The week so far, a selection

I don’t really know what “platform engineering” is

Last episode I shared the the email Q&A I had for an article about platform engineering. The finished article is up, much nicer edited than just copy and pasting my email. It’s part of the buzz around the SHIFT conference next week, which I’ll be at, in Zadar, Croatia.

Wastebook

• Always use the cloakroom for your backpack at a museum. No need to carry it around.

• Adding peanuts to soup is a genius move.

• It’s hot all over northern Europe. They are not prepared for this at all. I was in the brand new Berlin airport for several hours and the AC wasn’t up for it. Europe is in for ten years or sweating their asses off for ten or so years until they figure this out. Now is the time to invest in HVAC, cologne, and handkerchiefs.

• If you’re going to use an animated gif in your presentation, you should have it loop for, like, five seconds max. You don’t want it to run over and over for minutes as you talk through the slide. (You know, convert it to an MP4 and then you can tell PowerPoint to just play it once.)

• “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” -Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project

• “I knew what time it was by watching TV” Tom Hanks

• Watering the Plants: “I wonder what’ll happen when I get a job I like. Will I keep these hobbies? I’ll have the knowledge, sure, but will I apply it, or go normal Jesse-workaholic mode and just throw myself into the job, ignoring all my previous escapes from reality?” And: “I used to be in the conference circuit and loved speaking all around the world at various user groups, conferences, and workshops. Speaking about tech you are passionate about in front of large, eager groups of strangers is intoxicating.”

SpringOn Tour in London, Oct 12th

If you’re a Java programmer in the London area, you should come check out the free SpringOne Tour conference on 12 October in London. It’ll give you a great overview of the latest in Spring, platform engineering and IDPs, and all that cloud native programming stuff:

I’m MC’ing it and will moderate a Q&A at the end. Come check it out - I mean, it’s free, and better than going into the office that day, right?

Logoff

One day, when I write some kind of book like Confessions of a Tech Marketing Hustler, I’ll figure out a chapter on this: the dissonance between being on the road and then being at home. As she says:

The city looks pretty when you been indoors
For 23 days I've ignored all your phone calls
Everyone's waiting when you get back home
They don't know where you been, why you gone so long

Friends treat you like a stranger and
Strangers treat you like their best friend, oh well

In the enterprise tech life-on-the-road, uh, life, you exist in a spick and span world of daily showers, well cleaned and air conditioned hotels, fancy meals, and smily handshake meetings. You expense everything, and shuffle along in a TV-show-like luxury world. Then you get home, and it’s just like real life. Dirty dishes, kids that need help with homework, exhaustion at the everyday things. This is all “fine,” of course: it’s the ping-ponging back and forth that can make you lose your mind.

This is a thing where, I think, if you know it’s going to happen, you can prevent it from happening. Rather, you can see yourself getting all tangled up during this transition and say “ah! I know what’s happening here - so I’ll stop it.”

Sometime later…

By topic-coincidence, I had lunch with my old pal Robert Brook who’d been on a multi-country train tour recently. He asked about this same problem: how does one deal with the cognitive exhaustion of so many life context switches? I think what I do is this: I make myself be OK with a drop in productivity. That is, I’m happy to “do nothing.”

When I’m traveling for work, giving a talk or having one meeting, I’m basically intensely at work for 2 hours: the 30 to 60 minutes of giving a talk, and making sure I show-up on time before that. You’d think I could fill the rest of the time with, like, writing a blog post (a newsletter?), editing some videos, making some videos. You know, just pull out your selfie stick and excoriate executives for being asleep at the wheel, or some such shit.

But, no. You will not do that. You will not have the brain power or the energy to be productive. The good news, having given a talk, having had a meeting with some prospects, having sat through a five hour EBC, dog and pony…you will have been productive. You will have done your work for the day, and you may space out. You may stare at a Deutsche Bank airport ad and contemplate the failed life.

The same is true for hectic tourism. There’s much advice about how to have a good vacation, how to be a good tourist. Here is mine:

1. There are three types of vacations: going to a beach, going to an event/amusement park, and going to a place (usually a city).

2. When you go to the beach, you do exactly that. You stay in a house or a hotel at most, a five minute walk from the beach. You wake up everyday and, if you’re someone who’s finders can automatically type out the word “productivity” perfectly, without having to do spell correct each time, you will think: “What will I accomplish today? Where do I need to go?” And then, as you figure out how to make the coffee machine work (again), your mind will kick in (rather, slink in), and say, “no, no. You are already doing it. You are at the beach. Productivity is now maxed out. You will either sit here, enjoying your coffee, or you will sit on the beach, enjoying the sun and the water and the sounds. Perhaps you’ll have a hamburger later, maybe a beer, or a cup of fruit if you’re lucky. And then, you come back here and sleep, and then away to the beach again. Golly, my KPIs will be maxed out in no time.”

