Jennifer Riggins and The New Stack crew have a good booklet out on Platform Engineering. I read over it and talked with Jennifer a couple times. I should have recorded those calls to munge into some articles, but, whatever.

You should check it out, I think it’s a good go at trying to nail down exactly what that term means. This month, at least :)

Download the ebook for free

ChatDM, The Paper

This is what spurred me to start using ChatGPT as a ChatDM, here’s The Register article that led me to it.

I’ve yet to ask it questions like “describe drinking games that the satyrs are taking part in that are so dangerous someone could get hurt doing them” or “why would a Displacer Beast Kitten leave the safety of its den if it believes an intruder is nearby?”

One interesting point that’s worth bringing into the bigger AI/LLM discussion. “Hallucinations” can be bad if you want real, truth (in which cases, they’re “lies” from the wide meaning of that word). But, when you’re creating and story telling, “making things up” is the whole game. Thus, ChatGPT’s downside of making things up becomes an advantage when you’re trying to be creative.

Here’s the paper. As with most PDFs I’ve downloaded, I haven’t read it in detail. I could go all nuts and check out the github repo too. Here’s one of the other papers cited.

Making a discord bot helps scale it up, but it’d be great to just get four or five prompts you could feed into ChatGPT. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You need a prompt to tell it you want it to DM (or play), one describing the world you’re playing in, one describing the start of an adventure, and then some mechanics (like feeding it monster stats, etc.). You’d also need to remind it of these things once the ChatDM’s memory had rolled off.

Automating that all with a bot would be helpful, sure. But then I’d have to figure out how to do all that.

Never underestimate the power of a cupcake

My co-worker Bryan Ross has been writing articles based on a video series I did…last summer? (Was it so long ago?). His most recent one is a round-up of his tips to get people to use your app platform. (Yeah, “platform engineering” - that’s a phrase I think I should stop using? I don’t know.) It’s a great write-up.

He’s got several more all ready to publish as well, and I’ll share those as they come out.

Upcoming

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

SREDay London is coming up in a few weeks, I’m speaking there. They gave me a discount code for “friends and team members.” Feel like you’re all at least on my team, right? The code is 50-SRE-DAY and you’ll get 50% off the tickets.

Meanwhile, travel season is back, and here’s where I’ll be, so far:

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Wastebook

• Related followup on yesterday’s customer value is “dangerous” episode.

• “People have been asking what celebrations I’m planning. I tell them none, but they’re welcome to come streetwalking with me as long as they don’t speak. Just allow me to shake my head, sigh deeply and not look where I’m going. Birthdays are not for flâneurs. You can’t saunter lazily through the city observing its rich variety if all you can think about are the years you have left to you.” Here.

• And: “I had hated exercise at school when it was free, so there was no sense in paying someone to make me as unhappy as I’d been then.” Ibid.

Relative to your interests

• Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest - One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”

• Europe’s new rules for Big Tech start today. Are they ready? - “Under the DSA digital service providers - including hosting services, online platforms, VLOPs and even intermediary service providers like ISPs - have obligations to ensure that products sold are safe and not counterfeit, and to eliminate advertising that targets minors or is served using sensitive data. Another requirement is to get rid of dark patterns in advertising. Clarity on how orgs moderate content and a requirement to present their algorithms for scrutiny is also required.” And larger services that reach 45m+ EU people have more, they “have to share data with ‘vetted’ researchers and governments, allow users to opt out of profiling recommendations, submit to regular audits, and have risk management and a crisis response plans in place.”

• The new spreadsheet? OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Enterprise for businesses - Can handle longer conversations, encryption, by default doesn’t share your stuff with the training AI, and SOC2 accounting controls. Also, of course, an admin panel.

Logoff

I’m starting to do the final think through of talk I’ll be giving next week at DevOpsDays Des Moines. I was asked to speak at the conference long ago (it’s a real compliment to be asked to speak), and I see was I clever enough to write an interesting, but ambiguous abstract!

There are a few things that I’m pushing around in my mind:

1. A conversation I had with an enterprise architect recently that went something like “why don’t we just use what we have correctly instead of installing a new paradigm?”

2. You’re working harder on the wrong things.

3. Optimizing vs. satisficing. Or: "once you've trained in accountancy, it seems like the only job."

I keep getting pulled to “do less, focus on one thing,” but I want to escape that kind of obvious bromide. Perhaps more of what I’m trying to get to is: “it’ll work itself out, don’t pre-optimize.” And, point one is key too: before you hop back to the start of the diffusion of innovation curve/hype cycle, have you tried reading the manual for what you currently have and following the directions this time?

Chance are high, you’ll skip reading the manual for this new thing. Case in point, the need for the Kubernetes community to tell everyone that it’s a platform for building platforms (insert Tweet screenshot) and that it’s not really intended for application developers. Then, lo and behold, when you don’t follow the original intent and scope of Kubernets, it’s complex and difficult! Security-blah-blah, skills gap, etc., costs, etc.!

A visual from a Torsten Volk study I saw recently:

What you see here is that Kubernetes is a tiny part of the overall stack you have. The infamous CNCF landscape shows this as well. What matters are all the things you wrap around it. I didn’t realize this early on in the container wars - I was famous on Software Defined Talk for saying “I thought Kubernetes already did that” when some new startup or project popped up. And I don’t think when we talk about “Kubernetes” we realize that Kubernetes is a tiny part of what we’re talking about. If you’re building a platform, or whatever, Kubernetes is probably the least of your problems. If you’re not already good at all that other stuff, you’re just fucking yourself up by changing that one box out. Why not just try being good at that other stuff first with what you have?

Anyhow, save it for the presentation, I guess.

Don’t get hung up on “customer value” and “business value”

I feel like this metaphor of “customer value” (and “business value”) has gone too far. It’s become something that people think is real, not just metaphor.

Instead of “value” what we’re talking about is something like “is useful at a price the customer will pay.” Jobs to Be Done theory feels a lot closer to real.

The other issue: there are not ROI spreadsheets for a lot of things in our personal lives. What’s the ROI of eating dinner? What’s the ROI of watching a good TV show, enjoying the cup holders in your car, paying a lot extra to get a private pool at your AirBnB?

The pervasiveness of thinking about “value” and seeking ROI makes it hard to say things like “sure, those trash bags are one euro more a box, but they just work better than the cheaper ones.” Or, “I don’t know, we should just keep paying for Netflix because I like watching things on it.”

There is no spreadsheet that will show the ROI of getting surgery: avoiding death has intuitive value. You can get ripped off: you could have gotten the same for a cheaper price. I think of lot of ROI analyses should be reduced to that: did we get the best price, and are we happy with the outcome? Never mind “the return on investment.” Thinking that keeping your computers running is an “investment” is like thinking of getting needed surgery as an “investment.”

I don’t know, as a customer I don’t want “value,” I want to be satisfied with what I got, I want it to do the job I needed/wanted, and I want to pay a fair price. And then, usually, I don’t want to have to manage it or think about it.

You can call that all “value,” but the danger is that you’ll lose track of the original, literal thing. And then you need this kind of advice to pull you back.

Wastebook

• Those who are satisfied do not speak. Here.

• New hunch: PE firms mess with the evolve or die tenant of capitalism, “creative destruction.” They’re like cheat-codes that extend your video game characters life.

