Suggested theme song:
Current Status
I am a big fan of not “talking about the show on the show,” but, obviously, in the little nerd-corner of the Internet that I mostly exist in, there’s a big export of people from Twitter to Mastodon. I setup two accounts there: @cote@hachyderm.io which is my “person” account and my cross-posting firehose account. The first is, you know, me. The [second, @cote@cote.io, is just auto-posting of my blog](https://micro.blog/cote?remote_follow=1) (this could be demarcation’ed better, but, whatever).
So, follow me there if you’re into that.
Also, migrating my blog is more or less done, same great URL taste at cote.io. I need to go go and make sure my long form writing is sucked out of WordPress, but, whatever. That stuff has been lost in the stacks for years.
BCN, VMware Explore EU, platform engineering at BFBs
I’m going on a long trip to Barcelona for VMware Explore EU 2022 next week. I’ve got a great talk with a co-worker and Mercedes-Benz there on “7 years of platform engineering." There’ll be a recording at some point that I’ll put in there.
When it comes to platform engineering, I’m trying to balance two things:
- Not being the “you fucking kids get off my DevOps-lawn” person and, instead, take the idea on its own terms and figure out how it can help the overall goal of making software better and making the lives of people who build and run it better.
- Making the point that my work Pivotal/VMware Tanzu has been doing this for 10+ years and we and the customers we help have best practices, worst practices, and other “learnings” to contribute.
To that end, I think this episode of Tanzu Talk is really good. I talk with one of my co-workers who did platform engineering at UBS, you know, a BFB (big fucking bank):
Also, available in podcast form for when you’re washing the dishes.
Developer Toil Jargon Watch - “golden path.”
Right now, the favorite phrase is “golden path.” In 2020, Spotify defined it “The Golden Path — as we define it today — is the ‘opinionated and supported’ path to ‘build something.” Earlier, people like Netflix would say “paved paths," and all the way back to 90s agile think, you have desire paths.
Waste Book
- Most meetings should probably always be an hour. If you could do it in less, it likely should just be an email thread or Slack chat.
- Judging people based on how they make you feel, not how they actually are.
- “He smiled at me. And I saw the lines where other smiles had been.” The Story of Achilles. Ever the perfect characterization of Odysseus.
- Focus more on getting better at what you’re already doing instead of radically changing everything.
- “Hey, let’s not worry about Adventure Man right now.”
- Whether or not you know what you’re doing, you’re doing it.
- Work doesn’t take a vacation.
- Words are Fun.
- Thought-leaders like to recommend burning the boat. But most people are still in the boat and have no easy egress.
- Every time I download I .wepd file, I’m like, “really? Now I have to deal with this shit.”
My content
- Don’t be a cheap-ass:
- This will be published as a Tanzu Talk podcast episode soon, but in the meantime you can see me talk about Backstage with The Frontside. They’ve built a business doing implementation with some big companies so they’re some of the handful of people who are figuring out what Backstage is and how it make it valuable. I mean, there must be only, what 100 or 200 people in the world like that?
- Software Defined Talk #384: KubeCon NA 2022 Recap - Matt reports in from Detroit with all the news at KubeCon NA 2022. Plus, some tips on proper etiquette when stretching on International Flights.
- Software Defined Talk #385: Armchair Strategist - This week we discuss Cloud Growth Rates, Corporate Security, Meta’s Strategy and Elon’s Twitter Takeover. Plus, some thoughts on bike locks and a parenting post mortem.
Relevant to your interests
- Slow Work and Plain Chant – An Apology for the Failed Life - “Whatever it is you achieve, you do so almost involuntarily, by stalagtital accretion; there is no sense of anything getting done.” And: “Ours is not an ornamental age. It is not an age fitted out for Slow Work. Rather this is an age for thrift and economy in which the need to have done or to be seen to have done has triumphed over the need merely to be doing. If you are doing, then you are not done. We are what we accomplish and for the most part we accomplish nothing. Ornament, in this context, is a disease, a pathology of form, an encrustation of gothic irrelevance.”
- [How To Photograph Homes At Night Like](Todd Hido) - youtube.com/watch Pretty fantastic for #liminalspaces fans (like me).
- IDC- Transforming Workloads Through Application Modernization - “IDC estimates that there are 500 million legacy applications in use around the world. The vast majority are found on x86 servers, with most running on virtual machines (VMs).”
- Meta Myths – Stratechery by Ben Thompson - So…things are…actually just fine…?
- 🚴 Sentinel S60 Smart bicycle lock - I like this lock, but it’s worth more than my actual bike.
- Swordfish90/cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display… - This is for when you need to break the mainframe encryption.
- Grounding Twitter Ad Dollars Is Common Sense, Not Activism -
- A Birthday Surprise RedMonk reflections - I was hired as the first not founder analyst at RedMonk in 2005, and worked there until 2011. It was an amazing job and I’m so, so lucky that Stephan and James took a chance on me.
- Cutting the Strings: Staying Lean in a SAFe Organization - Little changes to do lean software development in a SAFe organization.
- Decompose monoliths using business workflows - Really nice, but brief overview of how SWIFT thinking worked to modernize an application for prescription refills.
- Open-source software fosters innovation, but only with the right controls in place - I talk a little bit about managing your open source usage: security isn’t really a big deal if you put in place policy and tools, pick thriving communities, and the value of giving developers choice.
- DATEV slices up their monolith - The slicing up the monolith works! ‘The Tanzu Labs approach enabled DATEV eG to quickly undertake the refactoring by modernizing the system “slice by slice,” using microservices and APIs. The new slice can be built, tested and deployed to production while the original system continues to run, eliminating business interruptions for clients.’
- Singapore to phase out checks by 205 - It often feels like so much innovation in finance is just about getting around to changing crusty old thing, not cool apps.
- Q&A: How CIOs Can Defend Against Damaging IT Budget Cuts - Asking for budget cuts assumes you’re doing too much already. You’re wasting money. To cut budgets means to do less, or to degrade services. This isn’t often the case after years of cuts. So, you’ve got to ask the cutters what they want to get rid of, and try to make that their informed decision: “ask your stakeholders to identify the IT services they believe cost more than they are worth. Together, investigate the business impact of cutting or withdrawing IT services to validate requirements, and balance the risks of service reduction or removal with the cost of risk mitigation. In this scenario, stakeholders have all the information to make an informed decision.”
- Cutting R&D to Grow GTM Spend : Is it Happening Across Software Companies? - “R&D as a percent of revenue across all public software companies increased from 24% to 28% in the last six years.”
- Russell Davies: Make things bigger Part One - YES. I AGREE.
- GREG ISENBERG on Twitter: “I asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 199 year old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves Their list of the questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career Ask yourselves these questions today." - I often feel like I no longer know what I want in life. This is a question therapists ask you a lot, and my response is often “if I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”
- Six Common Friction Points in the Developer Journey - “The six points of friction we see most often are: Poor technical documentation; Lack of a developer portal; Lack of an official forum or community space; Mandatory commitments (e.g., Entering contact information) to access resources; Lack of GitHub repo descriptions; Insufficient trial periods.” It’s about vendor developer relations, but this could apply to internal developer portals/internal software at an enterprise as well.
- 8 types of edge computing from Gartner - Not much text, but a diagram.
- Applying Golden Path - Using lean/MVP think to find and then refine the golden path to production.
More fun with caption generation.
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