3. When you go to an amusement park (Disney, Legoland, etc.) there is more “work” to be done, sure. But it’s like being at the airport. You just are comfortable waiting in lines and you sort of space out while you stand there. Do the kids want to eat awful corndogs, terrible fries, and other shitty fried food? Well! Let them! You are hitting your quarterly goals out of the park. You just shuffle along, going to things at whatever time they’re at, letting kids enjoy a tea cup ride or just playing in a sandbox for three hours.

4. When you go to a place, usually a city, there are more options. Your first goal is to get a sense for what normal life is like there. For this, I suggest walking around in a neighborhood, and spending some time in a few grocery stores. Being Just imagine what it’d be like if you lived here, and you had to get kids to school each day, figure out how to hire someone to clean your gutters, but also just sit on your stoop enjoying a fashionable rose, or lager. This is being a flâneur, which is all you really need to do when being a tourist. The second thing to do is to go a museum of some sort. You don’t need to see it all, or even the most famous things, just pick one period to look at. (The Mono Lisa is highly overrated, but all Van Gough painting are, despite their fame, very underrated - you should always see a Van Gough, each one will be amazing, no matter how many times you see it - the Dutch Masters [Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc.] are equally so, but it takes some training: no one likes bourbon or Scotch the first ten times they drink it, but on that 11th time, you think, “ah, I see what’s happening here - er, yes…well…I might just need to try it a few more times to make sure though…”). For example, you could go to Musée d'Orsay and just plan to look at the art deco interior design and furniture. Or the Rodin statues. If you happen to stroll by the other art, how thrilling for you! The third thing you should do is spend an annoyingly long time at a cafe, coffee shops (standard, or Amsterdam-style, I suppose, as your life-style dictates) restaurant, or a bookstore. Even just shopping works. There’s also, of course, nature, but that just seems like a type of walking about aimlessly.

In all of these cases, I hope what you see is that doing nothing is the goal. You can’t waste time if you weren’t looking to spend it wisely in the first place.

And, please, if you’re looking to be productive while you’re traveling for work: don’t do it. You’re just making it harder for the rest of us to look good.

Press Pass

I’m speaking at the SHIFT conference next week in Zadar, Croatia. Here’s some questions they asked me ahead of time for their ShiftMag outlet. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t send the third one in and saved it up for this here newsletter.

(1) Where do you stand in the DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering debate?

I guess by stance you mean “are these things different, or all the same thing, really?” I go back and forth on this a lot. The sum total of both is helpful - they’re both giving helpful practices and changes that organizations can follow and make to get better at how they do software.

It’s fair to say that the first wave of platform engineer thought-leadering was harsh on DevOps, but I think that early “DevOps is Dead” take has dissipated.

The platform engineering community is doing a great job of promoting the idea of product managing platforms, the notion of a platform itself. What exactly platform engineering means isn’t exactly sorted out yet. It either means “everything” or it might mean building and maintaining up the developer tools and runtime environment (the platform).

I don’t think we really know yet since the concept of platform engineering is. It’s only like, what, two years old? We can predict what it will be using the old trick of “most things in the future are a continuation of the past.”

I don’t really know if I’m part of the core platform engineering community, so I’ve recently stopped myself from trying to define it. I’m too much of an outsider at this point.

(2) How do you define developer platforms?

I define it mostly as everything above IaaS - what we used to call PaaS. For whatever reason, people don’t like to use “PaaS” anymore, but it pretty much perfectly defines what a “platform” is. I mean, it’s right there in the name of Platform as a Service.

You could also throw in developer tooling like CI/CD piplelines and the collaborative sites/consoles/dashboards developer use (internal developer portals - another category figuring itself out). If those tools are tightly integrated with the platform to make building, deploying, and running the applications better, it’s probably worth including them in the definition of “platform.”

(3) Another hot topic, connected to developer platform is – developer experience. What would you say is good (internal) developer experience and what would some of the killers of DevEx be?

That’s easy to answer but hard to get right. In general, good DevEx is when your developers can get their code to production fast. Of course, it shouldn’t be bad code, insecure, and all of that. Good DevEx should be when developers don’t spend a lot of time on “toil” or work that can be automated instead. Bad DevEx is when they have to file tickets and wait for things.

