If you can’t be at DevOpsDays Des Moines later this week (or stackconf in Berlin next week) to see the final version of this presentation, here’s my first time running through it. It container about 20 minutes of…uh…bonus material.*

• Meaning, things I need to cut.

Trees do not grow in straight rows

This picture clarified what it’s like to be an American living in Europe.

Everyday, you’re confronted by how old everything is. The word “old” deserves attention, and explains the whole point. To an American, “old” tends to be a negative term. (Well, a left leaning American, at least.) But in Europe, you are surrounded by old and there’s a certain comfort to it.

I live in The Netherlands, and the thing you realize quickly is that there is very little “nature” in The Netherlands. Westerners having been living here for thousands of years. The entire country has been touched by and designed by people. In fact, if it weren’t for human engineering draining swamps, digging canals, and literally building new land in the sea, the country wouldn’t be. Like. Exist.

The rest of Europe is this way too: unnatural. There isn’t really space in Europe that hasn’t felt the hand of humans. Sure, in the larger countries, there are places where humans have decided not to mess around. But, for the most part, nature in Europe has long - like, really, long - been civilized: conquered.

Here is what I tell my fellow flâneurs. As you amble about Amsterdam and all of Europe, notice how many trees are in a perfect row. And notice how old those trees are. Trees do not grow in a perfect row normally. People did that.

In America, there are not that many trees in a row. There are huge parts of America that are just…there. To be fair, I wouldn’t say there are “unknown” parts of America, but it’s much different than Europe. There’s nothing like West Texas in Europe, and (the Texan in me does not like to type this) that is just a tiny part of the American wilderness.

What we don’t have in America is what’s in the picture above: a connection to hundreds of years back. The way we’re raised, we know about back to 1776. Before then, it’s a confusing blur. Does any American really know what the French and Indian War was all about? And it’s only in the past several decades - my lifetime! - that we acknowledge and are curious about anything that happened before Europeans came to America. Now, that is a good centuries long history we (in all the Americas) should be visiting and drawing on more.

But. I don’t want the problematic aspects of the American-mind to distract from a compliment I’m trying to give Europe. All of That is there for us Americans to deal with: I am not glossing over it.

This endless history that Europe has is so hard to reckon with as an American, and I feel like it shapes the European mindset. What would be like to walk around a museum and feel a direct connection to something painted 464 years ago or 458 years ago.

Ironically, the second thing to reckon with is more recent in history: World War 2. So much of Europe through the flâneur’s eyes is defined by that war. When you walk in Amsterdam, you see buildings from the 1600s. When you walk in Germany, with rare exception, you see only buildings built after 1945.

If you don’t get it, let me tell you an anecdote from an English friend. He was traveling in Cologne, Germany, I believe, and noticed how new and modern all the buildings were, how the roads were perfectly formed to accommodate cars. How thoroughly modern everything was. After talking with a local German a bit, he said, “this is remarkable! How is it that everything is so fresh and new.” To which the German, gravely replied, “well, you should ask your great friends about that…”

And that brings us to the third thing. Living in Europe, I’m confronted a lot by that date: 1945. We Americans think of Europe as peaceful, socialists…“Freedom Fries” and all that.

What our short aperture of history misses is that it’s only since 1945 that Europeans haven’t been trying to kill each other constantly: basically, all the time, like, non-stop. Before 1945, it was near constant war in Europe. Us Americans might think the Europeans awfully pacifist and do-nothingniks, but you have to appreciate how done and utterly tired they must have been after 1945. Perhaps, forced to become enlightened, even. Centuries and Centuries of war and senseless death had finally exhausted, wiped out, and almost killed this entire part of the world.

You walk around the museums and the old parts of the cities that still exist and you constantly realize how old, how lived, how experienced, and how in the future everything here is.

(Us tech people scoff at the EU and their whacky regulations, but, well, I mean, if it gives you something else to do instead of constantly being at war, is it all that bad?)

SUPERSTREAM - Sep 6th, 2023

Next week at an O’Reilly Superstream hosted by Sam Newman, I’m talking about platform team practices I’ve collected from seven years of talking with platform teams. My colleague Whitney is also giving a talk, and she always has great presentations. You should come check it out!

From a 2015 Pivotal Deck

This is back when all of us in the industry were trying to freak out the enterprise market. It worked…?

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

See y’all next time!

Not much today.

Halloween Clown Tailwinds

“Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year.”

Somewhere, there's a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween.

