There’s a lot going at work now, employee wise. If you’re using a VMware email address to subscribe to this (there’s several handfuls of people who are), I’d suggest switching it over to a personal email address. BEST OF LUCK TO US ALL.

Meanwhile:

Wastebook

• “Never ask me how I paid” is my version of “never tell me the odds.”

• “Alfur, that was brilliant!” Alfur: “The important thing is: it worked!”

• “There’s a point here, and it’s this: waiting for permission doesn’t work. Sometimes you just have to sit down and do the thing before the idea turns to ashes inside you.” Here.

• “Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”?” Here. You can’t use a PowerPoint as strategy glue. Just rip it out and write it off.

• “Ate so many pies at a pie eating contest you can’t eat one specific pie ingredient ever again without vomiting.” EMO.

Relative to your interests

• The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2023 Infographic - File under: I should probably read this.

• There is no money in free software - There’s almost a taboo among open source minded people to say “there’s no money on open source.” But, you know, it’s mostly true. Sure, that phrase is a simplified version of “it’s very difficult to make a living with 100% open source products, let alone sustain reliable salaries of people working on it, blah, blah,” but all of that qualification still gets you the same result. // The answer is always the same, add in things that are not open source that you can well: (1) following the open core method and come up with a closed proprietary thing to see (either fully integrated builds that you support but do not give away freely, like Red Hat Linux), or closed source code that helps enterprises (usually it’s business users) run and manage the software better; (2) run a SaaS, again, a proprietary thing that your users/customers don’t have access to code wise, a unique thing that is available only to you and hard for users/customers to replication. On this second, the danger is that your competitors (mostly AWS) can do the same. The way you make money off open source to sell closed source code and/or a SaaS that runs your open source code.

• The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI - Nifty.

• Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - Yeah. The make your own GPT thing is weird and very unsatisfying. As a “developer,” what I really want to see is evidence that it’s doing something according to my instructions, using my info. Surely, there’s, like, a “developer log” they could show.

• Impact of digital screen media activity on functional brain organization in late childhood: Evidence from the ABCD study - I think it says: stop freaking out about screen time, it’s fine. This is the kind of thing that we’ll never know as a culture until all those kids are older - did society get destroyed, or does it just keep doing on? That is, when these kids are the new adults running the world, they’ll be like, “so, did using my phone all my life make me an idiot?” I mean, it’s probably fine: comics and TV did not rot The Kid’s brains (nor Dungeons and Dragons make everyone Satanists). I was one of those The Kids, and here I am, able to use substack and decode business gobbledygook for a good monthly wage. The elders who don’t use the same technologies as The Kids are always on about how The Kids use the technology too much and are becoming stupid because of it. Type-writers are killing cursive, AMIRIGHT?

Logoff

People ask me, they ask, “what do you do for Thanksgiving in Amsterdam?” We try, that’s what. It’s actually easy to get a turkey for Thanksgiving. We picked one up and were even told “happy Thanksgiving!” which is nice. Kim made the turkey this year and it was great! There was so much left over, and I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten most of it. Today I made broth (or stock…? …whatever) out of the left overs. Is turkey stock going to be good in things like couscous, soup, and such? Maybe chili. Who knows.

Here is the story of our turkey, from pick-up to sticking broth in the freezer:

I’m finally able to get back on the podcast tomorrow tonight after several weeks away. It’ll be nice to get back to that. We record around 10pm Amsterdam time/3pm Austin time: you can watch it streamed live, unedited in YouTube if you tune in around then.

Let’s get to it

Wastebook

• If it's bad to yuk someone's yum, I suppose it's equally rude to yum someone's yuk.

• When I see a title that reads “Towards a…” I often think “cool story. Call me back when you get there.”

• I’ve listened to much worse in my playlists for years, so, you know: two thumbs up…?

• “Every now and then, I think about the fact that Karl Lagerfeld owned over 300 iPods.” Here.

• “Make a plan for when things get weird.” Here.

• Prompt to use when summarizing things: What does the author think the right thing to do here is? Do they offer a vision of how things should be and/or how to get there?

• “Positive, but anxious.”

• “I am putting out poisoned chicken for the werewolf.” Here.

• Bullshiter’s Fatigue Syndrome.

• “you’re the ding-dong!”

• “one secret to longform superhero comics writing was that they were structured like soap operas, only with fight scenes instead of love scenes” Here.

• “pandemicpunk” Here.

• “a rapidly decelerating rate” - that is a cognitively weird of phrase in that. Maybe something like “much less,” or just “declining.”

• “It is universally acknowledged that human life is of paramount importance.” I think this is implied for most all written work. You can likely cut this part.

Where to stay in Paris

If I were staying in Paris, I would stay at Le Méridien Etoile. It is not in the center or Paris, but it is a good hotel. It has that late 90’s/early 2000’s feel, but unlike many hotels from that era, it has good upkeep. The staff at Le Méridien Etoile are always nice and welcoming.

The hotel is right next to a Metro stop that is 20 or so minutes from the Louvré and, thus, about a twenty minute walk from the best museum in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay.

There is a gourmet grocery store just across the street (in the basement of the mall) with an extensive wine selection and many ready-to-eat good meals and snacks. And just a block to the east is Le Ralais de Venise, it is “tourist-y,” but so what? It’s a great place to get French steak and frites. I have stayed at Le Méridien Etoile many times, and it has always been nice.

Relative to your interests

• Services firms are out of runway. They must forget Labor Arbitrage and conform to Technology Arbitrage - “2023 has seen a nosedive in growth from most of the major service providers”

• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2023 London: Day 1 Highlights - “By 2028, modernization efforts will culminate in 70% of workloads running in a cloud environment, up from 25% in 2023.” - so something like 40% of all workloads will move from one type infrastructure to another on four years? Hopefully there’s some qualifying context for what those workloads are, because that is a lot of workloads. If it took this long (since, I don’t know, 2009?) to move 25%, that curve sure does turn steep quick all the sudden. // There’s more fun numbers too.

• Hild—A Historical Note - “I really want to change the outdated view of the past and put people who have been excised from history–women, crips, queer, people of colour, poor people–back where we belong. I want to recast the past, because that will influence the present and make possible the future. I want–like Hild–to change the world for the better.”

