Technology

The new Netflix series &The Haunting of Hill House& is based on the classic Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, but fans will probably have a better time if they put the book out of their mind.

Yes, the show opens with the same famous passage that begins the novel, and show and book characters have some similarities. But what writer-director Mike Flanagan has really done is use Jacksonsinister house as the setting for a new story, focused the Crain family — driven from the house by mysterious events back in 1992, and drawn back there due to present-day tragedy.

On this episode of the Original Content podcast, we&re joined (just in time for Halloween) by Devin Coldewey just in time to offer our initial impressions of the show. While we had some reservations (get ready for the most extensive discussion of fill lights that you&ll ever hear on this podcast), itclear that &The Haunting of Hill House& managed to scare the heck out of all of us, and we were also impressed by the fact that each of the five Crain children becomes a distinct, memorable character in their own right.

If thatnot enough to convince you, italso worth watching the show for all the hidden ghosts, and for the formal ambition of episode six, with its long, single-take scenes that span the past and the present.

In addition to our review, we discuss the release of &Red Dead Redemption 2& and the announcement that WarnerMedia will be shutting down its FilmStruck service for classic films.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

After rumours flew around this weekend, IBM today confirmed that it would acquire open source, cloud software business Red Hat for $190 per share in cash, working out to a total value of $34 billion. IBM saidthe deal has already been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat but is still subject to Red Hat shareholder and regulatory approvals. If all goes as planned, the acquisition is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.

The deal is all about IBM — which has long continued to rely on its legacy server business — taking a bigger bet on the cloud, and very specifically cloud services that blend on-premises and cloud-based architectures — something that the two companies have already been working on together since May of this year (which now might be looked at as a test drive). Red Hat will be a distinct unit within IBMHybrid Cloud team — which is already a $19 billionbusiness for IBM, the company said — and it will continue to focus on open-source software.

&The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market,& said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, in a statement. &IBM will become the worldnumber-one hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.&

The combined businesses will be able to offer software in services spanningLinux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation, IBM said. IBM also added that together the companies will continue to build partnerships with multiple cloud providers, including AWS, MicrosoftAzure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and others, alongside the IBMCloud.

While companies like Amazon have gone all-in on cloud, in many cases, a lot of enterprises are making the move gradually — IBM cites stats that estimate that some80 percent of business workloads &have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of todaycloud market.& Buying Red Hat will help IBM better tap into an opportunity to address that.

&Most companies today are only 20 percent along their cloud journey, renting compute power to cut costs,& she continued. &The next 80 percent is about unlocking real business value and driving growth. This is the next chapter of the cloud. It requires shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimizing every part of the business, from supply chains to sales.&

On top of that, it will give IBM a much stronger footing in open source software, the core of what Red Hat builds and deploys today.

&Open source is the default choice for modern IT solutions, and I&m incredibly proud of the role Red Hat has played in making that a reality in the enterprise,& said Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO, Red Hat, in a statement. &Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience & all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation.&

While IBM competes against the likes of Amazon, the companies will see to remain partners with them with this acquisition. &IBM is committed to being an authentic multi-cloud provider, and we will prioritize the use of Red Hat technology across multiple clouds& said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, IBM Hybrid Cloud, in a statement. &In doing so, IBM will support open source technology wherever it runs, allowing it to scale significantly within commercial settings around the world.&

IBM said that Red Hat will add to its revenue growth, gross margin and free cash flow within 12 months of closing.

Building web services and smartphone apps, which is most of what I&ve been doing professionally at HappyFunCorp¹ for the last decade or so, used to be pretty straightforward. Not easy, but straightforward, especially when the client was a consumer startup, which so many of them were.

The more we did the better we got at it. Design and write two native apps, usually iOS first and Android second. Don&t skimp on the design. Connect them to a JSON API, usually written in Ruby on Rails, which also powered the web site. Therealways a web site; consumers might only see the side which is a minimal billboard for the app, but thereessentially always also an admin site, to control features and aspects of the app.

Design isn&t as important for the admin site, so you can build that in something crude but effective like ActiveAdmin; why roll your own Similarly, authentication is tricky and easy to get wrong, so use something like Devise, which comes with built-in hooks to Facebook and Twitter login. Design your database carefully. Use jQuery for dynamic in-browser manipulation since raw Javascript is such a nightmare. Argue about whether to use Rspec or Minitest for your server tests.