Wastebook

• “So I quit my job as an engineer at Memorex’s disk drive plant in Santa Clara, California, and we flew to Kuala Lumpur. We found an un-air conditioned hotel room for $10 a night above a brothel with genial trans prostitutes and ate $1 meals served on banana leaves from the nearby restaurants. After a few weeks, we decided to get out of the sweltering heat and check out Singapore. It was just as sweltering there. After three more weeks, we’d had enough and no longer had an urge to go to Indonesia.” Here.

• “Consumers make choices for many reasons: price, convenience and marketing. Maybe politics. The other day I went to my local Walgreens to buy toothpaste and ultimately chose not my favorite brand but the only one that wasn’t under lock and key. I didn’t want to wait for an employee to liberate the Colgate, so Crest it was. Needless to say, I did not use Google to find out which brand was more committed to bodily autonomy. What can I say? I was in a hurry.” Here.

Relative to your interests

• Can you trust ‘open source’ companies? - ’There’s nothing wrong with making money. But, I’ve gotten really tired of projects that use open source for their start and then turn their backs on the philosophy that made them their first hundreds of millions. At the very least, they need to stop pretending they’re open source once they’ve moved to a “Look but don’t touch” or “Look but don’t profit from it” license.'

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey - Measure outcomes, not efforts.

Upcoming

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

As mentioned yesterday, I’ll in Des Moines next week to speak at DevOpsDays Des Moines. They were kind enough to invite me to give a keynote, which I’m looking forward to.

If you want to go, registrations closes today, I believe, so get those tickets now.

More upcoming:

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

I’ve been working on my slides for the above DevOpsDays talk. Here’s a picture I made for a slide. It’s transparent! So far, I’m doing a combo of two types of DevOpsDays talks: “vulnerable autobiography” and “list of good ideas.” I have’t gotten to the second, but I think the first is OK.

As ChatGPT goes Enterprise, here are Ten GenAI Reality Checks you need to take… - A long list of practice advice for planning out AI use in the enterprise.

Google’s $30-per-month “Duet” AI will craft awkward emails, images for you - All about Google’s enterprise AI announcement. For me, Google Apps/G Suite/(whatever) is hands down the best all in one collab thing - Office 365 is so weird between desktop apps and web apps that I still can’t get my mind wrapped around it. Collaborative editing in desktop Word is so weird, and their sharing dialogs are awful. Plus, GMail is so good.

Halloween creeps a little closer: Seasonal supply chains accelerate - “Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year” // Somewhere, there’s a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween.

Jennifer Riggins and The New Stack crew have a good booklet out on Platform Engineering. I read over it and talked with Jennifer a couple times. I should have recorded those calls to munge into some articles, but, whatever.

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 :)

Download the ebook for free

ChatDM, The Paper

This is what spurred me to start using ChatGPT as a ChatDM, here’s The Register article that led me to it.

I’ve yet to ask it questions like “describe drinking games that the satyrs are taking part in that are so dangerous someone could get hurt doing them” or “why would a Displacer Beast Kitten leave the safety of its den if it believes an intruder is nearby?”

One interesting point that’s worth bringing into the bigger AI/LLM discussion. “Hallucinations” can be bad if you want real, truth (in which cases, they’re “lies” from the wide meaning of that word). But, when you’re creating and story telling, “making things up” is the whole game. Thus, ChatGPT’s downside of making things up becomes an advantage when you’re trying to be creative.

Here’s the paper. As with most PDFs I’ve downloaded, I haven’t read it in detail. I could go all nuts and check out the github repo too. Here’s one of the other papers cited.

Making a discord bot helps scale it up, but it’d be great to just get four or five prompts you could feed into ChatGPT. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You need a prompt to tell it you want it to DM (or play), one describing the world you’re playing in, one describing the start of an adventure, and then some mechanics (like feeding it monster stats, etc.). You’d also need to remind it of these things once the ChatDM’s memory had rolled off.

Automating that all with a bot would be helpful, sure. But then I’d have to figure out how to do all that.

Never underestimate the power of a cupcake

My co-worker Bryan Ross has been writing articles based on a video series I did…last summer? (Was it so long ago?). His most recent one is a round-up of his tips to get people to use your app platform. (Yeah, “platform engineering” - that’s a phrase I think I should stop using? I don’t know.) It’s a great write-up.

He’s got several more all ready to publish as well, and I’ll share those as they come out.