• The Problems with Money In (Open Source) Software, Aneel Lakhani, Monktoberfest 2023 - I liked this talk because it said all the VC things we think in a nice, honest way from a technologist’s perceptive. Also, great “conclusion”

• Commodities, generics, and software - “Strangely, many software categories have commoditized, but, given that nearly everything is a service these days, operational costs have remained universally high. This makes it hard for lower priced generics to creep in. This means people continue to pay luxury prices for software services that are essentially commodities.” // This is some interesting thinking. Is it broadly true?

• hiroshima, and keeping my brain engaged - “[At home] My brain simply switches off because it is familiar with everything, it does not need to think. I seem to thrive in uncertainty even though it makes me very uncomfortable and anxious. I guess there’s different parts of my brain having different responses.”

• A Lack Of Consumer Portability And Choice Are Negatively Affecting The Mobile Experience - Kind of interesting contrary thought? Good point on the messaging service…but…when we’ve tried to collapse messaging (IM) it sort of never works?

• Oracle Cloud Made All The Right Moves In 2022 - Heavy on customer and use case mentions, this is a helpful overview of Oracle Cloud’s momentum. While it doesn’t address the question of what Oracle’s strategy is (I feel like it’s: migrate existing enterprise workloads to cloud, and maybe some new ones?) or pricing (or maybe it does, I didn’t notice in my early morning coffee scrolling), it’s a model of very thorough, but brief analysis.

• AI Speculation Dominates Cloud Native Conference - “Intuit noted that their implementation of DevOps, where developers are also responsible for production operations, wasn’t working very well at scale. The company is moving back to an approach with dedicated operations people responsible for keeping an infrastructure platform running. A platform that developers use, but don’t have to build or run themselves. The pattern is repeated at other well-known companies such as Discover, Boeing, and Cruise.” // It’d be great to revisit the “everyone should be a full-stack engineer but don’t call a full-stack engineer” idea.

• Tim Hockin: Kubernetes Needs a Complexity Budget - The New Stack - This is the mystery of Kuberntes' popularity: everyone complains about complexity, so why is it so popular? Is it actually not complex? Is it as simple as possible, that is, the alternatives are equally if not more complex? Also, the idea here is good: when you’re adding a new feature, always take into account how much more complex you’re going to make something. Counter examples are Word and Excel, but those might also be thought-provoking example. Also, those are consumer apps, not infrastructure stacks.

• I’m experimenting with different ways of looking at developer “productivity”. - While, you know, you’re not supposed to obsess over metrics, let alone just one metric, this is probably the a good direction for ALL roles in a company.

Logoff

There is no Thanksgiving holiday in The Netherlands, as you might guess. Still, if you work for an American company, it sort of feels like it. The right way to use Thanksgiving is as a sort of gratitude journal for the year so far.

I made a scripted out video for the first time in awhile yesterday and it was great. It’s for an O’Reilly project updating my how to thrive and survive in a BigCo talk. I’m using the project as both, you know, feeding my need to create and publish, but also see if O’Reilly is a good channel and platform for this.

I suspect I’d be better suited just publishing it on my own YouTube channel. But, having a third party involved as an official project is also, you know, a good way to kick myself in the ass to actually do something. I used to be self-motivated, my own “publisher,” but something has happened in the YTD that has had that publisher go on an extended hiatus. Hopefully, this project will get him back from beaches and playing D&D to start pumping out more work.

Thriving in a BigCo: Avoiding homework, and assigning homework

I’m working on a video series with O’Reilly based on my working and thriving in a BigCo talks. Here’s a little storyboarding I did on one topic to avoid having too much work that’s not part of your job, a concept I call “homework.”

Asking Questions Leads to Homework for You

When you point out a problem, you make yourself responsible for the solution, whether it’s your job or not.

This is a trap that technical people fall very easily into: asking why the company operates why it does as a way of pointing out problems and opportunities. Why don’t we integrate with this new service? Why are we still using FAX machines? Why don’t we use hashtags?

You now have extra homework. You need to study the problem, work on a solution, talk the various people involved and get their “input” (really, permission to mess with their stuff), report this all out in the big meeting, and then start the cycle all over again considering the “input” got in the meeting.

If you want to, and have time for all of this, have fun. But if not, be aware that when you point out problems and way to improve, you might just be assigning yourself more homework.

Bonus tip: when you hear the word “input,” run.

Yes, and… Assign Homework to Filter Vampires

Now, hold on: you can hack assigning homework for your benefit! Often, people will ask you to help them, to join a project, even review something. They want your “input.”

If this is your job - hey, presto! - you should do it.

If it’s unrelated to your official job, it is is extra work. The first thing you should do is ask them to send you some more information and thinking. That is, assign them homework. This can be as simple as asking for a date, requirements, budget ranges, etc.. It could be as complex as writing a memo on what the project is (“my boss needs a write-up to look over,” you might say).

This is like charging a small fee for a trivial service: it cuts out the freeloaders. If sending an email cost a penny, there would be almost no spam.

You can filter out the unimportant work because people won’t do this homework unless it’s actually important. Even if unknowingly, the person asking was hoping you’d just take it and run with, like, all of it, and then just hand it back to them.

Recent ChatDM

I haven’t updated y’all on my attempts to use ChatGPT for Dungeons & Dragons, especially for solo play.

In the most recent round of updates, you can now upload files, like, big ones. I was hopeful that it’d make ChatGPT a better DM: you upload the PDF for an adventure and just it to run it. It doesn’t really work out too well.

I don’t know how to describe it, but ChatGPT is just not…creative? Imaginative? Unexpected? It can’t improvise, even within a well constrained system. I mean, I guess that’s what all the freaked out creatives are saying and hoping for. The other issue with ChatDM is that it just has no idea how to do combat.

It’s still very good at brainstorming. I asked it to come up with a system for determining if monsters would retreat enough, and the first pass was pretty good. Would a gnoll retreat if half of its companions had been killed and it was injured, or are gnolls too dumb for that (actually, it looks like they might be pretty “smart” when it comes to just taking out the weak and pulling back for a snack)? An orc might retreat if it saw a tactical advantage in doing so, or it might fight to the death, and so on. The DM can subjectively determine all of that, but as with a lot of D&D having a system is helpful. Anyhow, ChatGPT came up with a good mix of checking moral (based on Wisdom), damage, and being outnumbered or not.

I’m also trying something new, a mix of journaling and Dracula-like technique. You have one character write journal entries (or, I guess letters, whatever) as milestones in the plot and adventure, then you instruct ChatGPT to fill in the time between the journal entries with role playing. I’ve only done this a little bit and so far it’s…OK?