On the other hand, sometimes you need to do these things for good reasons. You might have compliance and laws you need to conform to or get shutdown by the government. In those cases, you can likely improve DevEx if you know how to apply new tools and ways of thinking to old governance processes, but you might not ever get to the point where developers can deploy at will, multiple times a day. And, you know, I don’t know if I want my bank having that much innovation on a daily basis.

I know this is a kind of consultant-talk, airport book mystical answer to your question, but I’d say the best way to measure developer experience is to ask them “are you happy with how you’re do your job?” And if they say “yes,” you have good developer experience. If they say “no,” you should ask them what could make it better.

I’m not sure I really like the term “developer experience” very much anyway. “Developer productivity” is a little better, but “productivity” is more of a business metric than, like, a human metric. Businesses care about productivity because it means they increase their profit (literally and metaphorically): we can do the same amount of work with less effort than we used to. It used to take the developers and IT four weeks to deploy a new application, now it takes one week.

You can see why productivity can turn into the enemy of an individual: if I’m a profit-hungry business, instead of giving the IT staff three weeks off now, the business ask them to fill those weeks with even more work. And you also probably don’t give them three more weeks worth of pay: you probably still pay them the same thing.

Productivity can certainty help the individual feel like they’re doing a good job, and get a sense of fulfillment. I feel great when I’ve done a lot of work that I know matters. But at some point, whatever effort and change-stress an individual puts into being more productive doesn’t get them much, if any, reward.

But, developer productivity metrics are probably good for measuring if things are in good working order.

(4) And, why do you say they have been a thing for at least 10 years? Why are they in the spotlight now then?

We had Heroku back in the late 2000’s, then Cloud Foundry was based on that, and some other PaaSes and accidental platforms. Companies like Mercedes-Benz, JP Morgan Chase, several militaries, and others have been running platforms like those for 5, seven, ten plus years.

What I like to do in my talks is catalog the practices they’ve learned over those years, what works and doesn’t. I’m especially interested in what very large, usually 30 to 50+ year old organizations are doing with their platforms: how they make it work for thousands of developers. As a community, we tend to dismiss the wisdom of teams like this because they’re not using the next great technology. But, the ways to run a platform are pretty much constant over time, especially in larger organizations.

I think “platforms” are in the spotlight now because most organizations have finished their first round of putting kubernetes in place. It took several years to figure that out and start seeing more use in the mainstream. Once you get kubenetes up and running, then you need to start building a platform on-top of it: you have to add all that other stuff that developer use.

To pick one of the things out of the talk: the most important thing if you want to have a good platform is immediately start product managing it and think of application developers as your customers. Whatever team is building the platform should be talking with application developers all the time (weekly or so) and getting feedback on what works well for them, what doesn’t work, and if recent changes to the platform have improved things. You’d think this is what operations people who run this kind of thing do, but they’re usually more focused on the state and status of the system - if it’s running, if it’s secure, etc. - rather than the usefulness of the platform to developers.

For a more detailed discussion, if you haven’t checked it out already, you should read Jennifer Riggins’ platform engineering report, it’s free thanks to VMware:

I talked with her a couple times for it and reviewed the text ahead of time. 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 :)

Checked Bags

You know how it is: as an expat, when you go back to the US, you bring back some food, clothes, toys, books (in English), and so forth. Pinto beans are hard to find in The Netherlands as are fresh made HEB tortillas, of course.

This time of year it’s candy corn. Yup: five pounds of it. But also the makings for s’more’s. Country-to-country, candy turns out to be one of the last, unique cultural artifacts of everyday life. And, of course, in the 50+ little countries that is the United States, this can be state-to-state. Anyhow, I heard awhile back that IKEA makes great duffle bags for this kind of thing, the FRAKTA. They pack small, are very sturdy (they’re made from the same stuff as those big blue IKEA bags), and are cheap. Checks out! It works great. Here’s one going from Des Moines to Amsterdam:

Upcoming

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

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 to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 12th SpringOne Tour London Oct 9th SpringOne Tour Amsterdam Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

It’s 9pm here in Berlin. I’m speaking at stackconf tomorrow, then I’m off to London for SREday (both above). I’ve been reading Legends and Lattes, and it is super fun!

Confusing outcomes with capabilities

I don’t have this sorted out well, but the baby keeps crawling on me to remind me to chill the fuck out about being a professional thought leader and be more of a professional dad. (That’s right, I’m blaming my three year old for the shoddiness of the below!)

In the technology world, you are taught to think in terms of “outcomes,” or “business outcomes” to use the longer jargon. An outcome is the final effect a technology, decision, or change has. It’s a variation of “the means justify the ends.”

