Have you tried having less?Standardized. Centralized. Consistent. Those words I use over and over when talking about platforms. In large organizations, you’ve got hundreds, even thousands, of applications. There are likely tens of “platforms”: the stacks of runtime and middleware goo that all those apps run on. Maybe even hundreds if the company is large enough, old enough, and has gone through enough acquisitions (most all global banks). The more of those platforms your have, the more time you’ll spend managing them, governing them, securing them, and figuring out how to trouble-shoot problems.

Once again, I am bringing you only links and funny pieces of text. Relative to your interestsMeasuring Engineering Productivity, at Google, circa 2020 - “If the decider doesn’t believe the form of the result in principle, there is again no point in measuring the process.” // Some great advice in here about improvement programs. Come up with metrics and needs from the (economic/strategic) stakeholder who has the power to make changes.

Hello there! Wastebook“I spent my early childhood in a 15-minute city. It was called the 1950s.” Here. “a cybercriminal selling data from these breaches told its researchers that they had been able to compromise a Snowflake employee’s ServiceNow account using credentials stolen via infostealer malware, bypassing SSO provider OKTA.” // Security in 2024. What a bowl of dropped pasta. Here. Money is real: “Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people.

State of Spring Survey 2024The State of Spring Survey 2024 is out, you can get it for free, of course. Spring is widely used by Java developers, and Java is widely used for enterprise app development. Thus, what Spring people are doing is relevant to what large organizations are doing in software development. Let’s take a look at some of my hand-picked highlights1 from the survey: Microservices are here to stay.

Enterprise AI in HealthcareHere’s my interview with my co-worker, JT Perry, on actual uses (current and possible) for AI in healthcare. It’s good! Watch it all: There’s a podcast version if you prefer audio only. Wastebook“a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will ‘seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto–through creativity and technology–working with creators.’” Here. “I don’t do anything. I’m just the center of a rat king of chaos.

The Tanzu Platform - platform engineering in a box for private cloudThis week, at my work, we launched the Tanzu Platform. This is both actual, new things and strategic tuning of many of our existing products. In brief, we’re focusing a lot more on private cloud PaaS now, and private cloud data services. (Sure, you can do public cloud stuff too, and our customers tend to both, with a lot of private cloud.

Just wastebook and links this episode. WastebookIf you’re a writing type suffering from imposter’s syndrome, spend some time as an editor. You’ll soon discover that writing is incredibly hard, so if you can pull it off, you’re the real deal. “Preview The Magnitude Of Our 2024 Agenda” - subject line of a Forrester email. Alex: “So you want training data for my replacement?” Son: “Well, at least until they unfreeze your brain.

Just links and waste book today. Wastebook“If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it,” me, 2011. Follow and mute. “Dell’s employees, whom I believe are mostly adults and not small children, will be given colour-coded ratings to shame those who don’t come into the office enough.” Justin Warren’s newsletter, “The Crux #93.” “Largest companies most likely to deploy via YAML” - slide title from cloud native platform survey. “A Lot of Spain Looks Like Arizona… Except for the Parts of Spain that Look Like Massachusetts.

Today it’s just a links and wastebook clean out. Two Recent Garbage Chairs on AmsterdamI’ve found a few Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam recently. Truth be told, I stopped looking. When I moved here, the locals were bemused about all my photos “I never really thought about that,” they’d say, “but; yeah, there are a lot of garbage chairs!” I’ve got to get that sense of wonder back. (I seem to have deleted wherever I kept the archive of all these.

When it comes to cloud native application platforms, we’re at an important evolutionary point: will the best practice for platform strategies be to build or to buy? Should you choose the components you need for a platform and integrate them together, or should you buy a pre-integrated platform? Unless you’re a handful of organizations, the practical answer is that you should buy the platform. Before I get to why, what even is a “cloud native platform”?