Lots of original content this week, starting with this prediction about “enterprise AI”: I also made these since last episode: Another go-round at figuring out playing D&D with ChatGPT. It went pretty well! Here’s my retro/analysis of it, and here’s the actual play session with inline commentary. I was the guest co-host on this week’s Cloud Foundry Weeklywhere we discussed the new features in the Tanzu Application Service 6.0. We, of course, spent a lot of time on the generative AI beta stuff that’s included.

I don't think we really know what "enterprise AI" is yet, what apps will be helpful. So you need to just mess around and see what works. Come on a dog walk with me in Amsterdam and I'll tell you more. Check out the experimenting we're doing with private AI in the VMware Tanzu Platform. LogoffNo links or anything today, just the video above which I liked making. Will people actually watch six minute and 12 second video?

Here’s two things of mine to check out: What we do at my workWe broadcast our updated Tanzu overview yesterday. I MC it and do a Q&A session at the end. I tried to get a lot of my views of the platform engineering, what we do, build vs. buy, and the usual stuff in through my questions and the intro and outo parts. It’ll give an idea of what people do with our stack, you know, when it comes to building, running, and managing their apps.

From Dungeon Magazine#41, May/June 1993.Relative to your interestsSometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! - Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware - How can you start to take a design/UX-driven approach to building your platform (you know, your pile of Kubernetes stuff to pull it all together for app developers)? Whitney Lee & Abby Bangser have a good mind-model to think about designing the interfaces (how people use parts of that stack).

Many of the videos from KubeCon EU are on YouTube now, just days after the the talks were given. That’s pretty great! Here’s three talks from the Platform Engineering Day that I really liked. They’re primarily focused on what I’d call designing and product managing a platform. I’m a fan of the “platform as a product” notion - I came across it around 2016 or so at Pivotal and saw many organizations apply it.

I’ve written a few (little) business books, reviewed several, and reviewed several proposal for business books. Here’s what I think works well in proposals you’re sending to publishers: The publisher is in it to make money first, “important” content second. Your proposal is a business pitch, not an idea pitch. Make sure you talk about who the audience is, why they will buy the book, and why your topic (the market for the book) is hot, or at least, room temperature.

Wastebook“portal platform.” #outmeated. “Those sizzlers are nice.” “Tell him I’m eating,” 9 minutes in. “chair-use disorder.” Here. “Is a platypus a Kubernetes symbol? Developers love to take scary things and make them cute.” (Overheard in the crowd before a Cory Quinn talk at SCaLE 21x.) Also: “what about you, Charles, what are your thoughts on Terraform…and DevOps in general.” KLAUS KREMMERZ.Relevant to your interestsStudy finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less - “A new study out of Germany suggests that once you let people try them, they tend to have a real impact on car use, and even car ownership.

This is from last Fall at the SHIFT conference, but it still holds up: Relative to your interestsWhy Are Pants So Big (Again)? - tl;dr: you can wear comfortable jeans again. // “There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself” And: “If you zoom out far enough, all the paroxysms around self-presentation arrange themselves into an orderly, eminently predictable swing between big and small – you could call it the pants pendulum.

Re: “Bad” StrategyStrategy is people, and in a corporate setting, all the wonky parts of people are amplified. In the places I’ve worked, the lower down you go in the organization, the less relevant strategy is. What’s relevant is the actions you can take, not the outcomes the executes are going for with their strategy, let alone anything resembling a classic big-S Strategy. Besides, unless you have a huge chunk of equity, you get paid the same no matter the outcome.

Just links today. Relevant to your interestsTwo methods for designing better, more developer friendly platforms - Two ways to make good platform product management decisions: go to where the developers are, ask the developers // a little article by me. Platform Engineering: Orchestrating Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure - A big overview of platform engineering. Also: Syntasso gettin' into the devrel game! Forrester: Tips for assessing hybrid cloud management - All these years later, enterprise workloads are still running on all the clouds, public and private.