What does this technology help us achieve? Revenue, security compliance, faster app response times, developer productivity, migration, etc.

As ever, things are not cut and dry, but I’d say the two other ways of thinking about a tool are capability and price.

Capabilities are things like “run on Windows,” a general programming framework, a service mesh, a configuration tool, any given open source project…this a way of thinking about the tool as the tool. When you think of technology’s capabilities, you’re not really asking “and will that be useful to us?” Of course, “it works” is an assumed feature.

Price is obvious: it is either more than you want to pay, or less than you want to pay. Or, you know, Goldy Locks. Whether it’s a capability you want or it achieves the outcome you want doesn’t matter: it’s the number you want. For handful of of technologies, price is a feature, but not nearly as much as in handbags, t-shirts, and koozies. In general, there is only one price enterprise buyers want: cheaper.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk about mixing up outcomes with capabilities.

In the infrastructure space, we’re really bad at allowing those two to intermix, even treating them as the same thing, instead of keeping them separate.

To illustrate it: there are very few things that give you the outcome of developer productivity. Even defining “developer productivity” is stacking the deck for what you want to argue. I’ll define it as “allowing developers to do more work, ship more often, and probably be happier.” You could make it too vague and say “create the most business value with the shortest amount of time and cost.” As it says: productivity! This usually means removing toil from developer’s day-to-day lives, automating/eliminating manual reviews and meetings, speeding up onboarding (getting faster laptops and test labs), and automating as many things as possible (tests, building, deploying, monitoring, managing). MY DEFINITION IS NOT GREAT, MOVING ON.

(There is another thing we do too much in marketing and that is to think about “developer productivity” as a business outcome which…it could be…but I don’t think most businesses are that sophisticated in how they think about their software strategies. For example, if you’ve historically outsources your custom programming, you’re probably not sophisticated enough. In contrast, as I learned in a recent DevOpsDays talk, John Deere does look at its software factory as a core function so they can think of developer productivity as a pure business outcome. ANYHOW.)

Here is the problem: when you sell, evaluate, use, or otherwise think about a technology based only on its outcome. Us marketers are especially bad at this. Have you ever seen a pitch about some infrastructure technology that starts off telling you about macro economic headwinds and, like, software is eating the world? Chances are you’re thirty minutes to never away from hearing about the actual technology, what it does, and how it works.

The OpenStack era of cloud was rife with this. So many pitches started off saying why cloud was important (cloud or die!), explaining what cloud was, and then that it would help you achieve all sorts of outcomes like agility and moving from capex to opex.

I know it seems like I pick on Kubernetes a lot. And…yes, I do - I have mixed feelings - but, it’s also a recent phenomena we all know. Throughout it’s history, a lot of chatter about Kubernetes has focused on the outcomes it achieves: better cost control, developer productivity, etc. As it turned out, Kubernetes doesn’t really directly give you those outcomes: it’s just part of an overall stack that helps you get there.

Sure, it’s linked. But contrast that with the capabilities of an IDE. If I right click on a chunk of code and say “refactor this code to its own method,” that directly addresses productivity. Most of what an IDE does has the outcome of developer productivity. You know this because you can look at the alternative, a text editor, and see that developers are so much more productive with an IDE.

Now, you could say that Kubernetes gives operations and infrastructure people capabilities…“ops productivity,” and I would say - YES IT DOES (though, now that I look at the chart below for the thousandth time, ops productivity seems to be going in the wrong direction year/year? You see, I haven’t really looked at this chart in terms of operational productivity, just developer productivity.):

Operations people work directly with Kubernetes to get the capability of “install a shit-ton of containers on this cloud thing I setup and obey the configuration governance and policy and have all the processes in those containers talk with each other over the network like this. Oh, and, like, be secure?” The alternatives may not be as good, or as fast, or as reliable.

But Kubernetes itself doesn’t give a shit about application developers. For application developers, it offers a blinking cursor as if to say, “worked fine in ops, dev problem now.”

This is fine! This is what was intended! (Along with Google and Red Hat, et. al., neutralizing AWS’s competitive advantage in IaaS.) The Kubernetes thought-leaders have been trying to tell us this all along:

Kubernetes can certainly be part of a stack that makes developers more productive, but that’s not really a core thing it does. So if you’re thinking in terms of kubernetes as developer productivity, you’re at risk of mixing up outcomes and capabilities.

Things get a bit loopy here - there’s a needling distinction between being part of an overall stack that gets you come outcome (Kubernetes and developer productivity) versus directly creating that outcome (IDEs and developer productivity).

