AI Stone Soup

One of my co-workers, AI Adib, pointed me towards the AI stone soup, uh…analogy? Parable? Anyhow, the point of it is that the models at the core of all this AI stuff are cool, but it’s the layers and layers of applications and people on-top that make the difference. The app that you put on-top of the AI is what matters.

Indeed, the whole reason we’re talking about AI now is because of the app of ChatGPT, then Gemini, Midjourney, NotebookML’s podcasts, Claude, Perplexity, etc. These apps do a lot of the heavy lifting, workflow coordination, and anyone would suspect pre- and post-processing. Even all that vector database stuff.

As ever, it’s the packaging.

All of this amounts to “AI middleware,” all those other ingredients you put into the soup with models. AI middleware isn’t it all either: you need to actual apps too. I’ve used a lot of these apps and their usability and feature set matters a lot. The most valuable is retrieving and searching the web, uploading files and connecting to Google Docs is good too.

I’m thinking that, for “enterprises” looking to do AI, this AI middleware and the app layer are what will matter the most, be the most affordable (ROI’able?) option, and likely the quickest and easiest to succeed at.

//

Speaking of AI, I switched to using Claude over the weekend. For playing D&D it is amazing, so much better than ChatGPT. Its notion of projects is like Perplexity’s Spaces. ChatGPT does this kind of thing with custom GPTs. To the stone soup point, ChatGPT’s approach feels clunky and kind of forgotten about.

Claude will also lets you change writing style/tone. It has some canned ones, but you can “train” it. So, I uploaded some long newsletter episodes into it to see what it came up with. I think it’s fine?

The Model Context Protocol thing in Claude has a lot of potential. It’s trying to be a generic API for interacting with an AI. This includes, of course, bringing text in, but also “writing” out. For my basic uses, since it works with the GUI, you could have it interact with your local desktop, say like random NPC generators and game trackers for D&D.

Claude lacks web search, which is a major problem. If it had that, I could see giving up on ChatGPT.

In all of these, you can see that what matters isn’t the stone of the lower level models, but the layers and layers of app-stuff. Stone Soup!

Relative to your interests

I asked the AIs to write up this episode’s links in a Harper’s/Matt Levine link round-up style, made some tweaks, and here it is:

Strategy has finally outgrown its Sun Tzu phase, embracing gardening metaphors just as Dell's earnings wilt while customers await the next generation of AI silicon. Speaking of outdated frameworks, it turns out employee performance isn't actually Gaussian—though someone should tell HR—and Wardley Mapping continues its to enchant. I asked various social channels about Wardley Map case studies and stories, and there were a handful enough of replies: people love the stuff.

For those exhausted still lost in strategy-land, delight in some hybrid cloud chatter. Speaking of, Tanzu Platform 10 shipped, promising to transform Kubernetes from arcane yaml-craft into something mere mortals might actually deploy—complete with Cloud Foundry characteristics for those who remember when PaaS was supposed to save us all. Oh, and also just with Cloud Foundry for the discerning.

Meanwhile, modern work drowns in SaaS sprawl—though maybe we should just embrace the #defaultslifestyle of Microsoft 365—while growing organizations rediscover why hierarchy and meetings persist, much to everyone's chagrin.

Wastebook

The AI didn’t know what to do with the wastebook section.

• “there are more idiots here.”

• “Real leopards ate my face energy here” Reid.

• “my employer has never wanted me to share an opinion publicly and i do my best every day to ensure they never will” @maya@occult.institute.

• And: “leading voice of the goblin web.”

• ”I have a scraggly patch of hair on my right calf from when I scraped off a swath of skin in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament.” Jason.

• “inclusive growth.”

• “But you wouldn’t comment on telecommunications now, it’s too normalised” Matt.

• “Because no matter how much fun we had, it wasn’t the plan.” RotL #559.

• “trusted brawlers”

• “My entire existence of life.”

• “OKR stratosphere.”

• “I’ll wait for Burger King counter attack.” On Delta’s burgers in the sky.

• “Looking forward out in the 20 mile stare.” Furrierism.

• “AI that builds pipe, not hype.”

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I feel like there was more original content I wanted to share, but I can’t find it. Did I share this interview with the aforementioned “AI Adib” yet? In the second half we talk about how executives can think through their enterprise AI strategy.

Meanwhile, why not enjoy these FY27 Q3 vibes:

I let that guy shaking hands go on a little long, but it pays off.

Where are people putting their modernized apps? Here’s a recent survey chart on that topic from 451:

Recent Content

Three things for you today:

1. The private cloud equilibrium - my most recent attempt to figure out how much private cloud is out there.

2. Platform Engineering and UK Digital People, with Abby Bangser - this week’s Software Defined Interviews: As if platform engineering and expat'ing in the UK weren't enough, Whintney and Coté discuss the forgotten technology of business cards wih Abby Bangser.

3. The most honorable of mentions - This week’s Software Defined Talk: we discuss the relationship between DevOps and Platform Engineering, Gartner’s take on Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, and Nvidia’s search for new use cases. Plus, a listener chimes in to clear up some Podman misconceptions.

Relative to your interests

• DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability - Developer productivity is fine, but: “We thought the bottleneck was developers writing code, but in fact the bottleneck is putting good code into production.” // Maybe the current trend in DevOps/platform engineering/cloud native to to stop caring about developer productivity, rather, re-silo and let them care about it, and instead focus on operations productivity. Definitely that re-eval of how silo-busting has been going. https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2024/11/26/dora2024/

• The Rise of AI Agent Infrastructure - We’re all figuring out what “agent” means in AI land. It’ll probably end up meaning nothing if us marketing people do our jobs of claiming that we all do it.

