a Futurum company

Contributor

Alan Shimel

Alan Shimel is founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, a Futurum company, and a member of Futurum's executive leadership team. A technology entrepreneur, media executive and industry commentator, Shimel has spent more than three decades building businesses, communities and media platforms serving enterprise technology professionals, including co-founding StillSecure, a network security company, and the DevOps Institute, a DevOps certification and training body. At Techstrong, he leads a portfolio of media brands including DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Techstrong AI, Techstrong IT, Digital CxO, Platform Engineering, Techstrong Semi and Techstrong TV, along with a growing portfolio of events, educational programs and digital communities. With more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, Shimel is a familiar voice in the space and was an early advocate of the DevOps movement, helping bring DevOps practices into mainstream enterprise technology. His work today spans cybersecurity, DevOps, cloud-native technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and digital transformation, and he hosts popular programs including Techstrong Gang, Shimmy Says and Still Cyber, After All These Years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics from St. John's University and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School.

24Articles shown
1Contributors shown
6Archive page
Blogs

MediaOps, Boca Code Award ‘Engineer the Change’ Scholarship

I am really proud to announce that, in partnership with Boca Code, MediaOps has awarded a scholarship for the Fall 2021 term to the Software Engineering Career Course, a 10-week rigorous and fast-paced coding boot camp from Boca Code. Alina Maliuk, a first-generation immigrant from Ukraine, is the recipient. The Engineer the Change scholarship was […]

Alan Shimel · Sep 14, 2021
Blogs

Accelerating Software Testing

Yves Junqueira is the CEO of YourBase, a software testing accelerator for large codebases. He talks with Alan Shimel about the company, accelerating software testing and the impact on developer productivity. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation. Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us here on another segment for […]

Alan Shimel · Sep 8, 2021
Business of DevOps

MediaOps and DevOps Institute Earn Inc. 5000 Honors

I am really proud to announce today that both MediaOps and DevOps Institute have been honored by Inc. and earned inclusion in the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in America. For MediaOps, this is the second year in a row we have earned this honor. For DevOps Institute, it is the first year […]

Alan Shimel · Aug 17, 2021
Application Performance Management/Monitoring

EP 17: Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics

In this episode of DevOps Unbound, hosts Alan Shimel and Mitch Ashley are joined by Helen Beal of the DevOps Institute, Viktoria Praschl of Tricentis, Frank Ohlhorst, principal analyst with Accelerated Strategies Group and Alex Hidalgo of Nobl9 to discuss how to use DevOps metrics effectively to improve delivery performance and help teams become high-performing with a culture of continuous improvement. The video is below and a transcript of the conversation follows.

Alan Shimel · Aug 15, 2021
Continuous Testing

EP 16: How DevOps has Changed Testing Forever

DevOps has changed the game in almost every aspect of testing: who, what, when, where and even why. What’s working, what needs to change immediately, and what challenges—and opportunities—lie ahead?

Alan Shimel · Aug 5, 2021
Continuous Testing

EP 15: Why Testing is so Frustrating

In this episode of DevOps Unbound, hosts Alan Shimel and Mitch Ashley are joined by Adam Kalsey of Tricentis, Brian Dawson of the Linux Foundation and Caroline Wong of Cobalt to discuss why testing is considered the most frustrating bottleneck for developers and engineers. Panelists will explain the benefits of testing early on in the SDLC and how to accelerate the feedback cycle with automated and continuous testing, as well the pros and cons of testing, the value of shift-left testing and how to effectively balance quality and speed. The video is below, followed by a transcript.

Alan Shimel · Aug 4, 2021
Blogs

Nolij Consulting Brings Expertise Beyond the Public Sector

Alan Shimel talks with Ashley Mehta, CEO and president of Nolij Consulting, about the company’s deep expertise in health care IT, digital health care transformation, testing and evaluation, and the use of emerging technologies to solve issues in the government IT space. Now, the company is going commercial, and Mehta explains how their expertise can […]

Alan Shimel · Aug 3, 2021
DevOps Culture

EP 14: What Have We Learned?

The past year-plus has brought disruption and opportunity to businesses and software teams all over the world. Change is inevitable, but 2020 was a year of massive change: businesses pivoted, supply chains were disrupted, customer expectations shifted to contactless services, digital transformation projects accelerated, new digital experiences were created, the move to the cloud jumped into high gear and our ability to create and deliver software was elevated to an essential capability for business.

Alan Shimel · Aug 3, 2021
Continuous Testing

EP 13: Observability and Performance Testing

In this episode of DevOps Unbound, Alan Shimel is joined by Christine Yen of Honeycomb, Paul Bruce of Tricentis and Mitch Ashley from ASG/MediaOps to discuss how to effectively test the performance of your applications and how bringing observability into testing environments helps DevOps teams identify and resolve issues early in the SDLC. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.