I haven’t looked at making my own GPT. We’ll see if that’s anything.

Relative to your interests

• AI is coming for your favorite product’s good user experience - Don’t let Wall Street product management from afar: “Unless the company is existentially bound making these features work, it’s easy to imagine the various chatbots and assistants slowly spiraling into decay. A flashy launch goes out the door; the CEO touts their bold vision; the stock shoots up. The initial version—rushed to market to satisfy an impatient Wall Street—is kind of a dud; it works fine on the simple requests, but falls down on the hard stuff that would be really valuable. But nobody is that upset, because nobody really wanted the feature that much in the first place. There was no burning need that it solved, or pressing jobs for it to do. It was mostly marketing, after all. So it stagnates in its half-built form, left in the product as demo candy, and to prove that the company is thinking about the future, until a new thing becomes the future, and we all move on.” Also: “What makes Excel (and Google Sheets) unique from BI is that it’s not just a tool for working with data; it is the data.”

• How to Title Art - Guidelines for Artists - Looks good for coming up with titles (and summaries) for anything. Using this advice to come up a summarizing prompt for ChatGPT would be interesting.

• AI in Backstage - Check out Jennifer’s write-up of Ben’s talk from BackStageCon: put some AI in your BackStage (that’s my title, free of charge for use in future versions of the talk). It has some good prompt-writing advice too: “Next, think about chain of thought prompting,” Wilcock continued. “This is when you encourage the AI to take a breath, think step by step, work through the problem slowly,” as a way to prevent the AI from jumping to conclusions, by showing its work.

• OKRs in Software Engineering - First, figuring out what to actually do from an OKR seems to be a problem; second, it’s hard to tell if people understand what the OKR says, thus, I presume, what to do: “a mismatch in how aware managers think their teams are about their goals: 60% of individual contributors say that goals are communicated to them monthly, but 65% of managers say that they communicate goals weekly or multiple times a week”; third, as ever with metrics, gathering the data is difficult; forth, not enough training to get everyone to understand OKRs and to, then, all use them in a uniform way. The other issue, not present in the company the researches study is, fifth: sticking to OKRs past their creation. I’ve experienced all of these with OKRs, and almost all types of corporate-goal metrics over my career. And, here’s a nice example of how teams and leadership can easily get misaligned with team charters.

• Self-Gaslighting and the Doubt Loop - This feels like a template for most all, everyday-therapy.

• How to talk to little kids about their day, and why they draw a blank every time you ask. - Sure, anything will work better than “how was your day?”

• Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Record 9% Growth in 2024 - “IT spending in Europe is projected to total $1.1 trillion in 2024, an increase of 9.3% from 2023, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. IT spending in Europe is on pace to surpass $1 trillion by the end of 2023.” But: “CIOs in Europe who pursued the ‘growth at all costs’ strategy for over a decade, are now shifting the emphasis of ongoing IT projects toward cost control, efficiencies and automation, while curtailing IT initiatives with longer ROIs.”

• Half of cloud transformations are ‘abject failures’ | CIO Dive - “You have to go through some sort of transformation with your infrastructure, your data and your processes to do more than just layer on some new tech.” // My read from the summary: just lifting and shifting doesn’t get enough new advantages (cost savings) to make your ROI targets. When you use a new technology, you need to think about what it’s good at and change how you operate and work to take advantage of that. The cloud vendors don’t want to be cheap, they want to make money like anyone else. So you need to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

• Millions of Luxury Products Now Come With Unique Digital Passports. Here’s What That Means. - Blockchain to track (luxery?) good provenance.

Wastebook

• The Chronic: The perfect soundtrack for filing expenses. It’s like this and like that…yeeeeeaaaaah, compliant as heeeeell. Now, back to gettin' my stroll on.

• “charmed many users with oddball fundraising techniques like meaningless, stackable verification checkmarks” On tumblr business models.

• “they are locked in an embrace of mutually exclusive optimisms” Here.

• “When two or more people with authority and influence (formal or otherwise) have competing narratives for what’s broken, why, and what to do about it, you can end up with a narrative stalemate.” Here.

• There’s a certain tactic for presentations I call “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, so I’m going to tell you what my reaction to it is as I find out.” This is great for demos, new technologies, and, really, most all thought-leadering. It requires a type of story-telling that educates from this feint, and that continually winks at the audience as if to say “and, come on, I mean, does anyone really know what the fuck is going on here?”

• Related: baking a pie is simple. It’s making the pie dough that’s hard.

• “sporting a sort of coastal grandfather aesthetic; the tiny tighty-whities have been replaced by cable-knit sweaters, and he’s got a stubbly salt-and-pepper beard” Here.

• “Fireplace” is a ridiculously simple work. What is it? It’s the place that you have a fire. I’m fascinated by words like this: they are stupidly simple and so common that I don’t really think about them as descriptive words. You notice this if you encounter a lot of different languages, as I do, especially German and Dutch. I wonder if most words are like that: neighborhood, gas station. I guess these are words that you can break in two that are just descriptions of the thing, place, or concept: phrases that have become words, really. In contrast, older words have lost their literal meaning (or I just don’t know them!): kitchen, park, knife, love, tree, winter, porch, candy, fart, bed, shelf, lamp, dog, happy.

• Frequent Flyer pro-tip: if the gate sign says the plane is now boarding, but there is no plane at the gate, the plane is not now boarding.

• ‘The term microadventure was made common by British adventurer and author Alastair Humphreys and is defined as an overnight outdoor adventure that is “small and achievable, for normal people with real lives”. The New York Times described microadventures as “short, perspective-shifting bursts of travel closer to home, inspiring followers to pitch a tent in nearby woods, explore their city by moonlight, or hold a family slumber party in the backyard.”’ Wikipedia.

Logoff

I have my last, scheduled work trip of the year this week. It’ll be fun because it’s a new talk, just down in Belgium - an easy trip. I’ll see how it goes and then maybe write it up here.

Suggested outro.

"We can’t hire the right people” is the eternal complaint of CIOs everywhere. They’re beset by all this FUD’ing out about Facebook coming and disrupting the toothpaste industry, Google accidentally dis-intermediating car insurance, Elon Musk launching a bank1, or Amazon doing anything new.

I call this freaking out the “macro-economic headwinds” part of any pitch, freakout, or “TED-style” talk. The CIO’s reply is often: if only they could just hire the right people to sling the code, install Kubernetes the hard way, write good ChatGPT prompts, or whatever, they could turn those headwinds into tailwinds.

