Wastebook

• “portal platform.”

• #outmeated.

• “Those sizzlers are nice.”

• “Tell him I’m eating,” 9 minutes in.

• “chair-use disorder.” Here.

• “Is a platypus a Kubernetes symbol? Developers love to take scary things and make them cute.” (Overheard in the crowd before a Cory Quinn talk at SCaLE 21x.)

• Also: “what about you, Charles, what are your thoughts on Terraform…and DevOps in general.”

Relevant to your interests

• 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.”

• Lengthy Memoranda and Gobbledygook Language: Be short and use Plain English by Maury Maverick - Be as simple and short as possible, the man says.

• AI Chair 1.0 - ChatGPT gives instructions for building a chair out of some left over wood - and the guy builds it. // “ultimately, builds agency rather than contributing to our general disempowerment us.”

• Prompt library - Prompts from Antropic, so, not crap.

• HashiCorp reportedly pondering sale amid growing challenges - The DevOps Index probably isn’t doing too well? // “HashiCorp’s share price peaked at the end of December 2021 at $91.04 and at the time of writing is $28.80. The market capitalization is $5.2 billion.”

• Finally, Platform Engineering for Enterprise Cloud Migration - “he asks them to talk about their top five or ten technological pain points. Then the Mechanical Orchard team starts to analyze the legacy system’s behavior based on intercepting inputs and outputs, in order to reproduce the system from there in an open source, cloud native way. This doesn’t mean they don’t use the source code when available — that’s just not the starting point.”

• How to make use of typographic refinement in Pages & other macOS apps - Get really deep into fonts on MacOS.

• What’s new with Tanzu Application Catalog - One of the easier things you can do to be more secure is having your own container registry. Here’s one that’s proven and ready to go.

• Costco CFO ‘voice’ looks back on 40 years, $1.50 hot dogs and leadership | Grocery Dive - “We went out years ago and built a hot dog plant that makes two items, the big hot dog that we sell one at a time and then 12-packs or 10-packs of a smaller size for families. That’s a plant that makes 300 million hot dogs a year and we did that to take a few cents of the cost out by doing it ourselves in such huge efficient volumes and to try to keep that price lower. It’s become part of our folklore, both of those items you mentioned [the hot dog combo and the $4.99 rotisserie chicken]. In terms of changing prices those will be two things that would be last on the list and I don’t see it happening in the near-term.”

• Bringing tech innovation to the American Red Cross - “We try to find the essence of the opportunity that matters most. We start small and then iterate. If you focus on a smaller problem and get that delivered, you have better chances of expanding it. It’s a good way to launch a product: get feedback, see if we are hitting the right areas, and expand from there. That gives us an opportunity to test an idea and then scale effectively once it’s successful.”

• An interview with Piketty - “It depends” applies most of them time: “One of which is that I put excessive emphasis on the universal law of capital. But doing that was mostly a technique to organise a large quantity of data. So when I refer to the ‘first law of capitalism,’ I think it’s clear to anyone who reads me carefully that I’m always trying to historicise the processes and national specificities of how capital works, that it’s a political construction and so on. So these “laws” are not really laws, they are just simplified conceptual relations which can help organise a vast quantity of evidence.”

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.

Logoff

Last week was a crazy-long week of travel. It was nice to see friends, though!