Alan Shimel · Aug 2, 2021
Business of DevOps

EP 12: DevOps Unicorns

What should you look for when choosing a DevOps vendor? What criteria are others in your industry using to inform their decisions? How do you choose a vendor that is a good fit for your organization? And how do you know if you made the right choice? In this episode of DevOps Unbound, host Alan Shimel welcomes Larry Maccherone of Comcast, John Willis of Red Hat, Ravyn Manuel of the Smithsonian, Garima Bajpai of Capital Carbon Consulting and Mitch Ashley of Accelerated Strategies Group for a panel on DevOps unicorns. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.

Alan Shimel · Jul 30, 2021
DevOps Culture

EP 11: Unburdening Developers

Every app development need seems to ultimately fall to developers to fulfill. Build in security. Shift testing left. Provide users cooler, more customized experiences at cloud speed and scale. And do it all faster, of course. How do we accommodate the rising expectations without burning out developers? What can other team members do to lighten the load and allow developers to focus on the creative work they require to thrive? In this episode of DevOps Unbound, hosts Alan Shimel and Mitchell Ashley are joined by panelists Adam Kalsey of Tricentis, Tracy Ragan of DeployHub and Justin Hutchings of GitHub to talk about unburdening developers.

Alan Shimel · Jul 29, 2021
Continuous Delivery

EP 10: Observability & Continuous Improvement

Observability at enterprise scale brings with it additional application life cycle management requirements. Success requires knowing which changes result in improvements and which don’t produce positive results and how that information must make it back to the DevOps team through feedback loops. In this episode of DevOps Unbound, Alan Shimel and Mitch Ashley talk with Kurt Chase, senior director, global release management at Tricentis, Charity Majors, co-founder at Honeycomb and Ravyn Manuel, senior application manager at the Smithsonian as they discuss observability and continuous improvement.

Alan Shimel · Jul 28, 2021
DevSecOps

JFrog, Vdoo Securing SecOps

Earlier this summer, JFrog acquired Vdoo to deliver end-to-end continuous security from development to device—is this what DevSecOps looks like? JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Hami and Natenel Davidi, CEO of Vdoo, speak with Alan Shimel about what the acquisition means and how this will change the way organizations approach DevSecOps. The video is below, followed […]

Alan Shimel · Jul 28, 2021
Blogs

Shopify Gives Devs More Creative Freedom

Shopify’s Unite 2021 conference was held on June 29, 2021, and the e-commerce platform had some big, developer-centric news to share. Alan Shimel spoke with Shopify’s Glen Coates about the developer-first business model that is giving developers the most opportunity to build their businesses with a new 0% revenue share model, and how developers can […]

Alan Shimel · Jul 27, 2021
DevOps Unbound Rountable

The Future of Cloud Testing

Roundtable 10: Cloud-native application development has helped organizations stay ahead by delivering faster time to market. The growth in cloud computing has also presented new testing challenges – traditional testing isn’t enough to address security holistically for cloud-native apps. Alan Shimel

Alan Shimel · Jun 16, 2021
Business of DevOps

ADOC: Assessing DevOps Culture

The Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC) is crowdsourced, vendor-neutral and designed for individuals, teams and organizations who want to baseline their current DevOps state, identify the next target state, gain insights into how to improve their organization and team capabilities and measure and accelerate continuous improvement during their DevOps journey. The assessment models five DevOps […]

Alan Shimel · Apr 22, 2021
Blogs

EP 9: The Road to GitOps

GitOps takes DevOps best practices for development and applies them to infrastructure automation. In short, GitOps delivers a hermetic, immutable deployment. So, is GitOps replacing DevOps?

Alan Shimel · Apr 8, 2021
Blogs

How lulu Became a Lemon: A Digital Transformation Fail

Many people sometimes have a tough time figuring out what exactly digital transformation is and why it’s so important. I want to tell you a real-life story of how a once-respected brand, lululemon, has failed the digital transformation journey and, as a result, may fail in a new retail landscape. The story starts innocently enough […]

Alan Shimel · Apr 7, 2021
Blogs

EP 8: Testing Is Not a Monolith

With DevOps comes implementation of CI/CD, automation and testing. Is this sufficient to achieve “shift left testing”? Or does testing need to shift further left? Do we need new or additional tests for acceptance (ATDD) or behavioral testing (BDD)?

Alan Shimel · Mar 30, 2021
Blogs

Celebrating the One-Year Anniversary of TechStrong TV

A year ago today, we started a new streaming project called “TechStrong TV” to provide the audience with an alternative source of information and entertainment, focused on delivering great tech content, during the unusual times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Little did we know back then what this would mean for all of us. In less […]

Alan Shimel · Mar 30, 2021
Blogs

Meet the Winners of the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards

This is the moment you have all been waiting for. It is time to announce the honorees for the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards, and we couldn’t be more excited to share the names of the most outstanding leaders and tools in the DevOps community. Although, I must say, all the finalists have done an amazing […]

Alan Shimel · Jan 22, 2021