Terminal Velocity

Jonni Bidwell once again provokes readers   by fraternising with a Microsoft employee,   the ever-knowledgeable James Turnbull.

- Jonni Bidwel

James Turnbull is CTO of Microsoft’s Startup Advocacy team and a veteran of the open source world. He’s also a co-chair of the Velocity conference where, in October 2018, he was good enough to take the time to talk to us.

This is his second time in Linux Format, having graced the pages of lXF194 while he was VP of Services at Docker. This time around he talked about his days as a Bash ninja, his work with educational start-up Empatico and, of course, the new, opensource-friendly Microsoft.

Linux Format: How long have you been involved with the Velocity conference?

James Turnbull: I’ve been coming to Velocity for seven years, I think. And I’ve been a Chair of the conference for about three and half years.

LXF: So I get to spend my day at Velocity chatting to people a lot smarter than me, and probably more interesting than me too, so what am I missing, what’s going out there?

JT: Well, we try and have a vague theme every year, Velocity Europe this year focuses a bit strongly on ethics, particularly in technology. A lot of stuff’s happened in the industry in the last 12-18 months and a lot of technology firms are evaluating how they do business and who they do business with. We decided that was an interesting topic worth focusing on. We’re traditionally an engineering-centric sort of conference, and in our view it’d be good to get the engineers who build these products exposed to some ideas and information about how to apply some of the ethical frameworks and principles, what they should be thinking about.

LXF: You’ve just started a new job at Microsoft. Congratulations.

JT: Thanks. Yup, I’ve been there all of a month now.