 with Struts 1.0 and MySQL. To continue my Jurassic Park metaphor, it was the software equivalent of a creature that shouldn’t exist anymore, but somehow came back to life. And also because, now that I’m at Moderne , I…
I'm sure you know this classic line from Jurassic Park : “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could , they didn’t stop to think if they should .” —Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park That quote was about cloning dinosaurs, but honestly, it also applies pretty well to a scenario I'm now facing: resurrecting long-dead source code. Recently, I joined the team at Moderne , where…
It was 11 years ago (to the day, if you can believe that) that I started a new job after leaving my first job out of college. (Fun fact: that was also an 11 year run.) Since then, I’ve been charting my career journey in this space. It sure has been quite a ride , filled with diverse roles , inspiring leaders, and wildly different company cultures . Most of my time has been spent inside large…
I know from my experience working for and with enterprise companies that keeping dozens or hundreds (or thousands!) of apps up to date is complicated. Much of my career in tech has been spent in and around the cloud-based platform and modern application development spaces in an attempt to help solve this problem for customers. But I also spent time as a product manager working directly with…
I can’t believe it’s been more than ten years since I first became a product manager . Since then, I’ve been on a “ hybrid career ” journey, and have worked in a lot of different related areas over the past several years including product marketing, competitive intelligence, developer relations, customer education, and technical content development, all while playing both individual contributor…
My daughter's elementary school has this thing called the Growth Mindset Program. I didn't really pay much attention to what that meant when I first heard it. But as she progressed through a year or two of school, it came up more and more. So I figured it was probably time to figure out what it means. I asked my wife, the teacher. She told me it can be explained simply as "the power of yet." When…
SpringOne Platform is known for showcasing some of the most compelling customer stories you’ll find at any tech conference. Last year , we heard from many leading companies about how they are getting better at software. This year, there were more amazing tales of transformation from enterprise leaders. It’s safe to say that “ it’s still about outcomes .” But behind all these great outcomes is a…
Last week I visited Boston for the first time and attended my very first Cloud Foundry Summit. I also took the opportunity while I was there to make my first visit to Fenway Park. It was a fabulous week of firsts for me. As with any conference, one measure of excellence is the amount of quality examples of customer success stories. It's also nice to see compelling demos of new and interesting…
Richard Watson from Gartner led a customer panel in the final round of keynotes at SpringOne. In it, he asked the company leaders what blew their minds during the conference. Of course, it got me thinking about what blew my mind at SpringOne Platform this year. Here's what I came up with, in no particular order. Tweet loading… Open on X # 1. A High Quality Event I've been to a fair amount of…
After two full days at my very first SpringOne Platform , my head is spinning. At times I've felt excited, lucky, proud, impressed, and overwhelmed -- sometimes all at the same time. So what's the best thing to do when I'm feeling all the feelings? Write about it! I've been having lots of thoughts that I can't shake in two key areas so I want to share about them. # PCF 2.0: It's a Cloud! During…
In my last post, I explored what it's like to deploy a Spring Boot app to four different public PaaS products . Now that the app is live, we have to manage it. As promised, for this post, I'll build on the experience by going beyond the Day 1 deployment. I'll try out some of the features of each platform associated with Day 2 operations. Once again I'll look at three major public cloud players…
For custom-built applications, using a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution is an excellent option. With a PaaS, developers simply focus on writing code and pushing an app. It removes the complexity of having to build and maintain any underlying infrastructure. In this post, I'm going to try out some of the major PaaS offerings and compare and contrast the experiences. There are two different…
In a sea of overloaded terms, it seems to me that the word "hybrid" is perhaps one of the most often used. Whenever we want to convey that we are combining two [or more?] different elements into one, we stick the word "hybrid" in front and call it a day. It all started with genetic cross-breeding - plants and animals - in the biology world. But then the vehicular world joined the fun - hybrid cars…
It was exactly one year ago today that I became a Product Owner (née Manager) at CenturyLink Cloud, and as a colleague of mine likes to point out, that's a really long time in "cloud years." As I reflect back on the experience I've had so far, it feels good to know that the me of today knows a whole lot more than the me of one year ago. Just as a college student wishes he could go back in time and…
It's been three weeks since I began my Product Manager position at CenturyLink Cloud, and it's been a great experience so far. I've learned so much already and am really enjoying my continuing journey from the enterprise IT world into the cloud computing space. The most frequent question I've gotten from all of my family and friends since I took this job has been, "So...what do you do?" Of course,…
When I was hunting for my first career job as I was winding down my college years, I remember suiting up (though this was a couple of years before How I Met Your Mother aired, so that term may not have been around yet) and going on some interviews offered at the Cal Poly career center. I got through to the second round for two of them. One was for St. Jude Medical in Sylmar (where a few of my Cal…