Mostly Cloudy: How tech gets built in the 21st century

Update 2/2023: I forgot this page existed during this new era of Mostly Cloudy!

I am currently writing this completely free newsletter while evaluating my next steps, and have no plans to start charging for it here right now. But read on to see how I was originally thinking about this space back in the summer of 2019 when I first launched this newsletter, and read this for an update on where things stand now.

Original “About” post follows below:

This fundamental shift in how companies buy and manage the computing resources needed to do business in the 21st century will be a 12-figure business in 2019, according to IDC, but that $210 billion remains a small fraction of the $3.79 trillion that Gartner expects will be spent on information technology services in 2019. Much of that larger number includes communication services and consulting fees, but there’s no doubt that companies born on or around the cloud are poised to capture a huge slice of a market previously enjoyed by traditional IT vendors.

I’ve long believed this growing community of software developers, systems engineers, product managers, executives, startup founders, and venture capitalists has been underserved when it comes to finding news and analysis about their livelihoods that is technically sound and marketing resistant.

Welcome to Mostly Cloudy.

I’ve been writing and editing stories about technology for the last 18 years, starting at IDG and continuing at CNET, paidContent, and Gigaom, where I reacquired the enterprise computing bug as Executive Editor of a team that truly understood why cloud computing is such a historic shift in thinking.

A few twists and turns later, and here we are. At launch, Mostly Cloudy will be a bi-weekly roundup of cloud computing news mixed with original content, analysis, bad jokes, and occasional looks at other parts of the technology landscape that have an impact on all of us.

This newsletter will focus mostly on the services sold by the Big Three public cloud providers and the impact cloud computing has had on the practice of software development. Expect to also hear about hardware, open source, enterprise software trends, promising startups, emerging technologies, and maybe even the blockchain on a slow week.

At the moment, the plan is to publish on Tuesday afternoons and Saturday mornings, with Tuesday’s edition serving as a quick catch-up for anything you missed to start the week and Saturday’s envisioned as a more expansive view of the current state of affairs. Those plans are subject to change, because just like all of us at the beginning of something, I’m winging it.

Mostly Cloudy will be free through the rest of the summer, the least cloudy season of the year in the Pacific Northwest. Starting the Tuesday after Labor Day, subscriptions will cost $10 a month, but I’ll publish a mix of free and subscriber content after the meter starts running.

After almost two decades in the tech media business, I’ve come to believe that the only way to deliver quality professional content in the 21st century is to focus on an important topic and retain control of how that content is distributed. Readers should be customers, not products sold to advertisers, and subscriptions allow writers to treat them as such.

I hope to earn your business in the interim with a mix of content that people who want to truly understand the cloud industry won’t find anywhere else. You can subscribe to Mostly Cloudy below, and please tell your friends, enemies, colleagues, and fellow commuters how to find it.

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To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.