Rick Rubin’s Podcast

I 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. Coming up with and asking questions that get great answers is very difficult.

I think most of his questions are either asking “how?” as in “how do you choose an album cover?” or “how do decide if a joke is good?” His other frequent question is “what was that like?”: he likes asking people in advertising or adjacent industries “was it really like Mad Men?”

If you’ve seen that meme that’s like “how a person looks at a bookshelf” versus “how a carpenter/artist” looks at a bookshelf," he’s always doing the second.

He’s just so chill too.

He very rarely has anything negative to say. You leave each episode pretty much feeling great and optimistic.

As an exception that proves the rule: in one interview you hear him almost putting down executive types at record companies who are more interested in selling than creating good content. He says, they don’t know what they’re doing. But that’s about as far as the negative vibes goes.

Some of the episodes are a little weird if the people he’s interviewing don’t have much to say. I skipped over some two part series of, you know, magic powder doctors early on.

The content is good, and long-term there’s some kind of world-building going on that’s attractive. He’s building a world of curiosity, creativity (even “art”), all bound up in a world-view of just chilling the fuck out.

I mean, he’s rich and famous. We’re hearing from the rare exception to the thousands of producers and creative types that didn’t make it big. But, if you can put aside the accurate but boring Halo Effect criticism, it’s good stuff.

Also: the ads he has are fun to listen to and many of them are super-weird (nutrition-scammy) products. Macadamia nuts? Powdered imitation-gatorade? But, the actual ad reads and production are fun!

Wastebook

• We’ve passed a fuck-line here in Europe. I’ve seen the word “fuck” on more surfaces than ever: t-shirts, for sure, laptop stickers, on cars. I feel like it’s still spicy talk in the States, but overhear it feels like part of the general European trend to just like, well, not give a fuck.

• “Clarity first, then consistency.” Here.

• Three groups of people were playing cards in the Zadar airport. Is that a Croatian thing? Who ever plays cards anymore?

• “The Church of Recurring Revenue.” Here.

Have you tried just following best practices?

Don’t let the factory rust.

• Why and how cloud native technologies give you more control over your software delivery process? A rough answer: Cloud native apps are modular, container-based designs. They run in container orchestration engines and, it is hoped, have much of the infrastructure and networking stuff automated (though, this is yet to be fully realized and creates a problem in its own). Assuming the happy path: they're designed to be efficient to run, fast to deploy, and decoupled. This means you get more cost controls and more agility. What's important, though, is to standardize on how you do this.

• Much of what you probably suffer from now is having to deal with a whole bunch of different ways of developing, managing, and running applications, tech debt, and having to spend time manually doing compliance and security checks. "The business" and developers don't have enough cycles to study what users actually need, experiment with the best way to solve it, all while making sure they comply to internal standards and regulations. Doing all that "not the actual UI" work (moving pixels on the screen!) takes a lot more time than you ever think. One person in banking estimated that amount of toil at 50% to 60% of their team's time.

• Before we get to any of that, though, you need to make sure you’re thinking of software as a core part of how your organization runs. Here’s a simple test: who decides what your developers do? Are they given requirements and “wire frames” from another group and given a date to hit? This probably means you’re doing it wrong. Are they told what you need to accomplish and why those goals are important for “the business,” and then they can decide how to deliver those “outcomes”? You’re probably closer to good software culture.

• No matter what tools you use, if you follow a command-and-control approach to software, your results will be less than ideal. People know this is lean manufacturing: you push the work closest to the people actually doing the work. It’s no different in software, and, in fact, is even more so. With software the developers and operations staff are both working on the line and building the factory at the same time. They should be the ones determining what to do.

• Eventually management can take a bigger role as they become more like developers, or understand how software works. In tech companies, many of the founders and executives are (former) developers, so they of course know how to manage and get results from developers and operations people. Is that the case in your organization? What is management’s background? The board?

Relative to your interests

• 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.

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

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Oct 12th Spring Tour London Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I have a week and half before I travel again (see above) - and then it’s a doom-doozy of a travel week, plus more travel to follow. And, as you know, outside of the talk you’re giving or the meeting you’re having, very little gets done during work-travel. There’s also a series of three webinars in the works. And, I need to create/learn a new talk or two during that time. Meanwhile, there’s other macro-winds on the horizon way above my pay grade.

It almost seems all undoable! I wonder if that’s why I’ve been feeling more anxious than usual of late…

I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my annoyances working with experts/practitioners (well, anyone) over the years: they’re always telling me they don’t have time to take on new work, their backlog is full. And, I’m like, “I just want to record a podcast!” Turns out, you can just say no. Is that a way people work? Could I just say “oh, I have travel upcoming, a three webinar series, and then I need to make at least a podcast a week, and can you imagine how long it took me to type up that rant on analyst reports (a lot shorter than you think because I basically took one pass and didn’t edit it - but you get what I’m saying), so I can’t do that podcast”? Would my life and bank account be better? Would my work be better? Would my employers finances be better? At a startup…no? But at a regular company?

There’s something to be said for calibrating on “only work on things that matter, that have impact.” Which, I guess. But I also feel that in a big company, you hire a lot of people to do work on the mid-tier “impact.” The management/work advice we all soak in from startups and “high growth” companies seems hardly applicable to, like, the real world.

I have no calibration for those things. It’d be nice to have some, though.

(Also, I just ordered an iPad mini - I didn’t realize they had that size with the Apple Pencil. I love using my big ass iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, but I rarely do it. Could this mini get me over that edge. In theory, it’s also the perfect form factor for Kindle books and even PDFs [I think you’d have to landscape the iPad mini and scroll through the PDF instead of going full page, but that’s probably fine]. My main concern is, like, protecting the pencil. I need to find some kind of tape on hard-case that I can have for when I want to do the whole throw the iPad in my bag things. However, the main scenario I’m targeting is a go-bag with my video recording gear [tripod and iPhone mount with hot-shoe, Rode Wireless II’s, various cords] and the iPad mini. Throw in a little foldable bluetooth keyboard, and this feels like a good setup for trips where I can leave my laptop behind. The only thing I really need a laptop for is editing slides, probably? I think you can record podcasts and even present from iPhones and iPads. THE DREAM.)