The closer the outcome and the capability are, the more accurate your thinking will be.

Another problem with thinking only about outcomes is that you can’t evaluate it against alternatives. When Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt were going at it, they all wanted to deliver the same outcome. Competition came down to which had the capabilities to do it better, more reliably, in a way ops people liked, and (I assume) price. If you were talking about any of those in terms of outcomes, it’d have been largely a waste of time.

Outcome marketing is best for enterprise sales

In technology marketing and sales, there’s a relationship between the price of the technology, the seniority of the decision maker (whoever approves buying the technology), and how outcomes focused you are. As you can guess, the higher the price, the higher decision maker in the organization, the more you focus on outcomes:

(1) With rare exception, the senior executives approving purchasing something don’t have time to care about how the technology actually works, or evaluate it versus alternatives: they just have to build up a hunch that it seems like it’ll get them the outcome that they want.

(2) And, if you have a high price, you’re going to need a senior executive to approve the budget, so you’re pitching to senior executives, and then see (1).

If all you hear is capabilities talk, the pitch is intended for an individual way down the org chart. If all you hear is outcomes talk, the pitch is included for an executive, way up the stack.

SpringOne Tour is coming up in Amsterdam, October 9th, 2023. I’ll be MC’ing it. I live here, after all! It’s focused on - surprise! - the Spring Framework and programming:

Our Spring advocates, technical engineers, and application development experts bring an in-depth look into the beauty of open-source, with Spring Framework, Spring Boot 3, Kubernetes, Progressive Delivery and more, to strategize with you on how you can innovate faster.

It’s free to come and the content is great, so register and come check it out.

Upcoming

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

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 to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I’ll be in Berlin and London this week. Whacky!

In Iowa

I was in Des Moines this week to give one of the keynotes at DevOpsDays Des Moines (it went well). Here’s some snapshots from around town:

CEO Therapy

This week’s Software Defined Talk:

This week, we discuss Netflix's DVD deprecation, the remote work debate, and how to fork an open-source project. Plus, thoughts on why Europe needs more ice.

Have a listen!

Transcripts

For all the podcasts, videos, conference talks, and even notes to myself: I haven’t figured out what to do with automated transcript systems. It’s nice to have text, but the work involved in doing anything with feels almost as high as starting from scratch.

I’ve done hundreds of hours of video and podcasts over, like, 25 or 30 years. If I got actuate transcripts, I’m not sure what I’d do with them. When I do an hour interview with someone, you’d think getting a transcript would be useful.

You’d think that passing it ChatGPT to write an article would be useful. First, ChatGPT can’t handle that amount of text (at least, I don’t know how to get it to). Second, the result requires a lot of editing. Over that 30 years I’ve trained to become a good writer: I’m good at going from a blank screen and getting to 500, 1800, or many more words.

Maybe transcripts are not so good for writing, but they do seem good for:

• Voice Notes - I’ve never been a big user of voice notes. But that might actually be helpful. I’ve been it more than ever recently, and like many quips about taking notes, the value isn’t really in the note itself, but in using writing as thinking.

• Also, dictating writing might be good, but typing is so much faster and you can edit and correct as you go.

• I do read transcripts of other podcasts when I don’t want to listen to them, that’s fine.

This is a free report from Jennifer Riggins at The New Stack. I talked with her a couple times for it and reviewed the text ahead of time. 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 :)

Wastebook

• “Survival is optional. No one has to change” is cold comfort to the employees of companies that didn’t survive. I wish we’d spend more time in the “digital transformation” world focusing on getting people to change, not just tell the survivors how awesome it’ll be once they change.

• Remember the positive feeling that you could be fine taking actions to do things instead of focus on your own hobbies. Working on your life instead of vague FOMO.

Relevant to your interests

• VMware Expands Tanzu into a Full Platform Engineering Environment - Overview of our take on platform engineering, product-wise.

• Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird - Looks like fun, right?

• HashiCorp Retools Licenses And Software To Grow Its Business - Extensive look into the HasiCorp financials and talk of their OSS licensing shift.

• The Works of Mars, 1671 - Fortification engineering.

• Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: the Expiration Date Itself - “Food experts broadly agree that the expiration dates on every box of crackers, can of beans and bag of apples waste money, squander perfectly good food, needlessly clog landfills, spew methane and contribute to climate change.” // And, they’re gone for the most part in the UK.

• Texas’s Biggest Barbecue City Is Attracting a New Crop of Exciting Restaurants - Lots going on in Lockhart.

