American Christmas, part 2Stores that are open on Sunday, and don’t close until 9pm. People saying “sorry” for no reason. Bagels. Top sheets. Ceiling fans. HVAC. Warmth from the sun. Massive amounts of water in toilets. Bottle caps that come all the way off. Colby jack. Cheddar. Ritz crackers. Crushed ice from your home refrigerator. Oceans of lotions: ten versions of every product (sometime more than ten). 45mph. Self-service checkout machines that insist in weighing every grocery.

We throw around the term “waste” a lot in software. It’s been around since the 2000s, at least since the Poppendieck’s book Lean Software Development. DevOps really took it and ran with it, it was renamed “toil” in SRE, and now the concept is pretty solidly part of how we think of software. Italked with Steve Pereira on what “waste” means exactly. We talked about value stream maps as well, another concept that’s so common that we don’t define it much anymore.

Only In AmericanStill warm tortillas. Adults wearing joke t-shirts. Yoga pants. Free packets of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. Ice with every drink. 75 mph. Stern TSA. Little plastic shopping bags. No GDPR pop-ups. 20% tips before checkout. Donuts. Right turn on red. Ice machine in fridge. Very big bowls. Eggs in the fridge California wine. Closed blinds. Toilet next to bathtub/shower combo. Formal dining room. Formal living room. The soothing hum of lawnmowers in the distance.

The discussion below was fun: we starting talking about alignment ambiguity in Dungeons and Dragons, then went to the role of tech debt in large organizations, and threw in some “this meeting could have been an email” like thinking at the end. Check it out! WastebookI’m super busy right now. I’ve got a lot of stuff to not be doing. Alternate: I’ve got stuff to not be doing, I’m kind of busy right now.

I really liked my co-worker Paul Kelly’s post on this topic, plus some anti-patterns. So I made the video above! You may recall him from a discussion with Cora and me a few months back as well. Even if you don’t deign to watch my silly shit above, you should check out his post. Relative to your interestsIs the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster? - “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

I’ve played solo D&D with ChatGPT for three months. It’s not that great at the pure mechanics (for example, combat), but it has some great uses. This video is a little screwed up, but the audio is fine, and the content is even better…if I don’t say so myself! Relative to your interestsCoincidently for me, there’s been a few things on remote work versus return to office. Gartner Outlines Three Ways Organizations Can Successfully Motivate Employees Back Into the Office - Summary: prove that it’s more productive to be in the office than working online.

Update: here’s a newer prompt I’ve been using, plus more how to play D&D with ChatGPT. Here’s another prompt I’ve used to have ChatGPT be a dungeon master for ChatGPT. See the older one here. I think this one is probably too long. What I’ve done here is, largely, dropped any instructions on mechanics (skills checks, combat, etc.) and more focused on the style of play, the “vibe.” I also asked ChatGPT what it needed to know to be a DM.

The Business Bullshit DictionaryI’m recording a few tiny videos defining some business-world jargon. “Input,” “outcome oriented,” “politics,” and, here, “bureaucracy.” Once you’ve been in the corporate world for a few years, you stop noticing these words and a few years later, you stop taking them seriously, or at least, in a nuanced way. They’re just part of the noise of the cube-farm. But, if you pay attention to them, they’re often signals that are telling you either to beware or pointing to a problem that can be fixed.

What every kid wants, the Windows XP wallpaper.What’s your favorite “observed statistical regularity”?The “problem” with Goodhart’s Law is that we now know it exists. By “problem,” I mean using Goodhart’s Law when it comes to critiquing organizational metrics. If you know Goodhart’s Law (rather, the rewording of it as we’ll see below), when you’re making metrics, you change them and adapt them over time before they get gamed. When criticizing metrics (or anything, really) you should first assume that the people making them and using them are smart and trying their best…and know how to search the Internet.

There’s a lot going at work now, employee wise. If you’re using a VMware email address to subscribe to this (there’s several handfuls of people who are), I’d suggest switching it over to a personal email address. BEST OF LUCK TO US ALL. Meanwhile: Wastebook“Never ask me how I paid” is my version of “never tell me the odds.” “Alfur, that was brilliant!” Alfur: “The important thing is: it worked!”

Let’s get to it Found in a stack of my son’s old school papers.WastebookIf it’s bad to yuk someone’s yum, I suppose it’s equally rude to yum someone’s yuk.

When I see a title that reads “Towards a…” I often think “cool story. Call me back when you get there.” I’ve listened to much worse in my playlists for years, so, you know: two thumbs up…? “Every now and then, I think about the fact that Karl Lagerfeld owned over 300 iPods.

Thriving in a BigCo: Avoiding homework, and assigning homeworkI’m working on a video series with O’Reilly based on my working and thriving in a BigCo talks. Here’s a little storyboarding I did on one topic to avoid having too much work that’s not part of your job, a concept I call “homework.” The young developer assigns themselves homework. Image from geralt, 2015.Asking Questions Leads to Homework for YouWhen you point out a problem, you make yourself responsible for the solution, whether it’s your job or not.

“We can’t hire the right people” is the eternal complaint of CIOs everywhere. They’re beset by all this FUD’ing out about Facebook coming and disrupting the toothpaste industry, Google accidentally dis-intermediating car insurance, Elon Musk launching a bank1, or Amazon doing anything new. I call this freaking out the “macro-economic headwinds” part of any pitch, freakout, or “TED-style” talk. The CIO’s reply is often: if only they could just hire the right people to sling the code, install Kubernetes the hard way, write good ChatGPT prompts, or whatever, they could turn those headwinds into tailwinds.

Here’s the final installment of my talks with Here’s the third little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talk about things that slow developers and other staff down. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work. Watch it! Wastebook“To ‘help gamers keep the crunch to themselves,’ Doritos is debuting what it calls ‘Doritos Silent.

Here’s the third little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about managing Kubernetes, especially if you’re a large organization that has lots of everything. You know: MULTI-CLOUD, Y’ALL! He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work. Watch it if you’re into this kind of thing. Wastebook“If you’re a baker, making bread, you’re a baker.

Here’s the second little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about security concerns with Kubernetes. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work. Torsten says that last he counted, there were over 140 distress, services, and different ways of getting Kubernetes. As I say, this is probably too many.

… Here’s a little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about security concerns with Kubernetes. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work. Not enough failure yet to be perfectAs ever with security and a new technology, there’s a lot of uncertainty and finishing off the security features as a new technology is used more and more in the mainstream.

Suggested playlist for this episode. We Fear Change, a new talkI’ve got a mostly newish talk coming up next week about people’s fear of change in organizations, on Oct 24 2023 at 11:00am Amsterdam time. Register to Watch the Talk It’s narrowed down, of course, for software and ops stuff. You know: all that digital transformation, cloud native stuff I’m always on and on about. It’s the last in the series I’m going with my co-workers Bryan Ross.

If you thought yesterday’s edition was way too long deep into some stinky, weeds, today’s episode is for you! Johnny Ghoul.Using Midjourney and DALL-E to generate Dungeons and Dragons Battle MapsIt works well enough, I think, given how cool they look. The scaling is obviously not perfect, but it’s fine. I just did some basic prompts, with the only difference being a stream or not and “flat” or isomoprhic. With a combination of using seeds (for consistency and style) and figuring out really good prompts, I think it’d work well.

This is an example of a weird use of “developers are the new kingmakers”: There is a simple rule: developers rule. You run the global economy, right? Not politicians, not CEOs - developers are the ones running this global economy. What aspect of your life is not getting more digital? Everything, sports, entertainment, social experience or health, everything is becoming more digital. It’s a foundational aspect of all economy and human experience.

How to survive giving a lot of presentations at conferencesI think it was John Willis who told me that a long time ago. Relative to your interestsWhat is Technical Debt? - “In practice, my observations are that most development teams, even in small companies, are too far separated from these types of financial models to reason about technical debt in terms of revenue, but absolutely do feel the pain of technical debt in their day-to-day work (even if they can’t quantify it in money).

No links today, but this: Measuring Developer ProductivityOnce you suggest tracking an individual software developer’s performance, you get into big trouble with the thought leaders. This is, you know, pretty much a correct a response. McKinsey decided to have a go recently, giving us all a chance to think about “developer productivity” again. In recent years, I’ve mostly thought about developer productivity in terms of build and deploy automation - I know, just mind-blowing thrill rides, right!

Just a few things today. The Network is the Computer“Sun Microsystems founders (left to right) Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla stand in front of their sports cars at the company’s facilities in Palo Alto in 1987”. Posted by readjpeg.raw.Kubernetes Distro UsageIf you’re interested in marketshare, usage trends, and benefits/problems in Kubernetes-land, Torsten and crew at EMA has a new stack of analysis and charts about Kubernetes out.

Suggested theme song. Just links and fun finds today. Relevant to your interestsVMware named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant - Nice spot for VMware in the MQ. // This is a pretty small market! Hopefully the market is selling around container management, the stacks of app dev support above it, and filling in all the Kubernetes gaps. I mean, that’s usually exactly how the infrastructure market works. // “The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.

Software Defined Talk #434That’s the opening topic of our podcast this week. Oh, and we talk about a bunch of tech shit too: Watch the video above, or just listen to the audio only, edited podcast. Do LessMy colleague Bryan Ross has been writing up some tiny videos I made last year. They’re fun for me to read: he adds a lot of depth to what were, basically, just snarky asides in my head that I turned into 60 second videos.

Thought Leadership Hidden in Plain SightThere’s a variation of The Plumber’s Problem that I suffer from: The Tech Marketer’s Problem. When I see a new idea in tech bubbling up and I can smell the marketing strategy behind it (which, with my background, I usually can), I stop enjoying the, you know, story. This becomes an anti-pattern when the idea and technology is actually good, and I grow suspicious and dismissive once I’ve smelled marketing and thought lording/ladying/theming.

Videos! I finally got a good handle on what Backstage does today - not the outcomes it helps you get, but what it’s base, core capabilities are. Ben gave me a nice overview of the basics and let me learn-by-questioning a lot. Hopefully we’ll get together for two more parts: talking about the plugin ecosystem and then how you install, run, and manage it. There’s a podcast, audio only version if you don’t care for videos.

