Mark Burgess - Digging Away at Human-Machine Systems

I’m so thrilled! My guest for tonight is Mark Burgess - a “technologist, scientist and author, specializing in the physics of Information Systems” (quoted from Mark’s website).

Mark is probably best known to the IT crowd as the man who defined the ideas behind desired-state configuration management and the creator of the CFEngine CM tool that predated Puppet, Chef and Ansible and is still in use at quite a number of companies.

But for me Mark is first and foremost the creator of the Promise Theory which provides a new outlook on how effective collaboration between free agents occurs in complex systems.

I was thrilled and humbled to have Mark as my guest because his ideas and their implications are omnipresent in the systems we build and those we’re part of.

Listen to the episode to learn:

• What’s the connection between physics and information

• Why IT moves so slowly

• If playing with Kubernetes can make society a better place

If you find Mark’s ideas as fascinating as I do - make sure to check out his latest book Smart SpaceTime and a documentary series “Bigger, Faster, Smarter” on Youtube.

And if you really want to benefit from Mark’s deep understanding of complexity - he’s also providing consultancy to large IT organizations looking to adapt their systems and processes to the changing reality of our tumultuous world.

The episode is live on:

• Anchor.fm

• Spotify

• Youtube - also embedded at the bottom of this post.

Watch out for new episodes!

This episode is once again made possible by Otomato Software Ltd. - providers of Cloud-Native DevOps Knowledge and Services. Get in touch for:

• Developer Advocacy and Product Strategy
• Cloud Native Infrastructure Services and Training
• DevOps Acceleration

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