We’re trying our best, the executives clamor. But, the skills! Our people just don’t have the skills! So, like, sorry: can’t improve.

CIO goes: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is, of course, this:

And there has been this for a long time as well.

Solving the skills problem

The Skills Problem came up a lot during the VMware Explore executive summit I was at earlier this week. Instead of just being mopey about it, though, there was a lot of talk about how to solve it. Most of it sprung from the notion of: instead of focusing on hiring new people, focus on training your current staff.

Solving the "skills" problem is possible, people were saying. It just takes some planning and operating changes. One plan was very prescriptive: (1) put in place all you can eat self-directed training services like Pluralsight and O'Reilly; (2) plan out (in person) classroom-like training for new technologies and practices that you’re planning on using; and then (3) activity encouraging staff to always be learning. You can “enforce” these with annual review metrics, sure, but if you just make it part of expectations and allocate time with it, most people in IT will be happy to learn. Some enjoy stacking up certificates, which is fine if it works for you.

If "skills" means that you either (1) can't afford to hire people who have the skills in the new tools and ways of working you want to do, or, (2) that your existing people are not learning how to use new technologies, then solving #2 is likely easier and cheaper. It just has to become a high priority: training and education.

A good way to discover how high a priority "skills" is in your organization is to track how much time executives spend on planning, meeting, and budgeting on that topic. You can also track people's use of the self-directed learning platforms. As ever with management, the managers are the ones responsible for the overall system of the "organization," so if skills are a problem, that's something they have in their power to solve by changing the organization, how it works and allocates resources (time and money).

Thriving

The second related topic that I found interesting was making people happy at work, and happy with their work. Since knowledge work (most IT work) requires a lot of self-motivation to learn and adapt (see above skills problems!) and to problem-solve with open-ended, unknown problems, you need people who are in a good state of mind, not grumpy and unmotivated. As one discussion participant put it "a happy developer is a productive developer," which applies to any role, of course.

A lot of the important work in studying developer productivity over the past few years has been on this topic: how do you create the environment for thriving IT staff. There's the SPACE work from Microsoft and others, and some work from this year that I just discovered at Monktoberfest from the Developer Success Lab. A lot of this work is about metrics and measuring, but there's also a lot to learn about creating those happy employees who will then thrive.

If skills are a problem, that's great! Unlike all those macro-economic headwinds that executives have no control over, they can actually do something about that by putting in place operational changes. As ever: you just need to do it.

Wastebook

• I’m Barcelona, you can always get an Uber in five minutes if you don’t mind waiting fifteen minutes first.

• I propose we call all official conference events in the evening “soirees.”

• AV guy at #VMwareExplore “I presume this is another talk about computers? You should try doing one sometime on wildlife.”

• “an activity that is restorative, intentional, relaxing.” Here.

• Sometimes, being the person who knows how to print something out at their hotel is the most valuable thing you can do that day.

Relative to your interests

• Big Blue Can Still Catch The AI Wave If It Hurries - I am not a chip person, so I don’t understand any of this. Sounds good for IBM if they commercialize it and make some hoopla out of it?

• OpenAI introduces GPT-4 Turbo: Larger memory, lower cost, new knowledge - Updates to ChatGPT (and API updates too). A much longer memory for conversations (the “context window”) is what I care about most, that is: “The model is 2.75 times cheaper than GPT-4 and has a context window equivalent to 300 pages of text per prompt”

• Forrester has some succinct coverage of OpenAI the announcements, and, of course, some prescriptive advice.

• Gartner Says AI Ambition and AI-Ready Scenarios Must Be a Top Priority for CIOs for Next 12–24 Months - This either means people are barely starting, or that you don’t need an “AI vision statement”: “A Gartner survey in June 2023 of 606 CIOs and technology leaders found that only 9% of organizations have an AI vision statement in place, and more than one-third of respondents had no plans to create an AI vision statement.”

• The 2023 State of Kubernetes in Production - Embrace the Kontainer Khaos, just get some good management tools: “If you’re trying to standardize and have the same stack in the same environment for all your applications – that’s not realistic for today’s IT environment. It’s never been realistic,” Newman said. “The idea instead has to be how do you manage diversity, rather than how do you limit it.” // A survey on Kubernetes.

VMware Corner

I’m at VMware Explore EU this week. There’s a lot of VMware announcements. Here’s some coverage:

• VMware makes data services push with help for DBAs and devs - Soon, it’ll be a metal to UI private cloud stack.

• While it waited for Broadcom, VMware set out to do to data services what it did to storage, The Register.

• FinOps for Kubernetes in Multi-cloud, Multi-cluster Environments with Tanzu Mission Control - FinOps in VMware Tanzu land: “see the fully loaded cost of their clusters in the Tanzu Mission Control GUI. The cost will be based upon information added to Tanzu CloudHealth related to their custom pricing with AWS cloud and Azure platforms. The widget will display both single cluster costs and the total cost of a cluster group to support teams in making informed decisions for their Kubernetes environments.”

• VMware consolidates AI push at Explore in Barcelona

• VMware Explore - VMware focuses on cloud journeys and AI implementations.

Logoff

We went to a small Italian place in Barcelona called Teta de Monaja last night: it was great! I feel like a mother and son were running the place. At least, it had that vibe. And the food was tasty and affordable.

Here’s the final installment of my talks with Here’s the third little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talk about things that slow developers and other staff down. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work.

Watch it!

Wastebook

• “To ‘help gamers keep the crunch to themselves,’ Doritos is debuting what it calls ‘Doritos Silent.’ Gamers download Doritos Crunch Cancellation software and when the technology is turned on, the software detects the crunching sounds and silences it while keeping the gamer’s voice intact.” Tyler.

• “I’m local, but I shot the bingo finals. Almost got an award for that!”

• “Andreessen-style gibberish.” Here.

• Oh, you know: It’s the usual bullshit.

• I saw someone working in QBR slides in the plane. Planned versus won, targeted funnel versus actual sales. There was a lot of customers slide work - some embedded Excel sheets which they would go edit. These metrics are all, largely the same. It’s hard to know what any company would get out of customization them more than a set of three or five slides. I’m sure Salesforce just spits out oodles of them. These are the kinds that slides that, if you need to make custom ones, something is wrong with your sales ops stack, or worse, you might be trying to arts and crafts around the cold numbers. And, yet, to suggest they everyone should stop it with these custom slides, charts, and analysis and just use, like, 20 universal ones, is clearly bonkers.

