I don’t like annual predictions. Thankfully, no one’s asked me to do a big post about them this year, but usually I’m asked to do something formal. I always end up just predicting the same thing - predictions turn a lot more into hopes and dreams. I do like flagging things to pay attention to, and especially in a sort of “will this finally happen, or will we start re-calibrating our expectations from the apex of inflated expectations.”1

I’ve got three things to watch in 2024, here’s the first one (predictable for many of you, dear readers, no doubt).

Does kuberbetes make application development and delivery better?

For years we've read that kuberbetes is powerful but complex. We've also heard that application developers are not actually supposed to use it directly, let alone build all the app platforms and tools they need to make kuberbetes easy to use.

So, who is kuberbetes for, and are those people getting value out of it versus just using a standard VMs or more exotic things like serverless?

Survey results have been sort of good, people get some benefits. If you look at estimates for how many apps run in containers to get a sense for how much kuberbetes usage there is, you see something like 15% to 20% globally. If kuberbetes is going to be universal, it needs to expand to 50%, maybe even 70% of workloads.

Is that what the community wants for it, or is kuberbetes meant to be further down in the stack than something that application developers ever touch?

I try to follow the original intention of the Kubernetes Krew, which is, developers were never really meant to be exposed to it:

Well, I don't know how many of you have built Kubernetes-based apps. But one of the key pieces of feedback that we get is that it's powerful. But it can be a little inscrutable for folks who haven't grown up with a distributed systems background. The initial experience, that 'wall of yaml,' as we like to say, when you configure your first application can be a little bit daunting. And, I'm sorry about that. We never really intended folks to interact directly with that subsystem. It's more or less developed a life of its own over time. Craig McLuckie, SpringOne 2021.

If that’s true, when it comes to application the developers, I think the most valuable thing the CNCF (as an aggregate of the kubernetes kommunity) can do is define the application architectures, patterns, and practices application developers and architects need to use to be successful with kubernetes. And, you know, that might be done enough, in which case it’s just the endless slog of developer relations and thought-leadership to teach everyone and keep it rolling and updated.2

I haven’t programmed in a long time, so my historic examples are old, but the one I always think of are all those J2EE patterns and books. There was an underlying, infrastructure layer for Java (trying to re-write the CORBA death-star to get a better distributed application model), but if an application developer just made up their own way to use that underlying infrastructure, it all tended towards unique variation. Once every application follows its own design and practices, you have to spend a lot of time learning how to manage each one, and you typically lose any organization-wide benefits you were hoping to achieve: hopefully I don’t need to make the case for standardization?

Similarly, if we don’t start getting application developers (and architects) to use standardized design and patterns for their apps that are running on Kubernetes, we’ll get a bunch of unique garbage, er, sorry, variation. I feel like this happened with OpenStack: the conversation never evolved a new branch from operations into application development.

Good luck to the kommunity in 2024!

Got Java Apps? Stay on-top of security patches, upgrades, and out of support apps

We have a new tool at Tanzu,3 the Spring Health Assessment. You can use it for one project for free by uploading your dependency info from maven. It’ll create a report for telling you the, well, health of your app (see report example below). At a larger scale, we’ll work with you to do this at enterprise scale, you know, across hundreds and thousands of apps.

There’s all the usual stuff of wanting to keep your Spring apps secure and updated, but also you can figure out when your older version of Spring (and other Java components, I think) are no longer supported by the community or otherwise.

I think there’s a lot of use for this tool ahead because (1) recent changes in JVM licensing costs, (2) Spring Framework components rolling out of community support, ands, if I remember and understand correctly, (3) there’s going to be more frequent releases of the JVM from now on. And, of course, there’s the never ending slog of modernizing applications.

There’s thousands and thousands - and even more thousands! - of Spring apps out there in the world and keeping on-top of all of them is a chore. Check out our tool to start automating all that.

For even more, my team-mate DaShaun has a demo and discussion of the Spring Health Assessment, fresh from the streams.

Anyhow, look, if you’re using Spring, you should check it out. And if you want to apply it at a larger scale, you should email me, ‘cause the team is interested in how it goes for you.

Relative to your interests

• Austin Tech Scene - Tracking events in Austin.

• Coding at Google – text/plain - File under “probably should read this.”

