 I'm James Governor, one of the co-founders of a company called Redmonk, we're an industry research firm focusing on developer-led technology adoption. So that's, I guess, why Docker invited me to DockerCon 2020 to talk about some trends that we're seeing in the world of work and software development. So, monkchips, that's who I am. I spend a lot of time on Twitter, it's a great research tool, it's a great way to find out what's going on and to keep track of, as I say, those people that we value so highly, software developers, engineers and practitioners. So, when I started talking to Docker about this event, it was, you know, it was preronish, shall we say. The idea of a crowd wasn't a scary thing, but today, you see something like this, makes you feel uncomfortable. This is not a place that I want to be, I'm pretty sure it's a place you don't want to be. And, you know, to that end, I think it's interesting, quote by Ellen Powell, she says, work from home is now just work. And we're gonna see more and more of that. Organizations aren't feeling the same way they did about work before. Who are these people? Who's my concern? So GitHub says it has 50 million developers, right, on its network. Now, one of the things I think is the most interesting is not that it has 50 million developers, perhaps that's a proxy for a number of developers worldwide, but quite frankly, a lot of those accounts, there's all kinds of people there, there's the learners, there are data engineers, there are data scientists, there are product managers, there are tech marketers. It's a big, big community and it goes way beyond just software developers itself. Frankly, for me, I'd probably be saying there's more like 20, 25 million developers worldwide, but GitHub knows a lot about the world of code. So what else do they know? One of the things they know is that world of code and software and open source is becoming increasingly global. I get so excited about this stuff. The idea that there are these different software communities around the planet where we're seeing massive expansions in terms of things like open source. A great example is Nigeria. So Nigeria, more than 200 million people, right? The energy there in terms of events, in terms of learning, in terms of teaching, in terms of the desire to code, the desire to launch businesses, the desire to be part of a global software community is just so exciting. And this sort of energy is not just in Nigeria, it's in other countries in Africa, it's happening in Egypt, it's happening around the world. This energy is something that's super interesting to me. We need to think about that. We've got global challenges that we need to solve and software is gonna be a big part of that. So at the moment, we can talk about other countries, but what about, frankly, the gender gap, the gender issue? That from 1984 onwards, the number of women taking computer science degrees began to not track but to crater in comparison to what men were doing. The tech industry is way too male-focused. There are men that are dominant, it's not welcoming. We haven't found ways to have those pathways and frankly to drive inclusion and the women I know in tech have to deal with a massively disproportionate amount of stress and things like online networks. But talking about online networks and talking about a better way of living, I was really excited by GitHub satellite recently. It was a fantastic demo by Alison McMillan and she did a demo about Codespaces. So Codespaces is Microsoft's online ID, new platform that they've built. And online IDEs, we're never quite sure, plenty of people still out there just using Emacs, but Visual Studio Code has been a big success and so this idea of moving to an online IDE, it's been around there for a while, what they did was just make really tight integration. So you're in your GitHub repo and just be able to create a development environment with effectively one click, getting rid of all of the act-shaving, making it super easy. And what I loved was that the demo where Ally's like, yeah, cause this is great. When my kids are having a nap, I can just start coding and I don't have to sort out all the rest of it. And to me, that was amazing. It was like productivity as inclusion. I'm here with a senior director at GitHub, they're doing this amazing work and they're making this clear statement about being a parent. And I think that was fantastic because that's what to me, part of this working from home, which has been so challenging for so many of us, began to open up new possibilities. And frankly, exciting possibilities. So Ally's also got a podcast, Parent-Driven Development, which I think is super important because this is about men and women rule in this together. Sure, parenting is a team sport, same as software development. And the idea that we should be thinking about how to be more productive is super important to me. So I wanna talk a bit about developer culture and how it led to social media. Because you know, social media, we're in this advanced stage now, it's all TikTok, it's like exercise, people doing incredible backflips and stuff like that, doing a bunch of dancing. We've had the world of sharing cat gifts, Facebook. You know, we sort of see social media as I think a phenomenon in its own right. Whereas for me, I think it's interesting because it's progenitors. Where did it come from? So here's Murray Turoff. So 1971, one of the features in the emergency management information