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What’s This Docker All About?  

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Back in 1998, a small company called VMware was the first to successfully virtualize the x86 infrastructure, and in 2004 it became a part of EMC. Today, virtualization is as commonplace as The Phoenix Project books on the bookshelves of IT workers. Many organizations and service providers rely on virtualized environment to run their workloads, and VMware’s technology saved their customers’ huge sums of money they would to otherwise use to buy additional hardware. In the last 16 years, technology has come a long way, bringing with it new requirements to deploy applications quickly, across any device, platform, or cloud infrastructure.

Enter Docker. Founded in 2013 as a side project at dotCloud, Docker allows developers to “containerize” their applications, and run processes in isolation. That means that the app no longer needs to rely on an operating system or disk &etc. Docker still runs on a Linux kernel, however, everything else is completely isolated and independent of the operating system. Docker now works across many public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Rackspace and others.

What does this all mean to all of us? Well, for one thing, it will make applications even more portable, developers and DevOps engineers will be able to quickly and easily move applications from public to private clouds, from on-premise to someone’s laptop. Second, it will be easier to engineer fast application deployment. Thirdly, it will allow even more resource optimization, taking the next step of VMware started 16 years ago.

Are we living in an app-driven world? Absolutely. And Docker, valued at around $400m, is living proof.

Shorter, More Productive Meetings: Yeah there’s an app for that

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Less Meeting is an app that works with Outlook or through your web browser.  Like it’s name suggests, the app is geared towards making business meetings more productive and thus having them less frequently.

Step One: Setting Up

This app allows you to sync your calendars across various platforms including your Google Calendar and iCalander.  Selected contacts can then be invited and reminded of meetings.  Well begun is half done, as they say.

After you meeting time set, the app allows you to fill out a short outline of what you want to cover.

Step Two: Setting Limits

Probably one of the most intriguing aspects of Less Meeting is the workplace culture that it tries to create.  Meetings are designed to have a thirty minute limit.  Metrics allow you to measure what everyone is done who is attending the meetings.

For example, any notes taken or documents submitted are tracked centrally.  This allows the person running the meeting to see productivity during the meeting.  Thus, the best practices can be deciphered.  Like how Jim needs to be sent two reminders for every meetings because one just isn’t enough.

Step Three: Be More Efficient

Less Meeting has plenty of built in typing shortcuts so you can take notes more quickly.  It’s a little clunky at first, but as time goes on it goes better.  As stated before, all notes are tracked so they can be easily organized and presented.  These notes can be exported via e-mail.

Step Four: Follow up

Meetings are ends in and of themselves.  They’re tools to make sure things get done.  Less Meetings has a follow up feature.  You can assign tasks based on the notes taken during the meeting and send to-do lists to various employees.

After the lists are send, your employees can then write back saying that they have completed their tasks or require clarification or help, etc.

Step Five: Go Forth

Meetings are always going to be a drag.  With the Less Meeting App, maybe they’ll be less of a drag.  The pricing is based on the number of users, ranging from $12-8 a month.