• The Best Return-to-Office Policies Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All - Good summary of the return to office thing. Basically, workers hate it and say it’s a waste of their time, but management is freaked out that workers are slacking off. “Oftentimes, it’s more of a preference for leaders in organizations. And when they don’t have visibility into employees’ work lives, those concerns certainly come about. And again, our research doesn’t suggest that there’s a fire burning and we’ve got to bring folks back into the office. But it certainly has been the way that many organizations have responded to some of these concerns about productivity and collaboration in some of those areas.” What you have here is a classic anti-pattern of work: the people who are not doing the work are determining how their work is done. There’s a principle from lean that says the people closest to the work should define how the work is done - they are experts in it, after all, and will spot ways to improve it day to day. That applies here as well. What management needs to do is establish the strategy, context, and principles, even metrics, that those employees follow (I don’t know, insert all that military, small teams Make Your Bed Everyday productivity cult stuff from the 2010’s), and then let the workers define how they work. This is about more than morale, it’s about productivity. Anyhow: like any worker, management needs something to do, and the easiest thing to do is to inspect workers. It’s at lost harder to build a system where workers are autonomous, but a lot better than just being in a bunch of meetings no one wants to be in and that everyone except the boss thinks - knows - is a waste of time for them. Speaking of metrics: I’ve yet to see any ongoing metric-driven model that tracks any of this in office; remote work stuff. That’d very something helpful! Even more damning, in that interview, you can see in the research that management has to come up with - invent - reasons to make being in the office worth it to employees. Applying that lean principle (the people who do the work define and optimize how the work is done): if the workers think that being in the office is the best way to do the work, they should go into the office. Otherwise, you have to budget for starting up hot-dog roasts every Thursday, or whatever, to make being in the office worth it.

• A Simple Hack to Help You Communicate More Effectively - “Break down your message into three parts: What? So what? Now what?” - I like to do these in reverse order to get people’s attention, but I’m also impatient.

• Silicon Valley runs on Futurity - Story (or “vibes”) drives a huge part of tech company valuation.

• Rebuilding Trust and Breaking Free From Trust Proxies and The Swirl - “1. People underestimate how powerful it can be to take responsibility for past behaviors. In many cases, that is all people wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that leaders could accept responsibility for being part of the swirl. 2. Don’t underestimate the ritualistic shedding of past wrongs. Many cultures use rituals to shed bad mojo. In this case, it could be a meeting to air the dirty laundry, put it in a box, and burn the box.”

• 100 tiny changes to transform your life: from the one-minute rule to pyjama yoga - “’By asking: “If it’s irrational, why do it?” I stop doing it’” - this is the problem, though: how do you get yourself to actually do the rational act of following the rational? Perhaps it’s something like: you have to trust that things will be better. If you still end up unsatisfied and struggling after doing the rational, what was the point? Instead you can live in the moment and have a better chance of some seconds of happiness and relief.

• Paying Netflix $0.53/h, etc. - This is a fun way to look at streaming service pricing.

• Tetragrammaton - Rick Rubin interviews Marc Andreessen - This is an example of where a 3+ hour podcast works well, and is better than a 30 minute one. Normally, you just get tiny context-free chunks of Marc Anderson, and he comes off as a rich guy sort of floating above human moral concerns and everyday life. He doesn’t exactly get grounded in this interview - he’s ardently techno-positive and defensive about hating the tech industry. But, you at least get to understand his thinking so much more than you would in a WSJ column, or even a standard 30 to 40 minute podcast interview.

• How bad are search results? Let’s compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT - Testing out search across search engine and AIs. Not good!

I have a backlog of more links to share. Rather than overwhelm you, dear reader, I shall take the risk of saving some for next time, more aged as they may become. Do you like a long list, or a shorter one?

Wastebook

• “‘Failures’ are usually just incremental steps.” Here.

• Related: I’m too busy being upset at myself fucking up yet again to care about you fucking up yet again.

• The Dutch like to use cake as a pie-filling.

• “[A] Minotaur’s labyrinth costs nothing to enter. What we need is string to find our way out again.” Here.

• “Yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible.” Here.

• “Fecosystem.” Here.

• “The problem is, everyone we know really only has stones.” RoTL #521.

• “Do you believe that? I’m not asking if you can argue it, I’m asking if you believe it.” Here.

• “Since having kids, deadlines are a mere illusion, shadows of their former selves.” Here.

• “Temporal illegibility.” Here.

• It was only dark when it was night.

• For me, the long winter vacation is about relaxing, “recharging.” But the real trick is figure out how to continue that chilled out mindset once back in the fray of life. I rarely can.

• “We’d be showing them a pipeline of pipelines…redacting things that we don’t want to expose.”

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I have a new theory for these little videos. The views on them are so uneven - that one above has over 1,000 views, while others have, like, 79. I think what you’re supposed to do is (1) only post one a week or so, and, (2) re-post the ones that get low-views, maybe even varying the videos a little? Seems like a lot of work, but not really if you have a good workflow and a tool like Descript.

Also, we should get lunch - hahahah…jokes.