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

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 architecture

A 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. This is, you know, a distributed application. “Message passing” is one of the dreams of object oriented programming and Internet apps.1

Microservices!

Why you use a service mesh

Anyhow, if you’re do all of that, you need a way to manage all that network traffic. Each little bit of code has to know how to contact the other bits of code and work with it - so called “east-west traffic.”2 You need a registry that catalogs all those bits of code. You need to know information about that chunk of code: the version, how to connect to it, how to authenticate with it. You need to somehow make a call over the network, that is, get a network connection. You want it to be secure and encrypted, like, always now-a-days (I don’t really know what mTLS is, but EBC decks are fucking rife with it, so it must be great). And then the people running that network want to manage it: if some chunks of code are too chatty and filling up your series of tubes with too much crap, you want to throttle them. You want to gather metrics about your series of tubes and the messages sent down them. You know: network management. And, when you’re using it with Kubernetes, you want it to all think like and work with Kubernetes: how you configure and deploy it (yaml!), how configuration is rolled out and drift is done. Etc. Etc. (Check out Ivan McPhee’s service mesh overview for a lot more details and the vendors in the space.)

What drives me bonkers about this is that, like, this is what the Internet does. Why don’t we just use Internet primitives to do all of this? Why do we need to layer a whole new network management layer on-top of all the layers. Even more maddening, when you go up the stack into the application layer: the developers there have written all of their own stuff that handles all this functionality. You look at something like the projects in Spring Cloud and they’re, you know, doing all of this too. I’ve started to think that each of these layers happens because the people in the layers above you don’t want to talk with the network admins.

Anyhow, back to service meshes. They are handy! They do important things! For example, help you run your applications across multiple clouds, Kubernetes clusters (is that the right phrasing?), add in customized layers of security, and so forth. Big ol’ enterprises need all of this. I mean, everyone does.

So, what’s up with the whole category of service mesh? Well, Gartner is not so hot on it:

The hype around service mesh software has mostly settled down, and the market has not grown as much as was once anticipated. This raises questions about the usefulness and ROI of service meshes for most organizations. “Market Guide for Service Mesh,” August 2nd, 2023, Gartner.

The report notes that service meshes are used outside of Kubernetes as well. It’s like a whole new marbling of a layer around and inside your existing layers, be they VMs or containers. Yay…? Ivan’s take a little less dire, simply urging taking it slow before choosing which service mesh to use:

Avoid adopting a service mesh based purely on consumer trends, industry hype, or widespread adoption. Instead, take the time to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Explore the potential tradeoffs in terms of performance and resource consumption. Evaluate your support requirements against your in-house resources and skills (many open-source service meshes rely on community support). Once you’ve created a short list, choose a service mesh—and microservices-based application development partner—that works best with your software stack. Ivan McPhee, GigaOm, August 2023.

Filling in the gaps

When I first head about the notion of a service mesh long ago, my first reaction was basically “wait, I thought Kubernetes already did that?” This was the first in a long series of that reaction over the years. It turns out Kubernetes didn’t do a lot of the things I assumed it did. This was an instance of confusing outcomes with capabilities: for all the praise Kubernetes gets for improving operations and developer productivity, I’d assumed it, like, had those capabilities. But, in fact, many of the outcomes Kubernetes achieves are done by layering in all sorts of other projects, products, and ways of working.3 Ivan’s report does good job cataloging all those capabilities: your eyes can start to glaze over after awhile, so be sure to read the vendor profiles in reverse alphabetical order!

So, you need a service mesh to get all of that basic, distributed app functionality. This is fine! That’s how Kubernetes was designed, whether the overall community over the years treated it as such or not: “platform for building platforms,” “a life of it’s own,” and all that.

That Gartner report identifies a key trend in the ongoing rollout of Kubernetes. People don’t want to pay for things, and this leads to a lot of unplanned for work on their part of integrate all the free components together and deal with them:

The current service mesh market is largely dominated by open-source offerings such as Consul, Istio and Linkerd. However, Gartner client inquiries about service meshes consistently show open-source service meshes suffer from difficulty of use, and a lack of sufficient skills for effective engineering, administration and operational upkeep. The lack of mature DevOps practices can increase the operational burden. These challenges substantially increase as the number of deployed container pods and services grows exponentially, especially in a multicloud environment.

Hey, you get what you pay for. For vendors, this does mean one important product management and strategy decision: you need an easy to download, easy to get up and running, and totally free on-ramp to your paid-for product. I mean: that’s just late 2000’s, open core and early public cloud basics, right?

That Gartner report is good reading if you have access to it.

On your radar

I’m guessing you don’t have access to Gartner, so you’ll probably be interested in this GigaOm report from Ivan McPhee (have I referred to it already here yet?), which you can read thanks to my employer VMware. It’s equally good, though not as strident. Here is their radar:

We also discussed the services mesh concept and space on last week’s Tanzu Talk podcast (podcast or in video form-factor). Also, check out this interview about service meshes on our podcast from July of this year.

Relative to your interests

• 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. The problem isn’t that we haven’t optimized each individual part of the system enough. We’ve built more efficient tooling at every step. But the way the whole system is put together? The experience of using it? That’s basically identical to how it was in 2009, and it’s the reason we’re stuck.” There’s two fronts to the “DevOps is dead” rhetorical war now: from the platform engineering crowd and the fraction within the DevOps crowd itself.

• 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.”

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

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.”

Logoff

I was at SHIFT in Zadar, Croatia this week. I presented my platform talk on a huge stage! This was an arena and the stage was on the center, you were surrounded by the audience. That’s not normal: usually, the audience is all in-front of you. When I’m presenting, I tend to pick out three or five people in the audience that look at. You, of course, want to pick out people who are smiling and paying attention to you. They give you energy, and also help you figure out if your approach and content are working. In this case, I forced myself to circle around the stage, finding those people in all directions.

If you find yourself “in the round” like this, try to move around so that you can find more of those positive vibe people.