• AI is reshaping call center work in the Philippines - ‘“AI is not to replace people but to help people become more productive,” she said. “If you needed 10 team members before, maybe now you only need five.”’ // Hmm, those two statements don’t seem to go together.

• China tech tariffs: Which countries will be affected - Round up of how current tariffs are going, and what they are.

• Rewiring the way McKinsey works with Lilli, our generative AI platform - “30% time savings in searching and synthesizing knowledge.” // Worth reflecting on how much of this is pulling together all the stuff for monthly status updates to management, a huge time suck for office workers. Much of it is probably bullshit work, but why not let the bullshit artist do it?

• Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - I’d call this something more like “multi-cloud platform.” A sub-set is cloud native, Kubernetes, really. A further subset is private cloud. As always with critiquing Gartner work, unless you have full access to related PDFs and have read them, be careful with assumptions and scorn.

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Not much this episodes! I’ve recorded 6 podcasts this week, with one more coming this afternoon. I’ve also been working on that same internal video for our Sales Kick-off. You could say I’m multi-media brain-dead. Still, it’s been fun having “content” to focus on with little time to do so: it allows me to ignore all the daily bullshit work.1 Perhaps there’s something to learn there! Of course, it being Thanksgiving week in the US helps: most people are also ignoring daily bullshit work.

//

Just two more weeks left in my work-year. How did this last year go? My work made a dramatic shift in strategy, focusing just on private cloud. This is probably good.

I didn’t speak at as many conferences as I usually do. I do a little bit more internal facing work, and I’ve done a lot more “on brand” work. This is sort of weird. I’ve run out of things to say at conferences.

Since platform engineering decided to murder DevOps and just start that whole thing over from scratch, the conversations has turned into the same old shit we’ve been talking about since at least 2015. I spent a lot of 2022 and 2023 saying as much. It gets really, really boring talking about “how to do software better” over and over after 10 years, especially when the industry decided to reboot it. It’s like watching a really shitty remake of a classic movie you grew up with. This means it’s difficult for me to come up with anything interesting and entertaining to say.

Nonetheless, I had a few new talks - arguably just twists and updates on the same old shit, but fun to do nonetheless. I have one new talk that’s been accepted for new year building on my ongoing hunt for coverage of private cloud usage. And if the KubeCon London 2025 people are into it, there’ll be a new panel.

Open Source $$$ Ethics, How Analysts use AI, Advanced Chicken Nugget Diplomacy, with Rachel Stephens

In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

If you listen to podcast, you should subscribe to this one.

Relative to your interests

• Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures - “The report found code generation is the leading use case for generative AI, with more than half of survey responses naming that as a dominant use. Support chatbots came next, at 31%, followed by enterprise search and retrieval, data extraction and transformation, and meeting summarization.” // Once enterprise people are comfortable with using public cloud AI (they are currently not, at scale) things will grow a lot. Then we’ll need a year to see if it’s actually useful (and worth, like, $20 a month per head more in the IT bill). I hope it works! I like the AI stuff.

• Platform Engineering Is The New DevOps - “Once hailed as the savior of organizational dysfunction, DevOps is causing friction in teams finding that operations is work they never really wanted to do. To get back to a happier balance, DevOps teams are finding that platform engineering helps them to split out operations from application development so that each function can return to focusing on what they do best.” // Way back when, Andrew Shafer would explain that the “you write it, you run it” thing only works if you have a highly automated platform. He still goes over that of course. His point there is one of the most often forgotten parts of all the cloud stuff over past years. Worse is when you have lots of platforms or set the layer of your platform too low, usually at the IaaS layer. You need a centralized PaaS. People are difficult in change, but technology is hard as well, especially if you have the wrong technology or haven’t changed it to match, help, and embody the new way you want to work (“culture”).

• New York Times & AWS dispel three mainframe migration myths - What’s most shocking is that the New York Times had a mainframe. But, I guess it’s old enough that of course they do.

• The Future Of B2B Buying Will Come Slowly … And Then All At Once - “Six months later, a little more than 18 months after ChatGPT launched, we polled B2B buyers for the first time about whether they are using generative AI. The genAI adoption numbers were shocking. The overwhelming majority, 89% of buyers in Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, reported that they were using genAI in at least one area of their purchasing process.”

• Best non-fiction of 2024 - List of books.

• Marketing from jdilla.xyz - “If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked. Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.”

• Managing managers is its own skill - “I remember when a new executive was brought in to Freddie Mac at a high level in the IT department. My colleague Mary pointed out to me that he did not bring anyone with him from his former position. She saw that as a bad sign, suggesting that he had not earned much respect from his managers at his former employer. She was proven right, and he soon was bounced out of his position at Freddie Mac.”

• THE RIGHT PEOPLE - Driving subscribers: “Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?”

• AWS named as a leader again in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - AWS, VMware, Azure, Oracle, and Nutanix are in the MQ leader’s quadrant for “hybrid cloud.”

Wastebook

• “Individual non-contributor.”

• I’m pretty sure that I had a dream last night that I could easily buy SPY in my US brokerage account. For some reason, living abroad, I can’t do that. Taxes? Small print for liability reasons? Who knows, who cares. The thing is, I could probably call the brokerage and find out what to do. I am somehow horrified of calling them - just the conversation, just calling someone. What an odd, paralyzing phobia. This applies to almost every other business/consumer relationship I have. How do I get over that? I see other people who are totally fine just calling whoever - sometimes they’re the person hoarding a plane and talking on their phone. What thought-technology are these people benefitting from that I’m not?

• I did the math tonight and I realized I’ve worked in computers for 29 years.

• Related: Kid, I’ve got dotfiles older than you.

