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!).

Logoff

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.