Suggested playlist for this episode. We Fear Change, a new talkI’ve got a mostly newish talk coming up next week about people’s fear of change in organizations, on Oct 24 2023 at 11:00am Amsterdam time. Register to Watch the Talk It’s narrowed down, of course, for software and ops stuff. You know: all that digital transformation, cloud native stuff I’m always on and on about. It’s the last in the series I’m going with my co-workers Bryan Ross.

If you thought yesterday’s edition was way too long deep into some stinky, weeds, today’s episode is for you! Johnny Ghoul.Using Midjourney and DALL-E to generate Dungeons and Dragons Battle MapsIt works well enough, I think, given how cool they look. The scaling is obviously not perfect, but it’s fine. I just did some basic prompts, with the only difference being a stream or not and “flat” or isomoprhic. With a combination of using seeds (for consistency and style) and figuring out really good prompts, I think it’d work well.

This is an example of a weird use of “developers are the new kingmakers”: There is a simple rule: developers rule. You run the global economy, right? Not politicians, not CEOs - developers are the ones running this global economy. What aspect of your life is not getting more digital? Everything, sports, entertainment, social experience or health, everything is becoming more digital. It’s a foundational aspect of all economy and human experience.

How to survive giving a lot of presentations at conferencesI think it was John Willis who told me that a long time ago. Relative to your interestsWhat is Technical Debt? - “In practice, my observations are that most development teams, even in small companies, are too far separated from these types of financial models to reason about technical debt in terms of revenue, but absolutely do feel the pain of technical debt in their day-to-day work (even if they can’t quantify it in money).

No links today, but this: Measuring Developer ProductivityOnce you suggest tracking an individual software developer’s performance, you get into big trouble with the thought leaders. This is, you know, pretty much a correct a response. McKinsey decided to have a go recently, giving us all a chance to think about “developer productivity” again. In recent years, I’ve mostly thought about developer productivity in terms of build and deploy automation - I know, just mind-blowing thrill rides, right!

Just a few things today. The Network is the Computer“Sun Microsystems founders (left to right) Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla stand in front of their sports cars at the company’s facilities in Palo Alto in 1987”. Posted by readjpeg.raw.Kubernetes Distro UsageIf you’re interested in marketshare, usage trends, and benefits/problems in Kubernetes-land, Torsten and crew at EMA has a new stack of analysis and charts about Kubernetes out.

Suggested theme song. Just links and fun finds today. Relevant to your interestsVMware named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant - Nice spot for VMware in the MQ. // This is a pretty small market! Hopefully the market is selling around container management, the stacks of app dev support above it, and filling in all the Kubernetes gaps. I mean, that’s usually exactly how the infrastructure market works. // “The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.

Software Defined Talk #434That’s the opening topic of our podcast this week. Oh, and we talk about a bunch of tech shit too: Watch the video above, or just listen to the audio only, edited podcast. Do LessMy colleague Bryan Ross has been writing up some tiny videos I made last year. They’re fun for me to read: he adds a lot of depth to what were, basically, just snarky asides in my head that I turned into 60 second videos.

Thought Leadership Hidden in Plain SightThere’s a variation of The Plumber’s Problem that I suffer from: The Tech Marketer’s Problem. When I see a new idea in tech bubbling up and I can smell the marketing strategy behind it (which, with my background, I usually can), I stop enjoying the, you know, story. This becomes an anti-pattern when the idea and technology is actually good, and I grow suspicious and dismissive once I’ve smelled marketing and thought lording/ladying/theming.

Videos! I finally got a good handle on what Backstage does today - not the outcomes it helps you get, but what it’s base, core capabilities are. Ben gave me a nice overview of the basics and let me learn-by-questioning a lot. Hopefully we’ll get together for two more parts: talking about the plugin ecosystem and then how you install, run, and manage it. There’s a podcast, audio only version if you don’t care for videos.