• Why have the Dutch not come up with kruidennoten ice cream? It’d be like the Blue Bell buñuelos of the Netherlands.

• I bet this is a great panel from KubeCon. Packed with banks.

• Brevity is the soul of corporate comms confusion.

• “Please cease the vibing and chilling or we will swallow a battery.” ArcaneBullshit.

• “Bitter,” as in “they’re a very bitter person,” isn’t used much anymore. Now’s probably a time to put it back into the daily lexicon.

• “The industry keeps moving, even if I’m in all-day meetings.” Link-blogger powerhouse Seroter.

• “I’m sure we’d all agree that McDonald’s do not make the finest hamburgers on the planet. On the other hand, if you want a Big Mac, then a Big Mac is what you want — and no amount of boutique sliders fashioned from Kobe beef and hand-seasoned by elves is going to hit the spot.” From fellow Big Mac fan.

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The Software Defined Interviews podcast reboot is going real well, see above! Whitney is a natural at podcasting and she and I don’t overlap too much in, I don’t know, the conversations we want to have and takes. That makes for a whole new type of conversation than if it was just me or with my usual bunch. We have a lot of recordings this week which we’ll drip out every two weeks. You should subscribe to it and listen, of course. I don’t really “get” subscribing to YouTube as a podcast (I think you just subscribe to the channel?), but here’s the playlist of the video versions of our recordings.

//

As I mentioned, I’m working on an internal video. Five minutes for the annual sales kick-off going over what Tanzu is. Normally, I loath spending too much time on video content, well, any content, really. I suppose there’s hubris crossed with laziness: I think my “first takes” are good enough, and I believe in abundance over perfection.

That’s not how working on an internal video that represents your business unit works, though. I think I’m OK with the fine tuning, reworking, reshooting, and collaborative editing.

Most of it (being OK with it) I guess, is that the intention is to have it be in my gonzo style. Also, I’ve tried to think of the first few video recordings as draft to get people thinking and extract the content - what they want me to say - from the group.

Extracting that content is part of the process. It’s also, in the last few years, where I’ve found myself in marketing. I get involved in work that isn’t about translating the official marketing strategy, talking points, positioning, messaging - you know, the official point of view, “what to say” - into content. It’s about figuring all of that out, coming up with the stuff.

There’s usually so much rigor, discipline, and being on message with corporate marketing that he lack of “what to say” can seem bad, negligent even. But, I mean, that official marketing-talk has to be created somewhere.

The point being, if you work in marketing, you have to watch out for this switch. That applies to all sorts of work, actually. Sometimes you’re asked to follow he strategy, sometimes you’re asked to help come up with it.

(This is especially true when you’re working on corporate strategy. So often when I was doing that at Dell for software and cloud I waned to [and did!] ask “just tell me what you want, dear scatterbrained, changing what you ask for every meeting, executives!” but that wasn’t the job. It was to help them figure out what they wanted.)

I did a second interview with the GM of my division at work, Tanzu. The first one was about Prunima’s career in IT management and, now, cloud. This second one is all about private cloud. Here’s a video except:

Here’s a summary from our AI friend:

When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Purnima Padmanabhan, Tanzu GM, highlights that customers often require both private and public clouds, depending on their application needs. She outlines several reasons why people choose to maintain, even prefer private cloud:

1. Data Gravity - Applications running in private clouds often handle large volumes of data. Transferring this data to and fro other environments is challenging, and costly, especially when integrating advanced analytics or AI/ML capabilities. Keeping the data within the private cloud minimizes complexity and enhances performance.

2. Ecosystem Gravity - Applications frequently interact with other systems such as ERP, supply chain, ordering systems, and other applications and services. Hosting all these interconnected applications within the same private environment improves performance and reduces latency. It ensures seamless integration, as applications do not operate in isolation.

3. Control Over Governance, Privacy, and Regulation - Private cloud infrastructures offer greater control over data management, helping organizations comply with governance policies, privacy standards, and regulatory requirements. Customers feel more secure managing sensitive data within their own infrastructure, where they can enforce strict controls.

4. Effectiveness and Familiarity of Private Cloud - Many organizations find that their applications run efficiently on existing private infrastructures. Instead of migrating to public clouds, they can enhance their private environments by implementing platforms that make it easier for developers to build and update applications. This approach provides the needed flexibility without the complexities of a public cloud migration, often leading to better outcomes.

There’s more in my full interview with her in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed.

Relative to your interests

• Customer-centric applications: Heroku simplifies deployments - "Heroku’s owned by Salesforce,” she noted. “Heroku’s philosophy is like, ‘Hey, you know what? The undifferentiated heavy lifting for a lot of people is building your platform. You should spend the time building your business, building your app.’ The integrations that we provide, we unlock a ton of capabilities for all the creators bringing business analysts like sales ops, marketing ops people together with developers to build the best workflows and automations”” // Here’s to the dream of hiding Kubernetes from app developers working this time! Not only working, but having the industry actually stick to it instead of tearing it down to the IaaS studs once some cool new IaaS layer comes along in ₅ years.

• Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.’

• Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF.”

• Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.

• Elon Musk hints at plan to sink DOGE’s teeth into legacy tech - List of old IT in the US government. // Escaping the legacy trap is hard.

• Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%.”

• Google Cloud growth - “Google Cloud now accounts for 12% of Alphabet’s overall revenue. That’s nearly double the amount from 4 years ago.”

• The Influence of Bell Labs

• What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - "Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”

• IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!

Wastebook

• Ignorant urgency.

• Some simple premature optimization.

• “Give developers and engineers the terrifying responsibility of being in charge of their own spending. Let them enjoy both the upsides and downsides of being adults.” Justin.