• All is chaos. Thus, you can’t solve chaos by introducing more chaos. All you can do is accept the chaos and move on with your life. The enlightened use chaos to create more chaos. All evil is the denial of chaos and the sad attempt to beg Apollo to bring order.

• To say that you cannot trust your perceptions and your model of reality - the basis of all those who believe that all is nothing - prima facie disproves itself. For, if you believe that, how can your trust your conclusions thus?

• “data isn’t oil; data is sand.” Tim O’Reilly.

• “we are very short-term oriented, so we hardly stop to consider that this very mundane moment we are in now, a moment that seems so plentiful because it happens as part of our daily life, will become a precious piece of history one day.” Here.

• “the general raucousness of the occasion” Here.

Roll 20 for Distraction

Since last time, I’ve added a whole new layer of obsession to my renewed D&D hobby1…I guess you’d call it. I’ve managed to play several times with my kids. Once on a long bike ride, no dice needed, but you can use the color of the next car coming over the bridge if you need something random, I mean, they’re all basically black, white, grey, or “other” when it comes to color.

What I’ve done, though, is started using ChatGPT to both be a ChatDM and also a player. And also a co-writer for world building, adventures, and the like. So much so, that I started a blog to dump it all into: Eldergrove.quest. You can see my working theory for how to do D&D stuff with ChatGPT in the about page. I’m thinking of a way to livestream this “ChatDM” stuff. I think if I read the responses out loud it’d be something - and just general how to commentary. I have to tell you, D&D videos get a lot more views than digital transformation videos!

Midjourney is also pretty good, though a completely mystery to use precisely.

The ChatDM is great at little tasks like coming up with nonsense things a pixie would say to stupefy people. I’ve used to do some world-building, and it’s been a fun co-author for hyper-focused NPC studies.

Anyhow, I’ll maybe mention some more stuff I figure out here, but check out the blog if you’re into this kind of thing for the ongoing updates.

Relative to your interests

• VMware Explore’s 5 Big Reveals: Updates To Tanzu, vSAN, NSX+, Workspaces And An AI Deal With Nvidia - As it says. Includes some actual deal size info for Tanzu and Workspaces. Also, see this Broadcom/VMware analysis from the Silicon Angle crowd.

• Developers Are the Future Of VMware (Part 2): Multi-Cloud and AI, Torsten Volk - Good examples and thinking on using LLM AI in systems management stuff, in this case with VMware Tanzu and Aria.

• Rory Sutherland interviewed by Rick Ruben. - There’s a lot going on here!

• IBM sells off The Weather Company to Francisco Partners - I have to imaging that it’s a company that kind of runs itself at this time. If your business is consumer weather reporting, you’re kind of just repacking reality, and you’ve got a product that most everyone wants daily access to. Ratchet up the ads and a subscription business, and all you’re doing is an occasional UI and UX redesign to seem new and fresh. Perfect for a PE cash machine. // “As to what Francisco Partners intends to ultimately do with The Weather Company, you can probably guess. The PE fund said it will focus on making the most of three core areas: The Weather Company’s website and app, as used by netizens; its forecasting services for businesses and other orgs; and its advertising platform.”

• You Think You’re Not That Ambitious. Are You Dead Wrong About That? - “This is why finding the right balance of ambition and self-care is a lifelong challenge. Because it’s HARD to recognize when you need a real break, a real rest, a true period of nothingness long enough and big enough that you can rediscover who you are and what you love. But it’s also hard to notice when that freedom starts to become oppressive. It’s difficult to keep your eye on your own control panel, adding and subtracting structure and scheduling and organization from your life in order to maximize your happiness and productivity.”

• US judge: Art created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted - This is going to be weird for a few years, at least.

Logoff

Big props to the guy in this sleepy, Amsterdam suburb walking home from the grocery store and taking ten minutes to get the perfect selfie, pencil thin blunt hanging out his mouth, backlit by the golden hour sunlight. It’s good knowing he’s out there, taking her easy for all us sinners.

Suggested episode theme song.

How are things going for you?

Avoid using Vision and Strategy as an Executive Peace Out

Here is something from an article I’m reviewing for a co-worker:

It’s vital for any digital transformation to have a clear vision, purpose and a set of expected business outcomes. It lets everyone know what is changing, why it’s changing, and how it will positively impact the organization. All too often though, that simple message becomes bloated or lost entirely as the project moves forward.

This is true! Also, strategy needs to be practical, which means those who make up the strategy need to have some idea of how it would actually be done.

I like to suggest that vision and strategy should always be accompanied by principles: guidelines and constraints to use to determine what to do. And these should as specific as possible.

Instead of “we strive to listen to our customer” (which, first, is there a business that would ever say the opposite, out-loud at least?), you would say “we will follow product management principles to constantly learn what helps our customers and adjust our products and services accordingly.” Even that’s vague. If you know the actual industry and “medium” you’re operating in, that should be encoded in there. For example, are you doing this with software? Grocery stores? Sawmills?

Too many people treat vision and strategy as descriptions of the desired end-state (or, like, virtue-signaling bullshit - see “listen to our customers” above) rather than how the company will get there.

“Inspiration” and “leadership” are great and much needed. But they’ve been too interwoven with “vision” and sometimes strategy. At one point, maybe vision was a useful tool, but now I feel like every time I see that word I think “this is what the organization unconsciously thinks is its biggest flaw” or, at best, I just tune out.

And, again, a good test of the bullshit level of vision is to ask “would anyone ever have the opposite of that as its vision?”

I suppose you could have a vision somewhere in-between that test. For example, you might be in AI and automation and have a vision of “to eliminate the need for people to work five days a week.” Applying my opposite test, it’s not so much that any company would have the vision “to shift the work week to six days.”

A vision like that is what I like to call a “pony vision.” We all would like a pony for Christmas. The question is not even so much how we would get it (pay a lot of money and have it dropped off at your door around 5am on Christmas morning [and wake up around 4:30am to have that big cup of coffee before all this], trot it into the living room and put a big bow on it, picking and poop or pee until the kids wake up), it’s what we do to take care of it for the rest of its life. And how do we get the money to buy the pony. And then figure out how you buy the pony.

And, sure, there’s a fine line to walk between tops-down micromanaging and passing on responsibility for how strategy is implemented. No one likes to be micromanaged - that’s why we call it micromanaging instead of managing. As I like to say “bad things are bad, and good things are good.” However, management can’t just toss down some un-executable strategy. Strategy is just the first step, execution can’t just be delegating to some other group to “figure it out.”

What this means in practice is that management (and their corporate strategy group) should be able to answer the question “how were you envisioning we’d get this done? Like, week to week, day to day.”

Wastebook

• There’s a certain, vaguely dangerous feeling to writing a conference talk or webinar abstract that describes the talk you wish you could give instead of the one you (currently) can give.

• When listen to Rick Ruben interview people, I realize about myself: to evolve my podcasting skills I need to be happy and at peace with myself. Then I could ask the questions I’m curious about instead of trying to be smart, or, at best, helpful and educational.

• There must be a moment when you’re a young kid and an adult explains chewing gum to you, and you’re like “wait, you chew, it tastes good, like candy even, but it’s not food that you swallow. This is some fucked up, big people shit!”

• I’ll never be a always make your bed person, but I might could pull off being a always scoot your chair back under the table person.

• A feeling is just a thing that a stranger delivers to you. You can decide to do something with it, or just ignore it. Also, excellent live streaming skills/production here.