• Hilariously, the defaults in PowerPoint and Excel are probably enough. Simply mandating that you don’t use custom slides, Smart Art, and charts would probably fix a lot of white-collar waste.

• “FOMO continues to outweigh FOF (fear of fraud).” Here.

• "That’s turbo-amazing!

• We are watching Adventure Time again, this time for the three year old. It’s, of course, wonderful.

• “And check out these classic stylings! They don’t make them like this anymore!”

• Subscribe to read my polemic: Forks Have Ruled Too Long - Spoons are the Best Cutlery.

• “I don’t know how to make coffee. I’ve tried. I cannot master it. I’ve really tried.” Here.

• “How’d you sleep last night?” “Terrible! I couldn’t control that stupid heat - it’s cold, it’s hot!” American problems during the grand tour.

Relative to your interests

• Shift-down - Seroter’s term is taking off!

• More promo of the CNCF platform maturity model.

• You Keep Using That Word - He’s not a fan: “given that the industry is not known for creative, timely or even useful category descriptors, the next best step might be to gradually phase out or minimize the usage of the term edge in favor of terminology that actually communicates something that can be commonly understood.”

• I mean, these things are pretty annoying when they’re used by negligent speeders - Amsterdam considering license plate requirement, minimum age for fatbikes - “Last week, the police checked over 50 fatbikes at various places in the city and found that a third had an illegal throttle.”

• G.I. Joe PSA Compilation, Remastered - still amazing if you’re into complete absurd art.

• Dell GA’s APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift - Doing this kind of “it’s all integrated private cloud box” always seems like a good idea for Dell. But I never know if it’s a success. Also, does it actually work to talk about developers or in this context, or should the focus be all on the infrastructure people that are being asked to support (cloud native) developers? It feels like if you go to an application developer with this kind of pitch, unless you’re Bryan Cantrell or dhh, you’ll be hardcore ignored. Also: hopefully Dell gets dhh to keynote Dell World. The thought leadership for hardware vendors doing this probably needs to be explaining how application developers work and what they need to the infrastructure people buying and running the gear. I’m not sure talking to “developers” gets you much of anywhere, unless you can do it Cantrill/dhh style.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice, and at a booth). Nov 15th DeveloperWeek Enterprise, speaking.

Logoff

I’m at VMware Explore in Barcelona this week. That means I’m not at KubeCon, but there’s plenty of my team-mates and co-workers there. Go say high to the Carvel people and the folks at the VMware booth - tell ‘em I sent you. Also, Matt Ray will be there for his FinOps stuff, OpenCost?

I have three talks at Explore this week: a VMware booth/theater one at 2:30pm tomorrow, a panel on years of running developer platforms on 12:45pm on Wednesday, and then a talk about platform marketing (getting developers to use your stuff, and product managing it) at 2pm on Wednesday. The way they do listings for talks is a little weird, but you can find the talks listed here.

Here’s the third little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about managing Kubernetes, especially if you’re a large organization that has lots of everything. You know: MULTI-CLOUD, Y’ALL! He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work.

Watch it if you’re into this kind of thing.

Wastebook

• “If you’re a baker, making bread, you’re a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you’re not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you’re an artist. So the context makes the difference.” Marina Abramović from here.

• Related: The more modern art I see, the more I think: “I’m pretty sure all these people were totes shit-faced and horny as fuck all the time.”

• The Zurich airport is super chill.

• “‘malicious compliance,’ meaning you have completed something that was requested of you, simply to illustrate the stupidity of the request.” April Dunford

• We act like doing public transit is impossible. As Europe proves, what we really mean is that we don’t want to change, pay the costs, wait the time. Most things in “American Exceptionalism” are like this: we just aren’t imaginative enough, nor have enough faith that it’s possible to change. The Exceptionalism also rises because of how well isolated America is, geographically and culturally. We simply don’t have an aggregate first hand experience outside of our own. I mean, you know, that sounds like some weak, “oh, I see you went to college, fancy-ass,” thinking. But even in our own massive country, we get locked into the thinking of our geography. It’s like knowing only one religion from the whole history of humanity, and never being exposed to the hundreds of alternates across the world and across all of human history. If that one religion was caveperson animism, the idea that you could instead worship a human-like figure or an inedible Nothing, or just think the whole idea of religion was more akin to fairy tales…all of that would seem stupid, impossible, and wrong. But! Here we are, most of us not worshiping drawings on cave walls.

• “I like orderly confusion very much. But this is neither orderly, nor properly confused.” Dieter Rams.

• “Hot yak stew is brought, and ale, and you are soon feeling very comfortable as Grokkung tells you what his warriors have learnt recently.”

• “embracing momentary boredom” - I read this while I was bored waiting for my Uber to come…har har har…

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice, and at a booth). Nov 15th DeveloperWeek Enterprise, speaking.

Discount code for KubeCon US - while I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, my work has a discount code you can use to get 20% off your tickets. The code is: KCNA23VMWEO20.

Logoff

This is all I have for you today:

Here’s the second little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about security concerns with Kubernetes. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work.

Torsten says that last he counted, there were over 140 distress, services, and different ways of getting Kubernetes. As I say, this is probably too many. But how many should there be? I don’t think we actually give a number, but we think through it a bit.

Watch it if you’re into this kind of thing.

More recent estimates on Kubernetes usage

Yesterday, I referenced some 2022 Gartner estimates on containerized applications. By coincidence, I came across an updated estimate from them:

By 2028, more than 95% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 50% in 2023.

By 2028, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, which is an increase from fewer than 15% in 2023.

[And, later in the report, summarizing the state of things in March, 2023:] Gartner estimates that close to 50% of enterprises are running containerized workloads in production and nearly 15%1 of total workloads run on containers today.

This is from March, 2023. So, going into CY2024, I’m guessing it goes up 2% to 5%, depending on what the growth curve looks like. Also, notice that the 25% figure has been extended by a year. The 2022 version of this report had it 25% in 2027.

Here is a crude chart using dates from the 2022 and 2023 report. This kind of chart is dicey to use, so consider it for entertainment purposes only:

You can get a copy of the report linked here. Also, if you’re into these kinds of charts, here’s my most recent collection of Kubernetes and platform engineering related charts (I hesitate to call it “data,” it’s just charts), including the updates above.

Wastebook

• “Costservability” Brian.

