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. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?

There were a lot of ideas and topics that we didn’t get to. Enjoy the episode, either as a podcast episode or in the unedited video stream.

“Platform Engineering is one of the hottest topics covered this year by The New Stack, but is it more than just a trendy buzzword? Is it really the killer of DevOps? Or rather, is it the missing piece to help deliver on the promises of DevOps?”

I reviewed a draft of this book and am quoted in it a bit. Jennifer Riggins writes good stuff, and this overview of platform engineering is comprehensive. As you know, dear readers, I’m delightfully flummoxed by what platform engineering is - at the moment, I think it’s just what we used to call “developer tools” with heavy injection of cloud native flavoring. This is fine, really.

You should check it out, it’s free. My work is sponsoring it, sure, but that doesn’t make it bullshit, at all.

Wastebook

• “No where is far, everything is here.” Howard Jacobson.

• “I ended up taking last Friday off because things happened at a time I wasn’t expecting, and sometimes I’m not good at adapting to that.” Sounds like me.

Relative to your interests

• How Infrastructure as Code Helps IT Teams Cope with Employee Churn

• Platform Engineering Not Working Out? You're Doing It Wrong, an interview - “Purnima Padmanabhan [head of the business unit I work in] of VMware discusses platform engineering and how it helps create a ‘golden path’ that speeds up not just development but overall agility for businesses.”

• 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.”

• When did people stop being drunk all the time? - Historical data suggests that people in the Middle Ages consumed about a liter of beer a day, around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

tl;dr: Open Source Congress in Geneva; How dangerous is the European far-right?; Tyler Cowen is an Information Monster; The Elon Effect; The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids; Delivery Needs a Strategy; How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World; Netherlands residents among most accepting of non-binary people, study shows.

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. 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. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Logoff

Let’s see if the “tl;dr” concept works for a header. These are articles that I asked ChatGPT to summarize for me instead of reading the whole thing.

Thanks, again, to my mom being in town to watch the kids (and dog!), Kim and I are going on a weekend trip. This time, it’s back to Paris. I mean, of course, right? Last time we were there I goofed up getting tickets to the Musée d'Orsay, so I damn well booked some this time. I haven’t been there in a long time, and even longer without the, uh, delight of having kids in tow. They love them some Van Gough, you know, and you just can’t peel yourself away from it long enough to see all the other stuff.

If you have any good recommendations for Paris - eating, strolling, museums, site-seeing, zoning out - send them along to me. The only thing I try to do each time is get some steak frites at Le Relais de Venise, above. We’ve been to Paris a lot, but there’s an infinite number of things to do there. What are they?