Rick Rubin’s PodcastI like Tetragrammaton podcast a lot. (It’s one of those big deal podcasts that doesn’t actually have it’s own home page, which is totally weird - just search for it in your podcast listener or YouTube). Why? One, it is luxuriously long, Rick Rubin really gets everything out of the guests. Two, he asks great questions: at first they seem naive and simple, but then you hear the answers and stories and you realize how great the questions are.

“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.

A new way of thinking about open source sustainability - If you’re using open source components in your IT stack, don’t forget that long term reliability and stability is costly, and worth paying for.

The infrastructure drives the app architectureA cloud native applications is typically designed as a bunch of little components that coordinate with each other over a network. They may use events instead, and while that isn’t the same as point-to-point network communications, it follows the same idea: you have a bunch of indepedent-ish bundles of code that work together, as needed, instead of just one big chunk of code that does all the work.

Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? - Plan to never get past slide one: “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment.

Second Wave DevOps - The tools keep changing: “Let’s face facts: our implementation is what’s letting us down. What worked for John and Paul in 2009 is, in broad strokes, exactly what we have been asking every single DevOps practitioner to do since. We’ve replaced all the individual tools in the system multiple times (look at the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape for the evidence): less automated infrastructure, more infrastructure as code; less monitoring, more observability; less data centers, more cloud; less svn, more git; less virtual machines, more docker; less capistrano, more kubernetes; less hudson, more github actions.

Survey: Majority of US Workers Are Already Using Generative AI Tools, But Company Policies Trail Behind - “The new survey finds that 56 percent of workers are using generative AI on the job, with nearly 1 in 10 employing the technology on a daily basis. Yet just 26 percent of respondents say their organization has a policy related to the use of generative AI, with another 23 percent reporting such a policy is under development.

iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates - A concise list. The journaling app comes out later this year.

A NEW CAR!The first episode where Bob has his real hair. I’m not sure how it happened, but The Price is Right is a major show in my life canon. The music, the camp, the excitement and sincerity of it all - it’s perfect in every way. At my first job at a dot.com in the late 90s we would gather every morning to watch it on a huge projection screen.

The Poetry of Pricing - “Pricing is a signal. It’s a conversation between seller and buyer containing information that both parties will exchange. On the part of the seller it suggests both the cost of the offering and the value it provides. Buyers are inclined to see if they can stretch to the next higher increment given the increased value proposition.

Taking a careful approach to AI in marketing - There’s a lot of analysis that we should all be doing with marketing, but it’s often hard to get at data and figure out what to do with it. // “Fifteen percent said that more than a quarter of their tasks today are intelligently automated, but they expect that to increase to 78% in five years.

The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World - “I remember feeling giddy most of time we were in production, not from the legendary amount of pot consumed, but from anticipation that we were going to blow people’s minds. We were excited and felt lucky to have an audience for our artwork.

Small, regional events are probably better than the mega-conferenceI’m starting to think that small, regional events are much - like much - more important for enterprise software sales than the big, annual events. In enterprise sales (where you’re looking to work for a few years to build up multi-million dollar deals), you’re usually targeting a couple hundred mega-organizations (plus all the governments, large cities and states, and large universities). You know: banks/insurance/etc.

How Can CIOs Communicate the Business Value of IT? - Talk with biz-normals about how technology can make the organization better, not on the activities that’s required to do so: “IT demonstrates value when we enable business outcomes, not when we report effort expended, resources consumed or work done…. Highlight the impact technology can have on business outcomes, so the value in the investment is recognized and IT gets the funding it needs.

UK.gov efficiency hurt as legacy tech upgrades stall - Security is always the FUD-stick: “Dame Meg Hillier MP, PAC chair, said: ‘Whitehall’s digital services, far from transforming at the pace required, are capable of only piecemeal and incremental change. Departments’ future-proofing abilities are hobbled by staff shortages, and a lack of support, accountability and focus from the top. In particular, a lack of cyber-security experts should send a chill down the government’s spine.

US Banks Must Get Ready For Open Banking Now - Banks and regulations: the source of enterprise tech spend! It’ll probably make banking better for individuals too.

What is an Authority to Operate (ATO)? - Governance in the military.

Salesforce CEO takes another bold stand on remote work - Another chapter in the no one knows WTF on WFH deal saga: “For my people that’s my message. They need to mix in person and remote together. Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have lots of people who are extremely productive at home. But there also has to be sales people being productive in the office selling to customers and we need to make it all work.

DevOps Patterns for Private Equity: Technology organization strategies for high performing software investments - Wait, wut? As someone in the Software Defined Slack quipped, this should really be sponsored by Thomo Bravo, Silverlake, Vista, etc.

VMware Introduces Frameworks And Services At Explore Conference To Enable Enterprise Adoption Of Generative AI - Quick analysis of VMware’s AI strategy.

Everyone is Busy: Who Has Time to Transform? - Mark tries to crack the “how to engineer a corporate structure, plan, and incentive plan to actually change” problem of digital transformation. I think the answer is: make small goals that you do on a short (quarterly) basis instead giant, waterfall annual strategy plans. // “My role at USCIS involved a huge transformation project. Our initial mistake was to think of it as a monolithic effort; we were going to make all the agency’s paper processes into digital processes.

The week so far, a selectionI don’t really know what “platform engineering” isLast episode I shared the the email Q&A I had for an article about platform engineering. The finished article is up, much nicer edited than just copy and pasting my email. It’s part of the buzz around the SHIFT conference next week, which I’ll be at, in Zadar, Croatia. WastebookAlways use the cloakroom for your backpack at a museum.

Press PassI’m speaking at the SHIFT conference next week in Zadar, Croatia. Here’s some questions they asked me ahead of time for their ShiftMag outlet. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t send the third one in and saved it up for this here newsletter. (1) Where do you stand in the DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering debate? I guess by stance you mean “are these things different, or all the same thing, really?

Confusing outcomes with capabilitiesI don’t have this sorted out well, but the baby keeps crawling on me to remind me to chill the fuck out about being a professional thought leader and be more of a professional dad. (That’s right, I’m blaming my three year old for the shoddiness of the below!) In the technology world, you are taught to think in terms of “outcomes,” or “business outcomes” to use the longer jargon.

In IowaI was in Des Moines this week to give one of the keynotes at DevOpsDays Des Moines (it went well). Here’s some snapshots from around town:

CEO Therapy This week’s Software Defined Talk: This week, we discuss Netflix’s DVD deprecation, the remote work debate, and how to fork an open-source project. Plus, thoughts on why Europe needs more ice. Have a listen! TranscriptsFor all the podcasts, videos, conference talks, and even notes to myself: I haven’t figured out what to do with automated transcript systems.

HashiCorp Retools Licenses And Software To Grow Its Business - Extensive look into the HasiCorp financials and talk of their OSS licensing shift.

Forrester’s Impressions: VMware Explore 2023 - A brief overview of VMware’s strategy and where Forrester thinks it going.

It’s Not You, It’s Me: What It Really Means When Budget Is The Reason For The Breakup - Something that’s not useful isn’t worth paying for.

The Works of Mars, 1671 - Fortification engineering.

Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird - Looks like fun, right?

Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: the Expiration Date Itself - “Food experts broadly agree that the expiration dates on every box of crackers, can of beans and bag of apples waste money, squander perfectly good food, needlessly clog landfills, spew methane and contribute to climate change.” // And, they’re gone for the most part in the UK.

Texas’s Biggest Barbecue City Is Attracting a New Crop of Exciting Restaurants - Lots going on in Lockhart.

Favorite coffee-making setups from the Ars Technica staff - I made coffee with a Chemex for a few years. The coffee was good, and the overall ritual of it was just fantastic.

Books Recommended With Uncommon Wisdom and Tender Care - “Over and over, Aoyama demonstrates how it’s done. In her Hatori ward, good fortune is not arbitrary or unearned; it is never a gauzy gift from the universe. It arises instead from action, experience and wisdom. Her characters appreciate each other; they are grateful to each other; they recognize in each other quality and potential. (Put these folks in a laboratory dish with the dramatis personae of a cynical HBO show and they’d annihilate each other, matter and antimatter.

IowaI’m in Des Moines, Iowa for the keynote I’ll be giving at DevOpsDays here. I believe their registration is closed, so…if you’re not already registered, I won’t be seeing you! But, you can check me out rehearsing it here. There’s 20 minutes of bonus content! Like and subscribe, MOFOS! Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.ChatDM - Dealing with short-term memoryIf you’re interested in my recent experiments to get ChatGPT to act a Dungeon Master for solo-play Dungeons & Dragons, check out my recent write-up.

I’ve been experimenting/playing a lot with ChatGPT as a Dungeon Master. I like to call this “ChatDM.” That is, I’m a player, and it DMs for me. It’s not, like, great, but it is good enough if you want to co-imagine with it. Overtime, it is a great world building co-author with you. The current problem with using ChatGPT as a Dungeon Master is that it doesn’t have a long enough memory.

What VMware’s AI Vision Means for Your Job - Figuring out how AI will affect tech stuff.

Survey finds relatively few Americans actually use (or fear) ChatGPT - 30% to 40% (for young adult males) seem like a lot too me. // “Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it. Of course that changes by demographic: Men, those 18-29 and the college educated are more likely to have used the system, though even among those groups it’s 30-40%.

The Ultimate Guide to Developer Counter-Productivity - Focus on outcomes, not activities…mostly. So long as the activities are good and lead to outcomes. // Yes, and…many tasks may not seem directly tied to value, but they are. If you don’t measure where a shelf goes on a wall, when you hang it, there’s a good chance it will look shit. If you don’t take your compliance training in a bank, the bank could be operating illegally.

Man, Myth & Magic The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Mythology 21 Volumes In 1 - This is the kind of stuff I’d pursue and spend hours looking through in the 80’s.

Dark Mode: How Users Think About It and Issues to Avoid - A lot more on dark mode than you thought was possible to write about // “Aesthetic appeal and improved accessibility are the strongest arguments for supporting dark mode.

