I’ve been off the publishing grid for awhile, even off the consuming the Internet grid. This is a mix of partial vacation, taking care of some family things, an obsession with D&D, and the first break in my workaholic nature for…20…even 30 years? It is time for a few new habits, rather than swirling around the old ones. The most counter-whatyoudthink is probably to start going into the office more. My work has an OK-good office in upper west Amsterdam.

Put out a newsletter today. The musings on using ChatGPT for school obscure the real treat: me goofing around at the expense of DevOps and Platform engineering. I also finished up a mostly polished draft of a webinar I’m giving next week. Working with Darran has been great. He knows his stuff and helps me think of new interesting things to say as well. I thought my mom was coming tomorrow for her summer stay with us, but it’s Sunday.

Mid-day. For Father’s Day, Kim set me up with a nice hotel room that has a sauna in it. I think we’re developing a tradition of these parents days where the parent gets the day off. Sort of ironic, but fitting for the contemporary pro mental health vibe we all stew in. I was told to do no work, even my own projects. So I’ve been watching Batman: The Long Halloween.

“did some thinking, and suddenly it was gone 5” Spent most of the day on the newsletter episode, using two analyst reports as an excuse to putter around platform engineering again. I didn’t do my work to lookup platform engineering definitions; a delightful effect is that I was sent two: from Donnie (such nice writing style!) and a definition from Gartner. When I refer to analysts reports (Forrester, Gartner, IDC, 451 Reseach, etc.

A lot of post-production video work today. Doing all the work after you film and then fully edit a video takes a long time. It’s pretty much the same time for any length of video. The most difficult part if promoting it across the four or five channels I have. I don’t even spend time hustling it to other people to post. Who knows. I put up my first “Quick Comment” one - an idea where I just make very short videos that start with one figure/number, idea, etc.

Today’s newsletter has just a few links, some quirky quotes, and a list of upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at or attending. My newsletter crossed 600 subscribers this week. Fun! I’ve been trying to build up a more stable place to publish now that social media is FUCKING CRAZY and BLOGS ARE DEAD, and it’s working pretty well. I’ve been trying to come up with some new talks for awhile now.

Mid-day, when I have time. Another webinar in the can: my analysis of our 2023 State of Kubernetes survey. I positioned it as input and guidance into doing your own Kubernetes stuff. My theory on Kubernetes is that everyone wants to do it - “it’s the future” - but very few apps are running in production. Gartner estimates that ‘by 2027, 25 percent of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2021.

I had two recordings today. One on the platform maturity model draft, a paper I got the chance to review early on. There’s a live stream of it up, and I’ll lightly edit it down to a podcast episode later this week. I also did a small panel (with two other people) talking about how US government agencies and groups get better at doing software. It’ll be broadcast in June 21st.

Traveling back home, to Amsterdam, today. Yesterday’s VMUG Belgium talk went fine. Since it was to VMware admin types, I positioned my platform talk as a glimpse of their future. Whenever the infrastructure changes, you can use new application architectures…and then that drives new types of infrastructure and management needs…and so forth. It means that the people building and running infrastructure need to update their tools and how they work.

The day’s not over yet, but I’ve got two but things coming up the rest of the evening and will probably want to zone out after them: I’m hosting a fireside chat with Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of our group at VMware (streamed in LinkedIn). She should be fun to talk with. And then I’ll go almost straight into this week’s Software Defined Talk (podcast here, watch here for the live stream).