system that he built, which it's topical, it was for medical tracking, medical information as well, medical emergencies, it included a bulletin board system so that it could keep track of what people were doing on a team and make sure that they were collaborating effectively. Boom, that was the start of something big, obviously. Another date I think is worth looking at, 1983. So Radia Pullman, spanning tree protocol. So at DEC, they were very good at distributed systems. And the idea was that you could have a distributed system and so much of the internet working that we do today was based on Radia's work. And the notion that basically you could span out a huge network so that everyone could collaborate. That is incredibly exciting in terms of the trends that I'm talking about. So then let's look at 1988. You've got IRC. IRC, what developer has not used IRC, right? Well, I guess maybe some of the other ones might not have. But I don't know if we're post IRC yet, but Yarko Okarinden at a Finnish university, you know, really nailed it with IRC as a platform that people could communicate effectively with. And you know, then we go into like 1991. So we've had IRC. We've had Finnish universities doing a lot of really interesting work about collaboration. And I don't think it was necessarily an accident that this is where Linus Torfolds announced Linux. So Linux was a wonderfully packaged idea in terms of we're gonna take this Unix thing. And when I say packaged, what it packaged was the idea that we could collaborate on software. So, you know, it may have just been the work of one person, but clearly what made it important and made it interesting was finding a social networking pattern for software development so that everybody could work on something at scale. That was really, I think, fundamental and foundational. Now, I think it's important if we're gonna talk about Linus to talk about some things that are not good about software culture, not good about open source culture, not good about hacker culture. And that's where I'm gonna talk about code of conduct. We have not been welcoming to new people. You know, we got the acronyms, you know, JFGI, you know, we call people nudes. That's super unhelpful. We've got to find ways to be more welcoming and more self-sustaining in our communities because otherwise, communities will fail. And I'd like to thank everyone that has a code of conduct and has encouraged others to have codes of conduct. We need to have codes of conduct that are enforced to ensure that we have better diversity at our events. And that's for women underrepresented minorities. All different kinds of people need to be well looked after and be in safe and inclusive spaces. And that's for online events. But of course, it's also for all of our activities offline. So Linus, as I say, not the most charming of characters at all time, but he has done some amazing technology. So we get to like 2005, the creation of Git. Now, Git was, you know, not necessarily the distributed version control system that would win, but there was some interesting principles there and they'd come out of the work that he had done in terms of trying to build and sustain the Linux code base. So it was very much based on experience. He had an itch that he needed to scratch and there was a community that was building this thing. So what was gonna be the option came up with Git, foundational to another huge wave of social change, frankly, Git to logical awesome, April 2008. GitHub, right? GitHub comes up, they've looked at Git, they've packaged it up, they found a way to make it consumable so that teams can use it and really begin to take advantage of the power of that distributed version control model. Now, ironically enough, of course, they centralize the service in doing so. So we have a single point of failure on GitHub. But on the other hand, the notion of the pull request, the primitives that they established and made usable by people, that changed everything in terms of software development. I think another one that I'd really like to look at is Slack. So Slack is a huge success used by all different kinds of businesses. But it began specifically as a pivot from a company called Glitch. It was a game company and they wanted a tool internally that was better than IRC. So they built out something that later became Slack. So Slack 2014 is established as a company and basically it was this Slack fit software engineering, the focus on automation, the conversational aspect, asynchronous aspect. It really pulled things together in a way that was interesting to software developers. And I think we've seen this pattern in the world, frankly, over the last few years. Software developers are influences. So Slack first used by the engineering teams, later used by everybody. And arguably you could say the same thing actually happened with Apple. Apple was mainstreamed by developers adopting that platform. Get to 2013, boom again, Solomon Hikes, Docker, right? So Docker wasn't, I mean, containers were not new. They were just super hard to use. People found it difficult technology. It was esoteric. It wasn't something that they could fully understand. Solomon did an incredible job of understanding how it could fit, containers could fit into modern developer workflows. So if we think about immutable images, if we think about the ability to have everything required in the package where you are, it really tied into what people were trying to do with CI