Mindsets and Tactics for New Leaders of Software Teams - Seems like good stuff.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

If you can’t be at DevOpsDays Des Moines later this week (or stackconf in Berlin next week) to see the final version of this presentation, here’s my first time running through it. It container about 20 minutes of…uh…bonus material.* Meaning, things I need to cut.

Trees do not grow in straight rowsThis picture clarified what it’s like to be an American living in Europe. Everyday, you’re confronted by how old everything is. The word “old” deserves attention, and explains the whole point. To an American, “old” tends to be a negative term. (Well, a left leaning American, at least.) But in Europe, you are surrounded by old and there’s a certain comfort to it. I live in The Netherlands, and the thing you realize quickly is that there is very little “nature” in The Netherlands.

Not much today. Halloween Clown TailwindsFrom Chris Rogers at S&P Global Market Intelligence.“Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year.” Somewhere, there’s a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween. Wastebook“So I quit my job as an engineer at Memorex’s disk drive plant in Santa Clara, California, and we flew to Kuala Lumpur. We found an un-air conditioned hotel room for $10 a night above a brothel with genial trans prostitutes and ate $1 meals served on banana leaves from the nearby restaurants.

As ChatGPT goes Enterprise, here are Ten GenAI Reality Checks you need to take… - A long list of practice advice for planning out AI use in the enterprise.

Google’s $30-per-month “Duet” AI will craft awkward emails, images for you - All about Google’s enterprise AI announcement. For me, Google Apps/G Suite/(whatever) is hands down the best all in one collab thing - Office 365 is so weird between desktop apps and web apps that I still can’t get my mind wrapped around it. Collaborative editing in desktop Word is so weird, and their sharing dialogs are awful. Plus, GMail is so good.

Halloween creeps a little closer: Seasonal supply chains accelerate - “Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year” // Somewhere, there’s a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween.

Jennifer Riggins and The New Stack crew have a good booklet out on Platform Engineering. I read over it and talked with Jennifer a couple times. I should have recorded those calls to munge into some articles, but, whatever. You should check it out, I think it’s a good go at trying to nail down exactly what that term means. This month, at least :) Download the ebook for free

ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons - This is what spurred me to start using ChatGPT as a ChatDM. I’ve yet to ask it questions like “describe drinking games that the satyrs are taking part in that are so dangerous someone could get hurt doing them” or “why would a Displacer Beast Kitten leave the safety of its den if it believes an intruder is nearby?” One interesting point that’s worth raising into the bigger AI/LLM discussion.

Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest - One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”

The new spreadsheet? OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses - Can handle longer conversations, encryption, by default doesn’t share your stuff with the training AI, and SOC2 accounting controls. Also, of course, an admin panel.

Europe’s new rules for Big Tech start today. Are they ready? - “Under the DSA digital service providers - including hosting services, online platforms, VLOPs and even intermediary service providers like ISPs - have obligations to ensure that products sold are safe and not counterfeit, and to eliminate advertising that targets minors or is served using sensitive data. Another requirement is to get rid of dark patterns in advertising. Clarity on how orgs moderate content and a requirement to present their algorithms for scrutiny is also required.

Don’t get hung up on “customer value” and “business value”I feel like this metaphor of “customer value” (and “business value”) has gone too far. It’s become something that people think is real, not just metaphor. Instead of “value” what we’re talking about is something like “is useful at a price the customer will pay.” Jobs to Be Done theory feels a lot closer to real. The other issue: there are not ROI spreadsheets for a lot of things in our personal lives.

US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted - This is going to be weird for a few years, at least.

Generative AI dominates VMware Explore news - AI uses in the VMware stack.

Developers Are the Future Of VMware (Part 2): Multi-Cloud and AI | by Torsten Volk - Good examples and thinking on using LLM AI in systems management stuff, in this case with VMware Tanzu and Aria.

I tried to get ChatGPT to summarize VMware Explore 2023 for me. I don’t know, it wasn’t that great. Also, a peak into my Dungeons and Dragons “ChatDM” obsession.

Preface In the annals of Eldergrove’s tangled history, a formidable tapestry of culture and survival, one cannot overlook the enigmatic presence of The Lost Tribe. Nestled within the heart of this ancient forest, a society of orcs has taken root, upending both conventional orcish dogma and the limitations those who see them through eyes of ignorance. This monograph endeavors to peel back the layers of this unique tribe, piecing together the fragments of lore and legend that define their identity.

A half-harpy is the result of a human breeding with a harpy. Usually, the offspring is a harpy (female), but 10% of the time the offspring is a half-harpy. Half-harpies are male 90% of the time, have wings, human arms, human hands but with long talons on each finger, and, as with a harpy, legs that start as human but end in vulture like ankled and feet. Half-harpies are accepted into harpy society, but have an even deeper wanderlust than regular harpies.

Overview The Lost Ingredient is an adventure that takes place in the city of Aurel’s Reach and the surrounding Elderwood. The player, a new apprentice to Thanlin, a powerful but forgetful elven alchemist, is tasked with finding a rare ingredient, the Luminescent Elder Lily, for a potion that Thanlin has been brewing. The adventure involves seeking guidance from Rye Leafoot, a friend of Thanlin’s, retrieving stolen truffles, and negotiating with a tribe of pixies.

Pixies, those delightful and mischievous denizens of the Elderwood, are as much a part of the forest as the trees and the streams. Tiny and whimsical, they flit through the undergrowth, their wings aglow with an ethereal light. They are guardians of the forest, protectors of its secrets, and masters of trickery and illusion. Their laughter is the rustle of leaves, their whispers the sigh of the wind. They are elusive, yet their presence is felt everywhere.

Ah, the Whispering Willow! Or just ‘The Willow’ if you’re trying to sound casual while nursing a frothy mug. This isn’t just any old tavern in Aurel’s Reach; it’s the place where half of my mischief has started… and maybe about a quarter of it has ended. Exterior Perched right against the city’s imposing northern wall and merging with that magnificent redwood – it’s almost as if nature herself decided to raise a toast!

At the very heart of the Elderwood, Aurel’s Reach unfurls. Envision the central region of the Elderwood map: this is the Eldergrove, the verdant heart where Aurel’s Reach proudly stands. Its origins remain a mystery to me, yet over countless centuries, it’s blossomed to accommodate a lively 15,000 souls. The city sprawls gracefully alongside a serene, straight stretch of the river, which some say lent its name to the town.

Elderwood. Ah, dear reader, it’s so much more than a mere word on parchment. It’s the delicate shiver of leaves under a morning breeze, the deep-rooted tales older than the oldest oak, and the harmonious symphony of bustling life and placid landscapes. To the north, run a mountain range, The Elf’s Wall. These peaks casts lengthy shadows, towering sentinels of age-old stone that I’ve often found myself wondering about. How many stories have they witnessed, unchanging and eternal, as empires rose and fell?

VMware Explore’s 5 Big Reveals: Updates To Tanzu, vSAN, NSX+, Workspaces And An AI Deal With Nvidia - As it says. Includes some actual deal size info for Tanzu and Workspaces.

Suggested episode theme song. How are things going for you?Avoid using Vision and Strategy as an Executive Peace OutHere is something from an article I’m reviewing for a co-worker: It’s vital for any digital transformation to have a clear vision, purpose and a set of expected business outcomes. It lets everyone know what is changing, why it’s changing, and how it will positively impact the organization. All too often though, that simple message becomes bloated or lost entirely as the project moves forward.

Culture vultures - “Traditional word-based culture—and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category—is now a feeding ground for vultures.

Non-knowing growing - “…non-knowing, growing. It’s what babies do when they learn to walk. They get up, they fall over, they get up, they fall over, and they gradually figure out what walking is. They don’t know how to walk.” // If you’re open enough to the universe, you make sure that doesn’t ever stop.

It’s Time To Tell The Healthcare CX Story In Terms Of ROI - The focus is healthcare, here, but this applies to all industries: “Meeting with C-suiters and boards of directors, the disconnect is pretty clear. While CX pros (in many industries, not just healthcare) tend to talk about customer experience improvements in terms of better, CX-specific metrics, they fail to connect those changes to things that matter to the decision-makers and budget-holders.

How Barbie Went Viral - “by creating meme-able content, centering your audience instead of yourself, inviting connection, and building in the right incentives, you can increase the odds of a lightning strike” // Yes, and…it is so exhausting to have to be your own marketing agency.

Necronomicon all’italiana - Fantastic stuff.

Cloud-native approaches are now default software development practices - Highlights from a recent 451 survey. “Many organizations using cloud native expect their adoption of these technologies and architectures to become more ubiquitous over time. Among companies using cloud-native resources, approximately 60% say more than half of their applications are currently architected using cloud native, rising to 77% when organizations project two years into the future.” // “Homegrown cloud-native software development is strong.

The next generation of developer productivity – O’Reilly - As ever nowadays, developer productivity is the top problem. Also, full CI/CD (or just good pipeline automation) is still hovering around 50% as it has been for a decade or more: “Over half of the respondents (51%) said that their organizations are using self-service deployment pipelines to increase productivity. Another 13% said that while they’re using self-service pipelines, they haven’t seen an increase in productivity.

I’ve been off the publishing grid for awhile, even off the consuming the Internet grid. This is a mix of partial vacation, taking care of some family things, an obsession with D&D, and the first break in my workaholic nature for…20…even 30 years? It is time for a few new habits, rather than swirling around the old ones. The most counter-whatyoudthink is probably to start going into the office more. My work has an OK-good office in upper west Amsterdam.

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office - Hmm. It seems really hard to tell what the effects of remote working and in-person working are. People just have to make shut up.

Bike maker VanMoof also files for bankruptcy in Germany - I had no idea that this luxury bike company was in such bad shape. Their bikes sure seem awesome, but are hella expensive compared to the €80 beaters you can get that, you know, do the job just fine.

As HashiCorp adopts the BSL, an era of open-source software might be ending - Is it too soon to say that open source businesses no longer work? (Unless you’re a bit public cloud or you do open core?

Checking In On ChatGPT - Text-centric AI best used for text-centric toil: “The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn’t quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more “boring” corporate tasks will always have its place.