Upcoming

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

SREDay London is coming up in a few weeks, I’m speaking there. They gave me a discount code for “friends and team members.” Feel like you’re all at least on my team, right? The code is 50-SRE-DAY and you’ll get 50% off the tickets.

Meanwhile, travel season is back, and here’s where I’ll be, so far:

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.

Wastebook

• Related followup on yesterday’s customer value is “dangerous” episode.

• “People have been asking what celebrations I’m planning. I tell them none, but they’re welcome to come streetwalking with me as long as they don’t speak. Just allow me to shake my head, sigh deeply and not look where I’m going. Birthdays are not for flâneurs. You can’t saunter lazily through the city observing its rich variety if all you can think about are the years you have left to you.” Here.

• And: “I had hated exercise at school when it was free, so there was no sense in paying someone to make me as unhappy as I’d been then.” Ibid.

Relative to your interests

• Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest - One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”

• Europe’s new rules for Big Tech start today. Are they ready? - “Under the DSA digital service providers - including hosting services, online platforms, VLOPs and even intermediary service providers like ISPs - have obligations to ensure that products sold are safe and not counterfeit, and to eliminate advertising that targets minors or is served using sensitive data. Another requirement is to get rid of dark patterns in advertising. Clarity on how orgs moderate content and a requirement to present their algorithms for scrutiny is also required.” And larger services that reach 45m+ EU people have more, they “have to share data with ‘vetted’ researchers and governments, allow users to opt out of profiling recommendations, submit to regular audits, and have risk management and a crisis response plans in place.”

• The new spreadsheet? OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses - Can handle longer conversations, encryption, by default doesn’t share your stuff with the training AI, and SOC2 accounting controls. Also, of course, an admin panel.

Logoff

I’m starting to do the final think through of talk I’ll be giving next week at DevOpsDays Des Moines. I was asked to speak at the conference long ago (it’s a real compliment to be asked to speak), and I see was I clever enough to write an interesting, but ambiguous abstract!

There are a few things that I’m pushing around in my mind:

1. A conversation I had with an enterprise architect recently that went something like “why don’t we just use what we have correctly instead of installing a new paradigm?”

2. You’re working harder on the wrong things.

3. Optimizing vs. satisficing. Or: "once you've trained in accountancy, it seems like the only job."

I keep getting pulled to “do less, focus on one thing,” but I want to escape that kind of obvious bromide. Perhaps more of what I’m trying to get to is: “it’ll work itself out, don’t pre-optimize.” And, point one is key too: before you hop back to the start of the diffusion of innovation curve/hype cycle, have you tried reading the manual for what you currently have and following the directions this time?

Chance are high, you’ll skip reading the manual for this new thing. Case in point, the need for the Kubernetes community to tell everyone that it’s a platform for building platforms (insert Tweet screenshot) and that it’s not really intended for application developers. Then, lo and behold, when you don’t follow the original intent and scope of Kubernets, it’s complex and difficult! Security-blah-blah, skills gap, etc., costs, etc.!

A visual from a Torsten Volk study I saw recently:

What you see here is that Kubernetes is a tiny part of the overall stack you have. The infamous CNCF landscape shows this as well. What matters are all the things you wrap around it. I didn’t realize this early on in the container wars - I was famous on Software Defined Talk for saying “I thought Kubernetes already did that” when some new startup or project popped up. And I don’t think when we talk about “Kubernetes” we realize that Kubernetes is a tiny part of what we’re talking about. If you’re building a platform, or whatever, Kubernetes is probably the least of your problems. If you’re not already good at all that other stuff, you’re just fucking yourself up by changing that one box out. Why not just try being good at that other stuff first with what you have?

Anyhow, save it for the presentation, I guess.

ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons - This is what spurred me to start using ChatGPT as a ChatDM. I’ve yet to ask it questions like “describe drinking games that the satyrs are taking part in that are so dangerous someone could get hurt doing them” or “why would a Displacer Beast Kitten leave the safety of its den if it believes an intruder is nearby?” One interesting point that’s worth raising into the bigger AI/LLM discussion. “Hallucinations” can be bad if you want real, truth (in which cases, they’re “lies” from the wide meaning of that word). But, when you’re creating and story telling, “making things up” is the whole game. Thus, ChatGPT’s downside of making things up becomes an advantage when you’re trying to be creative.

Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest - One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”

The new spreadsheet? OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses - Can handle longer conversations, encryption, by default doesn’t share your stuff with the training AI, and SOC2 accounting controls. Also, of course, an admin panel.