Also, the morning of I had some kind of anxiety attack. You know, the kind where there’s nothing to actually worry about and yet it feels like there’s everything to worry about. It wasn’t about speaking at all. In fact, I was looking forward to finally getting up there because I knew it’d drive out that general panic attack thing. And, it worked! Public speaking is a safe, calming space for me.

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. The problem isn’t that we haven’t optimized each individual part of the system enough. We’ve built more efficient tooling at every step. But the way the whole system is put together? The experience of using it? That’s basically identical to how it was in 2009, and it’s the reason we’re stuck."

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. Why? You would think in those grunge-tinged days it was ironic, but it was not. It was because we actually liked it as a whole even.

Anyhow, it’s all so lovely. The contestants are so happy just to be acknowledged and given a chance, so into it and vibrant. They’re all made equal and part of a larger whole by practicing the purist, most complex, mysterious, and poetic part of commerce: pricing.

And even when that sad trumpet sounds, they give Bob a hug and as they walk off stage, that sparkle in their eye says “don’t worry, imma get it next time!”

Also, what other show would you ever hear the phrase “a handsome grandfather clock”?

Enterprise DevOps TechCon, October 3rd, Utrecht

If you’re into cloud native apps, kubernetes, and all that, and you can make it to Utrecht on October 3rd, you should come to Enterprise DevOps TechCon. They’ve put together a really good agenda, including talks from The Dutch Police about how they’ve been running their apps, an overview of the same at RTL/Videoland, and The Netherlands Railways (NS). Plus, all sorts of other technical talks. Oh, and an opening talk from me. I’m looking forward to it - you don’t get to see that density of practitioner talks too often. And, it’s totally free to attend! Come check it out.

Relative to your interests

• The Drunk and Retired Podcast, a review from 2005 - I’ve been podcasting for like 20 years!

• Stop saying “fail”

• When It Comes to Enterprise Tech Spending, Buyer Enthusiasm is “Not Dead Yet!” - Enterprise tech spend survey from VC shop, Battery Ventures.

• Google monopolized internet search for a decade, landmark antitrust trial hears - Ruling expected early in 2024. Also, the EU is going after Google’s real business: advertising.

• 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.”

• Apple’s iPhone 15 adds Dynamic Island and switches to USB-C - Concise overview. I’m hoping to finally get a new phone now if they’re available where ever I am at the time.

• 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.”

Wastebook

• “If you ever want to know what is going on with a particular issue, start by looking at who is willing to shame what, or not.” I’m not sure what the mechanics of this are, but it sounds like some interesting investigative device. Here.

• To add to the “try have less managers” theory: “I was talking to a friend of mine back at Google, and his reporting chain looks like him, Director, Director, VP, VP, VP, Senior VP, and then the CEO of the company. Every single person between him and the CEO of the company is trying to add value wherever they can to show that they can move to the next level. Which means that decision making takes forever, because you have to have too many people in the room who are used to being the decision maker, who are all competing to be the ones making that decision, which in turn absolutely kills innovation stone dead because it’s like trying to swim through concrete.” Here.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 12th Spring Tour London Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I’m off to Zadar today for the SHIFT conference. I’m giving my platform talk tomorrow and doing some extra video stuff. I’m having to fly outside my airline alliance, and since there’s no Marriotts there, stay outside my hotel chain. THE HORROR! On the other hand, short as my trip is, I hope to get a little Mediterranean. time, s

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-conference

I’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., manufactures, pharma, global retailers, etc.

Many of the people you need to win over (bottoms-up with developers and operations people, but also “middle-up” and even the executives at the top) just won’t travel to a mega-event. Plus, the mega-event tends to be so focused on speaking perfectly about the vendor’s identity that the actual content is both thin and overwhelming.

At a regional event, you can get more attendance from the accounts you want, and can focus time on what those people want. I feel like the leads you get at a small, regional event would be higher and more targeted, plus: you get the chance to have deeper conversations (relationship building, you know, selling) with individuals, you meet more people, can run the maze through the company social networks to find the influencers and deciders, hear more rumors about what’s going on inside your accounts to better position your pitch (often tailored to each individual and group), etc.

Also, small, regional probably a little cheaper than a mega-event. Not much though, because you’re doing a lot of little events. $50,000 in Chicago, then €50,000 in Amsterdam, then $50,000 in Austin…throw in travel expenses (business class for those 6+ hour flights if you’re a kind company with a bigger enough P/E) and steak dinners, and pretty soon we’re talking millions annually.

I mean, what you’d want to do is some reporting on the leads and accounts at the mega-events versus the regional events. Pure number of leads, even at target accounts, isn’t going to tell you much. You probably need to do an analysis six and then 12 months later and see how many deals were closed and deal size from activities at each event. You could throw in “follow-up meetings” as a second metric if you needed another slide in your deck. My hunch is that you’re going to help close more deals at a regional event. You might get associated with bigger individual deals at the mega-event, but that could be because you tend to invite higher-level executives to those events than your small ones.

I don’t know: I haven’t ever looked at this at a company I work for because (a) good fucking luck getting access to all of that unless you’re an executive who can get a team of people to figure it out dumping the CSVs from Salesfroce and then spending a few days Excel’ing it into something useful, and, (b) if I did get that info, it’d be proprietary info that I couldn’t share.

A regional event strategy does require a road-crew (hello!), but if you integrate the strategy into sales, you also get the bonus of working directly with the local sales reps and sales engineers. Ideally, you’d have your field facing people like, mostly sales engineers, give a couple of the presentations at the event. These are the people that the people in the audience will keep talking with as you work on closing the deals, not the fancy-talking evangelists (hello, me again!) that are flitting about city-to-city.

Outside of vendor-run conferences, this seems to be the case with other small events like, for sure, DevOpsDays and other regional events I’ve been to recently like stackconf (Berlin) and SREday (London). DevOpsDays Des Moines feels like it had at least 500 people in attendance. If you were selling to John Deere or the numerous insurance companies in Iowa (which, yes, you are if you’re in enterprise tech sales), you’re going to reach a shit-ton more people at an event like that than at your giant confab in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Orlando, etc.

