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.

Looking at four months of numbers, here’s my theories of how to get more attention for my enterprise tech videos: Make short ones, each with one point - 1 minute to 10 minutes. Post the videos natively to Twitter, YouTube, or whatever channel - don’t rely on people clicking on YouTube. YouTube is, in general, the worst performer for eyeballs. LinkedIn is the best all around performer (but, I haven’t found detailed analytics, like seconds watched versus just auto-play).

I’ve tracked at least three different definitions of DevOps since the days of “agile infrastructure”: Using Puppet and Chef (and then Ansible and Chef) to replace Opsware and BladeLogic. Full stack engineers to setup EC2, load-balancers, and other Morlock shit. Full stack engineers are bad, but sort of the same thing. Also, you can’t have a DevOps “group” or title. But, you know, someone should do all that automation. Putting all the people on one team, having them focus on a product, and establishing a culture of caring and learning.

As a DevOpsDays sponsor you’re often given the chance to give a one minute pitch to the entire audience. Back stage at DevOps Rex, this week, I was talking with a first timer. One minute seems like such a small amount of time: how could you say anything consequential in 60 seconds? You’re presenting in front of the full audience, anywhere between 150 to 500 people. They probably also loath vendors, or, at least are bored by them.

Coffee is for coders. Whether you’re doing waterfall, DevOps, PRINCE, SAFe, PMBOK, ITIL, or whatever process and certification-scheme you like, chances are you’re not using your time wisely. I’d estimate that most of the immediate, short-term benefit organizations get from switching to cloud native is simply because they’re now actually, truly following a process which both focuses your efforts on creating customer value (useful software that helps customers out, making them keep paying or pay you more) and managing your time wisely.

The premise of this book, for most anyone, is painfully boring: planning out and project managing the installation of COTS software. This is mostly lumbering, on-premises ERP applications: those huge, multi-year installs of software that run the back office and systems of record for organizations. While this market is huge, touches almost every company, and has software that is directly or indirectly touched by almost everyone each day (anytime you buy something or interact with a company)…it’s no iPhone.

I get all ants-in-pants about this whole bi-modal discussion because I feel like it’s a lot of energy spent talking about the wrong things. This came up recently when I was asked about “MVP”, in a way that basically was saying “our stuff is dangerous [oil drilling], so ‘minimal’ sounds like it’d be less safe.” I tried to focus them on the “V” and figure out what “viable” was for their situation.

I have a larger piece on common objections to “cloud native” that I’ve encountered over the last year. Put more positive, “how to get your digital transformation started with a agile, DevOps, and cloud native” or some such platitudinal title like that. Here’s a draft of the dread-ROI section. The most annoying buzzkill for changing how IT operates (doing agile, DevOps, taking “the cloud native journey,” or whatever you think is the opposite of “waterfall”) is the ROI counter-measure.

A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects has taught me that, eventually, the executive in charge just has to take a leap of faith.

Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis and collaboration tools, as well as cloud-related technology, Chambers said in an interview last month.