Mark Burgess on Promises Best of 2015

The Business901 Podcast of the year was a two part series Designing through Promises & Designing through Promises, Part 2 with Mark Burgess as the guest.

The Transcription of the Podcast can be found at The Theory of a Promise

Mark Burgess

Mark Burgess is perhaps best known as the author of the popular configuration management software package  CFEngine, but has also made important contributions to the theory of the field of automation and policy based management, including the idea of operator convergence and promise theory. CFEngine was formed in 2008 and Burgess took a leave of absence from the University in 2009 to work closely with the appreciative users of CFEngine, and implement the fruits of past research into the software. At this time, he also branched into the field of Knowledge Management. Mark Burgess has been involved in a number of Free and Open Source projects, including:

  • CFEngine (principal author)Thinking in Promises
  • CASE: A scientific computing simulator for cellular automata.
  • Fault Cat: fault tree analysis software (project manager)
  • Archipelago: Network analyser
  • The GNU C Tutorial (principal author)

Mark is the author of numerous books, articles, and papers on topics from physics, Network and System Administration, to fiction. His new book is Thinking in Promises and which was the topic of last week and this week. The first podcast gave some history and background on the subject. while this podcast is more directed at applying the Promise Theory.

I would like to mention that the association with Mark was a result of another podcast with Jeff Sussna. Jeff’s podcast and transcription can be found at Digital Services.