1. A lot of post-production video work today. Doing all the work after you film and then fully edit a video takes a long time. It’s pretty much the same time for any length of video. The most difficult part if promoting it across the four or five channels I have. I don’t even spend time hustling it to other people to post. Who knows. I put up my first “Quick Comment” one - an idea where I just make very short videos that start with one figure/number, idea, etc.
2. My PlatformCon talk was broadcast today, and there’s two others I like. See the newsletter link below to find those.
3. My newsletter episode today has a small pondering of “is platform engineering kind of a jerk to our old pal DevOps?” I go back and forth on this in my mind a lot. I think the answer is a smoothie of yes and ¯_(ツ)_/¯. I edited this down from a longer essay that started with commentary on the marketing geniuses behind PlatformCon. It seemed too cynical, like I was unmasking some secret cabal to BRING THE WHOLE THING DOWN. No, I genuinely think it was a great move. There was no guarantee that it’d work, but it did. Check out the last parts of a recent Cloud Cast to hear the marketing story behind PlatformCon.
4. My wife is on a weekend trip with friends this weekend, so it’s just the three kids and I. The hardest part is making sure the dog goes on a walk. We have no yard (or “garden” as they say on this side of the Atlantic), so the dog has to go on a walk. My son hates doing it, and it’s an argument every time. My middle daughter is too young to walk the dog. The dog is nervous and anxious and doesn’t like other dogs. So, I end up walking the dog a lot. But then you have the three year old. Thankfully, my son can watch the youngest. But, you know: it’s a lot of hassle. The best dogs are other people’s dogs. Don’t ever get a dog. Or a cat. Fish probably. Snakes and lizards.
5. I don’t really know the division between these day notes and my newsletter. At the moment, I also don’t care. I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of energy making sure I don’t spend a lot of energy thinking about my information architecture, or, whatever.

Names are magic

I don’t really know what I think about the idea and movement of “platform engineering.” It definitely has the feel of a market and category now. I reference it all the time, as do “us all” in the cloud native world. I suspect over the next year it’s the phrase everyone will be using for whatever it is exactly.

On the one hand, platform engineering an obvious, kind of goofy-rude hijacking of DevOps. In a sort of ideal world, it would all just be called “DevOps,” and we’d all be debating if a “DevOps engineer” includes managing the developer platform.

On the other hand, the overall community feels like it’s up to a lot of good. It’s certainly rallied a lot of new content, stories, concepts, and all the thought-leaders. The notion of pulling in IDPs and other developer tools is, I think, an addition to DevOps. But again: shouldn’t that just be an addition to, an evolution of, DevOps?

We have a good discussion of what exactly a “DevOps platform” is on this week’s Software Defined Talk, related to discussing the recent Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for DevOps platforms.

The names you give things are powerful, and accumulate a lot of meaning. Re-naming something is often required to evolve it, to sort of reboot everyone’s collective mindset to try again.

“We have three DevOps teams.”

“Cool, cool. How do developers get a development environment to start coding.”

“They open a ticket, of course. Wait. Was that a trick question?”

I’m beginning to think that platform engineering is a new take on DevOps where the community reverses the old DevOps principle that culture matters far more than tools.

In platform engineering (so far), tools matter a great deal. Practices are important (the community is close to subsuming the platform as a product notion). Culture is either assumed or not really in scope: there’s almost this feel of “oh, that’s DevOps' job…”

That’s kind of how DevOps played out at first. Automation, monitoring, then several years of surveys, PDFs, and conferences, and all the slowly-sudden: it’s all about the culture, tools don’t matter.

Agile software development was always about practices and, eventually, culture. The only tools required were unit testing frameworks and, if you were luxurious, backlog/project management tools like Pivotal Tracker and Rally for the SAFe-set.

Agile’s utter rejection of tools probably came as a reaction to the Rational era where tools were king. Rational tools embodied the process and practices. It was sort of impossible to do RUP without tools, especially the UML generators.

As with DevOps, platform engineering will learn soon enough that the people and processes are part of the platform as well: they’re as much a technology as the actual tools. Everyone knows this, of course, because of DevOps. But giving your tools and “culture” equal footing has proven hard to do over the decades. You tend to go way too far on one or the other.

