Adventurer and Geek
Copyright © 2020
Traveldoo welcomed a new Chief Technology Officer at the back end of last year and his vision is bringing some exciting changes to the business. At a time when the industry is facing some of its biggest challenges, Jeremy Brown gave us some of his ideas and the road ahead.
Hi Folks, I’ve now been at Traveldoo for six months and wanted to introduce myself and give you an update on what we are doing. It has really been great to be onboard with the team at Traveldoo.
As a new father I have had some time to reflect on what life is about, and one of the things that I believe gives me meaning is to do something generative with my life. Certainly, having a child is the most rewarding and generative thing I will ever do with my life. Fatherhood is not the only area of my life where I want to do something generative, I feel the need to build things in my professional life as well.
I recently reflected on my time bootstrapping Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs in EMEA, this has definitely been hugely rewarding and I believe that we, as a team, built something truly remarkable. For those of us involved it was definitely a generative experience, to build something from an idea to a product that produces real outcomes (the definition of outcome I like is - a change in people’s behaviour that effects business results).
This is what what was written on the t-shirt my team gave me as I prepared to present my final business update to the team at our quarterly team meeting.
“Chaos, panic, disaster! I think my work here is done.” - a former Labs Director
These have been poignant moments as I finish up in my current role as Director of Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs in EMEA this week. It was great to leave on a high with our best ever quarter, the business is on a roll!
I’ve not written much about coming back to Red Hat to head up the Open Innovation Labs in EMEA, but somehow it seemed fitting to author a blog post to mark a momentous last week. Last week we held the official opening events for Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs space in London and on Tuesday of this week our first customer working in the space, Motability Operations, held their Demo Day to show off what they had built in their four-week residency to their business sponsors.
TL;DR; This is an awesome go-anywhere-do-anything bike that is pure FUN - if you are in a rush skip the review and check out this gallery of highlights from the past year.
I’ve had my Cannondale Slate Force CX1 for almost exactly a year and done over 2000 km on it on and off-road, tumbled off it, had an accident and done a few gravel bike events, so it’s been given a thorough workout - about time I write a review.
The short version is that I love, love, love this bike! It’s the most expensive bike I’ve ever bought, and I’ve had the most fun I’ve every had on a bicycle. It is a go anywhere do anything bike, and if you are only going to have one bike then this is it!
TL;DR Use AppPolice for the Mac to control how much CPU the BlueJeans for Mac app can use (100% or 1 core seems to work) so that your computer is usable while using video and your battery won’t be zeroed by a one hour call.
I’m a big fan of using video for calls instead of just voice - participants are often far more engaged when you can all see each other, and you can give thumbs ups, raise your hand and give other visual cues as part of the conversation that avoids the usual voice conference call.
At Red Hat we encourage remote work, and one of the ways we make it work is to have a lot of video calls using BlueJeans, which works great for me on my Mac except for one horrible problem that tends to completely kill my experience - if I enable my camera (kind of important for a video call) when I’m using the BlueJeans desktop app (seems to happen with Chrome and browsers as well) the BlueJeans app seems to try to hog ALL of my CPU that it can use and when it has all the cores of my processor spinning away at maximum I will lose HALF of my Mac’s battery life after a one hour call!
One of the things I’ve been meaning to try for a while is to experiment with combining Open API Spec (formerly known as Swagger Spec) and static websites. So I’ve hacked together a quick experiment that allows you to embed OpenAPI Spec inside a Hugo site.
You can see an example of this in action here.
Today I voted in the UK’s EU Referendum to remain in the EU, and it really irked me because there are many things that are broken in the EU.
I recently left Red Hat to join Apigee and one of the funniest things I get asked when I say this is if I’m going to make computer games!
I’ve been a hardcore Apple/Mac/OS X fanboy ever since the first Intel Macs came out and since I made the switch from Windows I’ve never really look back. However I’ve always had this niggling feeling in the back of my head that my desktop OS wasn’t as open as I would like it to be. OS X and Macs have just been so popular with developers and Mac laptops really have the best hardware — for me the killer feature has always been the trackpad, even though others are now imitating the aluminium form factor nobody has come close with their trackpads yet. This fantastic machine definitely won me from one closed ecosystem (Microsoft) to another (Apple’s) but it’s still a closed ecosystem and since I got my first MacBook Pro in 2006 I’ve noticed that this ecosystem has gotten more closed — Mac App Store being a great example.
However I sometimes write code, mess around with new technology and most importantly I wanted to be fully in control of my desktop and my data and move to an ecosystem that was by default open. Linux seems the perfect choice but I’ve really struggled to have a compelling event to move me over to the ever improving Linux Desktop, until this year…!
What if you could wrap up your application in a lightweight container and then move it to any Linux server and have it perform in a predictable way with no changes? bare metal? virtualized? in a multi tenant environment? securely?
What if you could choose your language and runtime environment (Ruby, Python, JEE, JavaScript, etc) and have it provisioned with your application code? with full life-cycle management? with auto scaling? supported by the vendor behind the technology? on any PaaS?
TL;DR version — Docker is an awesome way to containerise any application running on Linux, but it has some shortfalls. Red Hat’s collaboration with dotCloud the company behind Docker will fix these and allow Docker run on almost any distribution of Linux (including RHEL and it’s derivatives). They will also integrate the technology that underpins the OpenShift PaaS (cartridges) so that the lifecycle of an application runtime can be managed. Meaning your application will eventually be able to run anywhere on your infrastructure or on the cloud with no changes — cool eh?