• “Optimist: The glass is ½ full. Pessimist: The glass is ½ empty. Excel: The glass is January 2nd.” Here.

• I’m not really into the idea that devrel people don’t “sell.” (1) If you’re from a public cloud company, you’re going to use your work’s stuff for demos. (2) You don’t need to sell products, you just need to sell the idea of way of working that aligns with your company’s market definition. Just go watch the greats of Kubernetes, Spring, AWS, Microsoft, etc. They call this “thought leadership.” (3) If you’re not selling, you probably need to improve your “non-vendor vendor talk” skills, which are surprisingly not hard to improve if you get over the false idea that it’s “icky.” I mean, have you seen how much those new MacBooks cost?

• Related: “a bullshitter who delivers” Benedict Evans on Elon Musk.

• I'm hoping to have a DEEP heart-to-heart about the use of powdered cheese in an American cuisine classic: Kraft Mac and Cheese.

• I’m pretty sure that the next plot point in this developer productivity metrics nerd-fight is someone saying “this is a meaningless phrase made up by people to sell things.” Reverse the FUD-flow!

• Q: A couple years later, what has “DevSecOps” ended up meaning? A, from @kerfuffle@mastodon.online: “It still just means "make sure the concerns of each discipline are properly anticipated by the others so they don't become apparent too late and impede delivery", but that isn't reflected in job descriptions.

  In practice, #DevOps is an Ops engineer who uses infrastructure as code, #DevSecOps is someone who sets up a #CVE scanner in the delivery pipeline, and only few folks think about the silobreaking mentality of mutual understanding that it all was supposed to entail.”

Relative to your interests

• Announcing the Platform Engineering Maturity Model, CNCF - I want to dig into this further. But, I did an early review of it and it’s great - a very useful tool if you’re putting a platform in place (and, I’d argue, if you’re doing some kind of “Kubernetes strategy”).

• OpenCost Expands Its Horizon: Introducing Multi-Cloud Cost Monitoring! - “open source cost monitoring for cloud native environments”

• IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer alternative benefit - I’m no US accountant, but this both weird and against the norms of white collar employment. The 401(k) is one of the backbones of how the middle class system works in the US: best not to fuck with it. Insert “workers of the world,” etc.

• The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned - Case study of parasocial relationships: “Artists' personal stories have long been part of how art is marketed, from Vincent van Gogh to Frida Kahlo, but in those cases, the artists' paintings attracted interest first, and the biography became part of its legend as its fame grew. Today, personal biography and narrative are more important than ever in the gallery–most art comes equipped with some kind of story. But social media gives an added twist: Hordes of people can feel as if they have a relationship with a painter like Devon Rodriguez without ever having had any direct experience of his painting at all.”

CFPs: #cfgmgmtcamp 2024

The CFP for cfgmgmtcamp 2024 is open, here. This is a good, under-the-radar conference in Ghent, Belgium, especially for Kubernetes, SRE, DevOps-y kind of talks. I’ve been many times (and finally spoke last year) and it’s always more than worth my time to go.

All the greats often make it. I usually end up spending a couple hours sitting in the cafeteria catching up with someone.

I haven't checked, but you can usually also submit a multi-hour workshop. One year, for example, Tasty Meats Paul (and someone else?) did one along the lines of "getting Kubernetes up and running." It's usually timed to be the week after FOSDEM to attract that crowd and speakers.

If you’re on the “infrastructure stuff” circuit, you should check out speaking there. And, definitely attending if you can.

Here's the talks from last year to get a sense of topics.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice, and at a booth). Nov 15th DeveloperWeek Enterprise, speaking.

Discount code for KubeCon US - while I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, my work has a discount code you can use to get 20% off your tickets. The code is: KCNA23VMWEO20.

Logoff

It’s getting colder here and we got a big pile of wood for the fireplace. I used to know how to light a fire, but now I have no idea.

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering how I’m doing, this best represents my combined current mood about things:

…

Here’s a little interview I did with Torsten Volk at EMA research. We talked about security concerns with Kubernetes. He’s done a great, very thorough look at Kubernetes usage and the state of things. You can get it for free thanks to my work.

Not enough failure yet to be perfect

As ever with security and a new technology, there’s a lot of uncertainty and finishing off the security features as a new technology is used more and more in the mainstream. And this is exactly what you see with Kubernetes now, especially in “the enterprise.” Despite the “everyone’s doing it” feel, when you look at estimates for how many applications are running in Kubernetes, it’s sizable and growing, but far from “everything”:

​[B]y 2027, 25 percent of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2021.

From: Gartner, CTOs’ Guide to Containers and Kubernetes — Answering the Top 10 FAQs, Arun Chandrasekaran, WataruKatsurashima, 31 May 2022.

In my mind, this means that something around 15% of enterprise applications are running in containers. Are those containers running in Kubernetes? That’s harder to tell - there are many container-based platforms from the Container War days, including the Cloud Foundry ones, probably some Docker-based ones, etc., etc.

But, I’d assume that a lot of those containerized applications, especially the growth that moves the estimate up to 25% will be running in Kubernetes. You know: yeah, probably.

As more and more enterprise applications are created and migrated to Kubernetes, things will quickly be discovered, proactively fixed, and things will be peachy. Such is how technology goes.

There’s a lot of buckets

The other things driving security in the Kubernetes world is that it’s a stack designed to be DIY’ed. Instead of one, integrated and unified stack that’s polished off, you can assemble together all the parts. You know, because you’re probably a victim of the “we’re special and so we have to tinker with the stack” anti-pattern. The number of combinations of that final stack, then, are massive, and each time you customize the stack, you open yourself up to screwing up the security. So it goes with building your own stacks! Hopefully you’ve done your Wardly map analysis, or whatever.

Being the one interviewed is great - just like a being on a panel, you pretty much just show up and talk. Easy and fun.

Watch the interview, it’s only 10 minute long!

Wastebook

• A consultant would clearly say that one problem you have is refusing to accept outside help. Here.

• “Yet sometimes, I suffer from what you might call achievement fatigue: I question my motives, I ask myself what the hell I’m doing or supposed to be doing, and sometimes, I cut myself some slack.” Achievement Fatigue.

• ‘the “pressure to presence.”’ Here.

• I get all my news from The Register.

Relevant to your interests

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT can look at uploaded files in the latest beta updates - I’m thinking that, soon, ChatGPT will be a better way that create images than Midjourney. Midjourney’s prompts and refinement method is way too complex and uncontrolled. It’s very difficult to figure out how to say things like “add a skateboard to the second image.”