• There was a strange time, when I was a teenager, when people wore pleated khakis that are well ironed, dry-cleaned even.

• “The sun still hot but the glare from the Mediterranean no longer angry, the Promenade des Anglais given over to people perambulating rather than exercising, remembering that their bodies are primarily sites of pleasure, not denial.” Here.

My Content

First, if you’re the kind of person that reads this newsletter (and are in tech), you should check out this interview with Mike from Jaguar Land Rover. It’s very rare to get stories from real world, large organizations getting better at software, doing the cloud native, etc. Here’s one! (Also available in podcast form, if you prefer.)

We had Brian on this week as a guest on Software Defined Talk. He’s great, and it was a fun show: “This week, Brandon and Coté are joined by a special guest host, Brian Gracely. We discuss HashiCorp's transition to BSL and break down the recent interview with AWS CEO Adam Selipsky. Plus, some thoughts on the use of the word ‘orthogonal.’” Take a listen, or watch the video of the unedited episode.

Relative to your interests

There’s a lot to catch-up on.

• 80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office - Hmm. It seems really hard to tell what the effects of remote working and in-person working are. People just have to make shut up.

• Banks fined $549 million for hiding messages in iMessage and Signal - One of those things that makes boring, old enterprises so different than consumer tech companies, regulations. // ‘"Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined banks for being unable to produce discussions going back to at least 2019. The regulators say employees used their personal devices to discuss official company business via apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal and that those “off-channel communications” weren’t “maintained or preserved.”’

• As HashiCorp adopts the BSL, an era of open-source software might be ending - Is it too soon to say that open source businesses no longer work? (Unless you’re a bit public cloud or you do open core?)

• How to Set Up a Platform That Effectively Supports Your Development Teams - This seems like the kind of thing I should read…

• It’s Time To Tell The Healthcare CX Story In Terms Of ROI - The focus is healthcare, here, but this applies to all industries: “Meeting with C-suiters and boards of directors, the disconnect is pretty clear. While CX pros (in many industries, not just healthcare) tend to talk about customer experience improvements in terms of better, CX-specific metrics, they fail to connect those changes to things that matter to the decision-makers and budget-holders. On the other hand, when we talk about the impact that better CX can have on key business goals — increased revenue, lower cost, and improved resilience — I see those business leaders lean in and say ‘Tell me more.’” // I’m befuddled as to why this is still a problem after decades. Is this not institutionalized thinking in IT? That is, each generation has to rediscover this.

• Bike maker VanMoof also files for bankruptcy in Germany - I had no idea that this luxury bike company was in such bad shape. Their bikes sure seem awesome, but are hella expensive compared to the €80 beaters you can get that, you know, do the job just fine.

• The next generation of developer productivity - As ever nowadays, developer productivity is the top problem. Also, full CI/CD (or just good pipeline automation) is still hovering around 50% as it has been for a decade or more: “Over half of the respondents (51%) said that their organizations are using self-service deployment pipelines to increase productivity. Another 13% said that while they’re using self-service pipelines, they haven’t seen an increase in productivity. So almost two-thirds of the respondents are using self-service pipelines for deployment, and for most of them, the pipelines are working—reducing the overhead required to put new projects into production.” // I’m a little leery of survey like this because these the conclusions you’d make from there results seem to always be the case. But also, I didn’t read it in detail.

• PayPal Makes Strategic Moves With Expansion Of Venmo Offerings - Update on Venmo, especially the teen bank account features. A great example of creating new markets and features in retail banking. Also, some buy now, pay later (BNPL) stuff: maybe as great of a business now (having been sold off to PE)? // I always forget that PayPal owns Venmo: “What started as a bill-splitting, emoji-sharing social payments app has become a secure business transaction tool with increasing utility while remaining cool with the hard-to-please generations. No wonder Wall Street is impressed.”

• Checking In On ChatGPT - Text-centric AI best used for text-centric toil: “The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn’t quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more “boring” corporate tasks will always have its place.”

• Cloud-native approaches are now default software development practices - Highlights from a recent 451 survey. “Many organizations using cloud native expect their adoption of these technologies and architectures to become more ubiquitous over time. Among companies using cloud-native resources, approximately 60% say more than half of their applications are currently architected using cloud native, rising to 77% when organizations project two years into the future.” // “Homegrown cloud-native software development is strong. Looking specifically at how organizations are building and buying these services, 65% of organizations say at least 50% of their cloud-native software is internally developed.” // “Improvements to IT operations efficiency is accelerating as cloud native’s biggest benefit. Efficiency improvements continue to be the top benefit seen by organizations using cloud native (66% in 2023 versus 61% in 2022), while the role of cloud native in delivering sustainability is now moving front and center alongside security (respectively 45% and 44%). Improvements to developer speed and productivity (43%), cost reduction (40%), and improved time to market (40%) are other key benefits.” // “Fielded from May 4 through June 29, 2023, with a panel of IT decision-makers, 330 of whom were actively using or currently implementing cloud-native technologies and methodologies.”

• Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’ - Project versus product for happiness. Also, living life by waste book/commonplace book - something I certainly can appreciate. (Bit it a ringer it being Helen Garner, but don’t let that stop you.)

• Necronomicon all’italiana - Fantastic stuff.

• How Barbie Went Viral - “by creating meme-able content, centering your audience instead of yourself, inviting connection, and building in the right incentives, you can increase the odds of a lightning strike” // Yes, and…it is so exhausting to have to be your own marketing and social-media agency.

• Creating an integrated business and technology strategy - Use business strategy to drive tech activities. This series seems good.

• Non-knowing growing - “…non-knowing, growing. It’s what babies do when they learn to walk. They get up, they fall over, they get up, they fall over, and they gradually figure out what walking is. They don’t know how to walk.” // If you’re open enough to the universe, you make sure that doesn’t ever stop.

• Culture vultures - “Traditional word-based culture—and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category—is now a feeding ground for vultures.”

• MacWhisper is a tool I both do not use enough, and that you should use more.

d20 alone

I’ve played two, Dungeons and Dragons “solo” adventures, see afore mentioned American-vacation status. This format has a lot of potential. If you ever played the Lone Wolf books back in….uh…long ago…they are kind of like that. (Obviously, yes, they’re like the old choose your own adventure books, but much more intense with the rules and such.)

First, it was The Executioner’s Daughter. Then, the much praised The Death Knight’s Squire. They’re fun! The second is a classic, map driven “dungeon [and forrest] crawl.” The first managed actually do the type of adventure I liked to DM more: a story, without so much dungeon.

The encounter tool at D&D Beyond is super helpful for playing these. Otherwise tracking your character, an NPC, and four blood hawks would be tedious. That tool could be better, but it’s better than nothing. (I’m sure there’s all sorts of tools, I haven’t taken the time to look. I haven’t yet figured out the D&D online community, so I don’t know how to filter the crap from the good stuff yet.)

There’s a lot you could do with this solo adventure format. Maybe one day I’ll try. And I suspect there’s a good market it in. There must be millions of people like me who want to play but lack the social group to find friendly people to play with. I mean: I’m not going just go play with strangers online!

I’ve been tracking some narrative-tool ideas and “rules” of the format.

