Check out our Cloud Native Services and book a call with one of our experts today! 

Visionaries, Rebels and Machines

From the first sparks of electrification to the dawn of artificial intelligence, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines is a rip-roaring adventure through the history of technology.

483157_Dobson_Visionaries_PB_Front Panel

Sign up now for a free taste of the book. You will receive chapters 1, 14 and 16 free to your inbox.

* indicates required

Container Solutions is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us. From time to time, we would like to contact you about our products and services, as well as other content that may be of interest to you.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices.

We have collected three chapters from Jamie’s book, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. The first is the prologue, ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was Jeff’s’, which asks the question, how did an on-line bookstore, labelled by analysts as Amazon.toast, escape the dot com crash and go onto invent cloud computing? Why did Jeff scream out, ‘developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy’?

The second free chapter, ‘Talent Density’, described by one reviewer as ‘delicious’, focuses on the ‘algorithm’ for getting talent right and the road to Damascus insight, Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO and co-founder had which changed everything.

Finally, the third free chapter is ‘The secret life of teams’. Why do some teams thrive whilst others falter? What is the code that managers have been trying to crack for over a century? Picking up where Carl Rogers left off in the 1960s, a Harvard professor cracks the code to high productivity at companies like Google and lets the whole computing community in on the secret but there is a problem - the incompetent men who run most companies don’t think the secret applies to them.

"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the profound impact of technology on our lives and the leaders who dared to dream."

- Philippe Ensarguet, VP Software Engineering, Orange

"As well as providing an informative history, Jamie Dobson draws out the lessons we can learn from how things developed and suggests how they might apply in the era of AI."

- Steve Freeman, Principal Engineer, Gousto

"More than just a book on tech history, this is an enjoyable journey through the failure-fuelled cultures that powered innovation, ultimately leading to the cloud and AI. Thoroughly engaging and thought provoking." 

- Daniel Vaughn, Director of Software Engineering, Mastercard

"This is an entertaining romp through the history of technology, telling the stories of key people to illustrate fundamental principles along the way."

- Adrian Cockcroft, former cloud architect at Netflix and AWS

About the author

jamie headshot

Jamie Dobson

Jamie is the co-founder and first chief executive of Container Solutions. A first encounter with a BBC computer and BASIC at the age of nine launched his lifelong passion for programming and software development. Nowadays he focuses on helping executive teams to succeed with the cloud and cloud native, helping them to avoid classic mistakes.