I really liked my co-worker Paul Kelly’s post on this topic, plus some anti-patterns. So I made the video above! You may recall him from a discussion with Cora and me a few months back as well. Even if you don’t deign to watch my silly shit above, you should check out his post.

Relative to your interests

• Is the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster? - “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

• Drafting the ‘so what?’ of the digital quality model - Why better customer experience (through “digital”…you know: software) is better for government. Also, if to answer the question at the end, I don’t know if this fits UK lingo, semantics, and semiotics (that is it too martial and Starship Troopers and even some xenophobia), but in the US we’d sat “citizen.”

• Orange Showcases Its Innovation Credentials - It’s hard being a stupid network. // ‘In candid opening remarks, Mr Zerbib said that the mobile industry had been stuck in a “generational paradigm”. He explained that customers haven’t noticed a major change in moving from 4G to 5G and that marketing has overblown expectations by focusing too much on bandwidth and not enough on energy efficiency and reliability. Instead, he advocated a concept of “continuous innovation”, in which network and service improvements are rolled out constantly.’

Wastebook

• Hold on. Does “semiotics” just mean “dog whistle,” whether political or apolitical? That’d clear up that mysterious word.

• I prefer to hold-off on planning things until I’ve already done them.

• Holding a DocuSign to my head.

• “Hibernation chic” - Dress in layers at home during the dark winter, not “chunky” hoodies and stuff. // “Hibernation chic is about optimising the way you feel, not the way you look, but that doesn’t mean it has to be schlumpy. I see no logic in making this time of year any more depressing than it is already by dressing in your most ancient tracksuit bottoms and a jumper that has gone bobbly.”

• “Working in a half-assed, dotted-line capacity.”

• I am the walrus.

• Changing culture is free, tools cost money.

• I don’t code anymore, but I feel like a bottoms-up definition or “cloud native” is “distributed applications, but with containers,” where “containers” increasingly means “Kubernetes.” You can throw in some patterns like “make your APIs smaller” (microservices?) and sprinkle some 14 factors flavoring on it, but is it that much different? (Which is fine! Incrementally improving is how things get better.)

• “assholocene” Here. Originally: here.

• I don’t know. In enterprise IT, “culture” as a top problem needs to stop being a gaudy version of “resistance to change.” I think when people say “culture” is a problem they just mean that that OTHER group of gatekeepers won’t approve their change requests, tickets, and otherwise do what they want. That is: culture as a problem is a symptom of the underlying problem. I guess you could say “we need a culture of accepting change (so that we can start working in a new way)” instead of “a culture of staying the same,” but, I mean: yeah, that’s my point. When people say “culture” is a problem, what they mostly mean is that someone(s) other than you doesn’t want to work the way you do.

• “undocumented SQLite databases should not be the way that a multi-gazillion dollar corporation is storing valuable data.” Here.

• "My favorite thing someone says to one of my friends is, ‘Why isn’t she famous?’ I love when they say that because that means they think maybe I’m good enough to be famous. To me, famous looks like a lot of work."’ Toni Price.

• “One of my mentors often told me that if you’re not building it, selling it, or supporting it, you need to be constantly evaluating your employment exposure in a company.” On the job career management.

• “sacrificial trash” - “In October of last year, YouTube creator and fandom expert Sarah Z coined the term “sacrificial trash,” and it’s a great concept. If I can try and condense her almost hour-long video into one sentence: “Sacrificial trash” is a piece of media that tries to pander to young audiences with woke identity politics to cover up how mediocre it is, which, in turn, creates a chaotic feedback loop of online discourse. Sarah Z’s video uses the 2016 Ghostbusters film as a good example of this. It’s a pretty bad movie that got a lot of attention for its all-woman cast, which then kicked off a wave of wildly misogynistic backlash, which then led to a bunch liberals and progressives defending the movie, which made them look silly because the movie was, in fact, not good.”

• We’re all doing the best we can, some of us just shit at our job.

• “What time is it in California right now?”

Logoff

I’ve had a lot of fun making these Bullshit Dictionary videos. I’ve still got about five or six more I filmed but unedited. I’ll be posting them here, there, everywhere, and even on TikTok as they come out. In the meantime, I’m listing them all in their own playlist. LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE, mofos.