(Also: Kenji is so inspirational as a video maker. His content, of course, is great, though it has nothing to do with my content [except the chip tasting and Nutella nonsense, sort of]. What’s inspiring is that, well, if you make videos, you can imagine his workflow. I’m sure each video takes a long time, but you can totally see how he’s optimized a one-man [I’m guessing] workflow from content planning, filming, editing, post-production and posting. You can tell he has a “stop planning and just get out the camera and start filming” attitude that you have to have for this kind of work. It’s also a good example of how much “pro-am” equipment [I think Go Pro’s and iPhones] make it possible for individuals to do good, important, etc. content. In all the nonsense about TikTok destroying the world, or whatever us old people worry about, it’s easy to overlook how this equipment, contemporary computers with video editing and rendering horse-power, mics [you can see him using a Rode Wireless Go here, one of the best], and video production have “democratized” video production. There may worrying about other types of content [text, music, etc.] being shittified by the Internet, but as a consumer, video is so much better than when there were just three channels, the PBS and the UHF channel. Also, I rewatched my goofy how to eat videos recently - I mean, first, they’re great! And, second, it’s adorable to see my kids grow up over the course of three years. Also, gravy is always a winner.)

American Christmas, part 3

• Kids out and about in their pajamas.

• “Help me remember that our full size mini-van is hidden behind this Suburban.”

• Adults out and about in their pajamas.

• “Here’s the check. No rush, though!”

• Massive, high capacity washing machines that would fit a calf.

• The cheap wine is still expensive.

• Free electricity in AirBnBs.

• 15 types of cauliflower frozen pizza.

• “Please be respectful of our neighbors and the residents living above us. Please keep noise down after dark.”

• Golf-cart security guard.

Also, see parts one and two.

Relative to your interests

• Get your work recognized: write a brag document - Making sure you prove your value at work.

• Tech stuff for Ten-yr-olds - by Camille Hartsell - As it says.

• Sulking is a fascinating form of indirect communication - “Given that sulking is a somewhat understandable strategy through which powerless people can get their needs met, it’s puzzling that we are so opposed to it.”

• The science of decision-making: why smart people do dumb things - Drivers of decision making, a simple framework.

• Make Yourself Immune to Secondhand Stress - “five positive psychology habits that help inoculate your brain against the negative mindsets of others: 1)writing a 2-minute email praising someone you know; 2) writing down three things for which you’re grateful; 3) journaling about a positive experience for two minutes; 4) doing cardio exercise for 30 minutes; or 5) meditating for just two minutes.”

• 2023 in Review: Reading and Writing Highlights - “I had a great year.” Seroter’s list of books, publications, etc.

• Kellblog Predictions for 2024 - “ABM is a lot of work. You shouldn’t bother trying it to win a $10K or even a $50K deal. But when you can do $100K to $500K+ deals and have a few strong references in a vertical to which your company has strategically committed, that is when you should do ABM.”

Wastebook

• The best is when you visit an old friend and your phone still has the WiFi password.

• "freelancers’ liedowns. Here.

• “I’ve eaten the burrito that tastes only of Wednesdays, all of your Wednesdays, all your loves that didn’t end because they didn’t begin, all your small midweek deaths.” Here.

• “It’s just bald men. They’re going to be dead soon anyway.”

• “This is a bad time to get mixed up in the uncanny, not that there’s ever a good time.” Here.

• “We told you about the Japanese bathroom story, right?”

• “Seasonal jute.”

• “I said I’m gonna die with my boots on.”

• “I retired two months ago, and I feel like a teenager!”

• The Haunting of Hill House is a story about siblings. It’s the part of the story that I’m most fascinated by. I hope my kids have that kind of ongoing relationship.

• Was it Arley who changed Nine Inch Nails “Terrible Lies” into “Terrible Fries,” or was that Weird Al?

• “Look, people know that coffee makes you poop.” bdg.

• “It’s me, Andrew Jackson!”

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We’re going back to Amsterdam today. A holiday trip is never long enough: always book the extra days, with maybe just a day or two buffer to get situated back for real life.

American Christmas, part 2

• Stores that are open on Sunday, and don’t close until 9pm.

• People saying “sorry” for no reason.

• Bagels.

• Top sheets.

• Ceiling fans.

• HVAC.

• Warmth from the sun.

• Massive amounts of water in toilets.

• Bottle caps that come all the way off.

• Colby jack.

• Cheddar.

• Ritz crackers.

• Crushed ice from your home refrigerator.

• Oceans of lotions: ten versions of every product (sometime more than ten).

• 45mph.

• Self-service checkout machines that insist in weighing every grocery.

• Using physical credit cards.

• “Everyone is so fuckin' happy.”

• Giant, fluffy cupcakes for breakfast. (Called “muffins” by the locals.)

• Limestone facade.

• A box of 12 croissants, each as big as Drax the Destroyer’s two fists side-by-side.