The Big Event

The big event is, I guess, needed as more of an event about the company and their announcements. The Big Event is a press and analyst moment - you get all those people there, the “influencers,” and you get your story out and they generate a lot of content. Yay!

For me, The Big event should also be about customers and prospects that are close to finally paying. The Big Event is a prestige even for your customers - getting an invite and travel paid The Big Event is a good treat to give customers. You know, with whatever ethics and compliance applied to the letter, of course.

Just securing a customer a speaking slot is good. Most of the people at your customers (and prospects) don’t get the chance to speak at conferences very much, let alone ones that have good video production and will post the videos to YouTube.1 This is true for all types of staff. For executives at your customers, getting a keynote speaking slot is good for their careers.

And, then, there’s the content in the actual talks customers give. The regional, vendor conferences are mostly a set of the same talks from the vendor, not new ones each time. It’s like stand-up act on the road. It just looks like it’s fresh. Though, having a local end-user talk would be a good edition, as well as having the local sales team speak at the event, as mentioned above.

In contract, the mega-conference is your chance to get customers on-tape (which means, in YouTube) talking about using your technology…and, yeah, in addition to that, just general, helpful conference talks. It’s your chance (the vendor) to also get content in YouTube about your productions, your positioning, etc.

While I’m here, this is another thing that mega-conferences do weird. I want to tread lightly here because putting on a mega-conference is A LOT OF FUCKING TERRIBLE THANKLESS WORK. Just imagine spending ten hours deciding on t-shirts, packing cubes versus insulated water bottles, or figuring out if you have budget for hot dogs during breaks, or if it’s just going to be popcorn - throw in all the life and worldviews of a geographically dispersed and cultured team (“what if people are offended by corn?”) and you’ve got endless…endless meetings. Imagine picking a newborn’s name with 200 co-workers, but there’s lawyers involved and 100 executives, supporting by their staff whipping up PowerPoints proving that “Gerry” is the clear winner if you want to follow the Q3 guidance from McKinsey, and, really, is Statista really a site we want to get market data from(we have an IDC EULA, you know - oh, we’re a systems management company [sure, inside a hardware company] but for some reason we don’t subscribe to that part of IDC? File a ticket?)…meanwhile that other executive just took a screenshot of a James Governor tweet and, like, that’s all we had to do?…yeah…where was I?…right…vying for the baby’s name).

Anyhow.

The mega-conference is probably your number one channel during the year to build up your customer testimonials, references, and marketing. You should get as many of the talks as possible to be customers talking about using your product, or just validating your world view (“boy, we really needed to go cloud native to meet business demand,” said Really Big Insurance Company speaker). In fact, I’d say, that barring government policies, if you get a customer to speak, you should pay all of their travel expenses. Compare that to how much producing one of those fancy videos where people are walking around hallways and looking off camera as they say (hey, again, I know how much work it is) kind of vapid, too short testimonials that have been edited down to business jargon. The mindset of those videos is to be quick, short and sweet. Four minutes is considered long. That’s not really long enough to tell a meaty customer story.

A 45 minute conference talk by a customer can be converted into a logo on your “we’re sort of a big deal” slide, likely at least three other pieces of content, sliced into social vides, a PDF case study, then you can reference it in your own talks and presentations (this is, essentially, what I’ve made a career out of)…and then there’s the actual video itself!

Also, while you have customers there, you can do additional interviews and videos. The customers have already arranged their thoughts and gotten permission to speak publicly for the talk they gave. This means you can get them to talk more. And, you can put their content in other channels. I mean, you’re probably going to pay theCUBE to show up, maybe The New Stack, the CTO Advisor, moderately famous tech podcasts (call us!), right? Feed customers into those videos (if you’re paying for one of those show floor video outfits and you just have your execs talking with them, you’re losing out - get your customers on there!)

Where is the Mr. Beast of Enterprise Software Industry Analysis?

BTW: it’s beyond me why the big analyst firms don’t get into this “live from the conference room floor” business. I get the whole pay for play, blah, blah, but: really, no one gives a fuck, that’s some kind of internal neurosis those firms have. At the very least, 451 Group/S&P Global Whatever should be in that game. I know it’s easy to say after doing it for 20 years with the, uh, DIY quality that allow myself, but doing it all is not a big deal. You don’t need to be some Monday Night football quality-level like theCUBE. What’s more important is the content quality and distribution. If you got people like RedMonk or the helpful bullshit-detector sass of a Gartner analyst interviewing vendor execs and customers at The Big Event, it’d be great content and analysis - but the full video behind the analyst paywall, even. I think these firms don’t do it because (a) as mentioned it’d just out of their skills and comfort level, and, (b) classic innovator’s dilemma self-harm (they can’t re-prioritize budget and analyst time to go for what seems like a lower-quality, lower value product but ends up being just fine once you figure out the business model and invest in it for 24+ months).

O’Reilly should get into this too. Maybe Pluralsight, or whatever. I think those tech publishing companies are trying to figure out doing a paywalled YouTube, which I think could work (think scaling Ben Thompson, sort of). You put 1/4 to 1/2 of each video on YouTube and ALL THE SOCIALs, and then you have the full video behind your paywall. A huge chunk of revenue from those companies (and analyst shops!) comes from ARR: company-wide subscriptions to their services that are on a two to three year time bomb of lost revenue. Just like with software, if you’re an analyst shop or O’Reilly, over the course of that 12+ month subscription, you have to drive consumption. You want people at the companies viewing your content. Otherwise, at the end of that contract term your customers will be like “year, but no one really used this service, so how about we cut how much we pay you by 90%?” In that model, the content provider needs to stuff as much content as possible into their platform: just, like, anything! So, you’d get the big vendors to, at the minimum, pay travel and expenses to go their conferences and just interview the shit out of all the speakers. Win-win!

Also, as Richard Seroter points out, the mega-event is an important event for getting your own employees together.

Speaking of…

If you’re into cloud native apps, kubernetes, and all that, and you can make it to Utrecht on October 3rd, you should come to Enterprise DevOps TechCon. They’ve put together a really good agenda, including talks from The Dutch Police about how they’ve been running their apps, an overview of the same at RTL/Videoland, and The Netherlands Railways (NS). Plus, all sorts of other technical talks. Oh, and an opening talk from me. I’m looking forward to it - you don’t get to see that density of practitioner talks too often. And, it’s totally free to attend! Register and come check it out.

