I’m a Texan living in Amsterdam, so when I come back to the States (Dallas and Austin this time), I noticed things about American that I never did:

• People are eager to be helpful, especially when you have a bunch of kids. Everyone offers to help with luggage. A cashier will race back to the shelves to find a replacement for a broken item, or verify the sales price.
• People are apologizing all the time, and people tell them it’s not a big deal, and apologize back. At a haircut place, someone forgot at a jacket and came back. That person said “sorry,” the haircutter said “sorry,” and then there was another sorry in there.
• Everything is huge.
• SUVs and sedans are the norm, not hatchbacks. In Europe, the hatchback and small station wagon are the norm for cars. There are many Teslas too. In the States, there are Teslas, but almost no hatchbacks and very few station wagons.
• The eggs, even the organic ones, are a pale yellow.
• Also, I almost forgot that you refrigerate eggs in the US.
• Litigation lawyers love billboards. Hit by a truck? Workplace injury? Just drive down the highway and you’ll find five or ten lawyers with stern looks ready to help YOU GET MONEY. Sometimes they’re even holding sledge hammers or baseball bats. So weird.
• There’s a definite Austin look. Clothes are cotton, but outdoors-y. Tattoos for sure, but low-key ones. Shorts, t-shirts and even sleeveless t-shirts. Lots of dogs on long leashes with poop-bags artfully tied to the leashes. Which I guess is to say: very little designer clothes.
• Men do not, at all really, wear murses, man purses. This is so normal in Europe, that I don’t even notice it anymore

Originally in my newsletter.

From the report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Platform Engineering,” Paul Delory and Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Gartner, Oct 2022.

• The authors don’t take a strong position here (?), but I think their vision of platform engineering sits above the infrastructure layer. See the diagram above, for example. The platform engineering group doesn’t mess with that stuff. This seems right to me.
• Everyone loves a Gartner prediction: “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.”
• “Cost savings are unlikely. The platform should improve productivity, cycle time and speed to market, among other important metrics. Expect a good return on investment, but not less investment overall. Direct, cash-out-of-pocket savings are unlikely to materialize.”

This report is free to download, my work licensed it. If you’re reading this, you’ll find it useful, so you should go read it!

Securing Your Environment with Tools Before Rules

My colleague Bryan Ross talk about security in the whole cloud native world. There’s plenty go shift left, and something called “shield right.” Also, he concisely explains the value of having a container-native build service (here, the Tanzu Build Service) and how you can get developers securing their code (better) from the start with Accelerators (templates), and buildpacks.

I think buildpacks are one of the more impressive, under appreciated things from the Cloud Foundry community. The idea of, well, preventing developers from building their own containers is huge if you want control over security, governance, and even basic things like instrumentation and other production management concerns.

You may recall this Bryan from this excellent talk he gave about his experience running a platforms in large organizations. If you’re in this whole cloud thing, you should really watch it if you haven’t.