• “AI as an accountability sink.” Fresh in from Iceland.

• “Calling in rich.” Brandon.

• “DevOps Activist.”

• People don’t like it when you raise prices. Often, they’ll like it less if you disappear.

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I’ve been working on a video for our annual sales kickoff (SKO). Doing SKO work is always weird. People have so many theories about how to communicate with sales people. Also, as with a lot of internal comms, you can end up with so many fingers on the film that end-up with a Homer Car.

Brandon’s number one theory is that you need to tell them how to make money. I believe this is the most important thing. You could do just the and be done.

There’s a common belief that you have to be brief and high-level, keep in mind simple.

Another one is that you need to speak to the benefit and outcomes of the product you’re highlighting - which is another way of going over he problems solved.

My theory is that you also need to tell sales people who to find in an organization, what their problems are, and how your product can solve their problem. If you do person-to-person sales (not just through the web, PLG, demand gen - whatever), you also need to give them some conversations to have.

We’ll see!

Outro: It’s Tuesday, all day today. I recommend this 39 minute 45 second track. And if you don’t have time for that, here’s what you want.

Use the last paragraph for something fun

Watching the video is more fun, but here’s he transcript you can’t be bothered:

The way you learn to write a conclusion to an essay or a paper or whatever kind of text you're writing in school: just totally forget that.

What you want to do when you write a conclusion is not summarize what you've done, return to your argument, and say how you've proven it out or whatever. You do that before the conclusion.

What you want to do in a conclusion is introduce a new idea, a new insight. I think of this as a treat that you're adding at the end. You don't have to discuss it that much. You don't have to prove it out. You're just throwing something out there that kind of intuitively connects and makes sense, or that you're just gonna say and possit.

For example, let's say you just wrote some text arguing that the croissant is the superior pastry. What you might do is spell that out, reach the conclusion, summarize why it's done, state that therefore the croissant is the best.

But in your conclusion paragraph, you can say, Oh, and one last thing, if you're really in a hard spot and you don't have tacos available, you can also slice up a croissant, smash it on a griddle and make a makeshift quesadilla out of it.

This creates a memorable thing at the end, something that's fun, instead of just being kind of like an obligatory summing up of stuff. It makes your essay more memorable and also more enjoyable to write.

So next time you're writing some chunk of text, do your conclusion in the middle of the essay, kind of summarizing things, and add an interesting note, a little dessert item, a snack at the end.

Stay in the sandbox - Software Defined Talk #493

This week’s episode: “we cover OpenCost’s big incubation milestone, CNCF's graduation rules, and a flurry of tech acquisitions. Plus, some thoughts on teaching kids about passwords.”

You can listen to it, or watch the unedited video version if you prefer.

Relative to your interests

• Moving off an AS/400 will take a couple years, discussion in reddit.

• Twelve Factor project has been open-sourced by Salesforce - “Heroku is replatforming on Kubernetes.”

• DevOps, LLMs, and the Software Development Singularity

• 3 Hour Layover in Schiphol - My tips on what to do during a 3 hour layover at Schiphol.

• Cooking eggs with an espresso machine - This looks like the creamy texture of hotel eggs, except with fresh eggs instead of powder. Also, finally a use for that wand thing on my coffee machine.

• US presidential election impact: Region by region, from S&P Global - As it says for regions in the world.

• Want ad in Twitter - This the most concise, accurate job ad for a VP of Marketing in tech.

• Sovereign cloud provides CIOs with solutions to data management challenges

• Spring Boot and Temporal - “46% of enterprise workloads use Spring…. That is 46% of the workloads. That means that nearly half the time when you are using your banking, insurance, medical records, telco and utilities apps, Spring is in play. Streaming? Yeah, Netflix is all in on Spring. ECommerce? Amazon heavily uses Spring” (based on JetBrains 2023 and Stackoverflow 2024 surveys).

• VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

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I haven’t actually had that croissant taco, I just made it up as I was walking. Maybe I’ll try this weekend and report back.

Comparing two years of Twitter engagement to a month of Bluesky engagement

Like everyone else, I consider giving up on Twitter daily, especially with the US election bullshit. I don’t really read much on there anymore (I’ve tried all the tricks, even subscribing some months ago), but I still post things hoping to get the eyeballs. Since Twitter shut down is APIs (or made them expensive, or whatever), it’s harder to automate posting. I use the free tier of buffer, which is fine, but I’d rather just use Croissant.

Is that even worth it to even post to Twitter anymore?

Here’s the overall views and engagement on my Twitter account for the past year:

And, then top Tweets in the last ~3months (the max I could select):

That top video got 359 views, the next one 271. These are horrible numbers. A few years back when I went short-form video crazy, I’d get thousands of views of most videos in Twitter (LinkedIn is was and remains really good too).

The main thing I care about now-a-days is my newsletter. Does Twitter drive views and subscriptions for my newsletter?

Here’s the past year:

Over all time (December 12st 2022 to November 15th, 2024), Twitter drove 3,786 views and 53 newsletter subscriptions. That means most of my traffic from Twitter was in the past, and no much has happened relative to that in the pas year.

In comparison, LinkedIn has driven 3,179 over the past two years and 76 subscriptions in the same period.

In the past two years, Bluesky is at 18 views and 12 subscriptions. Let’s look at the post-Hightower Shift Bluesky period though. Between October 19th, 2024 and November 15th, 2024 (today) Bluesky generated 10 views and 9 subscriptions. In comparison, for that same period, Twitter drove 79 views and 0 subscriptions.

Views are nice, but subscriptions are the number one goal.