Wastebook

• My new theory is that there are too many managers and middle-people in the software process. I’m not trying to be an anarchist here, or anything. The developers should talk directly with the security and governance people, not through meetings and the tunnels. The developer team should talk directly with “the business” about what they need, and directly with customers/users. In the same way, the ops people should talk directly with the app developers. Draw up the old value stream and see where you’re waiting for a review meeting, a management decision, an authorization of some sort. With all the cloud native automation/shift left stuff, why is that needed? Figure it out and if the development team can just decide themselves, do that.

• #LifeHack if you’re going to write a thing that you’re sick of covering or paying attention to some topic, then you’re still paying attention to that topic. No need to mention that you’re sick of it and are going to stop. Just stop. 🤯

Relative to your interests

• 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. It would have been better to clarify the business outcomes, which were achievable. We knew we wanted to reduce the amount of paper that moved between our offices; that let us prioritize addressing the parts of the business that moved the most paper. We knew we wanted to be better at detecting fraudulent applications; that clarity let us focus on the types of immigration benefits most susceptible to fraud. And so on for our other goals. With this clarity, we tied the transformation to everyday activities rather than going off and building technical infrastructure as a sideline project.”

• 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. If that happens, along with USB-C finally getting to the iPhone, this will be an era of government regulations helping us out a lot in tech-land. Sure, the tech people will be all like “do we want the government decided tech innovation?” And I think I’d be like “yes, someone has to, cause no one else seems to be doing things that purely favor the customer/consumer, regardless of ‘business impact.’” I mean, whether a company is profitable or not is not my problem as a customer. My job is to get as much value out of the company as possible, not help them be profitable. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE.

• 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.'”

• 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.”

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techcon, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Nov 6th to 9thVMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

Thanks for all the feedback on yesterday’s episode. I learned long ago that you can never tell what people end up liking, so it’s good to hear from them when they do. And, I mean, it’s always good to hear positive feedback even it’s just a little heart click thing.

I’m sure all of you are just right up in the thrill of talking about enterprise tech mini-events in, like, Eindhoven and Kansas City, right?

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. It would have been better to clarify the business outcomes, which were achievable. We knew we wanted to reduce the amount of paper that moved between our offices; that let us prioritize addressing the parts of the business that moved the most paper. We knew we wanted to be better at detecting fraudulent applications; that clarity let us focus on the types of immigration benefits most susceptible to fraud. And so on for our other goals. With this clarity, we tied the transformation to everyday activities rather than going off and building technical infrastructure as a sideline project."

The week so far, a selection

I don’t really know what “platform engineering” is

Last 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.

Wastebook

• Always use the cloakroom for your backpack at a museum. No need to carry it around.

• Adding peanuts to soup is a genius move.

• It’s hot all over northern Europe. They are not prepared for this at all. I was in the brand new Berlin airport for several hours and the AC wasn’t up for it. Europe is in for ten years or sweating their asses off for ten or so years until they figure this out. Now is the time to invest in HVAC, cologne, and handkerchiefs.

• If you’re going to use an animated gif in your presentation, you should have it loop for, like, five seconds max. You don’t want it to run over and over for minutes as you talk through the slide. (You know, convert it to an MP4 and then you can tell PowerPoint to just play it once.)

• “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” -Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project

• “I knew what time it was by watching TV” Tom Hanks

• Watering the Plants: “I wonder what’ll happen when I get a job I like. Will I keep these hobbies? I’ll have the knowledge, sure, but will I apply it, or go normal Jesse-workaholic mode and just throw myself into the job, ignoring all my previous escapes from reality?” And: “I used to be in the conference circuit and loved speaking all around the world at various user groups, conferences, and workshops. Speaking about tech you are passionate about in front of large, eager groups of strangers is intoxicating.”

SpringOn Tour in London, Oct 12th

If you’re a Java programmer in the London area, you should come check out the free SpringOne Tour conference on 12 October in London. It’ll give you a great overview of the latest in Spring, platform engineering and IDPs, and all that cloud native programming stuff:

I’m MC’ing it and will moderate a Q&A at the end. Come check it out - I mean, it’s free, and better than going into the office that day, right?

Logoff

One day, when I write some kind of book like Confessions of a Tech Marketing Hustler, I’ll figure out a chapter on this: the dissonance between being on the road and then being at home. As she says:

The city looks pretty when you been indoors
For 23 days I've ignored all your phone calls
Everyone's waiting when you get back home
They don't know where you been, why you gone so long

Friends treat you like a stranger and
Strangers treat you like their best friend, oh well

In the enterprise tech life-on-the-road, uh, life, you exist in a spick and span world of daily showers, well cleaned and air conditioned hotels, fancy meals, and smily handshake meetings. You expense everything, and shuffle along in a TV-show-like luxury world. Then you get home, and it’s just like real life. Dirty dishes, kids that need help with homework, exhaustion at the everyday things. This is all “fine,” of course: it’s the ping-ponging back and forth that can make you lose your mind.

This is a thing where, I think, if you know it’s going to happen, you can prevent it from happening. Rather, you can see yourself getting all tangled up during this transition and say “ah! I know what’s happening here - so I’ll stop it.”

Sometime later…

By topic-coincidence, I had lunch with my old pal Robert Brook who’d been on a multi-country train tour recently. He asked about this same problem: how does one deal with the cognitive exhaustion of so many life context switches? I think what I do is this: I make myself be OK with a drop in productivity. That is, I’m happy to “do nothing.”

When I’m traveling for work, giving a talk or having one meeting, I’m basically intensely at work for 2 hours: the 30 to 60 minutes of giving a talk, and making sure I show-up on time before that. You’d think I could fill the rest of the time with, like, writing a blog post (a newsletter?), editing some videos, making some videos. You know, just pull out your selfie stick and excoriate executives for being asleep at the wheel, or some such shit.