PDFs vs. web pages: what’s better for users? - Bad things are bad, and using a thing for something it’s bad at (or when a better way exists) is also bad. PDFs are great, just not when it should be a webpage, or something else instead.

Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’ - Project versus product for happiness. Also, living life by waste book/commonplace book - something I certainly can appreciate. (Bit it a ringer it being Helen Garner, but don’t let that stop you.

A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessionsI’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of MC script writing - creating it, and reading it. I wrote the MC script last year. And, you know, I’ve watched lots of main stage keynote dog and pony shows (and plenty of goat rodeos).

I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out. To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really.

We try the Marks and Spencer Roast Beef and Onion Crisps, or Chips as us Americans would say.

PSA: I recommend that you use your personal email address to subscribe to this newsletter. We’re approaching and in layoff and job change season. Starting now to the end of the CY/FY, bonuses are paid out, promotions have been denied or gained, etc. If you’re subscribed with your work email, consider switching to a personal email address. 📨 📨 📨 📨 📨 Hunting for the cloud native and kubernetes pay-offThis is an excerpt from my talk yesterday with Bryan Ross, his theory here is fun, clever, and probably right:

What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.

Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor.

Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.

The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank.

Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk.

Suggested vibe for this edition: The eternal principles of an (enterprise) app stackThese are not all of them, but it’s a start. The function of an app stack is to allow your developers to be creative, use fast release cycles, and create software that can run in production: that stays up and meets whatever compliance (regulations, security, etc.) you need. We keep trying to merge the dev tools stack and the runtime tools environment into one platform.

Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”

This week’s Tanzu Talk podcast (video above) is all about developer experience, and COBOL: “75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly” reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently.

Forrester VMware Executive Checklist for DevEx - “75% of IT and business executives say that their companies' ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly.” And, a DevEx definition: “DevEx represents the skills, tools, frameworks, and methodologies aimed at creating, maintaining, and enhancing code throughout the software delivery lifecycle from creation through production and improving developer productivity both individually and collectively.

Pair programming has been around since the late nineties and boasts ample research and anecdotal evidence proving its effectiveness. It’s not limited to programming, either; it can also be valuable in roles such as product management. However, despite its benefits, it remains less commonly practiced than one might expect. Pair Programming in the Department of Defense (DoD) A great case study for the value of pair programming comes from the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.

I have another video today. You’ve heard of pair programming and you probably think it’s bonkers. Not many people benefit from this practice. Here, I go over how teams in the US military have been using pair programming to improve how they do software and spread that change to other teams. Some real DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION! Check out the blog post I based this on, it has a lot more on how other agile practices are helping out programmers in the DoD.

Passing the anxiety parcel - “And in organisations there’s a phenomenon I sometimes call anxiety pass the parcel… The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely it is that you are going to be indulged by those below you, in trying to pass on to them your anxiety…. You think you are giving clear and direct leadership, but you’re also in a way, on another level, saying to the people below you here, you, you have my anxiety.

Webinars have a bad reputation. They’re usually boring presentation that require you to give over your email address. I do a lot of webinars and watch a lot of them: they don’t all have to be crap! Here’s my take on why webinars are great, how they can go wrong, how to make them interesting, and how to get value from them as an audience member. Here’s some more marketing stuff from my newsletter.

Midjourney: Olan Mills style photograph of software programmers standing around a conference table in 1980s sitcom styleSoftware people are bad at estimatingHere are three ways that software people (developers, mostly) are bad at estimating: Estimating the feasibility of writing code for new features, that is, the risk of failure - if the new feature is difficult to impossible to write, or just doesn’t work altogether. Generally, it’s a lot harder than it seems because of all the things apart from the actual feature.

Why they’re smearing Lina Khan - Outcomes based regulation: “There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click. The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money.

Oracle’s revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive • The Register - ’a hypothetical organization with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable for the “Named User Plus” (NUP) license as per the legacy subscription model. That organization is also running Oracle JDK on 5,000 processors, and as such would pay $742,500 for NUP licenses and $900,000 for processor licenses under the legacy deal. The new Universal Subscription model would cost it about $3,118,500, a 90 percent increase in price.

AlmaLinux discovers working with Red Hat isn’t easy - Some follow-up, “how it’s going” meme-style stuff from the RHEL open source drama.

Nobody cares about your blog. - The post is pro-blogging, obviously. We should try to bring back blogging (or blogs masquerading as newsletters, whatever). With the collapse of Twitter, there’s lots of text based people who need an outlet.

Workin’ for the Man - This is how most all request driven processes (you have to file a ticket) end up being gamed by users: “So I think the winning technique is simply to flood their input queue with issues and eventually one will find a chink in the armour and reach an intelligent human being who Just Fixes It.

Free Lunch - Some strong Amsterdam type vibes here. // “Free Lunch is an all-caps display font that would look comfortable in a butcher shop window. Or a lunch counter menu in 1955. Or printed on the waxed paper that wraps a half-pound of Swiss cheese from your neighborhood deli. A little playful, great for headlines and logos.

The DoD: A Compelling Case for Extreme Programming - Good overview of why/how the practices in Extreme Programming (XP) help the needs of the military, and fit the constraints and challenges they have. For example, spreading knowledge with paired programming manages high turn over in staff.

Midjourney: Medieval serfs defending a castle from demons in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, from venusinfurs.The changing nature of “open”In our tech world, the idea of “open” has changed a lot in the past few years. Instead of it meaning “open to everyone,” the classic notion of “open source,” now it more means “open to everyone except our competitors.” Making money with open source is difficultRunning a high growth business on open source is difficult; you’re giving up on the easiest, most obvious thing to get paid for: the software itself.

Change takes a long time - This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time. There’s usually a lack of urgency, but this is a benefit for most of those large companies. The employees, management, and share holders want stability, predictability. Also, they don’t want to spend money unless they really, really…really…have to. Few people like change unless it’s needed.

People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars - “Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls.

What connected-car services are consumers willing to pay for? - There’s some fun stated-preferences versus revealed preferences in there.

Lines of Code - When there’s no perfect and easy measure, you have to (“end up”?) use the ones you have that are good enough.

Ever wonder why there’s not more t-shirts at tech conferences? Marketing people hate getting t-shirts for booths at conferences. In last week’s Tanzu Talk about platform marketing I went over why: Tech conference attendees love t-shirts. They’re also good for brand- and idenity-marketing: if you’re wearing the shirt, you’re likely a fan. Or, at least, you tolerate the brand. You don’t see a lot of t-shirts at tech conferences because marketing people usually hate t-shirts.

A4 Issue 1 July 2022 – Notes from the Drawing Board - This kind of thing is fantastic.

How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock - “There’s always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn’t allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero’s morbid speeches, and so on.

Throw someone a pep rally - Two thumbs up!

202306 - apenwarr - ’If you take a single pull request (PR) that adds a new feature, and launch it without tests or documentation, you will definitely get the benefits of that PR sooner. Every PR you try to write after that, before adding the tests and docs (ie. repaying the debt) will be slower because you risk creating undetected bugs or running into undocumented edge cases. If you take a long time to pay off the debt, the slowdown in future launches will outweigh the speedup from the first launch.

IT spending soars, generative AI investments barely leave a mark - These forecasts have been confusing in recent years. They’re always increasing, and yet the trends are always cost savings: ‘“Digital business transformations are beginning to morph,” said Lovelock. “IT projects are shifting from a focus on external-facing deliverables such as revenue and customer experience, to more inward facing efforts focused on optimization." The trend is reflected in where spending growth is highest.

No one has an “appetite for risk” - “I think there is a better way to express what we aim to express when we say ‘risk appetite.’ What we are talking about is the organization’s failure tolerance. How often is it okay for the organization to experience security failures? How big can the failures be (impact) and still be tolerable?

We’re back from a three day weekend in London for our anniversary. I tried very hard to eliminate all “productivity,” so I have very little to say today. I did want to ADVERTISE for a thing I have tomorrow. So I’ve gathered up some waste book for you today. Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet), Vincent van Gogh (1889).WastebookWe should revise the Peter Principle not to be insulting (reached the level of your incompetence), but burnout driven: reached the level of being able to put up with more bullshit.

personal organization - “Here’s my one piece of advice about personal organization: (calendars, tasks, planning, tracking): Think hard about your needs, pick a system, and then do not under any circumstances change it until at least one full year has passed.

Checking In on the State of TDD - Great round-up or the current thinking and research! But: Kids these days! “Look at it this way: 19 out of 20 startups fail. That means that odds are that you will never see this code again. You’d be a fool to spend any more time on it than absolutely necessary.” This is the kind of advice that’s fine for failed startups. And maybe even strategic if you’re just looking for a valuations run-up cash-out.

What the Government Email Account Hack Says About the Future of Cybersecurity - Always be securing all the things.

Beware of High Expectations in Enterprise TechHere are three charts. First, while everyone is freaking out about AI, it’s had little impact thus far: Shared by Mark Hinkle.Second, since 2020, usage of cloud seems to have leveled off at a 50/50 split between on-premises and public cloud: Source:  IDC, The Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure: Multicloud to Hybrid; Shared to Dedicated, doc #DR2023_T1_DM, March 2023But don’t worry, everyone is planning to move more to public cloud in the next three years.

Finding an estimate of how many developers there are in the world is difficult. Oh, there’s plenty of people making estimates, but those estimates vary so much that the estimates are suspicious. For example: Microsoft/GitHub recently said they now have 100 million developersusing GitHub. “We estimate that, as of Q1 2023, there are 35.6 million active software developers in the world,” says Slashdata (who the CNCF uses for surveys).

Security Team Culture Matters - Being in security should be a happy job. // “Security and risk teams are more motivated and purpose-driven than others. As a 25-year cybersecurity veteran, this totally checks out for me. “Almost everyone I know in [IT security] is mission- and purpose-driven. They took on this job to protect others!

Deploying the Swift Method to Modernize a Singapore Government Legacy System - Good description of what it feels like to be stuck in the legacy trap: “The [Singapore] government agency in this case study faced a similar issue with a legacy system that supported critical business processes, integrated with other business-critical applications, and was developed and maintained by third-party vendors. Over time, the codebase had become highly coupled within different business domains and contexts, making it difficult for developers to work on.

