Let’s get to it

Wastebook

• If 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.” Here.

• “Make a plan for when things get weird.” Here.

• Prompt to use when summarizing things: What does the author think the right thing to do here is? Do they offer a vision of how things should be and/or how to get there?

• “Positive, but anxious.”

• “I am putting out poisoned chicken for the werewolf.” Here.

• Bullshiter’s Fatigue Syndrome.

• “you’re the ding-dong!”

• “one secret to longform superhero comics writing was that they were structured like soap operas, only with fight scenes instead of love scenes” Here.

• “pandemicpunk” Here.

• “a rapidly decelerating rate” - that is a cognitively weird of phrase in that. Maybe something like “much less,” or just “declining.”

• “It is universally acknowledged that human life is of paramount importance.” I think this is implied for most all written work. You can likely cut this part.

Where to stay in Paris

If I were staying in Paris, I would stay at Le Méridien Etoile. It is not in the center or Paris, but it is a good hotel. It has that late 90’s/early 2000’s feel, but unlike many hotels from that era, it has good upkeep. The staff at Le Méridien Etoile are always nice and welcoming.

The hotel is right next to a Metro stop that is 20 or so minutes from the Louvré and, thus, about a twenty minute walk from the best museum in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay.

There is a gourmet grocery store just across the street (in the basement of the mall) with an extensive wine selection and many ready-to-eat good meals and snacks. And just a block to the east is Le Ralais de Venise, it is “tourist-y,” but so what? It’s a great place to get French steak and frites. I have stayed at Le Méridien Etoile many times, and it has always been nice.

Relative to your interests

• Services firms are out of runway. They must forget Labor Arbitrage and conform to Technology Arbitrage - “2023 has seen a nosedive in growth from most of the major service providers”

• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2023 London: Day 1 Highlights - “By 2028, modernization efforts will culminate in 70% of workloads running in a cloud environment, up from 25% in 2023.” - so something like 40% of all workloads will move from one type infrastructure to another on four years? Hopefully there’s some qualifying context for what those workloads are, because that is a lot of workloads. If it took this long (since, I don’t know, 2009?) to move 25%, that curve sure does turn steep quick all the sudden. // There’s more fun numbers too.

• Hild—A Historical Note - “I really want to change the outdated view of the past and put people who have been excised from history–women, crips, queer, people of colour, poor people–back where we belong. I want to recast the past, because that will influence the present and make possible the future. I want–like Hild–to change the world for the better.”

• The Problems with Money In (Open Source) Software, Aneel Lakhani, Monktoberfest 2023 - I liked this talk because it said all the VC things we think in a nice, honest way from a technologist’s perceptive. Also, great “conclusion”

• Commodities, generics, and software - “Strangely, many software categories have commoditized, but, given that nearly everything is a service these days, operational costs have remained universally high. This makes it hard for lower priced generics to creep in. This means people continue to pay luxury prices for software services that are essentially commodities.” // This is some interesting thinking. Is it broadly true?

• hiroshima, and keeping my brain engaged - “[At home] My brain simply switches off because it is familiar with everything, it does not need to think. I seem to thrive in uncertainty even though it makes me very uncomfortable and anxious. I guess there’s different parts of my brain having different responses.”

• A Lack Of Consumer Portability And Choice Are Negatively Affecting The Mobile Experience - Kind of interesting contrary thought? Good point on the messaging service…but…when we’ve tried to collapse messaging (IM) it sort of never works?

• Oracle Cloud Made All The Right Moves In 2022 - Heavy on customer and use case mentions, this is a helpful overview of Oracle Cloud’s momentum. While it doesn’t address the question of what Oracle’s strategy is (I feel like it’s: migrate existing enterprise workloads to cloud, and maybe some new ones?) or pricing (or maybe it does, I didn’t notice in my early morning coffee scrolling), it’s a model of very thorough, but brief analysis.

• AI Speculation Dominates Cloud Native Conference - “Intuit noted that their implementation of DevOps, where developers are also responsible for production operations, wasn’t working very well at scale. The company is moving back to an approach with dedicated operations people responsible for keeping an infrastructure platform running. A platform that developers use, but don’t have to build or run themselves. The pattern is repeated at other well-known companies such as Discover, Boeing, and Cruise.” // It’d be great to revisit the “everyone should be a full-stack engineer but don’t call a full-stack engineer” idea.

• Tim Hockin: Kubernetes Needs a Complexity Budget - The New Stack - This is the mystery of Kuberntes' popularity: everyone complains about complexity, so why is it so popular? Is it actually not complex? Is it as simple as possible, that is, the alternatives are equally if not more complex? Also, the idea here is good: when you’re adding a new feature, always take into account how much more complex you’re going to make something. Counter examples are Word and Excel, but those might also be thought-provoking example. Also, those are consumer apps, not infrastructure stacks.

• I’m experimenting with different ways of looking at developer “productivity”. - While, you know, you’re not supposed to obsess over metrics, let alone just one metric, this is probably the a good direction for ALL roles in a company.

Logoff

There is no Thanksgiving holiday in The Netherlands, as you might guess. Still, if you work for an American company, it sort of feels like it. The right way to use Thanksgiving is as a sort of gratitude journal for the year so far.

I made a scripted out video for the first time in awhile yesterday and it was great. It’s for an O’Reilly project updating my how to thrive and survive in a BigCo talk. I’m using the project as both, you know, feeding my need to create and publish, but also see if O’Reilly is a good channel and platform for this.

I suspect I’d be better suited just publishing it on my own YouTube channel. But, having a third party involved as an official project is also, you know, a good way to kick myself in the ass to actually do something. I used to be self-motivated, my own “publisher,” but something has happened in the YTD that has had that publisher go on an extended hiatus. Hopefully, this project will get him back from beaches and playing D&D to start pumping out more work.