But, no. You will not do that. You will not have the brain power or the energy to be productive. The good news, having given a talk, having had a meeting with some prospects, having sat through a five hour EBC, dog and pony…you will have been productive. You will have done your work for the day, and you may space out. You may stare at a Deutsche Bank airport ad and contemplate the failed life.

The same is true for hectic tourism. There’s much advice about how to have a good vacation, how to be a good tourist. Here is mine:

1. There are three types of vacations: going to a beach, going to an event/amusement park, and going to a place (usually a city).

2. When you go to the beach, you do exactly that. You stay in a house or a hotel at most, a five minute walk from the beach. You wake up everyday and, if you’re someone who’s finders can automatically type out the word “productivity” perfectly, without having to do spell correct each time, you will think: “What will I accomplish today? Where do I need to go?” And then, as you figure out how to make the coffee machine work (again), your mind will kick in (rather, slink in), and say, “no, no. You are already doing it. You are at the beach. Productivity is now maxed out. You will either sit here, enjoying your coffee, or you will sit on the beach, enjoying the sun and the water and the sounds. Perhaps you’ll have a hamburger later, maybe a beer, or a cup of fruit if you’re lucky. And then, you come back here and sleep, and then away to the beach again. Golly, my KPIs will be maxed out in no time.”

3. When you go to an amusement park (Disney, Legoland, etc.) there is more “work” to be done, sure. But it’s like being at the airport. You just are comfortable waiting in lines and you sort of space out while you stand there. Do the kids want to eat awful corndogs, terrible fries, and other shitty fried food? Well! Let them! You are hitting your quarterly goals out of the park. You just shuffle along, going to things at whatever time they’re at, letting kids enjoy a tea cup ride or just playing in a sandbox for three hours.

4. When you go to a place, usually a city, there are more options. Your first goal is to get a sense for what normal life is like there. For this, I suggest walking around in a neighborhood, and spending some time in a few grocery stores. Being Just imagine what it’d be like if you lived here, and you had to get kids to school each day, figure out how to hire someone to clean your gutters, but also just sit on your stoop enjoying a fashionable rose, or lager. This is being a flâneur, which is all you really need to do when being a tourist. The second thing to do is to go a museum of some sort. You don’t need to see it all, or even the most famous things, just pick one period to look at. (The Mono Lisa is highly overrated, but all Van Gough painting are, despite their fame, very underrated - you should always see a Van Gough, each one will be amazing, no matter how many times you see it - the Dutch Masters [Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc.] are equally so, but it takes some training: no one likes bourbon or Scotch the first ten times they drink it, but on that 11th time, you think, “ah, I see what’s happening here - er, yes…well…I might just need to try it a few more times to make sure though…”). For example, you could go to Musée d'Orsay and just plan to look at the art deco interior design and furniture. Or the Rodin statues. If you happen to stroll by the other art, how thrilling for you! The third thing you should do is spend an annoyingly long time at a cafe, coffee shops (standard, or Amsterdam-style, I suppose, as your life-style dictates) restaurant, or a bookstore. Even just shopping works. There’s also, of course, nature, but that just seems like a type of walking about aimlessly.

In all of these cases, I hope what you see is that doing nothing is the goal. You can’t waste time if you weren’t looking to spend it wisely in the first place.

And, please, if you’re looking to be productive while you’re traveling for work: don’t do it. You’re just making it harder for the rest of us to look good.

Press Pass

I’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?” I go back and forth on this a lot. The sum total of both is helpful - they’re both giving helpful practices and changes that organizations can follow and make to get better at how they do software.

It’s fair to say that the first wave of platform engineer thought-leadering was harsh on DevOps, but I think that early “DevOps is Dead” take has dissipated.

The platform engineering community is doing a great job of promoting the idea of product managing platforms, the notion of a platform itself. What exactly platform engineering means isn’t exactly sorted out yet. It either means “everything” or it might mean building and maintaining up the developer tools and runtime environment (the platform).

I don’t think we really know yet since the concept of platform engineering is. It’s only like, what, two years old? We can predict what it will be using the old trick of “most things in the future are a continuation of the past.”

I don’t really know if I’m part of the core platform engineering community, so I’ve recently stopped myself from trying to define it. I’m too much of an outsider at this point.

(2) How do you define developer platforms?

I define it mostly as everything above IaaS - what we used to call PaaS. For whatever reason, people don’t like to use “PaaS” anymore, but it pretty much perfectly defines what a “platform” is. I mean, it’s right there in the name of Platform as a Service.

You could also throw in developer tooling like CI/CD piplelines and the collaborative sites/consoles/dashboards developer use (internal developer portals - another category figuring itself out). If those tools are tightly integrated with the platform to make building, deploying, and running the applications better, it’s probably worth including them in the definition of “platform.”

(3) Another hot topic, connected to developer platform is – developer experience. What would you say is good (internal) developer experience and what would some of the killers of DevEx be?

That’s easy to answer but hard to get right. In general, good DevEx is when your developers can get their code to production fast. Of course, it shouldn’t be bad code, insecure, and all of that. Good DevEx should be when developers don’t spend a lot of time on “toil” or work that can be automated instead. Bad DevEx is when they have to file tickets and wait for things.

On the other hand, sometimes you need to do these things for good reasons. You might have compliance and laws you need to conform to or get shutdown by the government. In those cases, you can likely improve DevEx if you know how to apply new tools and ways of thinking to old governance processes, but you might not ever get to the point where developers can deploy at will, multiple times a day. And, you know, I don’t know if I want my bank having that much innovation on a daily basis.

I know this is a kind of consultant-talk, airport book mystical answer to your question, but I’d say the best way to measure developer experience is to ask them “are you happy with how you’re do your job?” And if they say “yes,” you have good developer experience. If they say “no,” you should ask them what could make it better.

I’m not sure I really like the term “developer experience” very much anyway. “Developer productivity” is a little better, but “productivity” is more of a business metric than, like, a human metric. Businesses care about productivity because it means they increase their profit (literally and metaphorically): we can do the same amount of work with less effort than we used to. It used to take the developers and IT four weeks to deploy a new application, now it takes one week.

