What is Megalith? A ten year plan… A distributed “operating system” for the datacenter, the cloud, the entire internet… An idealized design… A series of iterations in a direction… The past 10 years of Jeff Lindsay, and the next 10 years of Jeff Lindsay. We discuss what it is, what it could be, and where it’s headed.

Systems Live

Episode 51 - Megalith

We reflect on over a decade of giving many technical talks and watching many many more. We talk about our evangelism roots with Continuous Deployment and Webhooks both being primarily spread via technical talks. We also discuss dealing with the inevitable stress of giving talks and finally how to make your talks better.

Episode 50 - What Makes a Great Tech Talk

We talk about emergence both theoretically and concretely. How we see emergence everywhere in our daily lives. How viewing systems through the lens of Systems Thinking allows us to optimize for emergence, and leads to less friction in the systems (both technological systems and human systems).

Episode 49 - Emergence in Games, Software, and the Origin of Life

We talk about our personal experiences in Startups and the pros and cons, focusing on the common Startup myths and what companies can look like when you reject some of the common assumptions about what a Startup is.

Episode 48 - Why you shouldn't do a startup

We talk about our shared history around the long running beer-and-laptop party DevHouse (which Jeff cofounded), and the lessons we’ve learned from organizing meatspace events.

Episode 47 - Devhouse and Running Events

We talk to Daniel X Moore about Serverless Architecture, the future of javascript apps, and the lumberjack-programmer lifestlye that lets him dedicate so much time to opensource.

Episode 46 - Daniel X Moore on Serverless Architecture

We talk about DevOps, both theory and practice. We also talk about Configurator, an opensource Configuration-as-an-API, and compare that to existing options like Chef and Pupppet. Finally we discuss Bulat Shakirzyanov’s levels of configuration management.

Episode 45 - DevOps and Configurator

We talk in depth about Distributed Systems, the Actor Model and contrast Go with Erlang. This launches us into a discussion about Anzen, a new model for developing software.

Episode 44 - Distributed Systems

We talk about Idealized Design, an important tool from Russel Ackoff’s brand of Systems Thinking. We then try something new: we actually run a live Idealized Design session on a topic chosen by the audience.

Episode 43 - Idealized Design

We discuss why SOA sucks, the Microservices trend and how important it is to consider both technical and people issues at the same time.

Episode 42 - Why SOA is bad for you.

How can opensource build open services? Tired of transient fly-by-night API companies? Jeff and Timothy talk about new structures for building APIs and developer services that can financially and technically support themselves in perpetuity.

Episode 41 - OpenOps and Autosustainable Services

We talk about society’s underlying fears of technological progress and how they manifest. We talk about counterexamples, including the recent Spike Jonze film Her.

Episode 40 - Dystopia, Luddism and Her

We talk at length about Flynn, including the failed startup that came before and what Jeff will build next.

Episode 39 - Flynn past, present and future.

We talk about the Basic Income, do people have the right to a job and what are the responsibilities of creating technology that destroys jobs?

Episode 38 - Basic Income

Jeff and I talk about how our 2013 went. We talk at about consulting, lifestyle design, mobile lifestyles and why we both moved to Austin.

Episode 37 - 2013 Review

Timothy Fitz and Jeff Lindsay discuss software, organizations, systems theory, lifestyle design and more.

hubhopper

Systems Live

hubhopper