Only 22% of software developers say they have a clear understanding of what they need to do to comply with security policy, to make sure the applications they’re writing for their organization, are good in a security sense. Now, it’d be easy to say the developers are just dopes and they don’t know what they’re up to. But I think what this is indicating is that figuring out how to practically do security policy at the software layer is difficult.

In the face of volatility, CFOs—and their organizations—adapt - Belt-tightening watch. Lots of micromanagement and management by finance metrics ahead: “In the year ahead, CFOs plan to increase their focus on operational value drivers, management of KPIs, cash management, and capital structure. Other priorities have decreased in importance since Q3 2022.

IBM takes on AWS, Google, and Microsoft with Watsonx - If it works, it lets enterprises build up huge, custom trained models, and it has enough governance controls, it’d be a big deal for IBM. They key things learned from ChatGPT is that it has to be super easy, frictionless to get started with. That’s difficult for enterprises software makers, and it’s also hindered by governance, access control, and pricing per seat and data access.

Beware the Digital Whiteboard - The assertion: writing with whiteboarding/Sticky notes is not good, and can lead to leaky abstractions. Seem more like a “right tool for the job” thing, plus the usual garbage in, garbage out, regardless of the tool used to process the garbage.

Our final talk in our software stuff for financial organizations is coming up tomorrow. Above is a little anecdote that Darran made to me as we were working on it. If you’re into security, compliance, that kind of thing, check out the third part of our series: “How Cloud Native Improves & Ensures Security, Governance, and Trust in Finance.” Summarizing Articles with ChatGPT Works AgainRecently, I’ve been complain that I can’t use ChatGPT to summarize things anymore because it won’t pull from URLs.

Steve McQueen by, John Dominis - That guy made being cool look easy.

Steve McQueen by, John Dominis - That guy made being cool look easy.

Island Series: 6 Pack - These look like more amazing notebooks from a boutique shop.

Adopt Platform Engineering to Scale Application Security Practices - “Gartner Survey Data Reveals a Missed Opportunity - Platform teams focus on improving developer experience, developer productivity, software quality and delivery speed. According to Gartner’s 2022 Software Engineering Leaders Role Survey, only 25% of respondents cited “reduced security risks’’ as one of the top three goals for platform engineering and only 6% ranked it as the topmost goal.” // Here we are, about to finally have a moment that’s just focused on making appdev better, and of course security has to come in and try to grab all the attention.

ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%, analytics show - Indeed. I think I’ve found the limitations. The main one is the limit in the text you can feed it. If I could build up my own training data, that’d be something! The Link Reader plugin solves the summarizing web pages problem that I was having. What needs to happen now is just to get it integrated into enterprise software, and all the data ownership privacy stuff that goes with that.

Scratch Pad: Fireworks, Bootlegs, Spock - “I remain convinced that most categories of online services are akin either to hair salons, to grocery stores, or to movie theaters.” Also, the Spock picture.

Porter’s Five Forces and the social web - There’s something interesting to do here in applying Porter to contemporary tech.

A bonus Sunday episode! Waking up this morning, my first thought was how different my job is now with less travel. Like many tech companies, we have smaller budgets for travel. The means I can only take three or so trips a quarter unless I get someone else to pay for it, or for customer/sales visits. I dropped down a level in airline status due to decreased travel over the past year (and the lack of KLM maintaining your status to make up for COVID-times for several years).

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and have for, I don’t know, over 20 years. I’ve made and make a lot of podcasts. You might call me both a podcast listening and podcast creating expert. In the classic sense: a critic. I should review podcasts more frequently! If Books Could Kill - Worth the Resulting Shitting-On VibesA few times I year I try to eliminate all the bad vibes media from my life.

Put out a newsletter today. The musings on using ChatGPT for school obscure the real treat: me goofing around at the expense of DevOps and Platform engineering. I also finished up a mostly polished draft of a webinar I’m giving next week. Working with Darran has been great. He knows his stuff and helps me think of new interesting things to say as well. I thought my mom was coming tomorrow for her summer stay with us, but it’s Sunday.

Unleash developer productivity with generative AI, McKinsey survey - Their survey says it’s good in four areas: Expediting manual and repetitive work, Jump-starting the first draft of new code, Accelerating updates to existing code, Increasing developers' ability to tackle new challenges.

Pulling On Threads - I forgot about the “bring your whole self” thing.

When a good teacher seems like cheatingAll of the worrying about cheating with ChatGPT is hiding its biggest potential: being a teacher. As an “expert” (or, at least, well read) in digital transformation, DevOps, cloud native, blah blah, when I ask ChatGPT to do things for me, it’s mostly smell-free garbage, kindergarten stuff. But, when I ask it to tell me about something I don’t know about, it’s great. For example, I’ve been reading Against Purity, which does the community thing of using a bunch of jargon without explaining it.

Amazon Prime Video’s Microservices Move Doesn’t Lead to a Monolith after All - The New Stack - At this point, who knows anymore?

Rocky Linux project details how it will live on - “Nobody chooses RHEL because it’s state of the art. It isn’t. In fact, it’s about as far away from state of the art as it’s possible to be, and in the rapidly changing world of open source, that’s a very desirable attribute for a certain type of purchaser. They choose it because one specific version will be supported for a decade plus, and that in turn is why vendors support RHEL, and often nothing but RHEL.

Gartner Survey Finds 79% of Corporate Strategists See AI and Analytics as Critical to Their Success Over the Next Two Years - This seems very true: “Strategists said that, on average, 50% of strategic planning and execution activities could be partially or fully automated; currently only 15% are.” And if you established a stranded memo format, even more so. And you could have it generate presentations for you. Key will be, as always, getting access to the market and internal data needed.

How legacy tech can kill recruiting efforts, increase attrition and ruin the employee experience, Conner Forrest - “451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity & Collaboration, Employee Lifecycle & HR 2023 survey listed “candidates expect software or tools we haven’t adopted” as the top recruitment challenge (52%) they face. To put that into context, the next-highest response was expectation of flexible work (42%) and then compensation expectations being too high (40%).

Five Nos - “‘yeses’ matter more than ‘nos,’ and taking more chances generates more of each. While there’s a near equal chance of getting told ‘no’ in our endeavors, in virtually all cases, there is no penalty for that rejection beyond some brief discomfort or embarrassment. On the other hand, when you get a ‘yes,’ there is likely a positive outcome on many fronts.

LEGACY SOFTWARE AT BANKS! That’s the topic of the talk my colleague and I are giving tomorrow. You can watch it for free, check it out. In addition to the talk, you’ll get a free copy of my book on managing legacy software, Escaping the Legacy Trap Here’s the slides we have so far, a preview: The eternal first inning of cloudAccording to the chart below, the movement of apps to the public cloud has stalled out at about 25% since getting to around 20% in 2017.

Patterns vs Platforms - It’s all hard stuff. Instead of centralized platforms, perhaps consider public cloud instead, mixed with conventions. Variation: don’t build your own platform, outsource it to a vendor/cloud.

The Homework Apocalypse substack.com/inbox/pos… How to incorporate ChatGPT (etc.) in school and lessons…in a good way.

Recent picture of me trying to figure this all out. (I seem to have forgotten my toupee that day.)Source CodeI’ve almost figured out the drama around Red Hat redoing how they distribute the source code for RHEL. Is this it?Here is my understanding of it: Before the changes, anyone could get the source code (and I assume configuration, build methods, etc.) so that they could create an exact copy of RHEL (“bug for bug,” as people like to say).

Midjourney and Adobe Stock - Using AI to make stock photography, etc.

The real story of how Facebook almost acquired Waze, but we ended up with Google - “Acquisitions are the first moment when founders and investors have diverging interests. This is the one time when you should be wary of feedback from your investors. And, of course, like any negotiation, whoever is willing to walk away will get the better deal – always have a red line and hold firm to it.

Gsma | Mobile Industry Eyes Five Billion ‘Dormant’ Phones Sitting In Desk Drawers For Reuse Or Recycling - 5 billion phones sitting in desk drawers.

Midjourney and Adobe Stock - Using AI to make stock photography, etc.

‘Zero trust’ was supposed to revolutionize cybersecurity. Here’s why that hasn’t happened yet. - ’John Watts, a Gartner analyst, wrote in the firm’s annual predictions memo from last December that “moving from theory to practice with zero trust is challenging,” and that fewer than 1% of large enterprises are actually using it today…. Moreover, Watts predicted that “over 60% of organizations will embrace zero trust as a starting place for security by 2025 but more than half will fail to realize the benefits.

Beyond belt-tightening: How marketing can drive resiliency during uncertain times | McKinsey - What’s a little crazy is: shouldn’t this all just be the way marketing always works?

28 Questions to Ask Your Boss in Your One-on-Ones - Good things to talk about in your meetings if you can’t think of anything else.

A modern-era lift and shift: Danske Bank seeks massive cost-to-income ratio improvement with the help of Infosys - As ever with outsourcing: hire cheaper labor under less restrictive labor laws…?

I really liked how this first talk in out three part series came out. I wanted to talk as much as possible about actually strategy, business-think, so to speak, when it comes to how financial enterprises do software. All of us cloud native people spend a lot of time talking about the general benefits of cloud native stuff: better developer productivity and getting closer to the agile, deliver once a week (or daily!

Here’s my talk from Cloud Foundry Day, last week: The Cloud Foundry community has been around for a long time and the PaaSes built on it have been in use for awhile as well (many for at least five year, some for well over 7 years). In this talk, I first wanted to go over some advice on growing and sustaining a community build around a platform. And, second, I wanted an excuse to point out that Cloud Foundry works well for people and, you know, it’s kind of weird that we’re, once again, table flipping it all and starting over.

Has DevOps reached its goals from way back in the late 2000’s: deploying multiple times a day and having developers work closely with operations people? Adam Jacob brought up this question in two interviews recently, on my podcast, interviewed on my podcast by Matt Ray this week (which I [cough] haven’t, well actually listened to yet - maybe on the dog walk after I finish up here], and the Cloudcast, interviewed by Brian Gracely (I listened to that one real-good-like!

