having worked in a government agency that ditched IBM, let me offer a view of what that looks like from the customer side:
IBM bought a company whose product we'd been using for a while, and had a perpetual license for. A few years after the purchase, IBM tried to slip a clause into a support renewal that said we were "voluntarily" agreeing to revoke the perpetual license and move to a yearly per-seat license. Note: this was in a contract with the government, for support, not for the product itself. They then tried to come after us for seat licenses costs. Our lawyers ripped them apart, as you can't add clauses about licensing for software to a services contract, and we immediately tore out the product and never paid IBM another dime.
I tell this story not to be all "cool story, bro", but to point out that IBM does focus on renewal growth, but they're not geniuses...they're just greedy assholes who sometimes push for growth in really stupid ways.
Until passkeys can pass the test of "my non-technical friends and family don't call me for help about them", passkeys aren't ready. Vendors keep making assumptions about how users behave which are not safe assumptions, and that keeps blowing up the interactions of non-technical users. (I'm sure there's an "assumptions developers make about user accounts" blog out there somewhere.)
For example, my family has had to call me for help on the interaction between passkeys on Apple & Amazon multiple times. They have a shared Amazon account, which neither Amazon nor Apple seem to like. The first problem came when they didn't even know they'd been moved to passkeys - there was a popup that one of them didn't understand, they clicked OK to get it to go away, and suddenly the other partner can't log in, and neither of them can figure out how to log into Prime Video on their AppleTV. Another time one of them got "nudged" to add a fingerprint to the account, again freezing out the other person.
Until that nonsense stops happening, Passkeys aren't ready.
It's funny, I started with rPis for the same reason, but I'm about to replace them. I bought 20 rPi 4Bs for my homelab, and I just couldn't get them to do what I needed. I was looking to run a home k8s cluster and the Pis were just not suited to it at all (don't use sd storage for k8s 'cause it'll burn out the card w/writes, booting off usb was unstable even with powered usb hubs, netboot turned into an enormous pain in the neck).
DomainTools (domaintools.com) is hiring for multiple positions. We’re a mid-sized security company whose goal is to make the internet a safer place. Our part of that (enormous) job is knowing everything we can know about the Internet’s DNS (where domains resolve, who registered them, etc), to help security teams investigate malicious sites/pages/etc. The positions we’ve got open are remote, but limited to North America (US and Canada already, could probably figure out Mexico). The positions are:
* Senior Software Engineer - Cloud & DevOps Platform - This position will research, develop and deliver cloud automation using tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo, Vault, and Kafka. This position is basically building the base that the other engineering teams deploy onto, with the goal to make everyone's lives easier and more consistent.
* Full Stack Software Engineer, Integrations - This position will work with our product and engineering teams to integrate our data into other security products (Splunk, for example). It will touch a very diverse cross-section of the tools in the security space, as DomainTools wants to make sure our data is easily usable in a wide variety of places that teams may want to use it in. The position primarily works in python and Javascript, but may use others as needed (or customer/application requires).
* Senior Software Engineer and Software Developer Engineer-2 - These two positions are on the team I've been part of for the past 2 years. They're on the backend team, building systems to collect data about the entire internet (track the state of all domain names on the 'net, take screenshots of all of them, etc). The teams work primarily in python and golang, deploying services to kubernetes.
* Systems Engineer - This position is with our TechOps team, supporting the operation of our on-prem and cloud applications. This position supports production systems using Cassandra, Kafka, ElasticSearch, Linux, etc.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them. If you feel like any of these sound interesting but are a stretch for you, drop me a line at ageeclough ..at.. domaintools.com, I’d love to talk with you.
DomainTools (domaintools.com) is hiring for multiple positions. We’re a mid-sized security company whose goal is to make the internet a safer place. Our part of that (enormous) job is knowing everything we can know about the Internet’s DNS (where domains resolve, who registered them, etc), to help security teams investigate malicious sites/pages/etc. The positions we’ve got open are remote. The positions are:
* Software Engineer - Cloud & DevOps Platform - This position will research, develop and deliver cloud automation using tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo, Vault, and Kafka. This position is basically building the base that the other engineering teams deploy onto, with the goal to make everyone's lives easier and more consistent.
* Integrations Engineer - This position will work with our product and engineering teams to integrate our data into other security products (Splunk, for example). It will touch a very diverse cross-section of the tools in the security space, as DomainTools wants to make sure our data is easily usable in a wide variety of places that teams may want to use it in. The position primarily works in python and Javascript, but may use others as needed (or customer/application requires).
* Senior Software Engineer and Software Developer Engineer-2 - These two positions are on the team I've been part of for the past 2 years. They're on the backend team, building systems to collect data about the entire internet (track the state of all domain names on the 'net, take screenshots of all of them, etc). The teams work primarily in python and golang, deploying services to kubernetes.
* Systems Engineer - This position is with our TechOps team, supporting the operation of our on-prem and cloud applications. This position supports production systems using Cassandra, Kafka, ElasticSearch, Linux, etc.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them. If you feel like any of these sound interesting but are a stretch for you, drop me a line at ageeclough ..at.. domaintools.com, I’d love to talk with you.
IBM bought a company whose product we'd been using for a while, and had a perpetual license for. A few years after the purchase, IBM tried to slip a clause into a support renewal that said we were "voluntarily" agreeing to revoke the perpetual license and move to a yearly per-seat license. Note: this was in a contract with the government, for support, not for the product itself. They then tried to come after us for seat licenses costs. Our lawyers ripped them apart, as you can't add clauses about licensing for software to a services contract, and we immediately tore out the product and never paid IBM another dime.
I tell this story not to be all "cool story, bro", but to point out that IBM does focus on renewal growth, but they're not geniuses...they're just greedy assholes who sometimes push for growth in really stupid ways.