• PowerPoint gone crazy in the US Military (2010) - From 2010. Yes, and: it’d be cool if there was something better - memos?

• TikTok Star Devon Rodriguez Is Now the Most Famous Artist in the World. But What About His Work? - “The case of Devon Rodriguez is more evidence for the shift in emphasis from consuming art as content, to consuming artists as content.” And: “In 2023, Rodriguez is essentially in a race to develop an audience with a more-than-superficial interest in his actual painting faster than his social-media presence is drained of goodwill through over-exploitation.” // Also, a bunch of fans apparently got angry at this. I mean, of course: the critic said the art wasn’t good enough to be art. This is what the Internet can do for us.

• Leaving Twitter, Benedict Evans - “This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better - they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.” // I’m starting to think that the whole innovator’s dilemma is a much, much rarer occurrence/success than we assume. Instead, there are often deep-pocketed incumbents who simply make a better technology/product and/or are more successful at driving market adoption (sales and marketing that leads to purchases). Plus, sometimes, the dominant companies just get lazy.

• Fifteen ghosts and a demon.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice, and at a booth). Nov 15th DeveloperWeek Enterprise, speaking.

Discount code for KubeCon US - while I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, my work has a discount code you can use to get 20% off your tickets. The code is: KCNA23VMWEO20.

Logoff

We had a great week off in Spain (Sitges, to be exact) last week. I’m not often able to completely relax and disengage from life on vacations, but this time it worked. We had a place right across the street from the beach, and we didn’t worry about spending our time wisely. So, we wisely spent our time just going to the beach each day.

I have travel for the next three weeks, including tonight. Work travel has been a huge part of my life since 2006, and I’m not really sure what my role and purpose would be otherwise. But, it’s starting to seem like something I should figure out. Got any ideas?

Suggested playlist for this episode.

We Fear Change, a new talk

I’ve got a mostly newish talk coming up next week about people’s fear of change in organizations, on Oct 24 2023 at 11:00am Amsterdam time.

Register to Watch the Talk

It’s narrowed down, of course, for software and ops stuff. You know: all that digital transformation, cloud native stuff I’m always on and on about. It’s the last in the series I’m going with my co-workers Bryan Ross. He’s great to do these with because he’s been an actual practitioner so he bring, like, real content to the talks.

Check it out, it’ll be free to watch, of course. And if you can’t make the time, register for it anyhow and you’ll get an email when the recording is up.

Wastebook

• “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

• “too cool for the music business and too sensitive to chew their own steak.” Here.

• “Feelings are real and life’s hard. You learn to suck it up. Expressing feelings is important. So is MANAGING them. If adulthood is ONE THING it’s that.” Ibid.

• Cont.: I do not know how to operate the “expressing feelings” part. It is a weird, scary notion for me. I don’t understand the psychological, uh, “mechanics” of that: how “being heard” results some discharge of the toxic mind-goblins that dance around your head. And yet, everyone does it (boy, do they!), and it seems to work fine. To me, this “being heard” is complaining and, I think, my aversion to it is that I instantly react by thinking I’ve now been assigned a task that must get done - more shit for me to worry about and do, that is not even my “shit.” But I think that is wrong: you have to separate our complaining…wait, I mean…“being heard” from someone asking you for help. The problem I have there is that I’m not calibrated to know the difference. And people get really upset if you ask them “what, if anything, do you want me to do about it, or are you just complaining, I’m sorry, looking to be heard?” So, following the golden rule, I don’t “express feeling,” as I don’t want to subject people to this. But I think most people don’t suffer from the mis-calibration or ability to figure it out. Yeah?

• Viz. I don’t like to believe this, but complaining is often just releasing pressure, nothing to be taken too seriously.

• Don’t think of it as increasing developer producing, think of it as getting to a good baseline by removing waste.

• “in the canvas of life, incompetence is my brush.” Here.

• Hacking you bureaucracy.

• Johnny Webinar.

• “Pigeonhole.”

• Sameboatitious.

• “Let me, let you, let me go.”

• Shift left without shifting burdens left.

• Necessity is the parent of unflappablity.

• “I like Swiss cheese, unless I’m with four or more people.” Deep cut.

• “I used to be a programmer, but now I’m a professional. ‘Hello, World’ application developer.”

• “The commercial internet was still in its infancy. We could judge it based only on its potential, rather than its results.” // This is the thinking I’ve been missing from my obsession with the diffusion of innovation curve. Early in the cycle, we judge the technology by the optimistic potential it has, not by the yet to be known actual value of it. Coupled with the hype cycle, you get the notion that the initial hopes and dreams (potential) is way overhyped, and resets itself to the trough of disillusionment.

• More like the “trough of reality,” amiright?

• New web show idea: The Webinars Family.

My Content

• Software Defined Talk Podcast, Episode 437: The Let it Ride Lifestyle - This week, we discuss Amazon embracing Microsoft Office 365, offer some SBF hot takes, and review the lessons Docker learned when building an open-source business. Plus, we share thoughts on the new Apple Pencil, USB-C, and some Tim Cook fan fiction.

• Tanzu Talk Podcast, Keep it small to make big changes, with Betty Junod - You always hear that making a series of small changes is better than BIG BANG change. How does this really play out though? Doesn't that seem a little...naive when it comes to large organizations doing the BIG and MISSION CRITICAL work? In this episode, Coté [that’s me!] talks with Betty Junod on this topic. She draws from many sources like her first hand experience as an executive and working with the DevOps and cloud native community. They also discuss making culture changes in organizations and how recent work to figure out how to determine "business value." You can also watch the video version if you prefer that king of thing.

Relative to your interests

• Three More Things - Good suggestion here to think of video as a form of writing. Indeed, all those commentaries on “TV” are written after all, they’re just reading them on, uh, “tape.” And: “I don’t know what it means (yet?) to think by means of video editing.” And this, which explains the more important thing to ponder about AI stuff: “Generative models suggest writing doesn’t involve thinking at all, and to me that feels like existential invalidation.”

• Running and depression: Headlines suggest exercise is just as effective as meds. It’s not. - “the evidence also seems to show that as a practical intervention, exercise has limited applicability to real people in the real world. And there’s currently no good reason to believe that it will be as effective as medication.” // Generalizing, there are a category of cures for problems that I file under “if I could do that already, I wouldn’t have a problem.” In this case, if you could manage to start and stick to exercising three times a week, your life and mental state would probably already be better. The same goes for “digital transformation” guidance: if you could just start following all the agile and DevOps practices, then you’d already be in in good shape. “If lived, you’d home already.” Or “if it’s in stock, we’ve got it.” And: “the secret to wealth is to become a millionaire in your twenties.”