• Favorite coffee-making setups from the Ars Technica staff - I made coffee with a Chemex for a few years. The coffee was good, and the overall ritual of it was just fantastic.

• Books Recommended With Uncommon Wisdom and Tender Care - “Over and over, Aoyama demonstrates how it’s done. In her Hatori ward, good fortune is not arbitrary or unearned; it is never a gauzy gift from the universe. It arises instead from action, experience and wisdom. Her characters appreciate each other; they are grateful to each other; they recognize in each other quality and potential. (Put these folks in a laboratory dish with the dramatis personae of a cynical HBO show and they’d annihilate each other, matter and antimatter.)” And: “You’ve got to be careful with novels about libraries and bookstores… The risk, in all these cases, is flattery. It feels nice to be assured that the places you find appealing are, in fact, wonderful. It’s also boring. The standard for such novels, therefore, is that they reveal something interesting and true about these environments.”

• It’s Not You, It’s Me: What It Really Means When Budget Is The Reason For The Breakup - Something that’s not useful isn’t worth paying for.

• Forrester’s Impressions: VMware Explore 2023 - A brief overview of VMware’s strategy and where Forrester thinks it going.

Upcoming

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

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 to 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

Des Moines, 7:38am

I’ve got a lot of travel coming up - like the old days! Two more weeks of long trips.

More importantly, it’s the start of the school year for my three kids. You’re supposed to look at actual New Years as the start of a new cycle, but the school year has always been the beginning of the cycle for me, back to when I was kid, college, and even when I was kidless for a long time. It’s a time to start new habits, especially when it comes to parental pedantry. But, the structure of the school schedule also clear out all the time-wasting that comes with schedule ambiguity and openness. I was told once that I thrive in structure, which seemed right at the time, despite the chaos-driven nature I can seem to have: that’s just my writing and content style, though.

Iowa

I’m in Des Moines, Iowa for the keynote I’ll be giving at DevOpsDays here. I believe their registration is closed, so…if you’re not already registered, I won’t be seeing you! But, you can check me out rehearsing it here. There’s 20 minutes of bonus content! Like and subscribe, MOFOS!

ChatDM - Dealing with short-term memory

If you’re interested in my recent experiments to get ChatGPT to act a Dungeon Master for solo-play Dungeons & Dragons, check out my recent write-up. It’s going OK, and I think I’ve figured out a technique to get over it’s short-term memory.

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 :)

Wastebook

• The best way to make money is to not to loose money.

• Make It Bigger part 01 and part 02 - great stuff here, especially on focus (something I willfully ignore all the time) and building comfort with presenting. Also, Russell Davies has very unique, but subtle style to everything he does. I don’t know him, but I wonder how different his front-stage character is from his back-stage character. Is his vibe how he is in “real life”? He runs a conference called “Interesting” which I think is a word that summarizes his approach. Also, like me, he used to be very active and “big” in the 2000’s on the web and is, sort of, quiet now. How is that working out? I need a club of people like that where we meet and weekly answer the question “what am I doing now? should I be satisfied?” More broadly: the UK digital people are always, well, interesting.

• “it’s not not about the technology” Here.

• “Well, I don’t know how many of you have built Kubernetes-based apps. But one of the key pieces of feedback that we get is that it’s powerful. But it can be a little inscrutable for folks who haven’t grown up with a distributed systems background. The initial experience, that ‘wall of yaml,’ as we like to say, when you configure your first application can be a little bit daunting. And, I’m sorry about that. We never really intended folks to interact directly with that subsystem. It’s more or less developed a life of its own over time.” Craig McLuckie, SpringOne 2021.

• “It is a ghost of a word, with no meaning except that fact that it almost had a definition – now the definition cites it’s lack of existence.” Here.

• “Small enough to care.” Seen on the back of a semi-truck trailer on the way to Schiphol.

• If you tell me the procurement process for an organization I can tell you exactly what kind corporate culture it has. Enterprise Bloodwork.

• Privileged sad sack.

Relevant to your interests

• Longplay 2.0: An Album-Oriented Apple Music Player with Loads of New Features - Seems cool.

• Paper Calendars, quarterly ones - Print out A4 sized calendar pages, weekly ones, put until books

• Survey finds relatively few Americans actually use (or fear) ChatGPT - 30% to 40% (for young adult males) seem like a lot too me. // “Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it. Of course that changes by demographic: Men, those 18–29 and the college educated are more likely to have used the system, though even among those groups it’s 30–40%.”