• Free toilets at gas stations.

• Free toilets at grocery stores.

• Free toilets at…everywhere.

More things in part one.

Relevant to your interests

• Not even God can save DXC! - “Stabilizing delivery on infrastructure doesn’t mean people will buy transformation. Just look at the similar price-to-sales ratio to Kyndryl, another firm struggling to sell transformational services tied to its commodity infrastructure business.”

• Artmaker Blog - Bruce Sterling starting up his Wired-style blogging again? I hope so! For example: “He deliberately keeps it as a swamp so that he won’t become mentally trapped in the habits of the bourgeoisie.”

• What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it - ‘“First of all, our licenses aren’t working anymore,” he said. “We’ve had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That’s RHEL.” RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM’s ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.’ And: ‘Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, “is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company’s systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn’t know about Open Source, they don’t know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them.”’

• Software AG webMethods: The Farewell Sale - “Yesterday, I was surprised to learn that IBM is acquiring webMethods from Software AG.”

  

Wastebook

• “It’s good, but it’s fruit cake.”

• ‘I normally avoid camou clothing – (“It’s our version of plaid” – Wm Gibson)’ Here.

• Frank Sinatra singing “Jingle Bells” is almost better than the theme song for Halloween, but only on Christmas Day.

• On the Internet, you should always favor self-publishing and owning the published material. Each item may make zero money, but you’ll accrue the value and build the channel over years. Also, it’s often much faster, and publishers fall prey to perfect being the enemy of done.

• “Essentially, where you could see the welds and joins before, you could now see the chop marks and bolts.” Here.

• “This reminds me of my colonoscopy.”

• "Probably, maybe. But, not on purpose

  

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Still in Texas, now with the kids at “Nana Camp,” that is, staying with my mother.

We throw around the term “waste” a lot in software. It’s been around since the 2000s, at least since the Poppendieck’s book Lean Software Development. DevOps really took it and ran with it, it was renamed “toil” in SRE, and now the concept is pretty solidly part of how we think of software. I talked with Steve Pereira on what “waste” means exactly. We talked about value stream maps as well, another concept that’s so common that we don’t define it much anymore. He also brought the concept of slack, which I haven’t thought of in a long time. Check out the discussion!

Logoff

There’s not much going on since it’s holiday times.

Only In American

• Still warm tortillas.

• Adults wearing joke t-shirts.

• Yoga pants.

• Free packets of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise.

• Ice with every drink.

• 75 mph.

• Stern TSA.

• Little plastic shopping bags.

• No GDPR pop-ups.

• 20% tips before checkout.

• Donuts.

• Right turn on red.

• Ice machine in fridge.

• Very big bowls.

• Eggs in the fridge

• California wine.

• Closed blinds.

• Toilet next to bathtub/shower combo.

• Formal dining room.

• Formal living room.

• The soothing hum of lawnmowers in the distance.

• Strawberries as big as oranges, oranges as big as grapefruits, grapefruits as big as infant’s heads.

• Cucumbers.

• Football.

• Door knobs.

• Exhausted from walking around the mall.

• Chili’s.

• F150.

Resistance to change

Here’s another article from Bryan in his 11 part series on hurdles to changing software culture in big organizations.

What makes his pieces extra great is that he’s not just some PowerPointing bozo like me: he actually did all this stuff in large organizations, last at Sky UK.

Read it!

My content

• On this week’s Software Defined Talk Brandon discussed my business bullshit dictionary project, going over longer thinking for each term. Listen in!

• And if total don’t want to devote an hour to business bullshit, here’s the quick videos on each phrase.

Relative to your interests

• Reflecting on 2023 and a Look into the Future for Tanzu Application Service - What Cloud Foundry has been up to this year.

• The Top 7 Marketing Metrics for a QBR or Board Meeting - Centered around tracking contribution to sales.

• Cisco buys itself a Christmas present: eBPF source Isovalent - Networking!

• What next for digital government and Government as a Platform? - UK government centralized IT.

• Implications of the failure of the Adobe-Figma deal. - It’s the trust busting era for tech!

• Developer burnout caused by flawed productivity metrics - This software isn’t late, you just messed up your estimates of when it was due.

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Gift buying! Gift wrapping!

The discussion below was fun: we starting talking about alignment ambiguity in Dungeons and Dragons, then went to the role of tech debt in large organizations, and threw in some “this meeting could have been an email” like thinking at the end. Check it out!

Wastebook

• I’m super busy right now. I’ve got a lot of stuff to not be doing.

• Alternate: I’ve got stuff to not be doing, I’m kind of busy right now.

• “To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Here.

• “‘extracting’ cost synergies”

• For me, showing up early means showing up just in time.

