Coté

Episode 84: Tech recruiting from both sides of the table, with Sidney Miller

October 19th, 2024  |  1 hr 6 mins

Whitney and Coté talk with Sidney Miller about tech recruitment. They talk a lot about the process from both sides: people hiring and people looking for jobs. Plus, some thoughts on working at Neiman Marcus.

Episode 83: Whitney Lee

October 2nd, 2024  |  1 hr 26 mins

Whitney Lee's career path has been all over the place, from artist, wedding photographer, waiter, and now world-renowned devrel in the cloud native world.

Misaligned Incentives Episode 4: You get what you pay for - compensating tech staff is often done poorly

July 17th, 2020  |  50 mins 57 secs

We discuss compensation, particularly how people in the IT department ("developers," etc.) are so disconnected from the actual business that compensating them based on business performance is near impossible. Not good if you're an IT person and like money.

Episode 3: Improvement requires fear, or, digital transformation by crisis and fear

July 6th, 2020  |  38 mins 38 secs

People in large organizations avoid improving for improving's sake. They're very rarely proactive in transforming. Instead, it seems that management in most large organizations only act, and change, when they fear competition and failure. "Everyone" knows this is a bad strategy, and yet "everyone" does it. Perhaps we should embrace that behavior, or at least be empathetic, and figure out how to work with it.

Episode 2: Outsourcing, SIs, and other "others"

October 31st, 2019  |  58 mins 1 sec

We discuss outsourcing IT.

Misaligned Incentives Episode 1: Who forget to invite "The Business," to this kubernetes PoC?

September 11th, 2019  |  44 mins 21 secs

Join Rick and I as we try to find this elusive thing called "The Business." We lay out a theory we've been talking about: while IT has been improving or, at least, can improve, the business side of the house isn't showing up to do anything with CLOUD and AGILE and THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.

Monolithic Transformation

September 9th, 2019  |  1 hr 32 mins

The cliche we all recite is that technology isn’t the problem, culture is. Put another way, if the hardware and software are fine and fresh, it must be the meatware that smells. Come hear several de-funking recipes from enterprises whose meat now smells proper.

Given at Agile Scotland, August 2019.

Episode 79: Version control, DevOps, Code Reviews, Semantic Merging, Spanish Startups, & Plastic SCM

January 15th, 2019  |  1 hr 10 mins

Version control has changed a lot over the past 15 years: we’ve moved from a centralized to a distributed model at the basic level. But the practices people follow have changed and grown as new methodologies like DevOps and continuous delivery have relied on version control for operational stability and reliability. In this interview, Coté talks with Plastic SCM’s Pablo Santos to get the low-down and some tips on doing version control better. We also discuss Plastic SCM and how their approach to semantic merging and mergebot-driven automation addresses version control toil.

Episode 75: Don't call me an "evangelist"

September 3rd, 2018  |  1 hr 20 mins

Coté talks about his job being an "evangelist," a word people no longer seem to use but everyone understands. Brandon interviews Coté about what the job is, what the work's like, and some examples (other than himself) of people who do it well.

Episode 74: Numbers. How do they work? Rachel Stephens

August 27th, 2018  |  55 mins 41 secs

When Coté says he doesn’t know how numbers work, he actually means it. To help out, he talks with Rachel Stephens, from RedMonk, who not only explains ratios, but also finance numbers.

Episode 69: Analyst Relations, with Rita Manachi

April 2nd, 2018  |  48 mins 26 secs

Getting familiar with analyst relations is a key component of an enterprise software business. “Analyst relations” is sort of like PR, but actually pretty different. You want to, of course, drive influence with the analysts, but also consume the content and advise they’re putting out. And while there’s two major firms in the tech world - Gartner and Forrester - there’s plenty of other firms and individuals to work with. In this episode, Coté talks with Rita Manachi who’s been doing AR for over a decade about all of this, plus some advice on selecting drinks and using iPads in meetings.

Episode 68: Lineworkers and developers working side-by-side to improve Duke Energy’s software, with John Mitchell

March 26th, 2018  |  1 hr 56 secs

This is a great conversation with John Mitchell about Duke Energy improving it’s software capabilities, doing “digital transformation,” as the kids like to call it. We start from the beginning of what kicked the company off, a shift from COTS software to mobile apps and analytics.

Episode 67: Javvad Malik on security & being an industry analyst

March 19th, 2018  |  1 hr 4 mins

Security, security, security! Everyone wants security, at least they say so. How it’s actually managed and even conceptualized in organizations is a lot more than just patching software and using CAPTCHA’s. In this discussion, Coté talks with Javvad Malik who’s been in the security business for countless years. In addition to talking about how security is done well and poorly, they discuss controversies in the space and establishing a good baseline for securing organizations. Also, there’s talk of being an industry analyst, British patriotism (or lack thereof?) and webinars, among many other topics.

Episode 66: Dominic Wellington on machine learning, or, shadows in the datacenter

March 12th, 2018  |  1 hr 6 mins

If you only followed the daily headlines, AI and machine learning seem like a magical technologies that will either solve all our problems or put everyone out of work. In reality, there’s little to know AI and machine learning, though complex, has many practical uses. While they’re often delightful, there’re not mystical. Coté discusses how to think about machine learning, how it works, and some examples of what it can do with Dominic Wellington.

Episode 64: Christopher Luciano on Kubernetes & Istio

March 1st, 2018  |  1 hr 26 mins

Why does kubernetes even exist, why don’t existing things work just as well for it? And then what kind of applications can you run on it, at least following the original intentions. Once we sort that out, we talk about the same for Istio. We also discuss hospital IT and how large companies like IBM decide which open source projects to work on.

Episode 62: Nancy Gohring on monitoring, observability, DevOps, & M&A

February 12th, 2018  |  1 hr 7 mins

This is a really fun and great episode with Nancy Gohring on monitoring, log management, DevOps, M&A in the space, and tech journalism. Also, we finally get the most concise analysts of the $3.7bn Cisco/AppDynamics deal that I’ve ever heard. If you’re the type of person who knows the words “observiblity,” “The Big 4,” SNMP, or even just DevOps, you’ll like this episode.