The world of application development, delivery and platform choices is changing absurdly quickly, as this great post from CircleCI – It’s the Future! – makes clear.

Web native companies are now used to getting new memos every day, but for enterprises generally, and certainly Java shops, all this change can be a little overwhelming. But change, like death and taxes is a certainty, and businesses are crying out for helping making digital transformations. There is no reason Java shops can’t be part of the transformation as software eats the world. After all, when web companies grow up, they turn into Java shops (see Twitter and Facebook to name two).

With all the current frenzy about “Unicorns” and greenfield web native opportunities it’s easy to forget that Netflix started life as a monolithic Java app running in a tomcat container.  Or that Amazon wasn’t born as a micro-services company – that came some time after the company was founded. Point being – Enterprises need to learn from innovative (or “disruptive”) companies, rather than using them as an excuse not to change.

Tomorrow I am doing a webinar with Oracle where we’ll be tackling many of these issues, looking at the role of Java development in the age of PaaS, Continuous Deployment, Agile and so on, in the age of the new kingmakers. Hopefully you’ll join us for what I hope will be a good conversation after the presentations. Please register here.

Application Performance Management (APM) is going through one of its periodical refreshes as new platforms and methods emerge and pressure grows on enterprises to become more like web native companies in terms of velocity of digital product and service delivery. This video, sponsored by IBM, represents some of my current thinking on the subject. Let me know what you think.

Introducing a new podcast series, called Opinionated Infrastructure, for those of that don’t like to watch video rants while you’re driving. This first one is sponsored by Salesforce.com, which might surprise you given the theme is 20 years of Java, past, present and future. More surprising perhaps is that the guest is Joe Kutner, JVM Languages Owner at Heroku. Now don’t imagine we spend the show saying Java sucks, but JVMs are cool. That is not the point. Rather – what is the role of Java in a web native era? How did we get here, and what comes next. Heroku wants to be be a home for the new Java workloads.

Hope you enjoy the show. I will be making this a regular thing.

A couple of months back I presented at IBM Interconnect about developer events and why they’re increasingly important. IBM is a client and paid my travel etc.

Some of the reasoning is fairly obvious. Twilio for example, is now adding $1m in annual recurring revenue every seven days, driven by participation in more than 500 developer events in 2014.

IBM itself has been investing heavily in developer ecosystems, events and locations, through its Ecosystems and Digital Cities initiatives. It’s been running tons of BlueMix (IBM’s Cloud Foundry implementation) training events, hackathons and so on. And of course it supported the Shoreditch Village Hall venue, by Shoreditch Works, helping to fund a space in which we ran developer community events and conferences such as London Node User Group, London Java Community, and Cleanweb throughout last year.

But for traditional companies, IBM’s core customer base, the obvious isn’t always so obvious, so I put together this deck to help IBM clients (and Big Blue holdouts) understand the value of face to face interactions with developer communities, but also to provide some advice about how to come across.

So here are some dos and don’ts. I bet you have your own pet loves and hates. Please make your own suggestions.

felt like pretty much every announcement at #build2015 was aimed at removing a barrier to entry for developers. well done microsoft.

— James Governor (@monkchips) May 3, 2015

At Build 2015 Microsoft finally sloughed off many of the shackles of its own making and renewed its relevance to the industry from a developer, and thus customer, perspective. Microsoft is moving forward by systematically dismantling an apparatus of corporate control built on tight coupling between Windows and Office.

CEO Satya Nadella is increasingly looking like Microsoft’s Louis Gerstner – that is, an executive who can look at things from the customer perspective, with a truly outside-in view, and drive the cultural change needed to revitalise a company from the ground up. Nadella has a relaxed, confident demeanor that makes you want to lean in and engage, and now by extension, so does Microsoft. In terms of its corporate evolution Microsoft currently looks like IBM in the late 1990s, supporting whatever environments customers choose, but with Azure playing the role of Global Services, and the key customer being the modern software developer rather than the CIO. In other news Microsoft’s timing is pretty much perfect. Decoupling just in time for the age of micro-services? Priceless.

When Microsoft released its iPad apps for Office pretty much everyone gushed about them. But the apps would have been released two years earlier than they were had the project not been nixed by ex Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. This is not necessarily to damn Ballmer, whose “only failing was delivering sustaining growth (from $20 to over $70 billion in sales.)” but rather to point out the shackles of success were forged in an earlier era. Selling both apps and the infrastructure they run is after all the the holy grail of industry dominance.

But times have changed, and the change is accelerating. To reestablish relevance Microsoft needs to be winning new developers to the cause, and that just wasn’t happening under Ballmer. Where Ballmer was a farmer, Nadella is a forager. It’s not as if Microsoft didn’t know the world has changed, but sometimes new management is needed to drive the change a company already knows is necessary to respond.