It’s time for the Kubernetes value line - “There’s a reason the saying ‘culture eats tech for breakfast’ has become a favorite in today’s IT lexicon. What this pithy saying doesn’t get into is that technology can change behavior over time.

I’m at Cloud Foundry Day today - travel, conference, etc. I realized I’m giving the last talk, which is kind of a good slot to have. I’ll have to do some kind of “end of the conference” commentary on life. It’s Germany, and it’s hot. People leave the doors open for a breeze, so there’s the light smell of cigarettes here and there. (The Texan in me is a bit mystified, even stressed out at seeing open doors when there’s air conditioning.

Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Banking and Investment Services IT Spending to Reach $652 Billion in 2023 - Banks spending more money on IT. They’re planning to spend on: “cybersecurity, data and analytics, integration technologies and cloud.” // And, keep moving to (public?) cloud: “More than half plan to increase investments in cloud, while reducing IT spending in their own data centers. This is reflected by slower growth in data center systems spending from 13.

Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? – Café Lob-On - Difficulty crossing the chasm. But, come on: it’s been less than a year.

All those naked Greeks… - I think the conclusion is status, power, beauty, and sex.

Bluesky Has Problems - Me: there aren’t enough people and, thus, communities yet. Also: federation isn’t really anything people care about, and, thus, not a feature worth spending time on.

Mid-day. For Father’s Day, Kim set me up with a nice hotel room that has a sauna in it. I think we’re developing a tradition of these parents days where the parent gets the day off. Sort of ironic, but fitting for the contemporary pro mental health vibe we all stew in. I was told to do no work, even my own projects. So I’ve been watching Batman: The Long Halloween.

Rest for the restless - “Maybe it’s my low tolerance for boredom. I can’t help but do something, anything. If only I could embrace boredom, and just let myself be. I can do a seated meditation for 10 minutes with no big issue of fidgeting, just focusing on my breath. But that’s still doing something? Reigning in the monkey mind, trying to keep a straight spine. Not quite what I imagine a relaxed state to be.

I don’t need to “do less to do more.” I just need to do less.

The past is not what’s normal, the present is.

Recommended theme song: Dog walk through the parkOut on a dog walk on a recent evening, there were several things to see. The homeless guy who lives in the parkwas sitting in his little area and there was a young guy sitting there with him. They were talking about something, smiling and laughing a lot. On the bridge there was a girl and a guy fishing. She was sitting in a chair and the guy was leaned over the side of the bridge with a fishing pole, while the girl was tearing up something to throw in.

Do you like words like: security - governance - PCI - regulation - SBOMs?! Then you should attend our talk series on cloud native app development in banks, insurance companies, and financial services. It’s online and, of course, free. Relevant to your interestsThe Quest for Better, Faster Deals - The highest quality deals are driven by strategy and vision needs at the buyer, the lowest by regulation needs and projects done by external consultants.

Celebrity photographer Chris Floyd shares six pieces of career advice everyone can learn from - “I think that anything generic is fucked now. Anything where a client thinks: ‘We need a picture of a woman who is eating a salad’, say, or ‘laughing with a laptop’. If it’s not a specific person, it’s just a representation of an idea; they can just do that now in AI.

Gartner’s Enterprise Value Equation for Business Value of Platform Engineering - Metrics and attributes to use to measure platform effectiveness.

What is platform engineering? - “Here are the key pillars of platform engineering, as I see it: Self-service; Platform operations; Platform as product.” And: “at CWT we created a series of DevOps services like a CI/CD pipeline, self-service performance testing, an image service for pre-approved, hardened images (consumable via source templates or the built images in a variety of formats), as well as a container service built on Kubernetes. Every time we got more than one product to adopt a service, that was proof we’d avoided duplication and created efficiency.

What Is Platform Engineering, and What Does It Do? - Lori Perri at Gartner defines platform engineering (Oct 2022): “In short: Platform engineering implements reusable tools and self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations, improving the developer experience and productivity. This technology approach utilizes reusable configurable application components and services. The benefit to users is in standardized tools, components and automated processes.

Citi to cut 5K jobs citing tech initiatives - Not good for the pro-AI crowd. // ‘Citi’s technology transformation plans, which Mason said are in the execution stage, are driving efforts to reduce headcount…. Over time, “we will no longer need the same level of people that we have at this particular phase,” Mason said. “We’re reducing people even further … as we use that technology to automate a bunch of activities that we have to do manually today….

Change Fatigue In Digital Transformation: Where Has All The Value Gone? - Ways to keep the digital transformation alive: Contextualize business outcomes; Share the effort; Share the value; Conduct holistic load management; Target smaller, more frequent wins; Have a playbook; If you can, adjust incentives.

Change Management In Digital Transformation: There’s No Tunnel, There’s No Light - “21% of global services decision-makers supporting their organization’s digital transformation cited implementation of new processes and capabilities as one of their greatest challenges.” // …79% have more important problems, maybe even culture change totes chill.

The Quest for Better, Faster Deals - The highest quality deals are driven by strategy and vision needs at the buyer, the lowest by regulation needs and projects done by external consultants. I don’t know what “high quality deal” means, but it must be good. The conclusion: you want to sell to the business.

Singapore Bank DBS: A Blueprint For Digital Transformation In Finance - Nothing on how these changes were done, but a brief “what” of the strategy.

Reports Of OpenStack’s Death Greatly Exaggerated - Hmmm….I mean, I think it’s fairly exaggerated. the only market estimates (from the Flexera reports) show small share and y/y decline. But, there’s still a very active community/market in that slide of the cloud pie.

AI And B2B Marketing — Three Opportunities And Challenges To Ponder - “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half; the trouble is I don’t know which half” is still the case after all these years: “most B2B organizations struggle to deliver basic content measurement and intelligence today — 47% of B2B organizations consider themselves beginners at tracking content impact metrics.

“did some thinking, and suddenly it was gone 5” Spent most of the day on the newsletter episode, using two analyst reports as an excuse to putter around platform engineering again. I didn’t do my work to lookup platform engineering definitions; a delightful effect is that I was sent two: from Donnie (such nice writing style!) and a definition from Gartner. When I refer to analysts reports (Forrester, Gartner, IDC, 451 Reseach, etc.

Midjourney: a datacenter filled with clouds in the style of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.Just when you thought (perhaps, hoped) we finally had an understanding of what “platform engineering” is, Gartner and Forrester came out with a Magic Quadrant and a Wave that re-confuses the category.  Or, if you like, helps bring more clarity to the category! Perhaps just a sub-set of it. Let’s find out. The PDFs reduce it down to CI/CD…mostly…with some optional metrics and IDP seasoning thrown in to varying degrees by each firm.

What is the deal with Disney live action kid shows? Do they have a team that makes sure they all have the same…vibe? It’s so weird. (This Jessie show is ok. Not sure about the handsy ten year old: Jessie: “Do you have an off switch?” Handy ten year old: “yup. Do you wanna try and find it?!") I asked Ram about Cloud Foundry a lot today. I’m still not sure what I think about Kubernetes being “the future” when there’s so much work to do to make it easy to use.

A lot of post-production video work today. Doing all the work after you film and then fully edit a video takes a long time. It’s pretty much the same time for any length of video. The most difficult part if promoting it across the four or five channels I have. I don’t even spend time hustling it to other people to post. Who knows. I put up my first “Quick Comment” one - an idea where I just make very short videos that start with one figure/number, idea, etc.

Midjourney: a Soviet style poster with a software developer standing triumpantly on-top of a pile of software developers robots.Names are magicI don’t really know what I think about the idea and movement of “platform engineering.” It definitely has the feel of a market and category now. I reference it all the time, as do “us all” in the cloud native world. I suspect over the next year it’s the phrase everyone will be using for whatever it is exactly.

Apple Savings Accounts Funds Withdrawal Concerns - “Customers who have requested withdrawals have reported waiting 2-4 weeks for their money to show up.” // This is the catch with that account. 4.5% interest is great, though. You have to think of the Apple savings account as a weird, 30 day CD.

I want to try a new video format: the Quick Comment. Just one “fact” or idea and 45 seconds or so of commentar. We’ll see if I like it and/or keep it up.

Improving developer productivity with Platform as a Product, from PlatformCon 2023 - Great talk from the Cloud Foundry team at Mercedes-Benz on how they’ve been doing platform engineering. 300 apps, 1,500 platform services, and by my count, about 7 years of running it.

How to keep your new tool from gathering dust - “Learn where your tool can have the biggest impact; Enlist advocates to demonstrate and socialize your tool; Build consensus over time; Minimize friction around adoption”

Microsoft Design - Wallpapers - Fun! Including the old XP one in 4K somewhere.

Netherlands enables contactless payments on entire public transport network - Yup, it’s pretty great.

Today’s newsletter has just a few links, some quirky quotes, and a list of upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at or attending. My newsletter crossed 600 subscribers this week. Fun! I’ve been trying to build up a more stable place to publish now that social media is FUCKING CRAZY and BLOGS ARE DEAD, and it’s working pretty well. I’ve been trying to come up with some new talks for awhile now.

I have a new video, opining on multi-cloud and how Kubernetes might could help with fears of lock-in (a concept that I think is kind…basic?), check it out below: Relevant to your interestsThe Care and Feeding of Internal Developer Platforms - Five benefits of monitoring and managing internal developer platforms are noted: improved system performance, cost reduction, scalability, enhanced security, and improved feedback loops. Achieving these benefits entails securing deployment environments, establishing system baselines, setting up alerting rules, monitoring application performance, and automating processes.

Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button - If you value writing by the time put into it (“thoughtfulness”), the AI stuff is going to mess with your judgements. // “Now consider all the other tasks where the final written output is important because it is a signal of the time spent on the task, and the thoughtfulness that went into it. Performance reviews. Strategic memos. College essays.

7 Core Elements of an Internal Developer Platform - The reinvention of PaaS continues // The Eternal Recurrence of DevOps. To be fair, this time there’s tighter integration with CI/CD and ops doing some territory grabbing into SDLC.

The Care and Feeding of Internal Developer Platforms - Five benefits of monitoring and managing internal developer platforms are noted: improved system performance, cost reduction, scalability, enhanced security, and improved feedback loops. Achieving these benefits entails securing deployment environments, establishing system baselines, setting up alerting rules, monitoring application performance, and automating processes.

