Tag Archives: podcast

Interview with Uhuru, and more events in the pipeline

Posted on April 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

As my new role continues, a podcast I recorded with Michael Surkan over at Uhuru Software has just gone online. Uhuru provide hosting based on the Cloud Foundry platform, and add first-class support for .NET applications. They also have some really neat add-ons for MMC and Visual Studio to make deployment easy. We talked a little about the role of a Developer Advocate, the groups I’ve been talking to about adoption of Cloud Foundry, and some of the “gotchas” to consider when taking an application to a Platform-as-a-Service environment.

(if you can hear any background noise on this one, it was because I was at the Scala Days event in London on the day we spoke, and not Michael’s fault at all! I don’t think it sounds too bad)

Coming up this week, there’s the big Cloud Foundry Open Tour London on Tuesday (based on the numbers I’m hearing about, it sounds like that is going to be busy). Many of us from the engineering and developer relations teams will be speaking at that one. The rest of the week, I’ll be at SourceDevCon in London where my head honcho Patrick will be speaking on Thursday afternoon.

To round the week off, there’s Horizons at the BFI on Saturday and Sunday, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum. I was always more of an Acorn guy myself, but there’s no denying these classic machines really kickstarted my interest in this role space – and I can’t wait to hear MJ Hibbett perform “Hey Hey 16k” in person! :-)

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New podcast – Games at Work

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’ve  been podcasting fairly regularly for the past few years, primarily with my good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe over in Durham, NC on a weekly show called Dogear Nation.

As I’ve travelled more, and as we’ve all got more busy, it became harder to keep that momentum up. I know I, for one, was tired and looking for some fresh inspiration. When we reached episode 200 last year, we announced a hiatus.

This year, we’re starting to ramp up something new. Same presenters, different format – going back to basics, if you will. Probably not weekly, more likely every two weeks… but continuing to explore some of the themes we’d been looking at around how gaming technology and concepts can influence business, work and productivity.

We’re still working on branding etc but you can grab the first episode of Games at Work right now via the existing site. We’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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Dogear Nation 200, and 250 hours of podcasting

Posted on June 26, 2011 | 1 Comment

We’re just about to record episode 200 of Dogear Nation, a regular (weekly, barring a few more recent gaps) podcast summing up opinions of what’s new online and in tech.

I actually only joined Michael Rowe and Michael Martine (the co-hosts) as a regular element of the show around January 2009, and by then they had already clocked up 80+ episodes. Either way, I reckon on around 250 hours of recording time, and a little more than that when I include the few episodes I also edited; 2 and a half years of regular podcasting.

So what have I learned from this exercise?

  • Michael Rowe and Michael Martine are extraordinarily generous, friendly, and wonderful guys – I’ve enjoyed working with them and sharing ideas and opinions. I have two amazing friends for life, built through a digital foundation.
  • It’s difficult to keep a weekly podcast going, even with the regular input from listeners. It’s also difficult to drive and expand an audience. We’ve had some great contributors and regular listeners and I’m grateful to them.
  • Preparation is (nearly) everything. Over the course of the past couple of years we’ve evolved the way that we put the show together, finally arriving at a shared Google document where we co-edit the show notes to build the structure of the show. That’s really helped us to build momentum. It’s still good to have some ad-libbing and free discussion of course.
  • Technology keeps evolving. We knew this of course – one of the premises of the show has always been about the bleeding edge of technology and where things have been moving. Well, I think it’s fair to say that over the course of the past few years on the show, we’ve seen various products go from science fiction to the beginnings of science fact.
  • Go with what you know. I’ve had a lot of fun talking about the things that fascinate me and that I’m passionate about. I know that Michael, Michael, and before me, Matt Simpson, have also made their best contributions based on the areas that they’ve known about or have been most curious about. For example, amongst other things, Michael Rowe is a space / NASA buff and a hardcore gamer; Michael Martine is very business-focused, and hates anything that threatens to go near his eyeballs :-)

It’s been a fun couple of years.

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Several weeks ago – in Lotus

Posted on April 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

A very quick, and very belated, post to note that I was one of the guests on the episode of the This Week in Lotus podcast recorded March 18th 2011 (episode 43, for those keeping count). A good fun, panel discussion about what was new online and in collaborative and social spaces that week. In particular, we picked off a bunch of topics such as LotusLive supporting the earthquake disaster in Japan, Twitter’s new guidance on developing client apps, and IBM’s broader software capabilities.

You may want to dip in and take a listen… it’s far broader than just being about “Lotus” software, and the regular co-hosts Stuart and Darren are always worth a listen. Give it a try.

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Connectivity and Integration podcasts

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

As well as being WebSphere Messaging Community Lead out of IBM Hursley right now, I’m also part of what we refer to as our “Connectivity and Integration” organisation (middleware… plumbing… the hidden inter-application messaging and adapter stuff, ensuring that systems can talk to one another reliably). Much of what we do in Hursley, and the software that we develop there, is part of the Connectivity space. It’s the software that joins up all the pieces of a Smarter Planet, and it’s an interesting space for a techie like me.

We thought it was about time to talk about some of the features that are in our WebSphere Messaging products – WebSphere MQ, Message Broker, and the family of software that fits around them. So, my colleague Leif Davidsen and I sat down and recorded a series of podcasts. Each episode zeroes in on a specific feature or capability, such as high availability, or telemetry, or security – you get the idea.

As we were talking, Leif and I were trying to keep the discussions bite-sized (about 10 minutes at a time); highlight things that users might not have heard about before; be interesting to administrators and developers as well as to architects; and we tried not to use too much “marketingese” – although I reckon you might spot that in some of the podcast episode titles! :-)

You can start to subscribe to the Connectivity and Integration podcast series right now in iTunes or add the RSS feed to your favourite podcatcher. There should be some web content and show notes with links and references to follow soon – watch out for those, I’ll tweet about them and update this post when I know more.

NB did you check out my first and second columns for Sphere yet? More to come soon, and I’m hoping to join the GWC Lab Chat series for a future episode as well. Cool stuff.

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