• I think the first one is: you can’t kill the player. I mean, come one, at a business-level, you can’t kill your customer. That’ll shit the bed on churn, account expansion, and TCV. The Executioner’s Daughter is good on this, the other, not so much. Otherwise, the player will cheat! (I mean, I’m not saying I did…just that…uh…it seems like some people would…). There should be a ground rule that you won’t kill the player (unless they want that) - bad things might happen, so the player should just keep going, but you need some kind of safety gap. The point is for them to have fun, after all!

• If it’s all digital (PDFs), you should take advantage of the infinite nature of digital stuff, as The Death Knight’s Squire does. And, also, in PDFs you can have links that follow the old “if you choose to eat the chicken leg, go to page 45” format. I almost think that you need to keep each scene as its own page in a PDF, not run together with the other scenes. So what if you PDF is 600 pages long? You have infinite space!

• You should include some brief instructions on how monsters will attack, tactics they’ll use. Will a dragon blow fire at you, or attack with claws? If a pack of four goblins gets down to one, will it retreat?

• Along those lines, you should prompt players to do some prep work and planning. Will they need torches?

• You should remind players to do things like eat, take rests, etc. The Death Knight’s Squire is pretty good at this, even building little loops in about finding a camp sight.

• I think there’s the potential to take, like, the wonderfully endless random encounter things Chris Tamm does and come up with some one page side venture and even role-playing scenarios. My favorite part of DM’ing and playing was always improvised, made up stuff between adventures…I mean, at some point, that’s what the adventures became. Again - you have infinite space, so you could just pack in 300 pages of this extra stuff and be like “go to page 243 and roll some dice.”

• If you were really ambitious, you could write some good prompts for ChatGPT, even putting them up as URLs so that the player asks ChatGPT to fetch the contents of URL (meaning the player can’t read it), and then ChatGPT walks you through a tiny side-story. Hmmmmmmm….. Maybe people do!

• The key to authoring these (as with all things) would be to streamline it as much as possible. Your customers would want it to never end, to keep going.

Anyhow. It’d be fun to make some.

(Or, you know, I should just find people to play with.)

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th & 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME, attending. Nov 6th to 9thVMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Logoff

I’ve been off the publishing grid for a while, even off the consuming the Internet grid. This is a mix of partial vacation (you European would call this “an American vacation” - why don’t I just fully commit to taking a days off? I have so many of them available. But, nope.), taking care of some family things, a renewed obsession with D&D, and the first crack in my workaholic nature for…20…even 30 years?

It is time for a few new habits, rather than bobbing along the waves of the old ones.

Return to the officeless-office

The most counter-whatyoudthink is probably to start going into the office more. My work has an OK-good office in upper west Amsterdam. It is a 40 minute bike ride, each way. That amount of biking a day would both give me more exercise than I’ve ever had in my life and also more lazy-mindfulness time than the same.

(By far, the thing I like about living in Amsterdam the most is biking. I don’t do it enough.)

But, the office lacks, well, offices, which is the huge problem with the anti-WFH people.

I have a whole desk-studio setup for all the videos and podcasts I do. Lights, camera, mic, and shit. There is no place for that at a regular white-collar office.

I bet if there were actually close-the-door offices at work, people would want to return more. But open plan offices are shit. Everyone knows this; you don’t need to go selective-bias find some HBR article or some McKinsey study.

Nonetheless, working from home with all of the distractions is too difficult. Plus, that bike ride…

Editing

The second change: when I say I’ve been “doing nothing,” what I mean is that I have not been publishing my own work. I have been doing plenty of work on other things: spending a lot of time editing others, writing an MC script, the grind of conference season scheduling, content prep, and planning for the future.

The general “helping others” is what I should get more comfortable with as real work.

I’m pretty sure I’m very good at editing and general content-creation, uh, “pedantry.” I am not good at spelling and typo-prevention - I am not a copyeditor. As a consequence, I value and respect copyeditors a huge amount. I am also wordy, etc. But this is a thing about editing: whether or not you can edit yourself has little to do with your skill at editing others.

There’s something in the weird mix of my skills at writing, narrative, speaking/podcasting, having gazed at my rhetoric-navel for 30+ years, my total unwillingness to be confrontational about anything, and then my taste that makes for comfortable, welcoming, but effective editing and content-creation shepherding. I don’t know. I should edit more people’s stuff.

After all, the Rhetoricians were my favorite. While Socrates and his crew were talking about some mystical, Truth bullshit, the Rhetoricians were getting shit done with words.

I’ve almost done enough of nothing to be ready to get back to doing more of something.

A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff

Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessions

I’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of MC script writing - creating it, and reading it. I wrote the MC script last year. And, you know, I’ve watched lots of main stage keynote dog and pony shows (and plenty of goat rodeos). Here’s some quickly typed out tips on writing the MC script:

1. The content is important, but the timing is more. You need to get a sense for how many words you can put in the slots. Then you can change the words around as much as needed.

2. Account for walking on and off the stage. I timed myself and it took me about 8 seconds to walk five meters, stop, and say, “Hi!”, including turning a corner at the start (like walking out from behind a curtain). So, double that to 16, round up to 20 if you want to be safe. If the MCs walk off as the people walk on, you can save some time. But, account for them maybe shaking hands, etc.

3. If the MC is introducing a video, then maybe you can just have the stage go dark and start the video as the MC walks off - saving that walk off time.

4. Read it out loud a lot, record it. This is for timing, but also to see if its easy enough to say the words, if it sounds “natural,” and if it can be read from a teleprompter.

5. I record each chunk on its own, watch the recording and time it, work on the text, re-record it, etc. This is better than doing it all at once and matches what the MCs will actually be doing too.

6. Instead of having the MCs walk on stage, you can always use the “voice of god” (VoG) for super quick intros. The voice of god is an unseen announcer. Keep these very short just name, title, and, optionally, topic, e.g.: “now please welcome Chris Christopher from Acme Inc.” This will shave down walking time and longer intro time. I’d use the same person for the VoG each time.

7. It’s good to do in-person intros (not VoG) for people you want to respect: executives, customer speakers, inspirational speakers, etc.

8. You should have the MCs be the first humans the attendees see and hear (there’s usually some opening thing, then they come out). The introduction can be super short, or long if you prefer. At a minimum it should be something like “Hi, I’m MC One. And I’m MC Two. Wow, welcome - this is so awesome, right? You’re tellin' me! Today you’re doing to hear some great stuff like this, and that, and that other cool thing. All your people are great, and the thing we’re here for is great. You’re going to hear about some great things that have been going on, some new great things we’ve been working on for you, and some great stories about people using and benefiting from the thing. Let’s get started with So and So…”

9. The MCs should generally acknowledge what was just said in the previous section, maybe adding something like “boy, that was great, right?” sort of thing. Their main job in the show is mix together the sessions and to introduce people.

10. Before you lock down the final draft, you probably want to have 30 to 60 seconds free for last minute additions and shifts. And then, on the day of, there’ll be changes for that, it’s probably good to keep the total MC script time about 30 seconds under allotted. This can be bonus time for other unforeseen things too.

11. The biggest job is the closing, or “house keeping.” The MCs should tell people what’s coming next, when significant, fun events are, and send them off with some encouraging advice, like to take the time to talk with people. You’re priming people for what to do.

12. Also, there might be some rookie mistakes you can help attendees avoid. For example, at some conferences, you have to reserve your spot in sessions, and they fill up fast. If that’s the case, you need to tell the audience - I never think to do that so I end up missing a lot of talks that were pre-booked. What are other things you can help them with.