• What Should We Measure? - “Slack Time. Speed of Processes. Condition of Most-Edited Files. Escaped Defects. Net Promoters.”

• Acquisitions - “Why can’t people just be content with their yearly revenue? Why does everything have to be bigger—and clearly, not better? If the revenue curve doesn’t go up each year, blind panic seems to help us gravitate towards that poisonous philosophy: why not try an acquisition or two to give sales a healthy boost?”

• There’s always money in the infrastructure stand: “IDC recently published our first GenAI forecast … half of the opportunity over the next 18-24 months will be in infrastructure… IDC Forecasts Spending on GenAI Solutions Will Reach $143 Billion in 2027 with a Five-Year Compound Annual Growth Rate of 73.3%,” from Matt Eastwood.

• VMware Explore North America 2023: Customer Spotlights - “Despite having over 75 developers, OneMagnify efficiently manages their current Tanzu Application Service environment with less than one full-time operator, thanks to comprehensive automation built into VMware Tanzu.”

• “One of the biggest dangers with being someone who considers themselves ‘results driven’…” - “What Buckingham and Goodall discovered was evidence of the old adage, “employees don’t leave companies, they leave bad bosses”. Team culture, not company culture, they argue, has the largest and lasting impact on how we do our work.” And: “One of the biggest dangers with being someone who considers themselves ‘results driven’ leader is that you can suck the intrinsic motivation out of people’s work, thus robbing them of purpose. This typically happens when leaders become obsessive about hitting targets that have been set, even when they make no sense or have become abstracted from their purpose or intended outcomes.” And this intriguing one: “The problem is that the organisation’s leadership have ambitions greater than the resources they are willing to expend on those ambitions. As the management consultant cliché goes, they have champagne tastes and mineral water budgets.”

• Nvidia staff are still working from home - More of a round up of wfh tech company policies.

• What non-standard items do you always travel with? - Travel gear, mostly for the work trip, but some good ones to have on hand for car trips with kids.

• iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Review: Depth and Reach - Check out those photo from an airplane window.

• Would generative AI have made me a better software architect? Probably. - Yup.

• Scanned in Whole Earth and related magazines - Nice!

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!). Nov 15th DeveloperWeek Enterprise, speaking.

Discount code for KubeCon US - while I won’t be at KubeCon US this year, my work has a discount code you can use to get 20% off your tickets. The code is: KCNA23VMWEO20.

Logoff

I’m off to a week’s vacation in the south of Spain. We’ll see how the newsletter’ing goes.

If you’re interested enough in this newsletter to have scrolled this far down, perhaps you could give me some Halloween cheer by recommending it to other people. You know: I love seeing the numbers go up!

If you thought yesterday’s edition was way too long deep into some stinky, weeds, today’s episode is for you!

Using Midjourney and DALL-E to generate Dungeons and Dragons Battle Maps

It works well enough, I think, given how cool they look. The scaling is obviously not perfect, but it’s fine. I just did some basic prompts, with the only difference being a stream or not and “flat” or isomoprhic. With a combination of using seeds (for consistency and style) and figuring out really good prompts, I think it’d work well.

As ever, DALL-E seems to default to some cheesy cartoon style, while Midjourney defaults to MCU epicness. I’m sure this could be tuned, but I dislike DALL-E’s style for sure.

Another good test would be upload classic Dungeons and Dragon maps as seeds/inspiration and see what happens. Also, zooming out would be interesting. Here’s a 2x zoom out I did:

The idea here would be that you could make very large maps that you could then zoom back into for actual battle maps. The fully zoomed out one could be a full, big map hex. The problem with the above, I think is that you’ll end up zooming out of the picture. Witness, using the last one above:

Finally, here is something interesting. In Midjourney, the prompts tend to be descriptive of the picture. In DALL-E you can just write something and say “make a picture of that.” So, I took a newer description of my D&D setting (here’s an older version) and asked DALL-E to make a map for it:

That’s promising! It even got real text on there, which Midjourney doesn’t do. With these maps, it would be especially good at places you were just making up on the fly. I have a very specific idea of what this map should look like because I’ve - uh, you know: hobby! - thought about it a lot. But if I just wanted to make something up with no preconceived idea, these would all be great.

So, you could image using the ChatDM to help come up with adventures and, along the way, come up with maps and stuff. I’ve used Midjourney in the past to make pictures of custom magic items which was great.

Wastebook

• “Jiffle is now live for Explore.”

• My friends, The Capitalists.

• “It’s ok - we can filter you out.”

• “DevOps World in New Jersey”

Relative to your interests

• Apple introduces new Apple Pencil, bringing more value and choice to the lineup - Much cheaper then the previous ones, but lacks a couple of features as the expensive one.

• The Developer Platform - Pretty good overview of all the platform stuff, including marketing and product-think.

• Crafting Effective Problem Statements: A Game-Changer

Logoff

I don’t know what it is, but this whole thing just seems so cool to me:

I mean, I love the actual song. The part at the end where he’s all like “we’ll discuss it further” kind of jolts you out of the song, but, whatever.

But I think it’s also some vague nostalgia I have for 70s and 80s culture. There’s a tired Gen-X thing where you’re like “hey, man, back in my day, before the Internet, we all stewed in the culture artifacts since the 1940s. Those people were still alive - so many World War Two movies and Bugs Bunny pretending to be Groucho Marx.” At some point, my parents must have been really into Yacht Rock style music - or maybe it was just on the radio all the time and I heard it. That song came out as year before I was born, so it’s not like I was watching it climb the charts: it must have been radio play in the 80s and my parents playings it. (My dad listened to a lot of Heart and Stevie Nicks on the 45 minute commute to Georgetown when he picked me up in Austin for my weekends with him - we ate sausage wrapped in tortillas on a stick and he, in true 80s style, drank a tall boy in a brown paper bag as we inched through traffic.)

By modern standards, those guys look hella grubby and, if it weren’t for the sun glasses, you’d assume they were taxi drivers, dock workers/teamsters (maybe that blue collar thing was the goal!) - especially Michael McDonald’s little gut just chilled there, down to the belly button. It’s like the ancestors of the Benji Hughes look.