Posts in "longform"

How to use Tahoe's new Use Model shortcut to summarize articles

The new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, I like to summarize a lot of pages. Sometimes, ChatGPT can’t get the text for those pages, or I don’t trust the text it retrieves. There’s a shortcut that will retrieve the cleaned up text of a page (as markdown). So, you can get that markdown, and with the new Use Model shortcut, you can summarize it and then send the markdown summary to Drafts.

Things I Like

There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1: Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long it takes to get the good stuff/the point. I know the context, I want the fix.

The community is moving

The people in my tech community who talk about community find Twitter so vile that there’s little discussion of the good parts. It was a great place for discovering, building, and “doing” community. And it still is, though mixed in with all the other stuff1. This history of DevOps, cloud stuff, and everything that followed - open source, even! - would be different if Twitter weren’t around. We’d be in…listservs? Blogs?

The "Be Nice" product and marketing strategy for open source enterprise stuff

Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the early adopters, you have to show how you make it better and are evolving the project without hiding it.

Open Source usage survey

Some commentary on a recent survey commissioned from my work, VMware. Unsurprisingly, open source is used by almost everyone. When it comes to what I care about software development, open source is indispensable. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a developer who only uses closed source software, if not whole systems like kubernetes or Cloud Foundry for running their applications. It’d almost be impossible. And, indeed, in our State of the Software Supply Chain survey this year, 2022, 90% of respondents said they were using open source in production.

How to do fun and interesting executive dinners, round tables, etc. - online and in-person

Here’s what I’ve learned in doing 30 (maybe more like 40?) executive events in person and online over the past four or so years. Over my career, I’ve done these on and off, but it’s become a core part of my job since moving to EMEA to support Pivotal and now VMware Tanzu with executives. At these events, I learn a lot about “digital transformation,” you know, how people at large organizations are changing how they build software.

Reluctance to change - Notebook

I've proposed an open spaces for DevOpsDays Amsterdam, 2021. The idea is: The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things, get better, change. However, many more people seem less than eager to change - your co-workers, managers, and the countless “others” in your organization.

_Working Backwards_, recent book on how Amazon runs.

Notes: central is thinking about product features, not business. The business funds the product, the customer value - it's the McGuffin that you careful guide to being cash flow. The question here is to find other org.s that have adopted abs adapted the practices successfully, or not. the advice at the end is pretty straightforward - the practices are kind of simple, so applying them just means deciding to do them - just like deciding to diet and exercise.