Bickel Blog

Launchable announced today that Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a co-founding member along with Harpreet Singh. Why is this important? Well obviously because of two things - Kohsuke and how their company will improve DevOps with a new era of testing. Why is Kohsuke Important? In short, because of a proven background of creating a massively used technology, in an open and inclusive platform and community, and has done so in a humble manner. Kohsuke created Jenkins (then Hudson) while he was a developer at Sun. He saw a chance to have software serve his need of doing continuous integration - automating the cumbersome build-test-deploy cycle. He soon realized it could be used by his colleagues and the rise of Jenkins began. In December, 2019, there were 264,000 locations with 992,000 nodes running Jenkins, running 32,870,000 jobs. Take a look at  t he Jenkins statistics page to see the up and to the right trends that Kohsuke started 15 years ago. So Kohsuke might have gotten luck...

I’ve been lucky to use CRM in various ways over the past 35 years. The RunSignUp implementation is the 6 th major implementation of CRM I’ve been involved with over the years. From the beginning, RunSignUp has implemented many of the key concepts of CRM so that races can maximize customer satisfaction and retention and lower costs of customer support – all with the goal of engaging their various communities to maximize the impact of their race. Right now, we are consolidating our various features of Participant Management, Marketing Automation, and central consolidated database to bring a comprehensive set of CRM benefits to races. It might be interesting to see my personal journey and compare how CRM has matured over the years. 1.      1987 - Digital Equipment Sales Tracking. I did a side project to help the District Sales Manager and her 50+ sales people do a better job of tracking their prospects and sales. This was back in the days of Act!, which...

Sometimes a combination of market forces, technology changes and people coalesce into a rare opportunity. That is happening for CloudBees now. DevOps has been hot for the past few years, but the recent GitHub acquisition by Microsoft put an exclamation point on it that reverberated in the industry and beyond. In 1913, Henry Ford put together the idea of the assembly line to produce cars faster with higher quality. Today, almost every business and organization on the planet is based on software at some level - to track orders, to win new customers, and even to replace old business models. And the key competitive advantage is creating better software, faster. Several years ago, the idea of DevOps emerged - basically cutting the overhead and shrinking the time to market. Companies like GitHub were created to allow developers to share code and make changes faster. A clever guy at Sun, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, saw a personal and organizational problem way before the DevOps revolut...

I'm a glass half full type of guy. And lately I have been feeling better and better about the US because I see all these good, common sense things happening like #metoo. I woke up this morning feeling so much better because of the simple step taken by Dicks Sporting Goods. “When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” Mr. Stack (Dicks CEO) said in an interview Tuesday evening. “We love these kids and their rallying cry, ‘enough is enough.’ It got to us.”

From: http://magazin.spiegel.de/SP/2017/6/index.html The rest of the world has a new image of America. I'm not sure this is the real way to put America first...

I've been bothered by this "America First" slogan. Part of this is the fact I work with a very diverse set of people . I watched the new " Becoming Warren Buffet " movie on HBO this week. And one of the things he said really crystallized my problem with the "America First" slogan. To paraphrase he said: "I won the lottery. There was a 1 in 40 chance that I was born in the US. And there was a 50-50 chance that I would be born male. So I have a hard time understanding why my life is worth more than anyone else on earth."

One of the big choices facing not only politicians, but businesses and other Nations will need to choose which strategy when working with Donnie. Like the bully in the playground, the choice is to: compliment him and give him your sandwich at lunch fight him publicly try to avoid him Putin, most Republican politicians and the business leaders who heed his calling out on the playground yard are "trying to work with him". Just like the bully, he is easy to out-smart by playing to his ego. Tell him you will keep workers in the US, tell him you are creating jobs in the US and he gets his ego rush and thinks it is all because of him. On the other hand, there are businesses who are trying to avoid - Uber and Nordstrom are the two stories in the news today. But with boycotts going both ways Pro Donnie  and Anti-Donnie , most smart businesses who want to take this strategy will just cover up for a while. For politicians - both leaders of other nations as well as US p...

How do citizens of the US and World take the news that Donnie lost a lawsuit against members of a golf club he bought? https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-01/trump-wins-by-losing-a-court-fight-over-debt For me, it makes me upset that someone abuses the legal system like this instead of doing the right thing in the first place. It makes me upset that the leader of our country bullies people who have a signed agreement. He is now playing on a much larger stage. Trying to intimidate world leaders and going back on promises made by our country .  It is just embarrassing and "Sad".

We will see how Donnie's measurements go over the next 4 years. This is a very quantifiable list of 17 metrics to track: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-20/17-metrics-to-watch-in-the-trump-era .

As 45 takes office, I happen to be reading Adam Grant's Give and Take . The central premise is that Takers can have short term success, but over the long term Givers have much higher degrees of success. Obviously Donnie is a Taker (I'll refer to him as Donnie because you can just imagine what he was like in the sandbox as a kid and there was one dump truck toy to play with). He has to be the "winner". This has resonated with a majority of the Electoral College, so he gets to set the public persona of America. And his "America First" approach is clearly the "Taker" approach that Grant writes about in his book. This works very well for short term negotiations, which seem to be Donnie's focus. He wants to renegotiate all trade and defense agreements to save us a few dollars. There are two problems with this approach. First, people see right thru the charade and play to the ego. This is seen by the march of CEO's to Donnie's Castle...

I was in Switzerland this week for CloudBees 2017 planning meetings. One night we went out to dinner and there was a Jazz bar next door. Our group consisted of French, Swiss, Belgian, American, Indian, and Japanese people. We listened to an Italian guitar player and piano player sing a British musician's Illegal Alien : I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety You could end up as the only one Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society At night a candle's brighter than the sun Takes more than combat gear to make a man Takes more than a license for a gun Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can A gentleman will walk but never run If "Manners maketh man" as someone said Then he's the hero of the day It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile Be yourself no matter what they say 

As a  small business owner  (24 employees), our little company has been on a roll since starting in 2010. We are profitable and growing with thousands of happy customers and growing market share. My tendency has been to continue to invest in the business because the fundamentals are so strong. For me, Trump brings uncertainty in several ways: I wonder if other businesses will be a bit cautious on spending and investments until there is more certainty on the moves he will make. That could cause some headwinds that could push us more towards a recession. While I have been in favor of more government spending, the coming tax cuts promise to be less efficient in terms of the multiplier effect of fiscal intervention. The basic concept is that money going to rich people will not be spent very quickly and therefore does nothing to improve the  velocity of money , which is a primary factor in the slow recovery over the past 7 years. Also, between the tax cuts and ...

I’ve submitted my absentee ballot voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election. As I did in  2012 , I am giving my reasons in case it helps others make their own decisions. Here are my key reasons: Life long commitment to making the world a better place Investing in major world changes Agree with her Policies and Proposals I like smart people who work hard Making the World a Better Place This is probably what inspires me the most about Hillary – she has had a lifelong commitment to making the world a better place. This video is her commencement speech at Wellesley College.  She was the first student commencement speaker in the college’s history, and you can see from the President’s introduction the amount of respect she had garnered in her 4 years there. Her speech also shows the core values she was thinking about then, and now. From her early days she has pushed forward to be in positions of larger and larger impact. While most of us are satis...