CD, tied into microservices and certainly the notion of sort of disposability. Docker nailed that. And I guess from this conference at least, the rest is history. So I wanna talk a little bit about scratching the edge and particularly what has become, I call it the developer aesthetic. So let's go into dark mode now. I've talked about developers laying out these foundations and frameworks that get mainstreamed. Frankly, now my son who's 14, he laughs at me if I don't have dark mode on in an application. And it's this notion that developers, they have an aesthetic, it does get adopted. I mean, it's quite often jokey. One of the things we've seen in the really successful platforms like GitHub, Docker, NPM, let's look at GitHub, let's look at that playfulness. I think it was really interesting. And that changes the world of work, right? So we've got the world of work which can be buttoned up, which can be somewhat tight. I think both of those companies were really influential in thinking that software development, which is a profession, it's also something that can and is fun. And think about how can we make it more fun? How can we develop better applications together? Takes me to, if we think about Docker, talking about build, share and run, for me, the keyword is share because development has to be a team sport. It needs to be sharing, it needs to be kind and it needs to bring together people to do more effective work because that's what it's all about. Doing effective work, if we think about Zoom, it's a proxy for collaboration in terms of its value. So we've got all of these airlines and frankly add up their total value, it's currently less than Zoom. So video conferencing has become so much of how we live now on a consumer basis but certainly from a business to business perspective. And when I talk about how we live now, I wanna think about like, what will come out of this traumatic and it is incredibly traumatic time? You know, for so many, I'd like to say I'm very privileged, I can work from home. So thank you to all the frontline workers that are out there, they're not in that position. But overall what I'm really thinking about, are there some things that will come out of this that will benefit us as a culture? Looking at cities like Paris, Milan, London, New York, putting in new cycling infrastructure so that people can social distance and travel outside because they don't feel comfortable on public transport. I think sort of amazing, widening pavements or we can't do that, all these cities have done it literally overnight. And sort of changes is exciting and what does come after? Like are there some positive aspects of the current issues that we face? So I've got a conference or I've got a community that me and some others have been working on. So Katie from HashiCorp and Carla from Container Solutions basically about, look, what will the world look like in developer relations? Can we have developer relations without the air miles? Because developer advocates, they do too much travel. It ends up, you know, burning them out. Developer relations, people don't like to say no. They may have bosses that say, you know, I was like, oh, that coverage went great. Now we're gonna roll it out worldwide to 47 cities. That stuff is terrible. It's terrible from a personal perspective and it's really terrible from an environmental perspective. We need to travel less. Virtual events are crushing it. Microsoft just had build, right? Normally there'd be sort of, you know, just over 10,000 people. They had 245,000 plus registrations. 40,000 of them were in the last day, right? Red Hat Summit, 80,000 people. IBM Think, 90,000 people. Did not crush it as well. Like this is a more inclusive way. People can dip in. They can be from all around the world. You know, I mentioned Nigeria and how fantastic it is. Very often Nigerian developers and advocates find it hard to get visas. Why should they be shut out of events? Events are gonna start to become remote first because frankly, look at it. If you're turning in those kinds of numbers and, you know, Microsoft was already doing great online events, but they absolutely nailed it, they're gonna have to ask some serious questions about why everybody should get back on a plane again. So if you're gonna do remote, you've got to be intentional about it. It's one thing I find so exciting about GitLab. GitLab's culture is amazing. Everything is documented. Everything is public. Everything is transparent. Take that really clear. And if you look at their principles, everything, you can't have implicit collaboration models. Everything needs to be documented and explicit so that anyone can work anywhere and they can still be part of the team. Remote first is where we're at now. Coinbase, Shopify, even Barclays says they're not gonna go back to having everybody in offices in the way they're used to. This is a fundamental shift and I think it's got significant implications, you know, for all industries, but definitely for software development. Here's the thing. The last 20 years were about distributed computing. Microservices, the cloud, we've got pretty good at that. The next 20 years will be about distributed work. We can't have everybody living in San Francisco and London and Berlin. The talent is distributed. The talent is elsewhere. So how are we gonna build tools? Who is gonna scratch that itch to build tools to make them more effective? Who's building the next generation of apps? You are. Thanks.