76% of respondents in our State of Kubernetes 2023 survey say they use multiple clouds - they’re multi-cloud. I look at the driving forces behind multi-cloud adoption, most notably the desire to avoid vendor lock-in. For more insights into multi-cloud strategies, Kubernetes benefits, and the challenges being tackled by your peers, check out the VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey. Check out the video

I like are.na - it’s fun, and not icky. Having to pay a little bit to post more than 200 items has a great filtering effect on the content. Anyhow, I wanted to include the things I put in are.na here, on micro.blog, but finding their RSS feed is elusive. Thanks to Fridaycat, I found how. If you look in their source code, you can see that all you have to do is append /feed/rss to the end of an are.

Monoliths, Microservervices and Mainframes – Reflections on Amazon Prime Video’s Monolith Move - “The supposed development time difference between the two methods is not based on the technology itself, but the context in which you’re deploying it. The argument made by the table is tendentious. It’s based on comparing the worst case for ‘traditional’ application development (months of work) with the best case for ‘rapid development’ (hours of work). Similar arguments can be made for all the table’s comparisons.

Escape the Legacy Trap: 5 Keys to Successful Application Modernization - Modernize those apps!

7 Core Elements of an Internal Developer Platform - The reinvention of PaaS continues // The Eternal Recurrence of DevOps. To be fair, this time there’s tighter integration with CI/CD and ops doing some territory grabbing into SDLC.

Mid-day, when I have time. Another webinar in the can: my analysis of our 2023 State of Kubernetes survey. I positioned it as input and guidance into doing your own Kubernetes stuff. My theory on Kubernetes is that everyone wants to do it - “it’s the future” - but very few apps are running in production. Gartner estimates that ‘by 2027, 25 percent of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2021.

I had two recordings today. One on the platform maturity model draft, a paper I got the chance to review early on. There’s a live stream of it up, and I’ll lightly edit it down to a podcast episode later this week. I also did a small panel (with two other people) talking about how US government agencies and groups get better at doing software. It’ll be broadcast in June 21st.

In the library of Castanamir the Mad (Jeff Easley, AD&D module C3: The Lost Island of Castanamir by Ken Rolston, TSR, 1984)

Mostly links today. I’ve been traveling this week and preparing and bunch of stuff to publish in the future. Tragic for the desire to publish now, now, now… How I TravelRelative to your interestsMaximizing value, controlling cost with cloud FinOps - “Among current users, 56% report that spending on public cloud was significantly over budget (by 30% or more) or somewhat over (by 10%-30%) in 2022, compared with 45% of respondents saying the same in 2021.

Traveling back home, to Amsterdam, today. Yesterday’s VMUG Belgium talk went fine. Since it was to VMware admin types, I positioned my platform talk as a glimpse of their future. Whenever the infrastructure changes, you can use new application architectures…and then that drives new types of infrastructure and management needs…and so forth. It means that the people building and running infrastructure need to update their tools and how they work.

The day’s not over yet, but I’ve got two but things coming up the rest of the evening and will probably want to zone out after them: I’m hosting a fireside chat with Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of our group at VMware (streamed in LinkedIn). She should be fun to talk with. And then I’ll go almost straight into this week’s Software Defined Talk (podcast here, watch here for the live stream).

Maximizing value, controlling cost with cloud FinOps - “Among current users, 56% report that spending on public cloud was significantly over budget (by 30% or more) or somewhat over (by 10%-30%) in 2022, compared with 45% of respondents saying the same in 2021. Multiple factors cause organizations to overshoot their budgets for public cloud services (see Figure 2). The need to scale up resources to address unexpected demand emerges as the chief culprit for cloud budget overruns (cited by 29% of respondents, up from 22% in 2021).

Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel -

Do You Shop Online? So Do Your B2B Buyers! - “75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, and 68% made a recent significant purchase using digital commerce”

I recorded a podcast today on security in cloud native. Security can seem like an incomprehensible complexity from the outside, but when you ask an expert to break it down, it’s simple. Sure, lengthy and tedious and precise, but not impossible. I’ll post it in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed sometime this week. I spent a lot of time prep’ing for that podcast: mostly reading a PCI document. I’m not sure when this happened, but my confidence-to-ease in doing live conversations, presentations, and otherwise “public speaking” comes from over-preparing.

Just links this episode. Some fantastic #gartnercoreFrom “Technical Insights: Battle of the APIs — Will REST be Toppled by GraphQL, gRPC or AsyncAPI?,” Gary Olliffe, GartnerRelative to your interestsThinking Strategically About Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) - As with most things, the whole SBOM push is probably a lot simpler to solve than it seems. Also, a delightful “old man yells at secure software supply chain hype” vibe as only Jon could do well.

What I did this summer, the PowerPoint - You should probably cut the first five slides of your deck

An Infinite Game: Interview with Laurel Schwulst - “when I use ChatGPT, I’ve noticed that I’m getting better at talking to a computer. To me, it underscores how amazing the ability to simply have conversations is. And if you’re someone who enjoys having conversations with yourself, I think it helps if you personify the different aspects of your personality.

The Forbidden Zone - ’Back then, you were a webmaster, doing it all.

European HVAC - Air conditioners to be big in Europe?

Can Watsonx Rebuild IBM’s AI Relevance? - Analysis of IBM’s AI stuff. Also, a good side point: no one really knows anymore what IBM does.

The Pessimism Problem Continues to Grow - It’s 60% now: ’Back in 2020, I wrote a post titled “The Pessimism Problem.” We had completed a survey where 54% of respondents agreed with the statement “We regret nearly every purchase we make after the subscription agreement is finalized.

A framework for council technology planning – SensibleTech - “We don’t have much – if any – ‘legacy’ code running on old virtualised mainframes like bits of central government do. In fact, a lot of what is called legacy in local government is anything but – it’s regularly updated and kept working and in line with statutory requirements. So it’s not legacy software. It’s just bad software.” // Getting a common language of digital transformation, a shared model of all the capabilities a local government needs, and an understanding of how all the tech works so that non-technical people can manage it and set strategy.

Touchpoints, coalescence and multi-platform engineering — thoughts from Kubecon 2023 - A sum up of the trends and state of the kubernetes/cloud native community, but an even better picture of the setting and tone.

Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Government IT Spending to Grow 8% in 2023 - “Worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $589.8 billion in 2023, an increase of 7.6% from 2022, according to Gartner, Inc.” And: “57% of government CIOs plan to increase funding for application modernization in 2023, up from 42% in 2022.

Retrospective of 10 years of digital in the UK government - Great overview of the past ten(?) years of digital transformation in the UK government. I must say: this exact analysis probably applies private sector companies worldwide.

Manage process before people - File under “must be nice…"

Majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it - “Just 14% of U.S. adults have tried ChatGPT” - until that gets up to 50%, a lot of the freaking (& hype) is like fearing necromancy. Once you use it a lot you’re like “oh, I see. Not a threat. That dumb-ass box can’t even tell me how to get my kids put their shoes on for school.

Extending the Pivotal Labs Way: How Tanzu Labs Helps Organizations Deliver Great Software - All about Tanzu Labs, the consulting group at VMware that helps your org get better at software. Their approach is very human centric, very pragmatic, and very effective.

How Ecosystems Are Changing Insurance CX - An example of using digital stuff to improve insurance, here car insurance claims. Also, not the point of needing to integrate with all sorts of third parties and systems: “Vehicle claims are often complicated, involve several parties, and take a long time to resolve. Each participant in the claims process, including carriers, loss assessors, vehicle repairers, diagnostics technicians, and so on, has distinct needs and requirements.

Thinking Strategically About Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) - As with most things, the whole SBOM push is probably a lot simpler to solve than it seems. Also, a delightful “old man yells at secure software supply chain hype” vibe as only Jon could do well.

Suggested theme song for this episode: 30% in 2025 implies low use in 2023 From the recent Gartner Marketing Symposium highlights: 64% of marketers have deployed, or are piloting, AI/ML to support autonomous campaign creation, execution, and optimization capabilities. [But:] Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. If you’re in marketing, you need to be using ChatGPT (or WHATEVER) today, as much as possible.

Cutting Costs by Cutting Waste - Instead of removing travel, R&D, etc. (which were thought to be required for your goals at once), focus on removing waste: Excessive risk management, analysis paralysis, unproductive meetings, imbalance of doing/watching, manual bureaucracy/toil.

How Agile Value Management Creates Value Faster - Some metrics for measuring progress.

Gartner Survey Reveals 71% of CMOs Believe They Lack Sufficient Budget to Fully Execute Their Strategy in 2023 - My take: 100% of executives agree they would like more budget.

On-Premises Cloud Is a Failure. Google Has the Fix - Or you could run Cloud Foundry and call it a day.

Read to the end to see an illustration of the inner workings of cloud infrastructure. For all the interest in Kubernetes, there’s not actually many apps running on it right now. Gartner’s Wataru Katsurashima estimates that “by 2027, 25 percent of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2021.” When I look at that, it makes me think that, I don’t know, there’s at best 15% of apps running in kubernetes this year.

Qlik acquires Talend to solidify data governance and quality -

First Attempt at Gathering DORA Metrics - Not easy.

It’s the agile mindset that matters for local government - getting local government to do agile is difficult - “Local government culture is heavily business case driven, where funding is unlocked by making promises around outcomes in one, two or more years’ time. There’s also decades of learned behaviour to overcome, where people are just used to things being ‘finished’ and having projects plans with lots of lovely milestones in them.

Day 868 and Chunks - Knowing what your or your organization’s goals are in enough difficult to come up with a to do list is difficult.

The secret of selling your product to enterprises - Sales is hard and expensive because of all the time and activities it takes, only the multi-quarter timeline, etc.

Economist Daron Acemoglu: ‘When mistakes involve powerful technologies, you’re going to have trouble’ - ‘He imagines a day when teachers could use AI to create individual lesson plans for every student, or nurses might be able to take on much greater roles in, for example, diagnosing diseases. “Why is it that nurses cannot prescribe medications? Why must everything go through this very hierarchical approach where you have to call a doctor [to do that]?

