Coté

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - if you build it, your customers might not come. Why? - Platform as a product!

The Unbundling of ChatGPT (Feb 2024 Recap) - AI is a feature, not a product.

Java 22: Making Java More Attractive for AI Apps/Workloads - “Java is embracing a minimalist approach by continuing to reduce ceremonies around writing initial steps of code, via instance main method and implicit classes, making it easier for folks to get started learning Java. With constructor makeover (statements before super[…]), Java has proven again that it supports responsible innovation, and relaxing language constraints that existed from Java’s version 1.0 without breaking any existing code."

The Justice Department Accuses Apple Of Smartphone Monopoly - ’When you’re as big as Apple, there’s a target on your back. The company’s market capitalization flirts with three trillion dollars, but more importantly, it commands a resounding 60%+ share of the smartphone market in the U.S. Therein lies the rub – our phones are the primary portal into how we live every moment of our waking (and sleeping) lives. What Apple chooses to allow or disallow has outsized implications for every provider hoping to get in through the portal and play a role in the digitally addicted lives of American consumers.’ And: “Apple’s obsession with its customer experience leads it to control the experience tightly, make decisions on its customers' behalf, and maintain an ecosystem that consistently delivers on the experience the brand promises. That philosophy limits choices for consumers. To that end, there is no dearth of people who are irked by this handcuffing and choose not to frolic in Apple’s walled garden. Then there are others who are part of the Apple family precisely because of the carefully managed ecosystem’s ease of use and intuitiveness."

From Here to GitOps and Back Again - GitOps as a feature of CI/CD.

A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn’t riding his first rodeo - “In organisations that are under antitrust pressure, ideas that might get put forward are held back, because people would rather not spend the time having them checked through legal and compliance teams. Acquisitions which a company might make don’t happen, because it would rather not appear rapacious or that it’s stifling nascent competition. And contractual clauses with partners can’t be as aggressive in locking them out of doing business in a way which doesn’t favour you."

Ex-technology companies. - “Organizations that spun up dedicated in-house build and deployment infrastructure have fixed engineering costs to maintain that infrastructure, and the math that convinced executives earlier–some sort of argument about the multiplicative effect on the impact of other engineers–doesn’t make as much sense anymore. But often you can’t just stop maintaining those investments, because that would require slowing down to decommission the existing systems, and ex-technology companies have little capacity for maintenance. Instead they’re focused on survival or roleplaying the motions of rapid product development despite actually spending the large majority of their time on maintenance.” // This is pretty great! Finally, a business strategy model for deciding build vs. buy. Look at the costs of building, running, and maintaining your own stack over (whatever, let’s pick a number) 3 to 5 years. Is it higher than buying, assuming revenue is single digit growth? Put another way, with software, it’s the maintenance that kills your numbers. // Also, to ponder: “They no longer believe they can change the business' outcomes through R&D efforts, and as a result they shouldn’t include engineering as a major stakeholder in business decisions."

How People Are Really Using GenAI - It makes jargon-based work more accessible, and complex things easier to understand. Also, just some everyday uses. And: an alternative to the garbage filled results you get from search, a way to filter the Internet. // “just 10% use ChatGPT which enjoys 60% market share regularly”

Late Night With the Devil: why people are boycotting the indie horror - “I’m not going to boycott an indie movie and the work of everyone else for what amounts to 20 seconds of AI title cards, because that doesn’t help artists either”

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty - “The Exit, Voice and Loyalty model states that members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change)."

First custom brand font for TJ Maxx built by McCann Design - ‘The Maxx typeface has a family of four weights and is apparently “chock-full of little gems in the Open Type features”. Typing out two X’s will bring up the option of the famous XX ligature that appears in the logo. There are also alternative shorter glyphs for the I and J, “to close the leading more naturally in tight typesetting”.'

101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago - “You are high in neuroticism, a trait that correlates with worse social relationships and an unhappier life. Sorry; there’s not much you can do about it other than be aware of it. Its saving grace is that it means you are attuned to what is wrong in the world and driven to fix it.” // Typical listical, but, sure, some fun stuff.

Battle of the Redis forks? - Commercialized open source is a mess right now…for the past ~3 years. Like other types of software, cloud has really been, uh, “transformative."

Untranslatable - “We’ll let him do a trial run for a week first, to see what kind of meat we have in the tub."

Coco’s Dispatch #67: Counterfeit Death Valley Pine Nuts at Kwik Mart - “I don’t believe in most recycling. I may believe in recycling cans, though I know it takes much higher heat to smelt. I may believe in non-intermingled paper pulp recycling. I may believe in glass recycling. I say may believe because I don’t know enough about it. It is possible it is all a sham. I do believe in French wine and the money it requires to buy it so I took a load of cans to my local recycling center on the way home from the swapmeet."

Content Editing: How To Handle Major Rewrites - Pretty detailed guide to editing (corporate) content that isn’t good enough.

Untranslatable - “We’ll let him do a trial run for a week first, to see what kind of meat we have in the tub."

Platform Maturity Model with Abby Bangser - Good framing: providing internal (dev) services to internal (dev) customers. (Abby has been doing a great job, devrel wise, in the past year+.)

How B2B Organizations Can Win With Younger Buyers - What the kids are up to. This feels like a description of youth of all generations. As the kids age in power, they both get tired, have their own kids, or otherwise just get tired and want to delegate, have help, or just coast. Until then: so much energy! So much flat hierarchy! So much energy! So much caring!

“Analogpunk, or, Tools, Shoes and Misery,” Bruce Sterling SXSW 2024) - He has a skill for turning mundane objects into lectures and relating them to culture. Put in direct link to MP3.

State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten - If you’re interested in how the Norwegian government is using cloud native stuff (like Kubernetes), this is a survey readout circa 2023/2024.

“Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms,” Kirsten Schwarzer, KubeCon EU, March, 2024. - - Good tour of applying design-think to platforms. That is, what do designers do on platform engineering teams. Some items: (1) Do at least one hour long user interview a week. This gives you an idea of what your users (developers) are doing, struggle with, how your improvements are helping or not, and give you data to decide what to do next. The last is especially useful for fending off The Boss and others who have suggestions that are not helpful: show them the data about what is, at least that you do things driven by analysis, not hunch. (2) Progressive disclosure - only show what people need for a given talk, not everything the tool can do. Can help with cognitive (over)load. (3) Errors are a good source for finding what’s wrong.

“Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking,” Samantha Coffman, KubeCon EU, March 2024.
A lot of good commentary and advice on product managing the platform, some techniques, mindsets, etc. Chief among them: focus on the value/problem you’re solving first, then how you solve it second…also trying to quantify what the problem is so you can measure if it’s fixed, and prioritize it.

Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! - Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware - How can you start to take a design/UX-driven approach to building your platform (you know, your pile of Kubernetes stuff to pull it all together for app developers)? Whitney Lee & Abby Bangser have a good mind-model to think about designing the interfaces (how people use parts of that stack). Thinking through how you design your platform “interfaces” for app developers is especially important if you’re building your own stack instead of buying one of the already integrated ones.

“We gave a profession of bullshit generators access to GPT-4. You won’t believe what happened next.” - If the work you’re doing is predictable - in this case, a lot of the junior level work at management consulting firms to come up with new strategies and GTM - the AI can help. The positive side: if you’re considering getting the consulting firms to bootstrap your annual planning, try a week with ChatGPT instead and see if it feels the same. Then don’t hire them, as much? Also, the AI is good at hype-marketing.

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol