The MonkCast

Kate Holterhoff, analyst with Redmonk, and Carl Sverre, creator of SQLSync and founder of orbitinghail, discuss database management for frontend engineers: an issue that has never been more pressing. Carl expands on the subject of client versus server side data caching, explaining how SQLSync uniquely addresses the data management problem on the frontend. He explains the importance of “offline-fir...

In October 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) invited RedMonk analysts Kelly Fitzpatrick, Kate Holterhoff, and Rachel Stephens to Austin, TX, so that they could report on AWS technology in action at relevant Formula 1™ events (AWS has an existing partnership with Formula 1™). In this the analysts discuss their initial impressions, the technology they saw in play, and their overall takeaways from the...

In this RedMonk conversation James Governor catches up with Boris Bialek, Field CTO at MongoDB on industry solutions and scalability. Given the story of the company includes one of the most well known memes in database history - “MongoDB is web scale” we felt it might be time to take another look. Bialek has been working on database scale for decades, including work on IBM's venerable relational d...

As generative AI drives demand for training and inference workloads, the tech industry has turned to innovations in chip, board and server design to provide the infrastructure and compute power to meet these demands. Annapurna Labs, which Amazon acquired in 2015, plays a key role in AWS's ability to innovate in this area, having developed the Nitro, Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium families of p...

Dr. Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, drops in for a discussion with RedMonk's Kelly Fitzpatrick on Web Assembly (WASM), philosophy, and Matt's intersecting interests in the humanities and technology. Topics covered include analytic vs. continental philosophy (and what Descartes has to do with them); Baudrillard on hyperreality; a TL;DR intro to Web Assembly; and how Kant figures into the chapter Matt...

Software quality and engineering metrics is a big topic in the industry right now, as companies seek to become more effective and competitive, and better understand how their engineering teams are performing. In this conversation Emilio Salvador, VP of Development at GitLab, and James Governor from RedMonk talk about the impact on generative AI on these topics, and take a look at GitLab's own fram...

AI is changing how software is written so it's no surprise that GitLab is investing accordingly. In this conversation with chief product officer David DeSanto we examine the company's strategies and approach to large language models (LLMs) and AI, with a particular focus on trust, security and transparency. GitLab sells to many regulated industry customers, which put a premium on responsible gover...

Rachel Stephens interviews Niki Manoledaki (Software Engineer at Grafana Labs) on her work on the CNCF's Environmental Sustainability TAG. They discuss the Kepler project, the SCI standard, and other efforts to help engineering teams understand the carbon intensity of their cloud workloads. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 24, 2024.

Kate Holterhoff, industry analyst at RedMonk discusses Frontend & Prototyping with Stephane Rodet, UX Engineering Manager at IBM. Rodet shares his experience working with the frontend, design, and UX teams at IBM. We discuss trends in this domain in terms of career opportunities, team roles, testing, and tooling. The landscape of frontend and prototyping is shifting fast, and Rodet explains ho...

In this conversation we caught up Anant Jhingran, CEO and co-founder of StepZen, a GraphQL platform. His experiences make for strong, well justified opinions about the role of GraphQL, its present and future. He's worked in core database technology, he worked at Apigee during the original API Economy wave, he worked at Google after the acquisition. What should the GraphQL experience be like, and h...

An in-depth conversation between RedMonk analyst James Governor and Spotify engineering leaders including Saunak "Jai" Chakrabarti, Meera Srinivasan, and Tim Hansen about Spotify, cloud infrastructure cost management, FinOps, and empowering engineering teams to optimise infrastructure spend by shifting decisions left. This RedMonk Conversation was published in video form on April 28, 2021.

In which James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk discusses Observability with David Cramer Co-founder and CTO at Sentry. David brings an opinionated view on what he sees as some misconceptions about the market for management tooling. We discuss developer experience, what it actually means in practice. How to build tools for developers and why that matters. David wants to cut through the hype about O...

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 p...

Kate Holterhoff, analyst with Redmonk, and Simon Willison, founder of Dattasette, co-creator of Django, and expert in AI technologies, speak about the AI prompt injection vulnerability. Simon lays out what prompt injection is and why it is so difficult to mitigate. They also cover major industry players (OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google), and the common mistake of confusing moderation, in the sense...

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 responsibilitie...

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 Ta...

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?...

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 som...

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 ene...

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 thi...

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 SI...

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...

While centralized storage systems have been an industry standard for years, decentralized storage options are beginning to emerge. To answer the question of “why distributed storage?” we spoke to two Storj Customers, Anthony Dutra of Zerto and Morgan Littlewood of IX Systems about their experiences. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on January 18, 2023.

As organizations look to improve their operational velocity, one of the things they're increasingly looking at is their developer experience. To understand how that can be improved, however, you have to understand what makes developers happy, and what makes them unhappy. Zenhub explored just this question in a recent survey and founder Aaron Upright joined us to talk about developer likes and disl...

In which James Governor discusses low code use cases and platform requirements with Matthias Steiner, Chief Product Officer of Neptune Software, a low code platform that emerged out of the SAP ecosystem. Matthias wants to break down some misconceptions about low code, and that's what he does here. This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 25, 2022.