Since launching their first cloud offering in 2006, Amazon has paid surprisingly little attention to its competitors. While Marc Benioff was shouting “cloud computing” from the Salesforce mountain top in 2007, Amazon seemed not to have noticed. When Microsoft started aggressively marketing Azure in 2009, Amazon reacted as though it…
My first experience managing a DevOps team came in 2010 when I took the VPE role at Sonian. While on the surface my new team looked like traditional system administrators, they shared three traits that were new to me in operations: a commitment to agile, a hybrid of software development…
Last week we witnessed a critical milestone in the history of cloud computing: the moment at which the public cloud became less expensive than physical infrastructure. This moment came on March 25th in San Francisco when Google announced a massive price drop across its GCE platform. The announcement was matched…
When I started writing the MVP for my current startup, I chose Ruby on Rails out of familiarity. I will also confess to harboring a secret Lord of the Rings vision of a single programming language to rule them all: Ruby for web (RoR), distributed systems development (JRuby), automation (Chef…
I was curious what the most common programming languages were on the profiles of software developers in the Boston area. The above chart is based on searching for "software developer" within 50 miles of Boston using a keyword for each language. It comes as no surprise that Java is the…
A year ago this month, we officially closed venture investment for my startup. Some days it feels like that milestone was a few months ago, and other days it feels like a few years. But with my one year anniversary post-funding, I thought I’d take a moment and reflect…