I have something like 11,000 followers in Twitter (I started in 2006 and have had several high profile jobs since then). I’m nearing 900 in Bluesky post-Hightower Shift. If I’m doing the math right, I have a “do followers click on my links?” percentage of 0.7% in Twitter and 9% in Bluesky.

Anyhow. I haven’t made a spreadsheet, but when I look at these numbers it makes me think that when I comes to shameless self-promotion, Twitter is now garbage and not worth the time to even automate cross-posting.

So, yeah: ENGAGE WITH MY BRAND, MOFOS! Oh, and subscribe to what you’re reading right now, my newsletter!

Subscribe now

Sidenote: I’ve been watching the view counts on YouTube for my fellow infrastructure software, cloud, etc. B2B people. They’re generally horrible! After speaking with a few of them who suddenly shifted to good results, I found out the trick: buy ads, buy traffic. This works incredibly well in LinkedIn too.1

Now, if you’re doing sponsored YouTube video in this space (like a lot of people!) who get paid by vendors and others to post interviews with company people and customers on YouTube, it’s clear that you should take some of that payment to buy views. This means less profit for you, sure, but once you start getting 1,000+ views on your videos about, you know, service meshe, obscure networking protocols, RBAC for Kubernees, or whatever other boring-ass enterprise shit you’re hoping will compete with how to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine…

…wait, where was I? …oh, right…

If you’re getting sponsorship for videos, pay for traffic, and once you get 1,000, 2,000, especially over 3,000 views, you’ll stand out so much from your competitors, and likely your client’s own YouTube video views that you can do more videos, raise prices, etc. There’s probably a spreadsheet you can make. This applies to the tech companies doing this and creatives hustling themselves (if they have the cash).

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I have an episode for later today as well, hopefully.

Making Money with Open Source - Software Defined Interviews

We talked about a lot more than making money with open source in this interview with RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens, but the part was pretty good:

In this episode, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

You can listen on the episode show notes page, watch the original video (above), or, best, subscribe to the podcast to check it out. Doing these podcasts with Whitney has been great, we’ve go four of five more lined up, so there’s plenty more coming.

Wastebook

• Wilford Brimley oatmeal marketing: whatever happened to just buying computers?

• The problem is often lack of focus. What the executive has to do is give permission to cut all the other stuff out, and do the structural work for that: shutting down projects, closing divisions, even getting rid of people. In tech, this often means limiting chasing shinny objects, shutting down “moonshots.” Anti-innovation as it may be, these executives only focus on things that make money and immediately, intuitively benefit the customer. You have a strategy to run the business better, maybe even make more money. You don’t have a strategy to come up with a new product, create a new market. Which is fine: you’ll probably fail at that, like most everyone else. Your goal is to survive and thrive, not risk it all for glory and selling your shares at the IPO.

• “The Drooling Diplomat,” Dungeon Magazine, #63.

• “Reading is a form of necromancy.” Here.

• Even “Bitcoin Jesus” can’t escape the IRS.

• “I really don’t want cynicism to become my compass.” Noah.

• “Bull power for money stream.” Both at GoTech World.

• “We are all smart with browsers made by others.” Talk title at GoTech World.

• If you give people the chance to edit, they often will. If you just publish it, they will often say it’s good. -“Musk-a-Lago.” Recent reports.

Relative to your interests

• Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.

• Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware.”

• Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.

• Da Art of (Business) Storytellin’ - “Storytelling is not only important for advertising but for internal team alignment. We hear stories about Airbnb’s movie-quality storyboards around its office or Amazon’s Press Release Method. The key takeaway is that the company must align marketing and product. Slogans and one-liners must be brainstormed at the same time patents are being drawn. If the product team builds first, then asks marketing to find the story, it’s a recipe for disaster. It will lead to the customer expecting X but actually receiving Y.”

• “Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” // And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

The T key on my laptop is sticking. How does one fix that kind of thing? (Notice how many T’s were in the sentence? I sure did!)

Not much to say, really. Weird afternoon. On such occasions, this is one of the many comfort clips that makes me smile.

Private PaaS

Along with our summary of Explore EU last week, around the start of this I go over my thinking about private PaaS, VMware, and Tanzu. At least that’s what I remember doing.

Wastebook

• “THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING” Systemantics. The Systems Bible, John Gall.

• And: “we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept that letter.”

• “I kept the option for tiling when holding down the Option (⌥) key because I’m a tolerant person at heart.” Good settings.

• “[H]e’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.” John Naughton.

• One dev’s “abstract away” is always one ops person’s problem.

Relative to your interests

• Broadcom’s VMware strategy is winning despite market friction - The case for the Broadcom acquisition being good, especially for all-in, large companies that want a private cloud stack. Plenty of financial and survey data to move it beyond anecdata.

• Who owns Kubernetes in VMware now? Or, Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery - “What happened to TKG? One of the lessons I took from the week was that there is still confusion over the Kubernetes runtime we sell and where it sits in the VMware by Broadcom portfolio. Earlier this year, we moved what was known as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service from Tanzu and included it as part of VCF where it is renamed to VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service. This move was very intentional as the Kubernetes runtime itself is just part of any modern cloud IaaS, and this being deeply embedded into the VCF stack means that more VCF customers will be ready to adopt advanced services offered by Tanzu sooner, without struggling with integration. Many existing Tanzu customers use other versions of the Kubernetes runtime (namely, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud) to meet specific requirements. Tanzu will continue to support these versions, but in the end, Tanzu Platform is designed to run on any CNCF conformant Kubernetes runtime.”