You can see why productivity can turn into the enemy of an individual: if I’m a profit-hungry business, instead of giving the IT staff three weeks off now, the business ask them to fill those weeks with even more work. And you also probably don’t give them three more weeks worth of pay: you probably still pay them the same thing.

Productivity can certainty help the individual feel like they’re doing a good job, and get a sense of fulfillment. I feel great when I’ve done a lot of work that I know matters. But at some point, whatever effort and change-stress an individual puts into being more productive doesn’t get them much, if any, reward.

But, developer productivity metrics are probably good for measuring if things are in good working order.

(4) And, why do you say they have been a thing for at least 10 years? Why are they in the spotlight now then?

We had Heroku back in the late 2000’s, then Cloud Foundry was based on that, and some other PaaSes and accidental platforms. Companies like Mercedes-Benz, JP Morgan Chase, several militaries, and others have been running platforms like those for 5, seven, ten plus years.

What I like to do in my talks is catalog the practices they’ve learned over those years, what works and doesn’t. I’m especially interested in what very large, usually 30 to 50+ year old organizations are doing with their platforms: how they make it work for thousands of developers. As a community, we tend to dismiss the wisdom of teams like this because they’re not using the next great technology. But, the ways to run a platform are pretty much constant over time, especially in larger organizations.

I think “platforms” are in the spotlight now because most organizations have finished their first round of putting kubernetes in place. It took several years to figure that out and start seeing more use in the mainstream. Once you get kubenetes up and running, then you need to start building a platform on-top of it: you have to add all that other stuff that developer use.

To pick one of the things out of the talk: the most important thing if you want to have a good platform is immediately start product managing it and think of application developers as your customers. Whatever team is building the platform should be talking with application developers all the time (weekly or so) and getting feedback on what works well for them, what doesn’t work, and if recent changes to the platform have improved things. You’d think this is what operations people who run this kind of thing do, but they’re usually more focused on the state and status of the system - if it’s running, if it’s secure, etc. - rather than the usefulness of the platform to developers.

For a more detailed discussion, if you haven’t checked it out already, you should read Jennifer Riggins’ platform engineering report, it’s free thanks to VMware:

I talked with her a couple times for it and reviewed the text ahead of time. 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 :)

Checked Bags

You know how it is: as an expat, when you go back to the US, you bring back some food, clothes, toys, books (in English), and so forth. Pinto beans are hard to find in The Netherlands as are fresh made HEB tortillas, of course.

This time of year it’s candy corn. Yup: five pounds of it. But also the makings for s’more’s. Country-to-country, candy turns out to be one of the last, unique cultural artifacts of everyday life. And, of course, in the 50+ little countries that is the United States, this can be state-to-state. Anyhow, I heard awhile back that IKEA makes great duffle bags for this kind of thing, the FRAKTA. They pack small, are very sturdy (they’re made from the same stuff as those big blue IKEA bags), and are cheap. Checks out! It works great. Here’s one going from Des Moines to Amsterdam:

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 12th SpringOne Tour London Oct 9th SpringOne Tour Amsterdam Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

It’s 9pm here in Berlin. I’m speaking at stackconf tomorrow, then I’m off to London for SREday (both above). I’ve been reading Legends and Lattes, and it is super fun!

Confusing outcomes with capabilities

I 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. An outcome is the final effect a technology, decision, or change has. It’s a variation of “the means justify the ends.”

What does this technology help us achieve? Revenue, security compliance, faster app response times, developer productivity, migration, etc.

As ever, things are not cut and dry, but I’d say the two other ways of thinking about a tool are capability and price.

Capabilities are things like “run on Windows,” a general programming framework, a service mesh, a configuration tool, any given open source project…this a way of thinking about the tool as the tool. When you think of technology’s capabilities, you’re not really asking “and will that be useful to us?” Of course, “it works” is an assumed feature.

Price is obvious: it is either more than you want to pay, or less than you want to pay. Or, you know, Goldy Locks. Whether it’s a capability you want or it achieves the outcome you want doesn’t matter: it’s the number you want. For handful of of technologies, price is a feature, but not nearly as much as in handbags, t-shirts, and koozies. In general, there is only one price enterprise buyers want: cheaper.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk about mixing up outcomes with capabilities.

In the infrastructure space, we’re really bad at allowing those two to intermix, even treating them as the same thing, instead of keeping them separate.

To illustrate it: there are very few things that give you the outcome of developer productivity. Even defining “developer productivity” is stacking the deck for what you want to argue. I’ll define it as “allowing developers to do more work, ship more often, and probably be happier.” You could make it too vague and say “create the most business value with the shortest amount of time and cost.” As it says: productivity! This usually means removing toil from developer’s day-to-day lives, automating/eliminating manual reviews and meetings, speeding up onboarding (getting faster laptops and test labs), and automating as many things as possible (tests, building, deploying, monitoring, managing). MY DEFINITION IS NOT GREAT, MOVING ON.

(There is another thing we do too much in marketing and that is to think about “developer productivity” as a business outcome which…it could be…but I don’t think most businesses are that sophisticated in how they think about their software strategies. For example, if you’ve historically outsources your custom programming, you’re probably not sophisticated enough. In contrast, as I learned in a recent DevOpsDays talk, John Deere does look at its software factory as a core function so they can think of developer productivity as a pure business outcome. ANYHOW.)

Here is the problem: when you sell, evaluate, use, or otherwise think about a technology based only on its outcome. Us marketers are especially bad at this. Have you ever seen a pitch about some infrastructure technology that starts off telling you about macro economic headwinds and, like, software is eating the world? Chances are you’re thirty minutes to never away from hearing about the actual technology, what it does, and how it works.

The OpenStack era of cloud was rife with this. So many pitches started off saying why cloud was important (cloud or die!), explaining what cloud was, and then that it would help you achieve all sorts of outcomes like agility and moving from capex to opex.

I know it seems like I pick on Kubernetes a lot. And…yes, I do - I have mixed feelings - but, it’s also a recent phenomena we all know. Throughout it’s history, a lot of chatter about Kubernetes has focused on the outcomes it achieves: better cost control, developer productivity, etc. As it turned out, Kubernetes doesn’t really directly give you those outcomes: it’s just part of an overall stack that helps you get there.