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Oct 5th & 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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I was reminded this week that it’s good to get out of the house. You might not be surprised to know that I am terrible at that. People are actually great and life affirming to hang out with!

Also:

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about starting up livestreaming again. I don’t know - for whatever reasons. After way too much work on a few seconds of intro and outro videos,1 fucking around with a new YouTube thumbnail), and re-setting up OBS,2 I did a pretty successful PoC this morning. By “success,” I mean all the technical stuff, the content was just “hey guys!” type of stuff.

OBS should be all set up now so that I can quickly go in and just do them at near clock time. Thankfully, I have somewhere around or over 20 years of podcasting and just showing up and talking, so if I have a topic, or a question, I can go on and on…and on. Speaking of: if you have any questions or topics, send them to me. I questions-driven show is the best: no prep, and people tend to ask things I’d never think to talk about.

LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE…mofos.

I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out.

To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really. Also, I don’t think it’s really so sporting to have a first level character be able to do a harpy siren song thing. So, I made up a “half-harpy.”

We haven’t actually played this yet, so I don’t know if it “works.” I figure what you do is run it up against some goblins in an ambush, maybe getting a blacksmith to send you on a mission to find a lost apprentice or, like, investigate a pie-shop robbery. At first level, it’s always those fucking goblins, right?

Doing this was a great, I don’t know, exercise in AI stuff. I didn’t use ChatGPT for the text (I didn’t even think of that until now!), but I used Midjourney to make the paper and the images. Some notes:

1. I sort of figured out how to use the give it an image thing to start with; I don’t really understand it. I bet Adobe’s Firefly thing would be better at prompts where you upload an image and say, like, “except use a human head instead of a bird one, and add in human arms in addition to the wings.” That one of the female crouched down under the combat page is as close as I ever got, and that’s still not exactly right. If you put too much vulture in, you get those vulture faces. That’s why I added the line to the text that faces can range from human to bird-like - at least I typed that somewhere. And also the part about having either human or vulture feet. I would have preferred just vulture feet. Maybe I can figure out the prompts.

2. It is incredibly hard to figure out the prompt for “make a human with bird feed, a human torso, a human head, human arms, and wings. Make the hands have long talons.” I’d also like to say “make the people look normal!” Instead, they all come out hella heroic, chiseled, and mid-driffy. I tried all sorts of things, but the only thing that would change it was to say “chubby.” “Zaftig” didn’t work, norHer did “stout.” And, “average” or “normal” definitely did. There must be some prompt tricks for “make them look like normal people, not super-models.”

3. Without trying, one time it actually generated full on breasts for a female harpy! I always thought nudity was programmed out. This sort of makes sense: that’s such a thing with harpies that it’d be hard to program that out. All the other times, the female harpies were either dressed or had those nipple-less bulbs like you’d see on a creepy robot.

4. If you do enough of these, you’ll see the humans arms softly stretched out…just like statues and pictures of angels! It took me a long time to realize that, but clearly “human with feathered wings” sends it right to the centuries of angels, all of who always have their arms spread out in that lazy, well, angelic way.

5. My son wanted his characters to be a cleric, so I tried to make some religious symbols. I dunno.

6. That one eating is great! I’ll throw in a bonus of the female version:

   

   Here’s a link to my Midjourney profile if you want to see all the others that I didn’t use.

I have a one to two player adventure thought up. The one that comes with the D&D starter set is a little too much.

Wastebook

• Do I make plans based on what I want done, or what I want to be doing?

• The number one, recommended cure for procrastination is to just actually do the task.

• “Nature doesn’t tell stories.” Here.

• This is a good tofu recipe, except you should deep fry it. Deep frying is super easy, it just requires an insane amount of oil. Fill a wok, turn up the burner, and the cornstarch breaded tofu cooks right up just like you’d get in a restaurant. Why did I wait all these years?

• Speaking of D&D: The terrans are suspicious and fearful of the half-harpies - the ability to fly, the taloned feet and lack of high-intelligence (they’re “bird brained”!), vulture-like eating habits, and behavior makes them weird to the terrans.

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See y’all next time!

PSA: I recommend that you use your personal email address to subscribe to this newsletter. We're approaching and in layoff and job change season. Starting now to the end of the CY/FY, bonuses are paid out, promotions have been denied or gained, etc. If you're subscribed with your work email, consider switching to a personal email address.

📨 📨 📨 📨 📨

Hunting for the cloud native and kubernetes pay-off

This is an excerpt from my talk yesterday with Bryan Ross, his theory here is fun, clever, and probably right:

Check out the full interviews, I liked it a lot. The podcast version will be in the Tanzu Talk feed tomorrow if you want to subscribe to that and catch it while you’re vacuuming the floors this weekend.

Container usage by workload in enterprises, share of wallet, and plans

You know I love getting more info on how much container usage (and, thus, an indicator of Kubernetes usage) there is in enterprises. IDC has a deck of charts out looking into what survey respondents say are good uses of containers and where they run containers. Here’s one chart. It shows which types of workloads actually run in containers versus what people think is a good idea:

Here’s a comparison of spend on “traditional” infrastructure versus containers. Spend doesn’t represent an actual count of applications running in containers (the pricing for each unit of infrastructure could be very different, all the way to free!), but it’s useful nonetheless.

What’s worth noticing here is (1) spend on virtualization has been flat. This suggests that, at least when it comes to share of wallet, virtualization is not being reduced by containers - though growth certainly is. That said, you could also say that containers are reducing virtualization, but that virtualization is picking up workloads from non-virtualized infrastructure. (2) More importantly, there’s a big growth in spend on containers (which we can feel safe in saying means a rise in importance of containerized workloads, and probably growth in those applications).

Software vendors - any company! - love and focus on growth, even if it’s in absolute terms tiny year/year of year. It sound much cooler to say that you’re involved in a market that has a 46% growth than, like, 0%…even if there’s shit-tons more money in the 0% growth company. But, you gotta chase those new dollar bills.

Finally, people’s plans. I don’t put too much stock in plans (as you may recall, moving all the workloads to public cloud has been just around the corner for about 10 or 15 years now). But, this is great for gauging people’s interest, especially for vendors who are hunting out what to sell, what to talk about, and how to drive interest for sales meetings. You know, and actual predicting about the future use of containerized workloads:

Again, the most obvious take-away is that there’s more growth in container usage, And, again, the important thing to temper your glee with is that the growth should be a combination of new workloads and migrating old works, i.e., this isn’t a “share” of containers versus traditional workloads.

Also, if you look at the charts, the container label is “Containers (Mounted in Virtual Machines and Bare Metal).” That’s a complicated! So, for some number of containers, we still have traditional infrastructure in use. The containers are more providing (yet another!) layer of packaging, execution, and management for apps on-top of already existing types of infrastructure.

As ever, we’re in the eternal first inning of cloud.

The charts have some further splicing up of the responses which is useful. For example, some of the charts separate out SaaS companies from others, which gives you a better picture of what “normal” organizations are doing (SaaS companies seem to use containers a lot more, as you’d expect). Also, there’s cuts on company size: companies with a 1,000+ people seem to use containers more than smaller companies. Check ‘em out if you have access (you likely do if you’re in a big tech company), or want to fork over $4,500.

Open source and security? The Conference!