• Alaskan telecoms company GCI uses VMware private cloud to boost business value

• “‘This means a shift away from just standard checking and savings accounts to more personalized self-service banking experiences and support,’ he said. ‘The bank felt tied down by the complexity of its legacy technology environment.’ Following extensive analysis, ABN AMRO decided to build a private cloud platform based on VCF and move away from their previous managed service.'” VCF at a Netherlands bank.

• IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.

• On-premises private cloud usage grew fastest in 2022 - January, 2023: “⁠⁠last year’s six-percentage-point uptick in on-premises private cloud usage outpaced growth in SaaS (up three points) and public cloud (up four points); hosted private cloud adoption was flat⁠⁠.”

• Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too. Also, maybe an edge computing/private AI use case - or you just switch over the humans when the Internet connection goes down.

• Ai, Big Tech, & Markets - “AI is the newest king of the economy and will end up making the rules.” // Plus, huge rise in tech company valuations since the US election.

• Modernizing the Mainframe in Place: Transforming Core Technologies - Improve the mainframe app. // Likely some good patterns for talking/thinking about modernizing any type existing apps “in place.”

• From Agile to Radical: conflict - How management can deal with “at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.” // A little bit on European work-culture too.

• The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment - Return of the leftwing counterculture, and what it could mean for software.

• Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).

• SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12) - “There’s just one solitary naked boob on the screen — and metaphorically speaking, all life has been sucked out of it. This is Dawn of the Dead, the classic 1978 horror movie that we’re talking about.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

I don’t have any conferences schedule for the test of the year. Early next year, I’m hoping to go to CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent, which I always enjoy despite the cafeteria lunch (it’s become almost charming at this point. There’s also SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

I’m in Bucharest for a day to give a talk at the GoTech World conference. They selected my legacy trap talk as the first talk in the DevOps track. The legacy trap talk doesn’t really fit there, but I've added some commentary on “ops legacy”: the old thinking and mindset of operations people. It’s, you know, my usual stuff on CI/CD, putting platform as a product in place, etc. I have a rehearsal recording that’s pretty good.

When you present this stuff, it feels like cheating because you’re repeating yourself. When I speak, I feel like each time I should be doing new material. But, most people watching it, especially in the room, likely won’t have seen the talk, so it will be new to them. Besides, all the “how to optimize apps and ops” stuff needs to be repeated over and over - per the above: THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING.

(Sidenote: you know, I often bemoan here that I don’t produce enough content. At the moment, I have a stack of about three, maybe even four, drafts of things that either just need a final edit pass [like the rehearsal video] or for someone to finally click the publish button. Doing alright there, I guess.)

Finally, I offer you the chance to contemplate contemporary men’s waistlines by looking at past waistlines:

Wastebook

• “I’m still in my pajamas — haven’t changed since Tuesday night. I’m also drinking a fair amount…” ProfG.

• “My conspiracy theory has a much higher budget.” Lordess.

• “To create this post, I used a cascade of AIs.” Tomasz Tunguz.

• “improvident” is an adjective meaning lacking foresight or failing to plan ahead, often resulting in wasteful or reckless behavior without considering future consequences. Culturally, the term is often used to critique individuals or societies that prioritize immediate gratification over long-term well-being. In literature and folklore, improvident characters frequently serve as cautionary examples, highlighting the importance of prudence and planning in various cultural contexts. From the 🤖.

• “He’s a serial boat-burner.” On Elon Mush, Sharp Tech, Nov 7th, 2024.

Relative to your interests

• Gartner Raises IT Spending Forecast For 2024 Again - “Gartner thinks that spending on servers, storage, and networking for the datacenters of the world will rise by 34.7 percent in 2024 to just a hair over $318 billion. We have not seen this kind of growth since the recovery after the crash in IT spending during the Great Recession, and this time around it is different because there is no crash ahead of such growth. Rather, this is a transformation in IT systems that is probably more impactful than the Dot Com boom.” // This is almost unbelievable. Where do you suddenly find ₃₅% more money? // Well, it’s probably just the public cloud companies: “The typical enterprise is definitely not spending anywhere near as much as the hyperscalers and cloud builders do on IT hardware and software. Enterprises spend more on services, relatively speaking compared to revenue size, because they do not have vast pools of IT talent like the hyperscalers and cloud builders do.” // Also, see the Gartner press release.

• Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities - Some useful MacOS command line utils - not the usual Linux ones.

• “Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture” - “There’s always a current thing.”

• It’s the parasocials, stupid - On the podcast election theory, that bring: (1) podcasts and videos are a big channel now, (2) the format is to hangout and “be genuine,” (3) for many voters, being a jackass is OK, even preferred, (4) if can be a jackass for three hours, you can go for the jackass vote. // Need to contemplate the difference and overlap between “being genuine” and “being a jackass.”

Conferences

GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about “focus” recently. I don’t focus on things. In work life, this means I say yes to everything and end up doing…a lot? Doing a lot of things can leave you feeling like you’ve done little of import. Being busy, but not consequential.

For example, I know that enterprise AI is the most important thing I could be working on, probably 80%, even 90% of my time. But, there are so many other things that come and go. I know that I should focus most of my “free time” attention on learning Dutch. The pay off for both would be huge.

But my mind doesn't think in long-term payoffs, and I definitely don’t go to the extreme of the irrational rationalist: if you have a chance of a 5x payoff, you should do it. Like most of humanity, I find it almost impossible to sacrifice the present (often, just being bored) for future gains.

Related, when your job makes focusing a bad strategic move:

“I feel like we’re just reactive,” marketing people have said to me over the years. This means they just do marketing (planning, managing, strategy, content) based on the most urgent need at the moment. There is little long-term thinking.

