Episode Details

Come Monday, we’ll see what full-on “digital transformation” looks like when Amazon fully owns Whole Foods. Also, Oracle is looking to move JEE to a foundation, closing out a long era of Java stewardship: how will “open source” like this work in a mature market? We also discuss the trend of private equity buying tech firms and GitHib’s write-up of building their own platform with kubernetes and series of small bash scripts.

• Coté is a terrible work-trip tourist.
• AA 263, DFW to PEK, seat 19K. Exit row seat is good, but the front part of the airplane looked good too (rows 8 to 13?).
• Pack some breakfast tacos.
• This VPN situation is a mess, rather, I didn’t prepare correctly. Sometimes Cloak works, sometimes it doesn’t. LTE seems better than hotel wifi, but the speeds are high.

• All done on Monday, August 28th. See NY Times article as well.
• John Mackey interview.
• Cheaper private label (I think they were top three or five sold in US).
• Return items in Amazon lockers.
• Cheaper groceries is cool, but for us, the interesting/instructive things to watch will be how Whole Foods goes full on digital transformation (or, even more eyebrow raising, does not!).
• Will they move everything to AWS?
• true Omni-channel and digital madness.
• Alexa: ”You look fat in that t-shirt, Michael, would you like me to order you some organic kale smoothies from Whole Foods?”
• Also, the potential for a culture clash seems high.
• As a side-effect, expect grocers to be trying out new computer stuff more, and observe their experience. How will the razor thin margin set cope with Amazon who’s been consistently rewarded for loosing money?
• Walmart and Google Hub thing, Andrew on the AI winter.

• Oracle looking to open source it, move it to a foundation.
• This worked out relativly OK for Java proper. It was hella weird, though, and I’m not sure the OSS version ever gained traction: maybe for, like, whatever Google, AWS, and Azure’s JRE is.
• Using this as a competitive ¯_(ツ)_/¯ is dicey, most people who compete here do open core themselves…so you can’t really say it’s bad; and if Oracle’s goal is to move it away from Oracle, you can’t say that Oracle is mismanaging it, etc.
• John Waters’ round-up of opinions, pretty predictable.
• Steve Yegge’s Kotlin Writeup, The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2017.

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