Sure, it’s linked. But contrast that with the capabilities of an IDE. If I right click on a chunk of code and say “refactor this code to its own method,” that directly addresses productivity. Most of what an IDE does has the outcome of developer productivity. You know this because you can look at the alternative, a text editor, and see that developers are so much more productive with an IDE.

Now, you could say that Kubernetes gives operations and infrastructure people capabilities…“ops productivity,” and I would say - YES IT DOES (though, now that I look at the chart below for the thousandth time, ops productivity seems to be going in the wrong direction year/year? You see, I haven’t really looked at this chart in terms of operational productivity, just developer productivity.):

Operations people work directly with Kubernetes to get the capability of “install a shit-ton of containers on this cloud thing I setup and obey the configuration governance and policy and have all the processes in those containers talk with each other over the network like this. Oh, and, like, be secure?” The alternatives may not be as good, or as fast, or as reliable.

But Kubernetes itself doesn’t give a shit about application developers. For application developers, it offers a blinking cursor as if to say, “worked fine in ops, dev problem now.”

This is fine! This is what was intended! (Along with Google and Red Hat, et. al., neutralizing AWS’s competitive advantage in IaaS.) The Kubernetes thought-leaders have been trying to tell us this all along:

Kubernetes can certainly be part of a stack that makes developers more productive, but that’s not really a core thing it does. So if you’re thinking in terms of kubernetes as developer productivity, you’re at risk of mixing up outcomes and capabilities.

Things get a bit loopy here - there’s a needling distinction between being part of an overall stack that gets you come outcome (Kubernetes and developer productivity) versus directly creating that outcome (IDEs and developer productivity).

The closer the outcome and the capability are, the more accurate your thinking will be.

Another problem with thinking only about outcomes is that you can’t evaluate it against alternatives. When Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt were going at it, they all wanted to deliver the same outcome. Competition came down to which had the capabilities to do it better, more reliably, in a way ops people liked, and (I assume) price. If you were talking about any of those in terms of outcomes, it’d have been largely a waste of time.

Outcome marketing is best for enterprise sales

In technology marketing and sales, there’s a relationship between the price of the technology, the seniority of the decision maker (whoever approves buying the technology), and how outcomes focused you are. As you can guess, the higher the price, the higher decision maker in the organization, the more you focus on outcomes:

(1) With rare exception, the senior executives approving purchasing something don’t have time to care about how the technology actually works, or evaluate it versus alternatives: they just have to build up a hunch that it seems like it’ll get them the outcome that they want.

(2) And, if you have a high price, you’re going to need a senior executive to approve the budget, so you’re pitching to senior executives, and then see (1).

If all you hear is capabilities talk, the pitch is intended for an individual way down the org chart. If all you hear is outcomes talk, the pitch is included for an executive, way up the stack.

SpringOne Tour is coming up in Amsterdam, October 9th, 2023. I’ll be MC’ing it. I live here, after all! It’s focused on - surprise! - the Spring Framework and programming:

Our Spring advocates, technical engineers, and application development experts bring an in-depth look into the beauty of open-source, with Spring Framework, Spring Boot 3, Kubernetes, Progressive Delivery and more, to strategize with you on how you can innovate faster.

It’s free to come and the content is great, so register and come check it out.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

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I’ll be in Berlin and London this week. Whacky!

In Iowa

I 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!

Transcripts

For all the podcasts, videos, conference talks, and even notes to myself: I haven’t figured out what to do with automated transcript systems. It’s nice to have text, but the work involved in doing anything with feels almost as high as starting from scratch.

I’ve done hundreds of hours of video and podcasts over, like, 25 or 30 years. If I got actuate transcripts, I’m not sure what I’d do with them. When I do an hour interview with someone, you’d think getting a transcript would be useful.

You’d think that passing it ChatGPT to write an article would be useful. First, ChatGPT can’t handle that amount of text (at least, I don’t know how to get it to). Second, the result requires a lot of editing. Over that 30 years I’ve trained to become a good writer: I’m good at going from a blank screen and getting to 500, 1800, or many more words.

Maybe transcripts are not so good for writing, but they do seem good for:

• Voice Notes - I’ve never been a big user of voice notes. But that might actually be helpful. I’ve been it more than ever recently, and like many quips about taking notes, the value isn’t really in the note itself, but in using writing as thinking.

• Also, dictating writing might be good, but typing is so much faster and you can edit and correct as you go.

• I do read transcripts of other podcasts when I don’t want to listen to them, that’s fine.

This is a free report from Jennifer Riggins at The New Stack. I talked with her a couple times for it and reviewed the text ahead of time. 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 :)

Wastebook

• “Survival is optional. No one has to change” is cold comfort to the employees of companies that didn’t survive. I wish we’d spend more time in the “digital transformation” world focusing on getting people to change, not just tell the survivors how awesome it’ll be once they change.

• Remember the positive feeling that you could be fine taking actions to do things instead of focus on your own hobbies. Working on your life instead of vague FOMO.

Relevant to your interests

• VMware Expands Tanzu into a Full Platform Engineering Environment - Overview of our take on platform engineering, product-wise.

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

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

• The Works of Mars, 1671 - Fortification engineering.

• 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.)” And: “You’ve got to be careful with novels about libraries and bookstores… The risk, in all these cases, is flattery. It feels nice to be assured that the places you find appealing are, in fact, wonderful. It’s also boring. The standard for such novels, therefore, is that they reveal something interesting and true about these environments.”

• 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.

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

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

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Des Moines, 7:38am

I’ve got a lot of travel coming up - like the old days! Two more weeks of long trips.

More importantly, it’s the start of the school year for my three kids. You’re supposed to look at actual New Years as the start of a new cycle, but the school year has always been the beginning of the cycle for me, back to when I was kid, college, and even when I was kidless for a long time. It’s a time to start new habits, especially when it comes to parental pedantry. But, the structure of the school schedule also clear out all the time-wasting that comes with schedule ambiguity and openness. I was told once that I thrive in structure, which seemed right at the time, despite the chaos-driven nature I can seem to have: that’s just my writing and content style, though.