• The Ultimate Guide to Developer Counter-Productivity - Focus on outcomes, not activities…mostly. So long as the activities are good and lead to outcomes. // Yes, and…many tasks may not seem directly tied to value, but they are. If you don’t measure where a shelf goes on a wall, when you hang it, there’s a good chance it will look shit. If you don’t take your compliance training in a bank, the bank could be operating illegally. If you don’t take time to meet with other teams (people), when it comes to needing to work with them, it will be harder. Also, if the outcomes you’re unproductive developers are getting are greats, who cares about LoC.

• Man, Myth & Magic The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Mythology 21 Volumes In 1 - This is the kind of stuff I’d pursue and spend hours looking through in the 80’s.

• Zodiac posters by Bruce Krefting, 1969

• Mindsets and Tactics for New Leaders of Software Teams - Seems like good stuff.

• Dark Mode: How Users Think About It and Issues to Avoid - A lot more on dark mode than you thought was possible to write about // “Aesthetic appeal and improved accessibility are the strongest arguments for supporting dark mode.”

• Here’s Why Automaticity Is Real Actually - How hype goes bad: “Suppose there is a good idea. People will be attracted to it. It will gather momentum. Eventually it will have made all the true claims it can make, but it won’t have used up its hype. Its momentum will carry it forward into making false claims and doing bad things.”

• Terraform vs. GitOps vs. System Initiative

Upcoming

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

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.

Logoff

I’m in Des Moines for DevOpsDays later this week, speaking on Friday. This is the view of downtown from my hotel room. It reminds me of Austin before all the new builds started coming in in the 2000s. They are BIG into agriculture ads in the airport. I don’t get that kind of regional focus on airport ads in Europe, so it’s always fun to be reminded of it.

Two airport thoughts:

1. In Europe, most airports I go to are in big cities, and big hubs. Those airports have a fancier feel. The staff in those airports also seem a lot cheerier than the staff in US airports. US airports have a very hostile feel to them from the sometimes ticketing, TSA, general staff, definitely customs and boarder patrol (they were nice this time! the only thing to Dutch ever do is make fun of me [rightly so] for not knowing Dutch after five years), etc. That said, American travelers are also more uppity - entitled even? I very rarely see people traveling in Europe getting upset or angry with staff.

2. Ben Thompson aside in some podcast awhile back that one of the reasons that American airports are so crappy (you know, old carpet) is that because they’re old. And they’re old because America was one of the first places to have lots of airports. I have no way to verify that, but it’s a good “turns out.” The turns out being that at one point, they were awesome and leading edge. First movers’ stuff becomes shit. I’d have to check. Also, as with so many things like this (comparing American, uh, “infrastructure style” to the rest of the world), the other thing is: America is a lot bigger than you’d think. We have a lot of airports compared to say, Germany, definitely The Netherlands, I wonder if all of the EU? (Something like 5,000 in the US vs. 3,500 in the EU - based on some shitty-quick Google searching).

The point being: I think they’re both just different systems and thus, have different results that are hard to compare. It’s a variant of “the purpose of a system is what it does.”Something more like “the system does/is what you choose.” So (a) realize it’s a choice, and, (b) choose wisely.

Trees do not grow in straight rows

This picture clarified what it’s like to be an American living in Europe.

Everyday, you’re confronted by how old everything is. The word “old” deserves attention, and explains the whole point. To an American, “old” tends to be a negative term. (Well, a left leaning American, at least.) But in Europe, you are surrounded by old and there’s a certain comfort to it.

I live in The Netherlands, and the thing you realize quickly is that there is very little “nature” in The Netherlands. Westerners having been living here for thousands of years. The entire country has been touched by and designed by people. In fact, if it weren’t for human engineering draining swamps, digging canals, and literally building new land in the sea, the country wouldn’t be. Like. Exist.

The rest of Europe is this way too: unnatural. There isn’t really space in Europe that hasn’t felt the hand of humans. Sure, in the larger countries, there are places where humans have decided not to mess around. But, for the most part, nature in Europe has long - like, really, long - been civilized: conquered.

Here is what I tell my fellow flâneurs. As you amble about Amsterdam and all of Europe, notice how many trees are in a perfect row. And notice how old those trees are. Trees do not grow in a perfect row normally. People did that.

In America, there are not that many trees in a row. There are huge parts of America that are just…there. To be fair, I wouldn’t say there are “unknown” parts of America, but it’s much different than Europe. There’s nothing like West Texas in Europe, and (the Texan in me does not like to type this) that is just a tiny part of the American wilderness.