Isabel Drost-Fromm sends me this: "in the wake of the Log4Shell kerfuffle I talked to several friends - all of them told the same story of professional engineering teams struggling to figure out whether or not they are affected back then. As a result with a few friends I started FOSS Security Campus, trying to address both, beginners through trainings and advanced engineers through the talk schedule. " It’s in Berlin, Sep 26th to 29th this year. Check it out!

Wastebook

• “I guess that’s the power of a good sandwich.” Here.

• “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” The White Album, Joan Didion

• “To be clear, I think the paradigm of let[ting] people enjoy things was borne of good intentions, but it has demonstrably resulted in a deluge of crap. There’s good stuff in there, but it’s more jetsam than flotsam: hard to find, harder still to get a hold of.” Here.

• “Hah…I love that story…” Life-hack on how to make boring stories funny.

What replaces the smoke break?

Smoking used to be a little time for a break, often standing up and walking outside. A time to touch grass, in big cities, more often concrete.

I like the romance of the smoke break, also the relaxing feel of it. Almost an off moment of mindfulness.

Now, I suspect people "check their phone" is the little break. But that doesn’t seem the same.

I suppose you could have an espresso, or a quickly to make a small tea? Get a cup of one of those and go outside to drink it, looking around aimlessly and talking idly with whoever is doing the same?

It can’t be eating something, or, like “taking a walk.” Those are their own things. But, the Swiss have a culture of interstitial meals, one at nine between breakfast and lunch, another at four between lunch and dinner.

But all that doesn't seem exactly the same as a smoke break - healthier, sure. There must be something.

Having never smoked, I've never really experienced "smoke breaks," but it seems...nice?

Relative to your interests

• Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”

• Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.” // Shadow IT exists because people need something that IT is not giving them.

• The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank.”

• Where’s Assaf? - Holy shit! That is scary to hear and I’m glad he is recovering.

• Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70 - “I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

• Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor.”

• What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.0! (Well, in two to three years when the exec’s vesting wraps up.)

• Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk.”

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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se landscapes from Oswald Achenbach are amazing. I saw one in the Musee D’Orsay (used above), and, as with all paintings that play with light, you can’t really tell from the screen how magical it is. Here’s another one, you canost imagine what it’d look like in person:

Suggested vibe for this edition:

The eternal principles of an (enterprise) app stack

These are not all of them, but it’s a start.

1. The function of an app stack is to allow your developers to be creative, use fast release cycles, and create software that can run in production: that stays up and meets whatever compliance (regulations, security, etc.) you need.

2. We keep trying to merge the dev tools stack and the runtime tools environment into one platform. The market rejects this over and over again. At some point, we should try listening.

3. It follows that: you will probably end up with a separate stack of developers tools, middleware, and runtime infrastructure. Perhaps our best bet is to focus on a common “API” (in the Kubernetes sense of that word, which, coming from a app dev background, I find an absurd use of that notion, but the street finds it’s own uses, etc.) that makes it easy to interoperate and integrate all those separate parts. Builders will build. At least give them some common set of patterns and interfaces.

4. Still, I think this assemble a best-of-breed pile of parts is, I don’t know, pretty stupid. You’ll always end up with an integrated, monolithic stack (a “platform” as we say now). Just make sure it’s not an accidental platform. Fully integrated platforms are proven to work. When you try to take them away from app developers who’ve finally given them a shot, the devs beg with you to stop standing up Kubernetes. (But, I have little credibility in my opinion here. I no longer do software, I just do slides.)

5. Building your own app stack is a bad idea 90% of the time. Everyone will think they’re in that 10%, but, do the math. If you build your own app stack, you now own it and have become a software company. Software must be a core part of your capabilities a. Is IT a “cost center”? Then this will hard to impossible. Buy an integrated platform and developer tools, whether that means committing to a public cloud or buying a layer of abstraction to layer on-top (“multi-cloud”).

6. Your app developers will dislike whatever you (the infrastructure people) do. They are wrong, if you do your job well. App developers always want to use the newest, most interesting thing. They will say anything to justify using it, and then they will hide using it. App developers don’t appreciate the need for long term stability, agility (you can change things, add new features quickly), and compliance/governance/security. App developers don’t care about the “ilities.”

7. Infrastructure people have the opposite problem: they overvalue the ilities and sacrifice app dev usefulness for them.

8. Of course, “the business” has one last “ility”: all for free, without changing anything…ility.

9. We tried service delivery to solve this, but despite intentions, it just created a wall of tickets that slowed things down and made stack evolution too slow. (How long does it take a brand new developer to make their first code commit? Even at Spotify, this is constant battle. Imagine what it’s like at a 80+ year old bank that doesn’t even track that metric!) Service delivery is very good at delivering a known and needed service, it is not good at building systems around constant change, i.e., software development and delivery. Otherwise: why would we be constantly talking about all of this? The system is defined by what it does, not what the builder’s intentions we’re.

10. Try something new! Try product managing the app dev stack. Talk with the app developers every week and follow a small batch cycle to improve the platform.

11. Technology matters a great deal. What also matters is that your process (how your work, how your organize, how you people manage - “culture”) adapts to the technology you’re using. You can’t force-fit technology into a culture. Try changing the culture to work with your technology. Change culture first. If you can’t change the culture, you need to change the technology. If you can’t change the technology, you have to change the culture.

12. The business does not want to be eaten by software. “The business” still doesn’t understand the value of software, that it can be the core enabler of the organization’s strategy, optimization, and growth/profit. I’m not sure they ever will, so you have to constantly prove this with metrics and success. “Speak the language of business” to the business. (It’s not like us tech people understand how “the business” functions either - we should do rotations, at least through the corporate strategy group…and vice-versa. Post-DevOps, the business/IT wall is the next wall to bring down.)

13. Above all else: (1) define what “working” is for you, and, (2) if your ability to build and run software to run your business and improve your business is working, keep doing that. Otherwise, change. Don’t keep doing things that don’t work for what you need.

14. Here is the obligatory common sense quote to put in big letters on a slide: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all," Peter Drucker.

Vacation is unhealthy for work, work is unhealthy for vacation

When start a vacation, I have to quickly detox myself from the daily habits of work: seeking and executing tasks; an eye on long term deadlines; carving out a space to operate on a large, mature company; interpreting and responding to strategy and group think; valuing delivery, making things happen above all else. In short, thinking about work all the time, using constant scheming to hedge against uncertainty. This mindset can’t be turned off, it even invaded my dreams from time to time. There is no work/life balance, there’s only work/life interruption.

When I’m going on vacation I have to stop thinking about work and thinking in that get shit done mentality. I have to stop thinking.

I’ve finally gotten the time that that flushing out work-mind takes to about eight hours. It used to be two days or so!

Vacation mode has no goal, little planning. Just reacting to possibilities, or not. There is no constant business case evaluation that drives action. Perhaps I’ll think a few days ahead to book museum tickets or a restaurant, or know that on Monday many things are closed. But I might decide to just stay in the hotel room for the night and read a book, or just sleep. My goal is to relax, and to do things that are relaxing. My goal is not to maximize the ROI of time or money spent. My goal is not to produce or deliver.

When I come back from vacation, the shift back to work is jarring, and difficult. It’s like I’ve finally experienced what it’s like to “be normal”: to have life be your job rather than your job your life.