All there OK, roll it out to your Heroku scaling environment, so you can simply &git push& to push to staging and production, with various levels of Postgres support, autoscaling, pipelines, Redis caching, Resque worker jobs, and so forth. If ita startup, keep them on Heroku to see if they catch on, if they find the fabled product-market fit, not least because it helps you iterate faster. If so, at some point you have to graduate them to AWS, because Heroku only scales so far and it does so very expensively. If not, well, &fail fast,& right

Those were the days, my friends, those halcyon, long-gone days of (checks notes) five years ago. The days of a lot of grief, sure, but very little decision complexity. The smartphone boom was on, and the web boom was settling down, and everyone was still surfing those two tidal waves.

Today Well, today we still are, neither of those waves have broken, per se, software is still eating the world, but things are … different. More of the world is being eaten, but italso happening more slowly, like growing 50% a year from a $1 billion base rather than 500% from $1 million. There are fewer starry-eyed founders with an app idea that they&re sure will change the world and funding enough to give it a shot. Those are still out there, sure, and more power to them, but the landscape is more complex, now.

Instead we see more big businesses, media and industrial and retail alike, realizing they must adapt and be devoured, experimenting with new tech projects with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Or requisitioning custom apps for very specific — but very useful — purposes, and requiring them to interface with their awkward pre-existing custom middleware just so. Or tech companies, even big household-name ones, outsourcing ancillary tools and projects in order to focus their in-house teams purely on their core competencies and business models. Our mix of clients has definitely shifted more towards enterprise in the last few years.

Which is not to say that startups don&t still come through our doors with bright ideas and inspiring PowerPoints on a fairly regular basis. As do super starry-eyed blockchain founders (granted, I&m sometimes a bit starry-eyed about blockchains myself) replacing the consumer-app founders of yore. I doubt we&re alone in having had a spate of blockchain startup projects late last year and early this, which has diminished to only a couple active at the moment. (Not least because the tooling is still so crude it reminds me of 90s command-line hacking.) But I strongly doubt that sphere is going away.

We haven&t dealt with as many AI projects as I would have expected by now, probably partly because AI talent is still so scarce and highly valued, and partly because it turns out a lot of seeming &AI& work can be done with simple linear regressions rather than by building and training and tuning deep-learning neural networks… although if you do those linear regressions with TensorFlow, itstill &AI& buzzword-compliant, right Right

Most of all, though, the tools we use have changed. Nowadays when you want to build an app, you have to ask yourself: really native (Java or Kotlin Objective-C or Swift) Or React Native Or Xamarin Or Googlenew Flutter thing When you want to build a web site, you have to think: traditional Or single-page, with React or Angular or Vue As for the server — Go is a lot faster than Rails, you know, and oh, that elegant concurrency handling, but, oh, where is my map/filter/reduce Javascript is still a clumsy language, but there are certain advantages to having one language across the stack, and Node is powerful and package-rich these days. And of course you&ll want it all containerized, because while Docker definitely adds another layer or two of configuration complexity, itusually worth it.

Unless you want to go fully &serverless,& at least for aspects, with Amazon Lambda or Google Firebase Even if you don&t use Firebase for a datastore, how about for authentication, huh And if you&re all containerized, and Kubernetized if/as appropriate, though maybe letnot go the many-microservices route until you&re sure your product-market fit justifies it, then where do you want to roll it out, AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or Digital Ocean Or do you want to use one of their PaaS services, like App Engine or Beanstalk, which, like Heroku, sorta kinda live between &serverless& and &bare metal virtual machines&

I oversimplify, but you get my point. We&ve never had more options, as developers, more tools available to us … and we&ve never had to struggle more with analysis paralysis, because itawfully hard to determine which of the possible toolsets is the best one for any particular situation. Sometimes — often — we have to be happy with just selecting a good one. And that selection problem doesn&t look like itgoing to get easier anytime soon, I&m afraid. Ita strange time to be a coder. We live and work all tangled up in an embarrassment of riches.

¹Yes, thatreally our name. No, this TC column isn&t a full-time gig. (Which is something people frequently assume, because itso much more visible and to some people writing a column every week sounds like a lot of work, but no, I&m really a CTO.)