If you live in a reactive state, it means your long-term thinking is also dangerous: what you planned to do two months ago in your campaign strategy may not longer be relative. You were planning on having thought-leader content about the intellectual metrics of fidget spinners, but now your company sells toy-slime. This is a bad cycle, and marketing gets blamed for the misalignment.

This spiral is usually driven by a corporate agenda that is also near-term focused, ever shifting to meet the needs of the last meeting. A lack of focus cascades from the top, but as with most problems in a corporate system, we all share in the responsibility, just some more than others.

//

Ironically, this morning I thought: what if I just publish what I have every morning before 7:30am? That’s the time when we start getting the kids ready for and off to school. And: here we are!

Improvised Corporate Asshole

I've been listening to the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. Somewhere I read that it's on Palantir's new employee reading list, which made me interested. The section on status is both weird and intriguing. It's very prescriptive - there's no "it depends." People love this book: it has 4.3 stars on Goodreads. That enthusiasm and its place on at least one corporate reading list makes the book's chapter on "status" weird and troubling.

I haven't delved into the other chapters yet—I skipped the biographical first chapter. Perhaps things go different in those sections. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it sounds like the whole "yes, and..." concept is covered extensibly, maybe even comes from this book.

Mastering People

In the status chapter, the basic idea is that any two humans are constantly establishing their relative status and then either battling over that status, or acting according to the pecking order: who's the master, who's the servant?

"Status" in this context is about who gets to command whom and who fears whom.

The high-status person commands others and is feared by low-status people. One acting exercise involves high-status characters eliminating an endless stream of subordinates for minor, even unknown offenses. The high-status person is essentially a bully.

The low-status person does whatever the higher-status individual wants and often fears them. This dynamic results in all sorts of comedy based on absurd situations. A low-status person attempts a robbery at a store but, after interacting with a high-status clerk, ends up taking only a few cents from the till. A low-status person is used as a chair, treated as furniture—an object.

That's the lesson of the status chapter: always know who has the power and who has to obey.  Are you resting on a chair, or are you the chair?

Once you establish those dynamics, you can create comedy by introducing unexpected twists and turns into that mechanic.

Also, the act of people battling for status can be entertaining once you remove the cushion of civility. There are many sections in the book where people throw crude insults back and forth at each other. Since the book is from the 1970s, these insults are more amusing for their quaintness than their shock value.

So, sure: comedy is often about uncomfortable or messed-up things. If it weren't, it'd all just be dad jokes, puns, and complaints about airplane food.

Off Stage

When reading this book, I suspect tech people are less interested in actually doing theater—let alone improv—and are more interested in understanding and engineering social situations. You can read this book not as a manual for the stage, but for how to act off-stage, in real life.

This is especially true if you're a technical person who's not familiar with the nuances of human interactions, and part of your job involves interacting with people all week. That is, on-site consultants working on difficult tech projects. What makes these projects difficult is that the people in the organization can't do them, often because of political battles and turf wars, because of status.

Here's a former Palentir person writing up why Impro is useful in this situation:

Being a successful FDE [on-site consultant] required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Impro is popular with nerds partly because it breaks down social behavior mechanistically. The vocabulary of the company was saturated with Impro-isms – ‘casting’ is an example. Johnstone discusses how the same actor can play ‘high status’ or ‘low status’ just by changing parts of their physical behavior – for example, keeping your head still while talking is high status, whereas moving your head side to side a lot is low status. Standing tall with your hands showing is high status, slouching with your hands in your pocket is low status. And so on. If you didn’t know all this, you were unlikely to succeed in a customer environment. Which meant you were unlikely to integrate customer data or get people to use your software. Which meant failure. A project to unify data silos to finally break down barriers is often seen as a project to take status away from each of those silos. The DBAs don't want to give you free, unrestricted access to the regional supply chain data because then, why are they getting paid so much? What status do they have if you never have to ask them for anything?

Management consulting is, potentially, an even darker version. Management consultants are brought in to fix an organization. The expectation is that they'll tell management exactly what to do to increase their share price—or whatever metric matters. Two common recommendations are to reorganize and/or to fire people. In most cases, then, management consultants are a threat to employees.

In both the on-site tech consultant and management consultant cases, they rely on the existing employees to do their job. The tech consultant needs access to the databases. The management consultant needs to know "how things are actually done around here" and what's not working well.

Both of these consultants have power in their relationship with the employees. They were sent by the bosses to fix things. After the consultant leave, they will still have a job, and likely a high-paying one. But if the consultants act like they have the power, most employees will not be helpful.

In those situations, you need to know how to work with people—not only in a genuine, truth-seeking way but sometimes by navigating complex social dynamics. You need to some social engineering.

If you didn't know how to talk with and work with people, you'd find an interesting framework in the status section of Impro. It'd be based on manipulation and undermining. You'd learn a framework for manipulating human interactions. You might play the subservient person to get the client overconfident and cooperative. Or, when you know you have power in a situation—you would have tools to assert it.

Just knowing that there is a social game you can play is a tremendous tool to discover, especially when you're a young, inexperienced tech person.

This is where the troubling part of the book comes in. It has no moral judgments about this constant power-playing. In fact, it seems to celebrate the "I'm sorry you can't take a joke" worldview. "Oh, I wasn't actually saying you were a boot-licking subordinate who should be disregarded—it's just improv! Hahaha!"

"I'm sorry you can't take a joke." Indeed. If you want to play the status game, the only response to that is always, "I can, but that wasn't one." 

Have you ever worked for this boss?