For a long time this was fine, mostly. My identity was so based on work enough (almost completely!) that it was easy to shift back. But, just like recovering from a night of drinking, as I age, it’s getting harder and harder.

Well.

Back to work!

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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The weekend in Paris with Kim was great. We spent hours in the Picasso museum and the Musée d'Orsay. At some point, I want to figure out how to go to all of the little galleries in a town, the ones with new, contemporary art. I do not know how that “work,” though. How you find the “real” ones, what you talk with people about if you’re confronted, how you prioritize and choose them: how you succeed at it.

Kim helped me discover a pathology of mine: if I don’t know how something “works,” I am afraid of doing it. This is probably why it’s hard for me to learn new things, and, thus, change and improve. It also limits my, like, experience of the world. The negative effect is compounded by my living in Europe where I always don’t know the languages, cultures, norms, etc.

I used to have a set-piece with my therapist on this: going to the butcher. In our previous neighborhood here in Amsterdam, there was a much aclaimed butcher just down the street. We don’t have much butcher availability, really, in the States, let alone sprawling Austin, Texas. (Instead, the grocery stores have plenty of good meat.) I love meat, and the meat in The Netherlands grocery stores is, well, you know, not to my Texan liking. The butcher had the good meat though. But, because I didn’t know how “going to butcher” works and I don’t know Dutch, I never went. It was a double hump of not knowing how something worked. Kim once got me a t-bone for father’s day, and it was magnificent. Somehow, I could get over that double hump and start gettinggood steaks.

Hopefully I can get over this needing to know how something “works.” At this point, it’s what’s holding me back. Sure, what I need to do is instead crave “learning.” But we all know what we should be doing and thinking, the trick is getting there.

***

No links this episode. I barely read anything online since last time. Instead, I read A Waiter in Paris over the weekend. It’s fun to read a book set in the place you are, especially on vacation. It was a good book, you should read it if you like that kind of thing.

This week’s Tanzu Talk podcast (video above) is all about developer experience, and COBOL:

"75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly" reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?

There were a lot of ideas and topics that we didn’t get to. Enjoy the episode, either as a podcast episode or in the unedited video stream.

“Platform Engineering is one of the hottest topics covered this year by The New Stack, but is it more than just a trendy buzzword? Is it really the killer of DevOps? Or rather, is it the missing piece to help deliver on the promises of DevOps?”

I reviewed a draft of this book and am quoted in it a bit. Jennifer Riggins writes good stuff, and this overview of platform engineering is comprehensive. As you know, dear readers, I’m delightfully flummoxed by what platform engineering is - at the moment, I think it’s just what we used to call “developer tools” with heavy injection of cloud native flavoring. This is fine, really.

You should check it out, it’s free. My work is sponsoring it, sure, but that doesn’t make it bullshit, at all.

Wastebook

• “No where is far, everything is here.” Howard Jacobson.

• “I ended up taking last Friday off because things happened at a time I wasn’t expecting, and sometimes I’m not good at adapting to that.” Sounds like me.

Relative to your interests

• How Infrastructure as Code Helps IT Teams Cope with Employee Churn

• Platform Engineering Not Working Out? You're Doing It Wrong, an interview - “Purnima Padmanabhan [head of the business unit I work in] of VMware discusses platform engineering and how it helps create a ‘golden path’ that speeds up not just development but overall agility for businesses.”

• Forrester VMware Executive Checklist for DevEx - “75% of IT and business executives say that their companies' ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly.” And, a DevEx definition: “DevEx represents the skills, tools, frameworks, and methodologies aimed at creating, maintaining, and enhancing code throughout the software delivery lifecycle from creation through production and improving developer productivity both individually and collectively.”

• When did people stop being drunk all the time? - Historical data suggests that people in the Middle Ages consumed about a liter of beer a day, around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

tl;dr: Open Source Congress in Geneva; How dangerous is the European far-right?; Tyler Cowen is an Information Monster; The Elon Effect; The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids; Delivery Needs a Strategy; How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World; Netherlands residents among most accepting of non-binary people, study shows.

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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Let’s see if the “tl;dr” concept works for a header. These are articles that I asked ChatGPT to summarize for me instead of reading the whole thing.

Thanks, again, to my mom being in town to watch the kids (and dog!), Kim and I are going on a weekend trip. This time, it’s back to Paris. I mean, of course, right? Last time we were there I goofed up getting tickets to the Musée d'Orsay, so I damn well booked some this time. I haven’t been there in a long time, and even longer without the, uh, delight of having kids in tow. They love them some Van Gough, you know, and you just can’t peel yourself away from it long enough to see all the other stuff.

If you have any good recommendations for Paris - eating, strolling, museums, site-seeing, zoning out - send them along to me. The only thing I try to do each time is get some steak frites at Le Relais de Venise, above. We’ve been to Paris a lot, but there’s an infinite number of things to do there. What are they?

I have another video today.

You've heard of pair programming and you probably think it's bonkers. Not many people benefit from this practice. Here, I go over how teams in the US military have been using pair programming to improve how they do software and spread that change to other teams. Some real DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!

Check out the blog post I based this on, it has a lot more on how other agile practices are helping out programmers in the DoD. And, as I mention, of course, all them free books you can get.

Relative to your interests

• Passing the anxiety parcel - “And in organisations there’s a phenomenon I sometimes call anxiety pass the parcel… The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely it is that you are going to be indulged by those below you, in trying to pass on to them your anxiety…. You think you are giving clear and direct leadership, but you’re also in a way, on another level, saying to the people below you here, you, you have my anxiety.”

• Chris Elliott’s Friday Night Videos Collection, 1987–88 - This is the kind of thing that I ate a lot of in my media diet as a kid. With decades of perspective, I am intrigued by how this kind of stuff influenced me and my overall style.

• Open Source Congress in Geneva - There’s a lot going on in the open source world at the moment, apart from licensing hijinks. Many more real-world things, e.g.: ’With the war raging in Europe, US/China rivalry heating up and AI promising to completely redefining our way of life, it is of little surprise that Open Source communities have increasingly heard alarm bells go off. As an overarching community, we’ve deal with export controls and suddenly being told to exclude contributors to projects. We’ve seen valuable contributors from certain countries excluded simply because of actions their leaders took that they had absolutely no path to influence. Some even fled their country and moved their entire families and lives. We’ve been asked how to handle contributions of AI generated code by hundreds of maintainers. We’ve had to defend and remind people that OSI is the organization that decides what licenses qualify as “open source” (particularly with SDOs). We’ve even had the perpetual “are you dead yet?” argument thrown around. Even if you consider just the regulatory issues facing open source in 2023 - including the CRA, PLD, AI Act (EU), Securing Open Source Software Act (US) and other examples - it is clear that the least various Open Source organizations can do is to educate the lawmakers on the consequences of their [in]actions and then prepare for the inevitable fallout (if they don’t listen). This includes preparing for things that will, if mandated by law, put an additional burden on all of Open Source organizations…' And, Roman goes on to list some.

• DevRel Management and Leadership: Guidance, Skill Development, and Book Recommendations.

• Banking as a service: The role of banks in powering the fintech industry - It does seem nuts to be a white-label bank, that is, someone else is the front-end and “owns” the customer: ’"As the low-cost provider to somebody else who owns the relationship, you’ve just sold your soul to the devil. … [W]e need to own the customer relationship, and we need to deserve to own the customer relationship through an offering that doesn’t need that fintech platform on the front end."’ // However, this is also the classic setup for disruption. The incumbent can’t go downmarket, follow the new model because it would damage their business, is not profitable compared to other things they could do, and just seems stupid. We’ll see.