• “he started from the typical open source ethos only to go down the roller coaster of VC fun only to end up in yet another corporate hairball” Here.

• Things I don’t have to do: “eat breakfast food at breakfast” Here.

My Content

• I put a few more The Business Bullshit Dictionary entries up.

• Check out last week’s Software Defined Talk episode: “This week, we discuss the distribution of cloud revenue, explore who is investing in A.I., and take a look back at Mesosphere DC/OS. Plus, some thoughts on the peacefulness of flying.” We’ve got two more episodes this year.

Logoff

We’re all off to The Big Break of the year: the holidays of December and January. We’ll be back in Texas for a few weeks, seeing family and friends there, of course. But also endless Tex-Mex, BBQ, steak, and American food. It’s been a little over five years since we’ve lived in the Netherlands. Going back is always a little weirder each time with new things, new events and politics that I haven’t experienced first hand, people getting older, and so forth. But, really, not that weird. More delightful in that they’re new things to experience.

I really liked my co-worker Paul Kelly’s post on this topic, plus some anti-patterns. So I made the video above! You may recall him from a discussion with Cora and me a few months back as well. Even if you don’t deign to watch my silly shit above, you should check out his post.

Relative to your interests

• Is the Texas boom town of Austin losing its luster? - “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

• Drafting the ‘so what?’ of the digital quality model - Why better customer experience (through “digital”…you know: software) is better for government. Also, if to answer the question at the end, I don’t know if this fits UK lingo, semantics, and semiotics (that is it too martial and Starship Troopers and even some xenophobia), but in the US we’d sat “citizen.”

• Orange Showcases Its Innovation Credentials - It’s hard being a stupid network. // ‘In candid opening remarks, Mr Zerbib said that the mobile industry had been stuck in a “generational paradigm”. He explained that customers haven’t noticed a major change in moving from 4G to 5G and that marketing has overblown expectations by focusing too much on bandwidth and not enough on energy efficiency and reliability. Instead, he advocated a concept of “continuous innovation”, in which network and service improvements are rolled out constantly.’

Wastebook

• Hold on. Does “semiotics” just mean “dog whistle,” whether political or apolitical? That’d clear up that mysterious word.

• I prefer to hold-off on planning things until I’ve already done them.

• Holding a DocuSign to my head.

• “Hibernation chic” - Dress in layers at home during the dark winter, not “chunky” hoodies and stuff. // “Hibernation chic is about optimising the way you feel, not the way you look, but that doesn’t mean it has to be schlumpy. I see no logic in making this time of year any more depressing than it is already by dressing in your most ancient tracksuit bottoms and a jumper that has gone bobbly.”

• “Working in a half-assed, dotted-line capacity.”

• I am the walrus.

• Changing culture is free, tools cost money.

• I don’t code anymore, but I feel like a bottoms-up definition or “cloud native” is “distributed applications, but with containers,” where “containers” increasingly means “Kubernetes.” You can throw in some patterns like “make your APIs smaller” (microservices?) and sprinkle some 14 factors flavoring on it, but is it that much different? (Which is fine! Incrementally improving is how things get better.)

• “assholocene” Here. Originally: here.

• I don’t know. In enterprise IT, “culture” as a top problem needs to stop being a gaudy version of “resistance to change.” I think when people say “culture” is a problem they just mean that that OTHER group of gatekeepers won’t approve their change requests, tickets, and otherwise do what they want. That is: culture as a problem is a symptom of the underlying problem. I guess you could say “we need a culture of accepting change (so that we can start working in a new way)” instead of “a culture of staying the same,” but, I mean: yeah, that’s my point. When people say “culture” is a problem, what they mostly mean is that someone(s) other than you doesn’t want to work the way you do.

• “undocumented SQLite databases should not be the way that a multi-gazillion dollar corporation is storing valuable data.” Here.

• "My favorite thing someone says to one of my friends is, ‘Why isn’t she famous?’ I love when they say that because that means they think maybe I’m good enough to be famous. To me, famous looks like a lot of work."’ Toni Price.

• “One of my mentors often told me that if you’re not building it, selling it, or supporting it, you need to be constantly evaluating your employment exposure in a company.” On the job career management.

• “sacrificial trash” - “In October of last year, YouTube creator and fandom expert Sarah Z coined the term “sacrificial trash,” and it’s a great concept. If I can try and condense her almost hour-long video into one sentence: “Sacrificial trash” is a piece of media that tries to pander to young audiences with woke identity politics to cover up how mediocre it is, which, in turn, creates a chaotic feedback loop of online discourse. Sarah Z’s video uses the 2016 Ghostbusters film as a good example of this. It’s a pretty bad movie that got a lot of attention for its all-woman cast, which then kicked off a wave of wildly misogynistic backlash, which then led to a bunch liberals and progressives defending the movie, which made them look silly because the movie was, in fact, not good.”

• We’re all doing the best we can, some of us just shit at our job.

• “What time is it in California right now?”

Logoff

I’ve had a lot of fun making these Bullshit Dictionary videos. I’ve still got about five or six more I filmed but unedited. I’ll be posting them here, there, everywhere, and even on TikTok as they come out. In the meantime, I’m listing them all in their own playlist. LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE, mofos.

I've played solo D&D with ChatGPT for three months. It's not that great at the pure mechanics (for example, combat), but it has some great uses. This video is a little screwed up, but the audio is fine, and the content is even better...if I don't say so myself!

Relative to your interests

Coincidently for me, there’s been a few things on remote work versus return to office.

• Gartner Outlines Three Ways Organizations Can Successfully Motivate Employees Back Into the Office - Summary: prove that it’s more productive to be in the office than working online. I’m not sure it’s possible either way as there’s a plenty of competing evidence and polemics. It’s probably better to go down the subjective “that’s just how we do it here” route and let people and employers filter their culture and teams by that.

• ‘Return to Office’ declared dead - “Unless the goal of return to the office mandates is actually to drive workers to quit in order to avoid layoffs and severance pay – as has been alleged in some cases – it’s hard to see why corporate managers would reject remote work when that brings greater access to talent, reduced turnover, lower property cost obligations, and greater productivity.”

• Is an ‘employee experience winter’ coming? - "One reason, Gownder said, is that the labor market isn’t as tight anymore. “Oftentimes employers will invest in employee experience when there’s a lot of attrition or things are going poorly on the employee front and they can’t keep talent,” he said, as was the case during the Great Resignation. That’s not the case anymore. When companies “aren’t so desperate to keep people, often they take their foot off the accelerator” when it comes to talent. // Also, the start of a slow y/y drop in DEI programs and spend. // Management will soon be shocked - shocked! - with the results: “When you disinvest in employee experience, and you go back to cost cutting and treating people as merely resources rather than valued partners, your organization will see engagement go down, and therefore other things go down as well.”

• The Evolving Landscape of DevRel: Trends and Predictions for 2023 - “Hiring a DevRel team before the product-market fit is established or without a clear strategy can result in wasted resources.”

• Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Review: Better, Cooler, and More Useful Than Ever - “I want to use the new model indoors and out as well; it’s a good indication to me that this is a great product because I want to use it more frequently and in more places. In fact, these new glasses are so good that I regret ordering them as sunglasses.”

• The Fairytale Narrative: Structured strategic planning - Jason usually knows what he’s talking about.

Wastebook

• I’m pretty sure they named this show PJ Masks to fuck with parents. “Dad, I want to watch PJ Masks.” “OK…I just searched for PJ Max and it doesn’t show up.” “No, dad, PJ MASKS!” “Uh, OK let me try again…nope…no PJ MAX.”

• Every year someone writes the “we need to tie this function closer to actual revenue generation” think piece. Then come February, you’re like “wow, funnel attribution is hard.” March: “why don’t sales people update Salesforce more?” And then you mostly go back to what you were doing last October.

• Can’t talk now; too busy tryin' #BeTheSkyNotTheWeather.

• “Idiot Plot Syndrome is the necessity for a character to be an idiot for the plot to make sense. You know: all those people in thrillers being chased by unknown assailants who split up to be picked off one by one instead of sticking together, or who don’t answer the phone or read the text from the person with vital information, or the character in the horror novel blithely traipsing down the basement steps into the dark…” Nicola Griffith.

• “Such a thing is compelling not because it offers answers in the form of text, but because it makes it possible to play text–all the text, almost–like an instrument.” Here.

• “Cyber-something.” Here.

• “Current-thing-ism.” Ben Thompson on Sharp Tech, Nov 30th, 2023z

• Are regulations that drive enterprise to NOT use public cloud legit? When where they made (of years ago, probably not)? And what are the technical reasons they exist? I can understand sovereign stuff (wanting to keep the jurisdiction in your country where you know the laws - or another, where the laws [it’s always taxes and privacy, right?] are more favorable to your profits), but everything else law seems weird. Don’t we trust payment processing (credit cards) to be not on-premises…and email, collaboration?

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I’ve been in the mode this week of: “when the muse comes to call, you better do the work, cause she sure as shit has stopped accepting my invites.” That’s meant a lot of videos which are, you know, actually really fun to make when the muse makes her magic. I have five or six ready to edit and post, and about four that are out already. I think I’ll trickle those videos out here, I dunno.

Here’s a series I’m working on: The Business Bullshit Dictionary. I’ve got some ready to edit on: synergies, optimize, strategic options, executize. Thanks for people who’ve suggested topics already!