What we don’t have in America is what’s in the picture above: a connection to hundreds of years back. The way we’re raised, we know about back to 1776. Before then, it’s a confusing blur. Does any American really know what the French and Indian War was all about? And it’s only in the past several decades - my lifetime! - that we acknowledge and are curious about anything that happened before Europeans came to America. Now, that is a good centuries long history we (in all the Americas) should be visiting and drawing on more.

But. I don’t want the problematic aspects of the American-mind to distract from a compliment I’m trying to give Europe. All of That is there for us Americans to deal with: I am not glossing over it.

This endless history that Europe has is so hard to reckon with as an American, and I feel like it shapes the European mindset. What would be like to walk around a museum and feel a direct connection to something painted 464 years ago or 458 years ago.

Ironically, the second thing to reckon with is more recent in history: World War 2. So much of Europe through the flâneur’s eyes is defined by that war. When you walk in Amsterdam, you see buildings from the 1600s. When you walk in Germany, with rare exception, you see only buildings built after 1945.

If you don’t get it, let me tell you an anecdote from an English friend. He was traveling in Cologne, Germany, I believe, and noticed how new and modern all the buildings were, how the roads were perfectly formed to accommodate cars. How thoroughly modern everything was. After talking with a local German a bit, he said, “this is remarkable! How is it that everything is so fresh and new.” To which the German, gravely replied, “well, you should ask your great friends about that…”

And that brings us to the third thing. Living in Europe, I’m confronted a lot by that date: 1945. We Americans think of Europe as peaceful, socialists…“Freedom Fries” and all that.

What our short aperture of history misses is that it’s only since 1945 that Europeans haven’t been trying to kill each other constantly: basically, all the time, like, non-stop. Before 1945, it was near constant war in Europe. Us Americans might think the Europeans awfully pacifist and do-nothingniks, but you have to appreciate how done and utterly tired they must have been after 1945. Perhaps, forced to become enlightened, even. Centuries and Centuries of war and senseless death had finally exhausted, wiped out, and almost killed this entire part of the world.

You walk around the museums and the old parts of the cities that still exist and you constantly realize how old, how lived, how experienced, and how in the future everything here is.

(Us tech people scoff at the EU and their whacky regulations, but, well, I mean, if it gives you something else to do instead of constantly being at war, is it all that bad?)

SUPERSTREAM - Sep 6th, 2023

Next week at an O’Reilly Superstream hosted by Sam Newman, I’m talking about platform team practices I’ve collected from seven years of talking with platform teams. My colleague Whitney is also giving a talk, and she always has great presentations. You should come check it out!

From a 2015 Pivotal Deck

This is back when all of us in the industry were trying to freak out the enterprise market. It worked…?

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.

Logoff

See y’all next time!

Not much today.

Halloween Clown Tailwinds

“Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year.”

Somewhere, there's a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween.

Wastebook

• “So I quit my job as an engineer at Memorex’s disk drive plant in Santa Clara, California, and we flew to Kuala Lumpur. We found an un-air conditioned hotel room for $10 a night above a brothel with genial trans prostitutes and ate $1 meals served on banana leaves from the nearby restaurants. After a few weeks, we decided to get out of the sweltering heat and check out Singapore. It was just as sweltering there. After three more weeks, we’d had enough and no longer had an urge to go to Indonesia.” Here.

• “Consumers make choices for many reasons: price, convenience and marketing. Maybe politics. The other day I went to my local Walgreens to buy toothpaste and ultimately chose not my favorite brand but the only one that wasn’t under lock and key. I didn’t want to wait for an employee to liberate the Colgate, so Crest it was. Needless to say, I did not use Google to find out which brand was more committed to bodily autonomy. What can I say? I was in a hurry.” Here.

Relative to your interests

• Can you trust ‘open source’ companies? - ’There’s nothing wrong with making money. But, I’ve gotten really tired of projects that use open source for their start and then turn their backs on the philosophy that made them their first hundreds of millions. At the very least, they need to stop pretending they’re open source once they’ve moved to a “Look but don’t touch” or “Look but don’t profit from it” license.'

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey - Measure outcomes, not efforts.

Upcoming

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

As mentioned yesterday, I’ll in Des Moines next week to speak at DevOpsDays Des Moines. They were kind enough to invite me to give a keynote, which I’m looking forward to.

If you want to go, registrations closes today, I believe, so get those tickets now.

More upcoming:

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.

Logoff

I’ve been working on my slides for the above DevOpsDays talk. Here’s a picture I made for a slide. It’s transparent! So far, I’m doing a combo of two types of DevOpsDays talks: “vulnerable autobiography” and “list of good ideas.” I have’t gotten to the second, but I think the first is OK.

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.