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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There’ve been some good blog posts on the Tanzu blog recently, but they don’t seem to get many views. So I wanted to see if I could drive some traffic to one of them that I liked.

In the video above, I tried multi-cam editing but by filing one video (on my iPhone) directly into Descript, and another one (with my “real” camera) with QuickTime. Syncing them up in Descript was pretty easy. Detail has a better method for cutting between scenes (a very good, clever method, with key shortcuts, that cuts the video and switches to the other camera at the same time). It’s weird that Descript doesn’t have multi-cam recording, but, whatever.

Software people are bad at estimating

Here are three ways that software people (developers, mostly) are bad at estimating:

1. Estimating the feasibility of writing code for new features, that is, the risk of failure - if the new feature is difficult to impossible to write, or just doesn’t work altogether. Generally, it’s a lot harder than it seems because of all the things apart from the actual feature. What will the new feature conflict with, will it be compliant? Will the code changes mess something up? How about the new edge cases, exceptions, and error handling you’ll need? And, if you’re shipping in multiple countries, you’ll need to worry about regional differences, requirements, and laws.

2. How long writing and shipping new features will take. I’d start by tripling any estimate a developer gives - if their estimate was right, you’ll be happy. Of course, if they can demonstrate that they’ve kept their promises over the years, believe developers a little more. But even then, you’re going to be asking them to do new things, take new risks, so they’ll need to re-calibrate their velocity.

3. The value/impact of new ideas and tech. Developers generally think that new technologies are good and valuable…pretty much simply because they’re new. They’re very influenced by fashion (that’s how us thought leaders keep employed!), and very eager to try new things before they’re tested and proven. Before they’re “boring.” Developers will respond to this passion by wanting to do new things, often just because they’re cool. Sure, they’ll tell you there’s a - if they even use this term! - business reason, but, you know, it’s not like they got a study from Bain on that. Likely, it was just a blog post from someone at Netflix or Spotify. For example, serverless, microservices, kubernetes, etc.

This third is related to “resume driven development,” where developers pick a new technology to use to learn how it works and fancy up their resume. However, it’s not as direct as that: developers are always seeking better tools, methods, and thinking.

These new things may be better, but until they’re proven out, it’s very risky to use them in you’re a large organization. If you already have tools and methods that, basically work, you don’t want to take on the risk of using a potentially GROUND BREAKING new technology that, more than likely, will be less than that, and even slow you down.

In the past few years, many people suffered from this with kubernetes. Their developers said they could build out Kubernetes-based platforms, and many failed. There’s not a lot of conference talks from those people, but when if you’re trying to sell to infrastructure people, you hear those stories a lot.

Webinars are good

(Meta-note: I did this video today to test out Detail some more. I was looking for how quickly I could make a multi-cam video and do the round-trip, idea to publish. Detail still doesn't have non-destructive editing [at least, as far as I can tell you can’t go back to any clip and re-adjust your cuts, you can only got back in the Ctrl-Z undo queue), and I can't zoom the timeline in as much as I'd like. I like adding text to videos [you can see how the text is behind my head in the above thumbnail], but I couldn't figure out how to have the text appear for just a moment, instead for the whole "scene." I usually use Descript [or Lumafusion if I'm feeling "pro-am" or purely on my phone], which I'll stick to. I sure do like the whole vibe and mindset of Detail, though.)

Wastebook

• NPC syndrome - I always feel like I’m a character in someone else’s story. I feel bad for them, defer to them, work on what they need. I feel good about that when it goes well, shamed when it doesn’t, and resentful when I don’t get what I want. (I should think of myself more as the main character?)

• “Dads don’t say ‘rad.’”

• There’s really nothing new to say shout all the Twitter stuff. It just continues to be stupid and driven by a misunderstanding of…real life. Each wave brings some articles trying to analyze it, but the answer is all the same: that dude doesn’t know what he’s doing, and doesn’t know so much that he can’t tell that he doesn’t know. This is something. Also: people who are not “normal” will do weird things given the chance, power/money, and enough years to fart around. This can result in good, abnormal results (getting electric cars, rockets, satellite Internet into the market), but also results in a bunch of bad, abnormal results. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc.

Chart Party: CFOs and CEOs Prioritize Growth, While Other Priorities Differ Slightly

Relative to your interests

• “My Bluesky experience so far has been mostly terrible…” - “I really don’t like the website interface – it feels like something I might have put together myself. Notifications fail to clear, and the same posts are always just there for some reason. I don’t follow enough people, is no doubt part of the problem.”

• Does ‘Buy American’ Policy Make Sense? The Answer Is Key for Your AI Portfolio Too - “The bottom line isn’t that the digital revolution has had no impact on productivity, but that the gains from offices and factories introducing enterprise software and smartphones have mostly accrued to the makers of enterprise software and smartphones. American corporations rule the world because they make tech, not because they use it better.”

• AlmaLinux discovers working with Red Hat isn’t easy - Some follow-up, “how it’s going” meme-style stuff from the RHEL open source drama.

• Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness. - ‘Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds. The rules aren’t particularly unique: Get fit, pick up a skill, talk to women instead of watching porn all day. But if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.’ // Also, towards the end, the most action packed description of a Zoom call you’ll ever read. // Possible good traits: “Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.”

• The DoD: A Compelling Case for Extreme Programming - Good overview of why/how the practices in Extreme Programming (XP) help the needs of the military, and fit the constraints and challenges they have. For example, spreading knowledge with paired programming manages high turn over in staff.

• Free Lunch - Some strong Amsterdam type vibes here. // “Free Lunch is an all-caps display font that would look comfortable in a butcher shop window. Or a lunch counter menu in 1955. Or printed on the waxed paper that wraps a half-pound of Swiss cheese from your neighborhood deli. A little playful, great for headlines and logos.”

  

• Workin’ for the Man - This is how most all request driven processes (you have to file a ticket) end up being gamed by users: “So I think the winning technique is simply to flood their input queue with issues and eventually one will find a chink in the armour and reach an intelligent human being who Just Fixes It.”

• Nobody cares about your blog. - The post is pro-blogging, obviously. We should try to bring back blogging (or blogs masquerading as newsletters, whatever). With the collapse of Twitter, there’s lots of text based people who need an outlet.

• Oracle’s revised Java licensing terms 2–5x more expensive - ’a hypothetical organization with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable for the “Named User Plus” (NUP) license as per the legacy subscription model. That organization is also running Oracle JDK on 5,000 processors, and as such would pay $742,500 for NUP licenses and $900,000 for processor licenses under the legacy deal. The new Universal Subscription model would cost it about $3,118,500, a 90 percent increase in price.’

• Why they’re smearing Lina Khan - Outcomes based regulation: “There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click. The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!”

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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After reading an IDC report on Dell acquiring Moogsoft, I wrote a long piece with advice on hardware companies acquiring software companies. Also, a list of other types of acquisitions. I did this kind of work at a previous job (Dell of all places!), so I feel I have some first hand experience. However, since the place I’m working at is in the process of being acquired, it seemed like a bad idea to publish it. Maybe one day! Here’s an older (2016) piece on the topic - it’s not too great. The thing on estimating is from that longer piece.