Dumping links like Galileo dumped the orange - There’s a lot going on here: ‘These are the interesting discussions we could be having about these tools, if we could stop letting mediocre billionaire live rent-free in our heads as they hold flashlights under their chins and intone “Aaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeeee” in their spookiest voices. These guys are pumping their upcoming dump, and all the biggest disaster-stories are part of the scam: “AI will become sentient” and “AI will do your job as well as you” are both statements whose primary purpose is to increase the value of the stock in companies making “AI” technology (neither “artificial” nor you get the idea).

Start Your Architecture Modernization with Domain-Driven Discovery - For when you’re doing more than just lift and shift. Also, Marc and I wrote up using DDD for app modernization The Legacy Trap.

The Cult of the Founders - Operating a large tech company is a different set of skills than marketing a small company.

“The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore - The culture of big box stores as seen through French eyes.

ICYMI: Instagram’s New App Could Be Here By June - Adding a microblog to Instagram?! // “You can post text updates up to 500 characters (that’s less than an Instagram caption, an extended tweet or a LinkedIn post so be concise!

LogoffSee y’all next time!

• Innovator’s Dilemma dynamics - “while a $40 million company needs to find just $8 million in revenues to grow at 20 percent in the subsequent year, a $4 billion company needs to find $800 million in new sales. No new markets are that large. As a consequence, the larger and more successful an organization becomes, the weaker the argument that emerging markets can remain useful engines for growth…. Not only are the market applications for disruptive technologies unknown at the time of their development, they are unknowable.

Adding A Product-Led Growth Strategy To A Traditional B2B Organization - Among other things: don’t forget they your sales model is going to drive your product management, eventually.

Josh Long at Devoxx UK: Showcasing Bootiful Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3 - “In his humoristic seriosity, Long mentioned that as he feels the compilation was taking too long he decided to ask for either elevator music or at least a notification, like the toasters, to alert him when the compilation is done.” Sounds about right.

The 90s Obsession With Transparent Technology - Clearly a good read.

Gartner Says Four Trends are Shaping the Future of Cloud, Data Center and Edge Infrastructure - Some predictions about how organizations will do public cloud stuff, if you’re into Gartner predictions. Here is one on migrating apps to public cloud: ‘The focus of refactoring cloud infrastructure should be on optimizing costs by eliminating redundant, overbuilt or unused cloud infrastructure; building business resilience rather than service-level redundancy; using cloud infrastructure as a way to mitigate supply chain disruptions; and modernizing infrastructure.

MariaDB walks tightrope between commerce and open source - “It recorded a 26 percent year-over-year increase in revenue to reach $13.5 million, although it was still making a net loss of $11.9 million, partly owing to the cost of going public.

AI Act: a step closer to the first rules on Artificial Intelligence - “AI systems with an unacceptable level of risk to people’s safety would be strictly prohibited, including systems that deploy subliminal or purposefully manipulative techniques, exploit people’s vulnerabilities or are used for social scoring (classifying people based on their social behaviour, socio-economic status, personal characteristics).” Also summarizing copyrighted material, it seems.

Eyecandy - Visual Technique Library - Different, fun camera techniques.

Stop worrying about cloud-lock-in, and outages, Gartner - Perhaps there’s enough good in choosing a single vendor (per app and group of apps, at least) that, like, you should.

A Formula For Pitching CIOs - Pretty good for any pitch.

Datadog’s $65M/year customer mystery solved - “Above $2-5M/year annual spend is where bringing a vendor in-house tends to come up. And this is because it is around this number where the cost of hiring a whole team to do what a vendor is doing can theoretically make sense.

TP–7 - teenage engineering - This is the weirdest looking recording gear I’ve ever seen. It’s so expensive that, like an expensive bottle of wine, I have to assume it’s good. Shipping without mics for such a price seems…weird?

Twitter doesn’t drive many substuck views - “At the start of the year, Twitter on average drove less than 3% of all views across Substack. Today, it accounts for less than 2%.” For my newsletter, Twitter is fine, it’s third place in views (2,923 since Dec 8th, 2022) after the actual newsletters (32,551), and the always mysterious “Direct” source (8,007). Twitter has also driven 31 new subscriptions, I currently have 593 subscribers.

IBM Watson missed the AI revolution, but Watsonx could become the heartbeat of the Generative Enterprise - Overview of the three parts of Watsonx, and discussion of what the deal is with it. I joined the waitlist.

Gartner Says Layoffs May Ultimately Harm Shareholder Returns - After firing people to lower costs, the remaining staff have to do more work, either demanding more pay of getting demoralized and seeking another job. Also, if you want to grow revenue, you’ll need more staff, so you’ll hire contractors, and eventually want to hire back more staff. There’s also a list of novel alternatives, including a four day work week!

Docker makes comeback with over $50M in ARR two years into restructuring -

Monoliths vs micro-services, here we go again -

Apple Makes More Fintech Moves With High-Yield Savings Account From Goldman Sachs - Very detailed overview of “Bank of Apple.

LCY station, London.

VMware strives to become the multi-cloud leader - Overview of VMware’s current strategy, etc. from the VMware analyst day.

Introducing Kubecost Cloud: Now in Open Beta! - - FinOps!

IBM looks to turn nearly 8,000 jobs over to artificial intelligence, CEO says - ’“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told Bloomberg News, referring to “back-office” positions such as in human resources.

Lunch philosophy

Bish at the Bank: Live in Baltimore by Walter Bishop Jr.

KubeCon Europe 2023 highlights Kubernetes explosion and need for instant platform engineering, CNCF - “10,000 attendees, 58% of whom were new to the conference, with another 2,000 people on the waitlist” And: “Surveys show that Kubernetes complexity, security, and a skills gap are the top challenges organizations face in adopting Kubernetes… Managing configuration complexity at a global platform scale, Painful Kubernetes upgrades, Multi-cluster management”

Jeffrey Bernard put it when I went to interview him: “As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work . . . if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn’t he?” How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson 📚

Setting the Record Straight on Cloud Computing ROI - Ability to add new features(quickly), access to new tech, scaling and performance, toil reduction to focus on things valuable to the business or competitive advantage, better security. Of course reducing costs (or “efficiency” if you’re forced to feel the “do more with the same/less” vibe) is one, but that’s not the point of the article.

Why Are You Doing This? (Wrong Answers Only) - Some of these are mostly (only?) for companies focused on profitless-growth and raising their valuation (startups and recently IPO’ed tech companies). If you’re at a company focused on cashflow and more long term share price, many of them are what you should be doing. In the first mode, you’re looking to build up “story” and visions of future valuation, and the cash out before things level out.

Use Forrester’s insights to calm depositors and prevent a bank run - Europeans are trusting their banks a lot more than Americans: ‘Among US online consumers, 40% agreed with the statement, “Recent problems with banks have made me more concerned that my bank will not be there for me when I need it.” French online consumers had similar sentiments: 38% of them agreed. But only 28% of UK online consumers felt the same.

The Definition Of “More From Less” In B2B Content Strategy And Operations - The best tip here to focus a lot on recycling what you have already. I agree: there’s always a lot of assets and not near enough promotion and reuse/remixing of them. // “When asked about their perception of the content that they receive from vendors who market to them, 61% of business buyers say that vendors give them too much content, and 63% say that what they get is more focused on style than substance.

How To Be Resilient: 5 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard -

Will Platform Engineering Get Loved To Death? -

The Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky : The Mystery of Everyday Life -

Build A Platform Engineering Team To Support Your Organization’s Prize Talent -

Scaling Beyond the Pilot in Public Sector Organizations -

CD Foundation Releases Fourth State of Continuous Delivery Report, 2023 - In these surveys (based on big SlashData surveys), Since 2020, the reporting on the deployment frequency breakout has held steady: ~35% more than a month, ~32% a week to a month, ~22% hourly to weekly, ~10% multiple times a day. These are a lot different than what analysts (like Forrester) typically track, as well as the old State of Agile surveys (digital.

Enterprise interest in sovereign cloud on the rise, survey - “In a poll of 1,000 enterprise leaders from 10 countries, including Australia, France, Germany, India, and the UK and US, 69% of respondents cited potential exposure to extra-territorial laws when using cloud as being a top concern.

FinOps! Five Cost Management Tips for IT Leaders, IDC - Good chart of what people are doing to optimize cloud spend (only n= from Dec 2022, though). Also:“In a recent IDC poll of CIOs, 64% of respondents said they were spending more on the Cloud than they budgeted. Over 50% of CEOs are concerned about Cloud Spend.” And: “companies that regularly employ cost benchmarking typically find 5-10% efficiency opportunities. However, companies that have never performed cost benchmarking can see up to 30% opportunities for cost efficiency.

I’m giving a talk about platform engineering lessons learned at Devoxx UK this week, May 10th to 12th in London. If you want to register, you can use the code SEEMESPEAK23 to get 25% off.

Spring Cloud Gateway: The Swiss Army Knife of Cloud Development - Hooking up your applications and the services they depend on, microservices or whatever.

The Cloudcast: How AI will Impact Cloud-native - This is incredibly comprehensive.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam

Deep Work summarized by Phil Gyford

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

1970s grocery store, wide angle. Midjourney.

Another bank bites the dust. Three recommendations to wring opportunity out of this so-called crisis. - “Continue investment in critical modernization initiatives. Digitize your commercial banking offerings Create actual offerings for small and medium enterprise clients, inclusive of start-ups and scale-ups.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? - “Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work?

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Snacks stand, Amsterdam, 2021.

In the Netherlands, a little bit of Texas for breakfast is still possible.

This is the first of a few videos and blog posts I have on our annual Kubernetes survey, which you should check out if you’re into that kind of thing.

Much like financial debt, technical debt is helpful when managed responsibly, but like real debt, tech debt can also stop growth and innovation in its tracks. My colleague Bryan Ross has a piece out on tech debt with five ways to address is. Here’s a summary of it. Think of technical debt as the accumulation of compromises on development quality to save time. Some examples of these choices are postponing unit tests, running outdated software, or focusing on end-user features at the expense of internal processes.