This year we’ll see a lot app platform teams struggle to get developers to actually use and appreciate their platforms. I know this because this has happened to every platform team I’ve talked with over the 9 years when they’ve put Cloud Foundry in place, failed to appreciate the “Kubernetes is not for developers” paradox, and are now putting “platform engineering” platforms in place. The solution is marketing and developer advocacy, and good old fashioned trust building. These are things that IT is traditionally not good at: it’s never been their job. So, this year, it’s time to fix that!

My colleague Bryan Ross wrote up his real-world experience doing platform advocacy and marketing recently, and I got him to give me a quick overview in the video below:

If you’re in the platform, DevOps, even kubernetes rodeos, you’ll get a lot out of his article.

Wastebook

• Don’t worry about where the fence is, just swing.

• Daughter: “I can’t read that book yet because I’m still reading this book.” Me: “you know, you can read more than one book at once.” Daughter: “What?! No you can’t. WHO TOLD YOU THAT?!”

• “A real holiday. No weird stuff.” Hilda, s3e1. (Good luck with that!)

• If that’s what I need to do to get a seat at your table, then your table sucks.

• “I don’t know why people lose sight of the fact that having fun is one of the very best parts of being a human.” Here.

Relative to your interests

• Google lays off “hundreds” more as ad division switches to AI-powered sales - How Google is using AI to replace human’s role in sales: ‘Google has been packing Google Ads—its most important product—with tons of generative AI features lately. One is a natural-language chatbot that helps people navigate the large selection of ad products; another is a system that can just make ad assets like images and text on its own based on a budget and goals given by the ad purchaser. Google’s generative AI ad system is part of a product called “Performance Max” which works by autonomously remixing and tweaking your ads using the click-through rate as an instant feedback system. Google used to have humans do sales guidance for its products, create art assets, and decide on text and layouts, but now AI can do it a thousand times a second.’

• A Theory of Grift - “the heart of a grift is that you get something that, in a technical sense, is what you paid for, but that is also not worth what you paid for it.” Who gets grifted: “grifts tend to target the middle of whatever the relevant bell curve is. There are a lot more average people than non-average people, so the market is bigger. And their averageness makes it easier to reason about their motivations.” Meanwhile, some management consulting suggestions for the health and wellness grifters out there.

• HOWTO: Change your behavior - Advice in that tidy style the nerds love.

• How High-Performance IT Improves Business Through Technology - I never like the way I word the concept of “business/IT alignment” when it comes to software development, that is, using your software to run, innovate, and grow your business. It always sounds so marketing-y. Similarly the word “enterprise” is a term of art that is incredible precise and helpful in my field but it feels weird and slightly eye-roll-y. And, of course, “digital transformation.” Anyhow, some good wording in this piece.

Logoff

People make fun of LinkedIn and do a lot of performative throwing-up about it. Even I do that! But, over the years it’s been very valuable to me and helped me do my job. With the shit-showing of Twitter I don’t have much access to the 11,000 people I built up over there since 2006,1 but LinkedIn has been great for that for many years, especially now.

My only worry is that most of those people are co-workers, but I’m starting to notice many more people from other organizations. There’s nothing wrong with those co-workers and I like having them in the audience as well, but I also like to get to people outside of my immediate social spheres.

And, even if it does just remain co-workers, it’s alway good to be well known in your company. Better, I’ve heard over the years that the silly videos I do are useful for education and training and, of course, to give other people stuff to post themselves.

So, LinkedIn: it’s good stuff!