Surviving and Thriving in a BigCo

If you work in a large organization, you’ll like this new video series I did with O’Reilly. Check out the intro above, and here’s the topics covered:

1. Cultivate your Style and Character.

2. How does a BigCo Work?

3. Mentors are Nice, Champions are Better.

4. Asking Questions Leads to Homework for You.

5. Assign Homework to Filter out Vampires.

6. To Innovate, Hide Out.

7. Slides are Docs.

8. Always Have an Ask Ready to Go.

9. Embrace Work/Life Imbalance.

If you have access to O’Reilly, you should check out the videos. If you work at a large organization, especially in a technical role, you should watch them all! You can get some kind of certification if you take the quizzes (a sort of hilarious thing for this type of content, but whatever).

These are good videos, if I don’t say so myself. If you like my style of stuff, you’ll like these. Tell me what you think!

Microservices Modernization Missteps: Four Anti-Patterns of Rebuilding Apps - and how to avoid them

One of my colleagues has a post out going over four anti-patterns when you're modernizing to microservices: (1) Relying only on code and documentation for business context; (2) Unvalidated architecture; (3) Insufficient test automation; (4) Big bang releases.

I helped put it together, so, you know, I think it’s pretty useful stuff. Check it out!

Software Defined Talk podcast #456

This week, we second guess recent decisions made by Google and Apple. Plus, what social media sites is everyone actually using these days?

Take a listen! Check out the unedited livestream video if you’re really a super-fan.

Relative to your interests

• We CAN Have Nice Things: Upgrading to Java 21 Is Worth It - “It’s (Jave 21) also morally superior. You won’t like the look of shame and sadness in your children’s eyes when they find out that you’re using Java 8 in production.”

• Thanks Oracle! Java licence squeeze puts a rocket under Azul - “Oracle, by developer use, was probably 60 to 70% market share according to Gartner. This year, that’s down to 30%. ” // Meanwhile, since Jan 2023: “The Oracle Java Licensing change made organisations purchase a licence for their entire employee population if even a single employee or server has installed a_ licensable_ version of Java – which is widespread, often without organisations realising this. And Oracle, notorious for its ferocious audits over the years, is stepping up audits of Java users.”

Wastebook

• “Every idea is a story of someone trying to solve a problem.” Here.

• “Boy, are you going to be glad you opened this newsletter. Because you are about to learn about the lone banana problem.”

• “A primer on space mining — and its impact on the IT sector.” From a 451 report.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Executive dinner on Java Security, March 13th, Dallas; DevOpsDays LA, speaking, March 15th, Pasadena “We Fear Change” talk; KubeCon EU, March 19th, Paris; Tanzu (Re)defined, April 11th, Palo Alto. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th.

Come to our little party at KubeCon EU, it’s Thursday night. Register for free here! And, if you’re going to KubeCon EU and haven’t registered yet, you can get 20% off with the code KCEU24VMWBC20.

Logoff

After a week of pissing rain, it’s sunny hear in Amsterdam. We’ll see how the weekend goes.

//

I finally got my 2FA login for my Twitter account fixed. I’d been ignoring it since the Fall, just posting my content, and then got locked out sometime in December or January. There’s still so many people in my tech world there. It’s kind of weird, weren’t they all supposed to abandon it out of Elon-hate, or something? I feel like I chose the wrong path during all that nerd-wailing. I’ve got a large enough following in Mastodon, but there’s just not as much engagement as I’m used to (there are a handful of people there that I write back and forth with that are great, though). And since I missed out on the initial tech-invasion of Threads (since I live in the EU), there’s not much there. This stuff always comes down to years of curation and activity, which is hard to build back up.

I don’t think that federated dream (where Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky all interior) is ever going to come true: that was clearly just some hopeful-nerd talk last year. (And now that you an pay Twitter to remove all ads, what they should do is open up third party APIs for the Premium+ customers - they’re not missing out on ads anyhow - but, whatever). It’d be great to have an Adium-like app for all that shit. Dreams! Anyhow, speaking of quality content (or lack thereof!) I have a backlog of lots of my silly videos to post in Twitter.