What the Government Email Account Hack Says About the Future of Cybersecurity - Always be securing all the things.

Security Team Culture Matters - Being in security should be a happy job. // “Security and risk teams are more motivated and purpose-driven than others. As a 25-year cybersecurity veteran, this totally checks out for me. “Almost everyone I know in [IT security] is mission- and purpose-driven. They took on this job to protect others!"

Deploying the Swift Method to Modernize a Singapore Government Legacy System - Good description of what it feels like to be stuck in the legacy trap: “The [Singapore] government agency in this case study faced a similar issue with a legacy system that supported critical business processes, integrated with other business-critical applications, and was developed and maintained by third-party vendors. Over time, the codebase had become highly coupled within different business domains and contexts, making it difficult for developers to work on. This situation led to product development squads being slowed down by dependencies on the support team for this legacy system. The development squads also lacked confidence to make changes to this system themselves—given the low automated test coverage—and faced uncertainty about what they would be able to deliver for their own work streams independently.” You can see the original talk this is based on here.

In the face of volatility, CFOs—and their organizations—adapt - Belt-tightening watch. Lots of micromanagement and management by finance metrics ahead: “In the year ahead, CFOs plan to increase their focus on operational value drivers, management of KPIs, cash management, and capital structure. Other priorities have decreased in importance since Q3 2022."

IBM takes on AWS, Google, and Microsoft with Watsonx - If it works, it lets enterprises build up huge, custom trained models, and it has enough governance controls, it’d be a big deal for IBM. They key things learned from ChatGPT is that it has to be super easy, frictionless to get started with. That’s difficult for enterprises software makers, and it’s also hindered by governance, access control, and pricing per seat and data access. To be valuable to individuals, a company will need to put as much of their data into their models as possible. If you’re just querying your own email and files, it won’t be impressive enough to show long-term value to individuals. And if you restrict the model to just a handful of people (as is done with most corporate data), then it also will be hard to show long-term value. This will freak out security people and lawyers. Back in the 2000’s when file sharing in enterprises (like SharePoint and intranet search) became popular, there was a wave of people freaking out that previously hidden in plain sight documents were now findable.

Beware the Digital Whiteboard - The assertion: writing with whiteboarding/Sticky notes is not good, and can lead to leaky abstractions. Seem more like a “right tool for the job” thing, plus the usual garbage in, garbage out, regardless of the tool used to process the garbage.

Steve McQueen by, John Dominis - That guy made being cool look easy.

Steve McQueen by, John Dominis - That guy made being cool look easy.

Island Series: 6 Pack - These look like more amazing notebooks from a boutique shop.

Adopt Platform Engineering to Scale Application Security Practices - “Gartner Survey Data Reveals a Missed Opportunity - Platform teams focus on improving developer experience, developer productivity, software quality and delivery speed. According to Gartner’s 2022 Software Engineering Leaders Role Survey, only 25% of respondents cited “reduced security risks’’ as one of the top three goals for platform engineering and only 6% ranked it as the topmost goal.” // Here we are, about to finally have a moment that’s just focused on making appdev better, and of course security has to come in and try to grab all the attention. This already happened with Kubernetes in the past few years. And: maybe it was a good idea to keep all this stuff separated in its own team so that each team can focus.