So what did Microsoft actually do at Build?

• Launch an IDE, Visual Studio Code, that runs on Windows, Mac OS-X and Linux from the get go. Code is an IDE that expresses what Microsoft has always been good at – IntelliSense, developer productivity for the 99%, solid debugging tools, but multiplatform. It supports Node.js, JavaScript, C#, C++, PHP, Java, HTML, R, CSS, SQL, Markdown, TypeScript, LESS, SASS, JSON, XML, and Python. It can only be a matter of time before we see Go and Rust supported, too.
• Support Xcode in Visual Studio. This one was kind of crazy – opening an Xcode file in Visual Studio to edit Objective-C using the Project Islandwood SDK. Why would you want to do that? Developers can now compile Objective-C to support Windows, allowing for porting of apps and games from the most vibrant ecosystem to Windows Store, which definitely needs a boost, but which is going to get a huge amount of cash support from Microsoft. The toolset was used by King, the publishers of Candy Crush, to port their app to Windows 10 Mobile. And now Microsoft is going to ship Candy Crush preinstalled with Windows 10. From developers to users, see.
• Support Android on Windows  – quite a different approach, but Windows 10 Mobile will be shipping with an Android subsystem, allowing for easier porting of Android apps to Windows using the Project Astoria SDK. These apps can be developed in Eclipse, as per the Google tool chain.
• Support Java in Visual Studio – demonstrated by 17 year old Aidan Brady, for writing Minecraft mods. Perhaps more telling in the keynote than the demo, was the fact Briana Roberts, on stage with Aidan, was at pains to explain that being able to write Minecraft mods with Visual Studio didn’t mean Microsoft didn’t like Eclipse.
• MOAR DOCKER – Microsoft ceded the stage to Docker CEO Ben Golub, so it became his show for  a few minutes. Ben explained that when it started working with Microsoft they expected to simply be writing support for Docker on Hyper-V, so Docker was surprised when Microsoft went a lot farther. In Ben’s words:
  • Here are the 5 surprises we have had in making this a reality
    1. Docker on Windows Server Not Just Linux
    2. Content and collaboration for developers
    3. Open orchestration for multi-container applications
    4. All about freedom of choice to mix and match to build the best distributed applications
    5. In just 6 months, real and it’s being demo’d today

    In the Demo, Mark Russinovich showed the following

    • A .NET application being deployed to Windows Server using Docker
    • The same .NET application being pushed to a Linux Server running on Azure via Visual Studio
    • Remote attachment and debugging of the .NET application running inside of a Docker container from within Visual Studio

    The demo is a great reflection of the freedom of choice to developers (italics mine).

• Deliver support for Apache Cordova in Visual Studio for creating hybrid web/native apps (as announced at Build 2014)
• Go nuts for Node.js. Slick Visual Studio integration with NPM, etc.
• Preview .NET framework running on Linux and Mac. When this work is baked, it will make the Docker support v interesting in terms of app portability.
• Make a browser that doesn’t suck. Welcome Edge.

Related- The Node stuff is starting to get interesting.

Here we go. Use Microsoft's Chakra instead of Google's V8 to power Node.js https://t.co/kz7bC5Y6aj

— Joe McCann (@joemccann) May 12, 2015

Perhaps most interestingly of all in terms of going where the developers are, oddly enough it didn’t make much splash in the keynotes, was extensive support announced for Github on Azure, Hyper-V and Visual Studio.

So Microsoft slew some sacred cows, but lowering barriers to entry isn’t enough in itself to attract net new developers. For that you need some beautiful and shiny to attract them. Microsoft certainly delivered that with its HoloLens demos. So yeah- you can now make an object in Minecraft and deploy it in your living room…

So Microsoft is back in the game. It is a dancing elephant. We’ll find out over the next year or so whether Microsoft can really begin to attract new developers into the fold however, but many impediments are now gone. Thankfully I won’t have reporters call me any more about being surprised because Microsoft is doing x where x is anything remotely open source.

On my Mac, wearing a @github shirt, working on my @docker presentation for Ignite. It's a new @microsoft. # @Azure pic.twitter.com/DJ74rAIopk

— Tom Hauburger (@thauburger) May 7, 2015

In case you haven’t already seen the post from my business partner Stephen I just wanted to let you know that some changes are afoot at RedMonk, to wit Donnie Berkholz is leaving the firm.

We are sad to see him go. He has made a material contribution to the firm’s success and helped build our community. So thank you Donnie.

However we’re still very confident about our trajectory. As Marc Andreesen says, Software is Eating the World. Every bite it takes RedMonk’s market opportunity grows. We’re brilliantly positioned. We were outliers when we launched the firm, because we said developers matter. But today market after market is getting the memo. 2014 was our best year ever.

So we&