About James Turnbull

James Turnbull is originally from Australia but now lives in Brooklyn, NY. He likes wine, food, and cooking (in that order) and tattoos, books, and cats (in no particular order).

He is a CTO in residence and lead startup advocacy at Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, he was the founding CTO at Empatico. Before that, James was CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Engineering at Venmo, and in leadership roles at Docker and Puppet. He also had a long career in enterprise, working in banking, biotech, and e-commerce. James also chairs the O'Reilly Velocity conference series. In lieu of sleep, James has written eleven technical books, largely on infrastructure topics.

Links Referenced: 

• Twitter: @kartar
• Turnbull Press

Transcript

Mike Julian: This is the real world DevOps podcast and I'm your host Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps from the creators of your favorite tools to the organizers of amazing conferences or the authors of great books to fantastic public speakers. I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools. Telegraf for metrics collection from systems, Chronograf for visualization and capacitor for realtime streaming. All of these are available as open source and as a hosted SaaS solution. You can check all of it out at influxdata.com. My thanks to InfluxData for helping make this podcast possible.

Hi folks I'm Mike Julian, your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. My guest this week is James Turnbull. You probably know James from his seeming inability to stop writing technical books such as Monitoring with Prometheus, The Art of Monitoring, The Terraform book and like a bajillion others. He has also worked for some pretty neat companies too, like Puppet, Kickstarter and Venmo and now he works at Microsoft leading a team as CTO-in-residence. Welcome to the show, James.

James Turnbull: Hi Mike.

Mike Julian: I'm really curious like what is a CTO in residence?

James Turnbull: I guess my primary mission is to make Microsoft relevant to start ups much the same way that Microsoft is shaping its relevancy towards the open source community. We're also interested in looking at other audiences that we've traditionally not been involved with and so it's just one of those.

Mike Julian: Gotcha. And you're just leading a team of people that are focused on that sort of stuff?

James Turnbull: Yeah, so most of my team is people who've come from startups or and particularly from engineering management leadership roles in startups. One of my colleagues is ... was the CTO of SwiftKey and another one, fairly famous, Duncan Davidson who wrote Tomcat and Ant and has been around engineering management for a long time — and folks like that who really are here to help sort of startups understand a bit more about how to grow and scale. And I think some of the big challenges startups have are actually not technology related at all. They're really about, you know, how do I build a recruiting process? You know, I had 10 engineers last week, I have 100 this week. How do we structure the team? So we've sort of brought together a group of folks who have fairly deep experience in those sort of problems for startups and have sort of a deep empathy for the startup community.

Mike Julian: Yeah that's quite the task ahead of you.

James Turnbull: Yeah. Look, I think, I mean Microsoft traditionally been known as an enterprise software company. You know, a lot of startups are not sure of their relevance to us. I think increasingly we're seeing traction to cover is one is that obviously Azure is one of our focuses and the cloud platform in there. And that platform is looking more broadly at not just enterprise audiences but other groups. And secondly, a lot of startups ... Microsoft's deep in the middle of most of their customers. So particularly if you're a Beta based startups, something like that and you're, you know, you're trying to sell into enterprise business, Microsoft has been doing that for 30 years. They have all the connections and account managers and sales folks and you know, multimillion dollar relationships with some of the people you want to be customers with. We can provide you with A, some of those connections, but also a lot of advice and expertise about how to sell to those customers.

James Turnbull: And having worked at both Empatico and Docker, you know, a large part of my job was attempting to sell, you know, as a small startup, as a fairly early employee at both into big companies. You know, you can't walk in the door to Wall Street financial if you're a 30 person start up in Portland, Oregon without having a pretty credible story. So I'm happy to sort of help startups and I do some of that messaging and understand how to have some of those conversations.

Mike Julian: Yeah. It's one of the interesting things about my own company is my clients are all these large companies too and I'm a two person company, but selling into a very large company is not ... it's nothing like selling it to a small company. Everything works differently. People think about their jobs differently.

James Turnbull: Yeah.

Mike Julian: Yeah. I think maybe my most favorite thing of everything you just said is this isn't your daddy's Microsoft. The Microsoft we all grew to know and hate is not today's Microsoft at all. Not by a stretch and that's just absolutely incredible to see that turnaround.

James Turnbull: Yeah. I got a LinkedIn request from somebody yesterday and the message said, you know, I've read a bunch of your books and you know, I've used a bunch of different sorts things you've worked on. I was really surprised to see you at Microsoft. And I was like, okay, this could end badly the next couple of sentences, because I've certainly had a few people of my generation who remember the bad old days and “Linux is a cancer” and things like that. And he finished with, you know, it's really interesting to see companies grow and change. And I was like, wow, okay, that's a ... I thought that was going to go really badly but I think it's a fairly accurate reflection.

Microsoft is aware of the fact that this is not a position that pragmatically that was not a good business position to be in. The world is changing. It's moving towards the cloud, you know, the stacks in people's companies, the way they manage things, the infrastructure, the software, you know, things are changing. And I hesitate to say this conclusively, but I think open source won, you know this for certain values of one, given recent sort of events, discussions about large corporates and their contribution to open source, but as a technology choice, it's pretty clear to me that open source won. And I'm kind of a bit smug about that to be honest.

Mike Julian: Speaking of your books I would just straight up say you're th...