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.

Rick Rubin’s PodcastI like Tetragrammaton podcast a lot. (It’s one of those big deal podcasts that doesn’t actually have it’s own home page, which is totally weird - just search for it in your podcast listener or YouTube). Why? One, it is luxuriously long, Rick Rubin really gets everything out of the guests. Two, he asks great questions: at first they seem naive and simple, but then you hear the answers and stories and you realize how great the questions are.

The infrastructure drives the app architectureA cloud native applications is typically designed as a bunch of little components that coordinate with each other over a network. They may use events instead, and while that isn’t the same as point-to-point network communications, it follows the same idea: you have a bunch of indepedent-ish bundles of code that work together, as needed, instead of just one big chunk of code that does all the work.

A NEW CAR!The first episode where Bob has his real hair. I’m not sure how it happened, but The Price is Right is a major show in my life canon. The music, the camp, the excitement and sincerity of it all - it’s perfect in every way. At my first job at a dot.com in the late 90s we would gather every morning to watch it on a huge projection screen.

Small, regional events are probably better than the mega-conferenceI’m starting to think that small, regional events are much - like much - more important for enterprise software sales than the big, annual events. In enterprise sales (where you’re looking to work for a few years to build up multi-million dollar deals), you’re usually targeting a couple hundred mega-organizations (plus all the governments, large cities and states, and large universities). You know: banks/insurance/etc.

The week so far, a selectionI don’t really know what “platform engineering” isLast 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. WastebookAlways use the cloakroom for your backpack at a museum.

Press PassI’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?

Confusing outcomes with capabilitiesI 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.