Newsletter #65 : The Saturday Tech Break

Hello,

The “5 Minute Tech Break” is coming at you on a Saturday as our UK team had the Friday off for a bank holiday.

Like any decent tech company, we study our analytics very closely and whilst a previous Saturday release saw an unusually low open rate of <25%, maybe these bizarre days of lockdown will see more of you kicking your heels on a Saturday and more inclined to clean out the inbox or the shoe cupboard or the spice rack.

Let’s hope we’re in the frame there somewhere.

This week another 2 Lockdown Learning interviews with tech leaders from around the world talking to us about their experiences and expectations with lockdown.

This week we called into Vancouver, Canada and Hertfordshire here in the UK.

We’ve added a couple of articles that caught our eye and also book recommendations from our guests, including a book that was originally written in 1923.

More next week but until then, stay safe and enjoy your Saturday clear outs …

Andrew Weaver

[email protected]

Another Week, Another Set of Interviews with Global Tech Leaders

Jerome is an experienced tech leader across a range of industries from professional services to logistics, gaming and most recently cloud technology at AWS.

He joined us from Vancouver to discuss various aspects of tech leadership and lockdown management …

“I get joy and satisfaction building and managing teams to deliver quality technical solutions while also fostering a positive, healthy working culture that keeps my employees engaged, motivated and happy.”

Watch the interview with Jerome here.

Tim has spent 20 years in the Financial Services industry currently as Chief Technologist for EMEA Financial Services at Red Hat and previously as Managing Director at an Investment Bank in London where he was a leader in the AppDev space.

He is also, as the interview discovers, another tech leader that’s also a thwarted rock star.

Is there a running theme here?

“Best career advice was to focus on my contribution and worry less about what others were thinking”

Watch the interview with Tim here.

Serverless and Containers: How to choose the right application strategy

When it comes to the modern tech stack, one of the fastest changing areas is around containers, serverless, and choosing the ideal path to cloud native computing. How do you, as a technology leader, point your team in the right direction, especially given how quickly this is evolving?

Courtesy of our friends at CTO Universe, an interesting webinar delivered by Tolga Tarhan, Senior Vice President, GM AWS Services at Onica that you can download here.

The session covered a lot of ground, including:

• An overview of Containers and Serverless technologies with a focus on key differences
• How to make the right architectural choices given particular application patterns and risks
• Tradeoffs and key considerations for when to leverage Containers or Serverless

In the Pandemic Era, Hiring Gets Automated

We’re seeing some incredible and troubling numbers come out of the jobs market at the moment, the US experiencing job losses unseen since the Great Depression of the 30’s.

There seems to be a prevailing view that this is a temporary, if spectacular, hit and that re-employment and re-hiring will take place fairly quickly – though as no-one yet knows how long this will take or what the new normality might look like, this might be bordering on wishful thinking.

This article in Bloomberg Tech looked at how hiring might be handled and how “software can keep a list of potential applicants ready to go when jobs bounce back”

In The Pandemic Era, Hiring Gets Automated

Book of the Week 1: Measure What Matters

Chosen by Jerome Pimmel from AWS.

“Many books on the interviewing process focus mostly on the type of questions to ask. Johanna does a wonderful job in laying out a recruitment strategy from the initial planning of the skills and responsibilities required of the new employee through ensuring you have an onboarding and training plan when they start.

Johanna provides a lot of templates and valuable examples to get you started. You can easily adapt them to the position you are recruiting”

Hiring Geeks That Fit

Book of the Week 2: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Chosen by Tim Hooley and driven by his interests in Financial Services and FinTech.

Definitely the oldest book selected so far by any of our guests on Lockdown Learnings.

“Although Reminiscences…was first published some seventy years ago, its take on crowd psychology and market timing is a s timely as last summer’s frenzy on the foreign exchange markets.”

“The most entertaining book written on investing is Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefèvre, first published in 1923.”

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator