Private PaaSAlong 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.

Detroit, 2015.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.

Improvised Corporate AssholeI'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 "

Code Neo (Pearl Sijmons), Joana Schneider, 2024.Relative to your interestsPriorities CIOs Must Address in 2025, Insights from the 2025 Gartner CIO Survey - “only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. This statistic highlights a significant challenge for organizations aiming to achieve their digital transformation goals.” // It could also highlight that the expectations were very unrealistic. I’d bet on that more than anything else. // Also, here’s some Gartner charts on the topic.

The Cloud EquilibriumAs you know, I enjoy the impossible chase to track down the elusive chart that shows how many workloads are running on private cloud1 versus public cloud. I last rounded up my findings in July, 2024. Of particular interest is the IDC CloudPulse report. I don’t have access to the most recent one, but you can see one of the older charts in an older blog post of mine.

Start with good content, get better contentI've seen enough generative AI used to help marketing now that my theory is: you should only use it if you're already good at making whatever "the content" or strategy is. The AI will help you make it better, or more broadly consumable. It will do a terrible job starting from a blank slate. You can coax it, try to get it to know your style, feed/RAG more context in, workshop and refine it…but at that point you’ve spent just as much time as it would taken to just type an email, call someone to plan/brainstorm, blog post, or hit record.

Whitney has a LinkedIn problemOur second episode of the Software Defined Interviews reboot is up: Whitney and Coté talk with Sidney Miller about tech recruitment. They talk a lot about the process from both sides: people hiring and people looking for jobs. Plus, some thoughts on working at Neiman Marcus. Find Sidney in LinkedIn. More details: They explore effective strategies for both the hirer and the job seeker. Key topics include the comprehensive role of tech recruiters, tactics for handling diverse skill sets, inclusion efforts, unbiased interview practices, and the significance of empathy and transparency.

Let’s start with some YAGV (yet another goofy video): Relative to your interestsSpring AI: An AI framework for Java developers - No python? No problem. The Great Data Integration Schlep - ‘Every company has something fucked-up and dumb going on somewhere, no matter how admirable they are in other respects, and if they’re facing an existential crisis there’s definitely something going badly wrong that somebody doesn’t want to face. If you ever want to get all your data in one place, you need to figure out some of the shape of the Badness, in an environment where most of the people you meet are presenting as “reasonable and highly competent professionals” and everybody’s got a different story about the Badness and why it’s unavoidable or someone else’s fault.

Most of the generative AI applications we'll see in the coming years will be just new features added to existing applications. Even more pragmatically, simply improving how existing applications work will drive a lot of the AI benefits. When it comes to applications, this means we should manage AI like we would any other service, both in process and how we run it. That's my prediction at least. I'm as enamored with AI as anyone else, trying out plenty of experiments and ravenously hungry for any real world case studies that are more complex that chatbots, sophisticated search, and (re)writing.

The recording of one of my talks has 8,400 views. That’s a lot more than other talk recordings. How does YouTube work, I sure don’t know! Confusing it more is that the same talk given at a different conference has 85 views. At least I wore a different shirt each time. Oh, and while I’m promoting myself, here’s my lighting talk (5 minutes) from DevOpsDays Antwerp pondering if DevOps is successful.