Anyhow! You should check out my talk at PlatformCon! It’s posted now. I try to cover the evergreen practices and mindsets of doing platforms, whatever you want to call it.

These practices are based on years of experiences of platform teams in large, normal organizations like Mercedes, BT, The Home Depot, UBS, JP Morgan Chase, etc. And, the talk is a compact 15 minutes, which was a rewarding challenge.

There’s two other talks I recommend:

• Great talk from the Cloud Foundry team at Mercedes-Benz on how they’ve been doing platform engineering. 300 apps, 1,500 platform services, and by my count, about 7 years of running it.

• An overview of platform best practices from Bryan Ross, formally of Sky TV in the UK. Bryan spends a lot of time talking about marketing and building trust - all the culture stuff. I think it’s VMware’s sponsor talk, so he goes over what VMware does a little bit.

My content

• I don’t like Anime, Software Defined Talk #418 - This week we discuss the Gartner MQ for DevOps platforms, Apple’s announcements and Cisco’s attempt to simplify. Plus, some thoughts on Meatloaf and Anime.

• What’s a ”Platform Maturity Model”? Tanzu Talk - In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with Abby Bangser about the platform maturity model draft that the platform working group at the CNCF has been working on. While the draft is a work in progress, the model the team is developed is extremely useful for thinking about how you build and run your platform team. Check out the interview, and if you’re interested in more, take a look at the draft paper. If you’re really full of beans, you can also contribute.

Upcoming

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

June 21st Cloud Foundry Day, Heidelberg, speaking. June 21st Making digital transformation stick in government agencies, online. June 22nd to 23rd DevOpsDays Amsterdam June 28th, July 4th, July 11th Cloud Native for Financial Services talk series.August 21st to 24th SpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th  DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar.

Relevant to your interests

• Apple Savings Accounts Funds Withdrawal Concerns - “Customers who have requested withdrawals have reported waiting 2–4 weeks for their money to show up.” // This is the catch with that account. 4.5% interest is great, though. You have to think of the Apple savings account as a weird, 30 day CD.

• Improving developer productivity with Platform as a Product, from PlatformCon 2023 - Great talk from the Cloud Foundry team at Mercedes-Benz on how they’ve been doing platform engineering. 300 apps, 1,500 platform services, and by my count, about 7 years of running it.

• Richard Seroter on shifting down vs. shifting left - Clever, fun phrasing! Build stuff into the platform instead of having (application ) developers figure it out, or, really, ops/platform engineer/DevOps types. The ability to do this depends on using a vendor stack, either public cloud or the likes that VMware and others sell.

• Netherlands enables contactless payments on entire public transport network - Yup, it’s pretty great.

• Microsoft Design - Wallpapers - Fun! Including the old XP one in 4K somewhere.

• Gartner Marketing Survey Finds B2B Buyers Value Third-Party Interactions More Than Digital Supplier Interactions - “The survey showed YouTube as the top social media channel to influence a recent B2B purchase decision, followed by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.” And: “Where buyers do research when figuring out what to buy // “B2B buyers identified a supplier’s website as the most leveraged channel, followed by the supplier’s social media channels, an online search for the supplier and the supplier’s interactive tools.”

• How to keep your new tool from gathering dust - “Learn where your tool can have the biggest impact; Enlist advocates to demonstrate and socialize your tool; Build consensus over time; Minimize friction around adoption”

Logoff

See y’all next time!

Apple Savings Accounts Funds Withdrawal Concerns - “Customers who have requested withdrawals have reported waiting 2-4 weeks for their money to show up.” // This is the catch with that account. 4.5% interest is great, though. You have to think of the Apple savings account as a weird, 30 day CD.

I want to try a new video format: the Quick Comment. Just one “fact” or idea and 45 seconds or so of commentar. We’ll see if I like it and/or keep it up.

Improving developer productivity with Platform as a Product, from PlatformCon 2023 - Great talk from the Cloud Foundry team at Mercedes-Benz on how they’ve been doing platform engineering. 300 apps, 1,500 platform services, and by my count, about 7 years of running it.

How to keep your new tool from gathering dust - “Learn where your tool can have the biggest impact; Enlist advocates to demonstrate and socialize your tool; Build consensus over time; Minimize friction around adoption”

Microsoft Design - Wallpapers - Fun! Including the old XP one in 4K somewhere.

