I have spent a lot of time on the road lately: three conferences (Monki Gras, KubeCon, Atlassian Team ‘25) in the past three weeks, with SIGCSE 2025 and Dynatrace Perform earlier this year and a slew of events in 2024.
As I look back at my event notes (so much AI) and the pictures on my phone (so many slides), I’ve also unearthed this favorite from IBM TechXchange in October, where Rachel Stephens and I added a Polaroid (I could write an essay on the medium alone) to the “Celebrate your learning, earning and certifications” wall:
Rachel also recently shared this photo of herself, Kate Holterhoff, and me as we celebrated having co-delivered our SW2Con keynote back in May:
And in looking for a date from the timeline of this Unofficial History of RedMonk I dropped a few years back, I found this gem from the 2022 Monktoberfest, where we managed to get a quorum of monks together for a photo (that’s Steve O’Grady, Lily Lachance, Rachel, Morgan Harris, me, and James Governor):
I will not bore you with the details of my event notes (or the many many many images of slides). However, in pondering takeaways from all of my RedMonk travels and conversations, I’ve made a short (and non-exhaustive) list. While they may seem obvious to you, in 2025 it is probably best to not take anything for granted. And so I leave you with three things that matter:
- Science matters. There are a lot of folks smarter than I am who can tell you why science matters, but this conversation with Dr. Cat Hicks is a good place to start.
- Education matters. Future generations will need the know-how to rescue us from the onslaught of vibe-coded agentic-chat-assistant-bot-apps and sentient MCP servers.
- People matter. Full stop. The photos on your phone that you actually care about don’t lie.
Disclosure: Atlassian, Dynatrace, and IBM are currently RedMonk clients.
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