This is from last Fall at the SHIFT conference, but it still holds up:

Relative to your interests

• Why Are Pants So Big (Again)? - tl;dr: you can wear comfortable jeans again. // “There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself” And: “If you zoom out far enough, all the paroxysms around self-presentation arrange themselves into an orderly, eminently predictable swing between big and small – you could call it the pants pendulum.”

• What if we rotate pairs every day? - “A few months after the experiment, one team gave us some interesting feedback: They found that when a problem came up in production, they didn’t need to depend on just one person to look into and fix it. The team could assign anyone to troubleshoot the issue. In addition, another feedback mentioned an incoming pair rotation brought new context that changed implementation direction and helped resolve a problem in the early stages of the feature’s development, thus saving the team lots of time and rework. These highlight the benefits of having knowledge spread among the team.”

• Sanders pitches 4-day workweek bill in US Senate • The Register - Works are the last to get worker productivity benefits - AMIRIGHT! “Today, American workers are over 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago.”

• Understanding product marketing and go-to-markets - Good stuff.

• White House adds teeth to secure software development requirements - ’“Attestation is now a hard requirement that will be enforced during the procurement or renewal process"…. Among the secure practices included in the guidelines, they include separation of production and development environments, use of multifactor authentication, regular logging and monitoring and other factors’

• Europe’s AI Act demands extensive “logs” of users - This probably isn’t the kind of AI “safety” the nerds want, but the goals seems like what normies would want.

• Great Marketing Machines Are Like Costco - Marketing (operations) is about doing a lot of things that lead to one pretty slide to the BoD. // “Great marketing machines are like Costco. There is no magic wand. There is no secret lever. It’s about 50 little things, all working together. And that’s one reason why people have trouble understanding them. This may be obvious, but I’d never previously seen it so clearly. CMOs show the funnel slide in board meetings with stages and conversion rates. But no one really understands the machine. They ask a few random questions, usually about channels. The inevitable attribution conversation follows. You can almost feel them searching for the one thing. But in this case, there isn’t one.”

• Study finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less - “A new study out of Germany suggests that once you let people try them, they tend to have a real impact on car use, and even car ownership.” // Electric bakfiets, as the Dutch call them, are awesome. It takes a few weeks of nerve control to cycle around Amsterdam with its narrow streets and along side other bikes, but then it is really close to having a car

Software Defined Talk Podcast

This week’s episode:

we discuss Coté's O'Reilly video series where he offers up some tips on how to survive and thrive in the workplace. Plus, some ideas on how to reinvent the virtual town hall.

This week’s episode is all about my surviving and thriving in large organization videos. Oh, you haven’t heard of that yet? Well, it’s a video series in O’Reilly. You should go watch it!

Wastebook

• “I know the automation will happen anyway, I know those jobs will go anyway. But I’d rather not be the one to build that.” Here.

• “I believe in laissez-faire for names, but if you are going to ban anything, surely ‘Elmer’ is worth some consideration?” Tyler.

• “I don’t care! I like lots of things.”

• “He moved to Chicago, married his college sweetheart, and found a job in a screw factory.” Here.

• “This is an explanation, not an excuse.”

• “Feel free to move fast and break it, and also feel free to pay billions of euros in penalties as a sort-of-tax for that privilege.” bruces.

• “Seagulls' impact on local wildlife can be significant and surprising.” Here.

If you want to know what’s up with Tanzu now-a-days, you should come to the above event and find out. It’s “invite only,” which means it’s for “executives” that we’re interested in talking with. If you’re at a large organization and you’re involved in app development or cloud strategy, you’re probably the type of person we want there. Check it out, and register for it. (And if paying for the travel is a problem, register anyway and maybe we can help out with that.)

🌐 Register now.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Tanzu (Re)defined, April 11th, Palo Alto. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th.

I can’t make it to KubeCon EU this year, but if you’re going: 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

I had a long week in the States - arriving in Palo Alto on Saturday for a fun work thing, then to Dallas for an executive dinner Wednesday night, and then to Pasadena to give the opening keynote at DevOpsDays LA. While a week is too long for me to travel now-a-days, each of the events was great, and it’s been nice to meetup with people.