Netherlands enables contactless payments on entire public transport network - Yup, it’s pretty great.

1. Today’s newsletter has just a few links, some quirky quotes, and a list of upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at or attending.
2. My newsletter crossed 600 subscribers this week. Fun! I’ve been trying to build up a more stable place to publish now that social media is FUCKING CRAZY and BLOGS ARE DEAD, and it’s working pretty well.
3. I’ve been trying to come up with some new talks for awhile now. I’m drawing a blank - a form of writer’s block, I guess. I see so many other talks and I’m either just bored with them, or think they’re cheap TED-tricks. I like talks that give me tools to use after watching them, not just vibes or thoughts. I keep thinking I need to remember that I’m not the audience for my talks though. I see so many of those vibes and mindset talks from people I like who are in the same - I don’t know - “area” as I am. Maybe I just need to do that.
4. I made two videos today, one that’s scheduled to post tomorrow. Making little videos is very satisfying. I’m good enough at it that it’s doable, still challenging, and involves a lot of creative choices. Also, they’re valuable for my work.
5. Unlike podcasts (which I’ve listened to daily for, like, I don’t know, before they were called podcasts in the early 2000s), I don’t actually watch a lot of videos. I don’t like videos so much. I must have some weird production aesthetic, or a childish one. I use Descript to edit them, which means there’s a transcript (I don’t usually correct the transcript for the longer ones). It’s a pretty good video editors - Descript definitely fits to how an amateur video editor would think. For example, it’s all timeline based: you don’t build up buckets of clips that you then assemble together.

I have a new video, opining on multi-cloud and how Kubernetes might could help with fears of lock-in (a concept that I think is kind…basic?), check it out below:

Relevant to your interests

• The Care and Feeding of Internal Developer Platforms - Five benefits of monitoring and managing internal developer platforms are noted: improved system performance, cost reduction, scalability, enhanced security, and improved feedback loops. Achieving these benefits entails securing deployment environments, establishing system baselines, setting up alerting rules, monitoring application performance, and automating processes.

• Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button - If you value writing by the time put into it (“thoughtfulness”), the AI stuff is going to mess with your judgements. // “Now consider all the other tasks where the final written output is important because it is a signal of the time spent on the task, and the thoughtfulness that went into it. Performance reviews. Strategic memos. College essays. Grant applications. Speeches. Comments on papers. And so much more.”

Wastebook

• “months seem to fly by while hours and days can feel endless” Here.

• “It feels like, just beneath the surface of our normal base reality, there is another layer of American culture. I’ll call it Barstool reality. It’s a place where niche Instagram personalities, OnlyFans models, college athletes, and that guy Hasbulla all intersect. Everyone has the sort of bad tan you get from spending too much time on a lake boat or the golf course or at a midwestern college football tailgate. The only food you ever see is fast food or big salads. Everything is written in a font that I can only describe as Mobile Game Sans. And no one ever blinks. This reality is always trying to figure out what the new drink of the summer is — it was White Claw, then it was ranch water, now it’s those big jugs of vodka and flavor packets, I think. That’s where this video is from. And every time a piece of content like this breaks containment everyone on Twitter loses their minds. But, honestly, all of the weirdly shiny and orange guys with zoomer middle parts wearing soft, over-sized T-shirts in these videos seem very at peace mindlessly jabbering about going to see Diplo at Red Rocks and I’m starting to think I would like to live in this world, as well.” Here.

Upcoming

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

June 9th PlatformCon, online. June 21st Cloud Foundry Day, Heidelberg, speaking. June 21st Making digital transformation stick in government agencies, online. June 22nd to 23rd DevOpsDays Amsterdam June 28th, July 4th, July 11th Cloud Native for Financial Services talk series.August 21st to 24th SpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th  DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar.

Logoff

Not much in the newsletter of late, huh? I’ve been doing a lot of other content. You can see some minor notes in the day notes posts on my blog.

Today I managed to get two videos out, which was rewarding. I have one queued up for tomorrow that’s testing a new format: just taking one figure, idea, or tiny thing and commenting on it. We’ll see if (1) I actually do, like, three, and, (2) if they’re interesting.