My posts have slowed down here, recently. If you want things more frequently, may suggest Mastodon, LinkedIn (hey, I know: but for me, after all these years [like 10, 15?] and the part of the world I work in, LinkedIn works for me), and YouTube? I lost things first in those places. Or, you can do what I'd probably do: just wait.

The Business Bullshit Dictionary

I’m recording a few tiny videos defining some business-world jargon. “Input,” “outcome oriented,” “politics,” and, here, “bureaucracy.” Once you’ve been in the corporate world for a few years, you stop noticing these words and a few years later, you stop taking them seriously, or at least, in a nuanced way. They’re just part of the noise of the cube-farm. But, if you pay attention to them, they’re often signals that are telling you either to beware or pointing to a problem that can be fixed. Or, they’re just silly, stupid slang people in the office use.

Check out the first one, I’ve got several more queued up for future newsletter episodes.

Modernize THOSE Apps

We're always going on about the right applications to pick when you start modernizing. It's usually a manual process with lots of sticky notes. Now, you can automate it a bit more with this open source tool from VMware Tanzu, the Application Portfolio Auditor. Check out Marc Zottner’s write-up for more!

Wastebook

• Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

• Do the Right Thing. Do What Works. Be Kind.

• “It’s been clear for quite some time that the early social media strategy of ‘jam a million people in a colosseum and let them fight it out with free speech’ isn’t panning out, but never has it been more clear than now” Jeff.

• “You’ve shown us how vulnerable we are to strings of text produced by a machine – willing to believe and put faith in them. Even though you still misspell your own name on your birthday cakes.” Here.

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I’m trying to come up with a few new talks for next year. So far, I have one on why people don’t want to change and how to address (fix?) that. You know, in the context of BUSINESS, BUSINESS, BUSINESS stuff, not, like, real life. Also one on platform marketing.

I have two issues when with coming up with new talks: (1) I don’t do anything technical, so I can’t, like, code and walk through some new programming thing of Kubewhatever. (2) I’m pretty bored with all the “culture” talks out there. I’ve been consuming that stuff for 20+ years (from the Rational Unified Process, to Agile/XP/Scrum, agile infrastructure/DevOps/SRE/platform engineering and their it’s all about the culture DORAnation, all the corporate re-org stuff from the 90s and my historic reading from the 1980’s, then we have the digital transformation stuff from the 2010’s or so. I know I’m complaining here, but I long for something new and interesting in this space. It feels weird just discussing the same things over and over.

I see a lot of what we’ve talked about for decades (see above) boiling down to just a handful of things:

1. Get clarity on what the goals, outcomes, “value delivered” is for your organization. You must understand that and guide your daily-work by it.

2. Understand the end-to-end process it takes to get “product” (usually software) out the door, simply know it and track it!.

3. Remove waste from the system, “toil” if you like. This is tightly linked with

4. Automation and “platforms” as we say now. You have to use tools to remove waste/toil.

5. Team autonomy and “let the person doing the work make the decisions.”

6. Don’t be an asshole, have a good culture.

We have many different tools and studies for all of this, some are vague and hand-wave-y, some driven by surveys, some mystical and awesome, and some clear and simple. I think the biggest shock for me is that people don’t already do all of this: like, is there anyone who doesn’t already know this and know that it’s the best way to work? What is the deal? What is motivating organizations to not operate like this, how did they get there, and why is it so hard for them to change?

Stories and case studies are still great to hear, so long as they talk about how people changes the organization, convinced people to change, created new corporate artifacts and process - all of that stuff.

There’s some interesting work swirling around in the past year’s worth of developer productivity tracking and metrics thinking and shit-posting. Perhaps a good talk would be something like “is developer happiness really the best way to increase EBITA?” It’d be fun to look at ALL THE GREAT PDFS and dig down into how they connect happiness (flow, autonomy - good culture) to success, and then track the business success of those organizations. Don’t worry, I believe all those studies that say that happy people do good work and that, thus, you should have a good culture. As I’m typing this, I think what I’m missing is the explanation of all the other stuff that you need to do well. In the tech world, there are many instances of companies with good cultures that fail. The goal wouldn’t be to dismiss all these developer productivity findings, but to try to steel person them more for all the finance and non-IT executives out there who’d be like “what an adorable, precious angel y’all are over there in nerd land!”

What’s your favorite “observed statistical regularity”?

• The “problem” with Goodhart’s Law is that we now know it exists. By “problem,” I mean using Goodhart’s Law when it comes to critiquing organizational metrics.

• If you know Goodhart’s Law (rather, the rewording of it as we’ll see below), when you’re making metrics, you change them and adapt them over time before they get gamed.

