Upgrade That Spring!

If you do Spring stuff in a large enterprise, you should check this thing out.

Relative to your interests

• AI for Economists - Some prompt formations and stuff for the ChatGPT and friends.

• Signs that it’s time to leave a company - Attempts to get people back in the office are something to watch in 2024: “I do think there’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time.” Also: I like this kind of advice because it focuses (1) on analyzing and judging the “culture” of an organization by how it runs its business day to day, not just the vibes, (2) pointing out that high growth companies are (like celebrity diets) the weirdos, not the instructive norm that you can imitate 100%. I’m most interested in this transition from high growth to “just normal” - few people write about that in tech.

• The Cloudcast: 2024 Look Ahead - Surviving the Q1 Kickoff - There’s a lot of good advice in here for surviving and thriving in a big company. Find out how the money is made, seek to spend less/do more with the same budget, support that, keep doing what worked last year, don’t get involved in bold (and thus risky) new ideas. The point of a big company (1) is stability and cash flow growth (profit), (2) good compensation and a secure job for staff. The second gets lost on all the startup frenzy: customer one of a big company are the people working there.

• Applying the SPACE Framework - Developer productivity metrics through context.

• Citi retires 6% of its legacy applications – and 20,000 people - I’m pretty sure those 20,000 are across the whole company, not just the people whose software was modernized as the headline sort of implies. Also, check out the chart for IT things they did, indicative of what they’re proud of and what matters to enterprise buyers.

• Max Ernst. Volume III: La Cour du dragon (Volume III: The Court of the Dragon) from Une Semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux (A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements). 1933–34, published 1934 - Looks pretty cool.

• This workplace battle is over - Axios summarizes a recent work from home survey: ‘“Maintain hybrid work” was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey conducted in October and November. A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year. “Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a recent note. About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, per Goldman.’

• The trouble with DevRel - “When awareness and adoption are no longer issues, the role of DevRel needs to change. It becomes less about creating content than it does interacting with and growing the community, fostering goodwill, nurturing customers, and providing feedback. Sadly, this is hard to justify when budgets get reduced and headcount is flat. DevRel then becomes an easy target for elimination.”

• ING says supermarket revenue will drop sharply due to ban on tobacco sales - On July 1st, you can’t sell cigarettes, etc. in Netherlands grocery stores. So, ING predicts prices for everything else will go up to make up for lost revenue: “When excluding tobacco sales, the sales in supermarkets are on the rise, according to ING. The prices on the shelves appear to be headed for another one percent increase, after a sharp rise in prices during previous years.” It seems like something is wrong with capitalism if that happens.

Wastebook

• “it’s unhelpful to say ‘let me know if I can do anything to help,’ because when you are going through a stressful life change, the last thing you need is for someone to demand that you make another decision.” Here.

• “Instagramming videos of the donkey he lets roam around his kitchen. It seems like a good life.” Here.

• I’m trying to use Google Docs as my note taking tool for work. It’s hard to get over the feeling that I’m using Word to take notes when I should be all tech-hipster and use markdown files instead. Also, if it’s an official corporate tool, you comply with all the corporate data security governance, you can share with employees, and (depending on what the admins have done?), you can use the Google AI stuff (well, I haven’t actually tested this, work has it turned off).

• “Efficiency 2: Cost Savings Boogaloo.” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

cfgmgmtcamp, Feburary 5th to 7th, “We Fear Change” talk; DevOpsDays LA, March 15th, “We Fear Change” talk; Platform Engineering Day at KubeCon EU, tentative, March 19th. I’ve got a couple of CFPs out there: Devoxx UK and DevOpsDays London.

Logoff

I’ve been a lot more focused on making videos for YouTube since COVID, like many people. I’m tired of all those thumbnails of people looking shocked or upset. I make a lot of them too! They certainly don’t help me reach a lot of views. How about I stop making them?