Untranslatable - “We’ll let him do a trial run for a week first, to see what kind of meat we have in the tub."

Coco’s Dispatch #67: Counterfeit Death Valley Pine Nuts at Kwik Mart - “I don’t believe in most recycling. I may believe in recycling cans, though I know it takes much higher heat to smelt. I may believe in non-intermingled paper pulp recycling. I may believe in glass recycling. I say may believe because I don’t know enough about it. It is possible it is all a sham. I do believe in French wine and the money it requires to buy it so I took a load of cans to my local recycling center on the way home from the swapmeet."

Content Editing: How To Handle Major Rewrites - Pretty detailed guide to editing (corporate) content that isn’t good enough.

Untranslatable - “We’ll let him do a trial run for a week first, to see what kind of meat we have in the tub."

Platform Maturity Model with Abby Bangser - Good framing: providing internal (dev) services to internal (dev) customers. (Abby has been doing a great job, devrel wise, in the past year+.)

How B2B Organizations Can Win With Younger Buyers - What the kids are up to. This feels like a description of youth of all generations. As the kids age in power, they both get tired, have their own kids, or otherwise just get tired and want to delegate, have help, or just coast. Until then: so much energy! So much flat hierarchy! So much energy! So much caring!

“Analogpunk, or, Tools, Shoes and Misery,” Bruce Sterling SXSW 2024) - He has a skill for turning mundane objects into lectures and relating them to culture. Put in direct link to MP3.

State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten - If you’re interested in how the Norwegian government is using cloud native stuff (like Kubernetes), this is a survey readout circa 2023/2024.

“Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms,” Kirsten Schwarzer, KubeCon EU, March, 2024. - - Good tour of applying design-think to platforms. That is, what do designers do on platform engineering teams. Some items: (1) Do at least one hour long user interview a week. This gives you an idea of what your users (developers) are doing, struggle with, how your improvements are helping or not, and give you data to decide what to do next. The last is especially useful for fending off The Boss and others who have suggestions that are not helpful: show them the data about what is, at least that you do things driven by analysis, not hunch. (2) Progressive disclosure - only show what people need for a given talk, not everything the tool can do. Can help with cognitive (over)load. (3) Errors are a good source for finding what’s wrong.

“Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking,” Samantha Coffman, KubeCon EU, March 2024.
A lot of good commentary and advice on product managing the platform, some techniques, mindsets, etc. Chief among them: focus on the value/problem you’re solving first, then how you solve it second…also trying to quantify what the problem is so you can measure if it’s fixed, and prioritize it.