• When criticizing metrics (or anything, really) you should first assume that the people making them and using them are smart and trying their best…and know how to search the Internet. How could you help them make the metrics better, instead of shitting all over their attempts to do a good job?

• Related: people in zombie movies seem to have never seen a zombie movie. If you know Goodhart’s Law, and you see a weird metric stumbling around on the street, you know not to go ask that metric if it’s in trouble. It’s a zombie!

• And, as always, when you go and look at the original wording, the “law” isn’t really as all encompassing as we think, nor simple. The version we all use, according to Wikipedia comes from Marilyn Strathern in 1997: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Hey! That’s good!

• But, the actual one is: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” I sort of don’t even know what that means, and I have a degree in philosophy. I assume monetary economist who get all excited about, like, interest rates and inflation know. My sense is that what the original is not saying is: “in a corporation, if you set KPIs/MBOs/OKRs and use those metrics to decide what decisions to make in the business, you will fail and are an idiot.” But that seems to be how we in the DevOps-y world reference Goodhart’s law. Like, it’s more about macroeconomic engineering at the country and global level? I think we can all agree that that system is super weird.

• I mean, to apply one of my life principles (“good things are good, and bad things are bad”), I suggest a new “law” on metrics, in two parts: (1) shitty metrics are shitty (2) don’t use shitty metrics, use good ones.

• We all worship at the alter of the DORA metrics. Like…METRICS. We’ve established those as an “observed statistical regularity” (did I get that right? Again, I couldn’t tell you if QE2 is economics or a new deodorant for 12 year olds), so does that make the DORA metrics bad? If not, why not? And if not, then, like, good metrics are good…?

• My other suspicion is that a lot of anti-metrics talk is focusing on a symptom of a bigger problem: management at a company doesn’t really know what to do, what they’re doing, why they’re doing, how to engineer the rest of the organization doing it, and/or how to improve. They both lack clarity and are failing to make sure all the workers have clarity and, therefore, know what they should be doing.

• In this case, whatever metrics you use have a higher chance of being bad. And as we know, bad things are bad.

Relative to your interests

• Europe has entered a new age of anxiety – and it’s dragging Britain along too | Martin Kettle - “five overlapping big insecurities confront all Europeans. These are: the military threat from Russia; the stagnation and inequality of Europe’s economies; significant migration within and from outside Europe; the impact of climate crisis in remaking economic and social life; and the weakening of the nation state. Others could unquestionably be added to the list, not least the overmighty global power of the internet and of AI. And all of them connect.” // I’d make a slight edit: it’s a little early to tell if AI is going to tear apart society. Until it can play a Dungeons and Dragons DM perfectly, I think we’re pretty cool. And it’s pretty shit at that.

• FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification 1.0-preview Released to Demystify Cloud Billing Data - Trying to “establish a unified, serviceable framework for cloud billing data, increasing trust in the data and making it easier to understand the value of cloud spend.”

• The Five Biggest Challenges in Digital Transformation - This is a pretty great talk from Laureen Knudsen on actually changing how your organization does software. It focuses on value stream mapping thinking and tools, but I’d simplify it to this: understand how your organization works, what it wastes time on, realize that you (“management” have the power to fix it and, like, it’s your job, and, so, go fix it. At the very beginning, there’s a great point: the good news it, the will to change is under your control, it’s not some external thing you can’t do anything about.

• Cloud Native Users Struggle to Achieve Benefits, Report Says - Vendor commissioned survey, matches the anecdotes you hear: “Users are encountering issues around security, tool sprawl and cultural difficulties, including poor collaboration between developers, security and operations.” // At this point, I would chalk stuff up to (1) change is always hard, especially knowing and believing how much process change is needed to get the advantages of new tools (“culture,” as people like to poetically say), and, (2) expectations are always inflated: see the hype cycle. This is known.

• Use Markdown in Google Docs, Slides, & Drawings - I didn’t know that was in there, must be new. I hear you can export to markdown too!

• Amazon Q touted as the AI chat assistant for all things AWS - “A very small team of Amazon developers successfully upgraded 1,000 applications from Java 8 to Java 17 in just two days.” // Coworker: “Which team are you on,” sips coffee in the break room. You: “Oh, I’m on a very small team.”

• GPTs for teachers - Whole bunch of prompts that look good and don’t seem to be hustling some slimy “workshop.”

Wastebook

• There’s no half-wet blanket. The blanket is either wet, or it’s dry.

• ChatGPTsplaining. Someone needs to explain to ChatGPT that it’s OK to just say “ok” most of the time and not overly explain every God damned thing.

• “Read The Roomba” Here.

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I’ve become part of the “time goes by in the blink of an eye” crowd. Like, I can’t believe the year is almost over! I feel like it hasn’t even started yet.