Off stage, the behavior and world-view in the book is definitely not a joke. If you read it and think "ah, this is something I can apply in real life!" you're going down a shitty path. For example, here's a list of rules of status quoted in a review:

'Ten golden rules' for people who are Number Ones. He says, 'They apply to all leaders, from baboons to modern presidents and prime ministers.' They are:

1. You must clearly display the trappings, postures and gestures of dominance.

2. In moments of active rivalry you must threaten your subordinates aggressively.

3. In moments of physical challenge you (or your delegates) must be able forcibly to overpower your subordinates.

4. If a challenge involves brain rather than brawn you must be able to outwit your subordinates.

5. You must suppress squabbles that break out between your subordinates.

6. You must reward your immediate subordinates by permitting them to enjoy the benefits of high ranks.

7. You must protect the weaker members of the group from undue persecution.1

8. You must make decisions concerning the social activities of your group.

9. You must reassure your extreme subordinates from time to time.

10. You must take the initiative in repelling threats or attacks arising from outside your group.

This is a manual for caustic corporate life and the types of terrible management structures we've been trying to fix for the past few decades. Just imagine how someone who was reading this to use in real life would be as a co-worker, a boss, or worse a "rival" in another group.

If you see someone reading this book, ask them, "Are you an actor?" And if they say no, be cautious. You'll next need to ask them, "Are you reading this book so that you know how people work and to work with people, or so that you know how to avoid being an asshole?"

The theater part of the book is telling you how use status games to construct interesting and fun theatrical systems. Art and simple and just stupid-as-good entertainment would be terrible tension, misery, bullies, evil, and ass-hattery. It'd be like reading greeting cards as your only source of entertainment.

Corporate life is not art, or even popcorn-entertainment. If you read this chapter on status as how to use status games at work to get things done, you're contributing to a shitty corporate culture. Things like those ten golden rules should be read as the complete opposite: if you're running your organization like this, you're an asshole that's making life worse for all of us. Would anyone want to work with a person like that, or for them?

In other words, the status section is a great manual for understanding and navigating the next four years where I'm sure a lot of people will be saying "oh, I'm sorry you can't take a joke."

Relative to your interests

• Top 5 Intelligent App Delivery Challenges and How Executives Can Solve Them - AI middleware.

• Gartner Says CIOs Need to Overcome Four Emerging Challenges to Deliver Value With AI - Make sure you cap AI spend in the next few years of messing around with enterprise AI. // Also, new tech burger-stack: “As CIO, your job is to design a tech sandwich that can handle the messiness of AI”

• Gartner Survey Reveals Only 48% of Digital Initiatives Are Successful - “On average, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed business outcome targets, according to Gartner, Inc.’s annual global survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and technology executives, and more than 1,100 executive leaders outside of IT (CxOs).”

• Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 8.7% in 2025 - “Europe has seen a remarkable 46% increase in server spending by technology providers in 2024. In 2025, technology companies will continue building out the infrastructure needed for training GenAI models today and inferencing them in the future.”

• VMware Explore - private cloud is the best way to manage AI and security concerns - “We are serious people. We’re here to help you run your business better. We’re not here to show and sell you bright, shiny objects.”

• Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 Barcelona: Day 2 Highlights - "53% of banking CIOs and technology leaders reported their firm was meeting expectations on GenAI initiatives. Only 6% exceeded expectations.

• The Birth and Continuing Evolution of Platform Engineering - The Humanitec really have it out for DevOps: “But a drawback of DevOps is that it cannot be scaled beyond about 50 developers before it begins tripping over itself and becomes difficult to manage. With that serious shortcoming, platform engineering and its strengths and flexibility was gaining more attention in the marketplace.”

Wastebook

• ”It is officially synergy-o-clock.” Here.

• “Everyone Everywhere Out To Lunch.” Taylor.

• “disappointed optimist.” Just in from Iceland.

• “Where to find a.m. drinking spots in the city.” Right on time.

• “Hand painted artsy font.” A font.

• “Changing lightbulbs in the rain.” Rodrick

• “Native in the platform.”

• Is it a real thing that it’s better to use short videos for internal training over text? You know, like in that Mr Beast memo?

Conferences

GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, but my work has a 20% off discount code you can use for registration: KCNA24VMWQR20.

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I’m back from Explore in Barcelona. I can especially tell, now, that it’s getting colder in Amsterdam.

//

Here is some advice about reading Americans that I gave a European friend this week. This friend was talking with an American about how their company should improve.

I met up with my European friend afterwards, and they said, “I couldn’t tell if they were taking me seriously.”

“Ah,” I said, “they were probably smiling and nodding their head as you talked, huh?”

“Exactly,” my friend said, “they seemed to be agreeing, but I couldn’t tell if they were listening to me and understanding.”

“Yes, well: they were American,” I said, “Worse: California tech American.”

“Yes!”

“Well,” I began, “here is the three step filter for seeing if an American is actually listening and maybe even agreeing with you:”

1. If they are smiling and nodding, this means absolutely nothing. And, in fact, it might mean they are totally not listening to you.

2. If they start asking you questions in return, this is encouraging, but still does not mean they are understanding or taking you seriously. “Oh, really? Why do you think Widget XYZ needs more tongs?” or “Ah, and what do you think we should do?” That last question is an especially bad indication: they’re probably just asking that to get you to talk more with the hopes that you’ll just get it out of your system with and walk away.

3. If the American start making statements, then they’re listening and may even be taking you seriously. The best is to have them repeat what you said back to you:“so what you’re saying is…” or “I hadn’t considered that, here’s what I think we should do…” or even “I don’t agree, and let me tell you why…”2

“Hmmm,” my friend said. (Which is almost the European version of an American smiling and nodding, but I know them well enough…)

“Oh, also,” I said, “have you ever heard of the American-corporate phrase ‘smile fucking’?”

“No, never” my friend said, “but, now, I know exactly what it means.”