A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff

Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessions

I’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of MC script writing - creating it, and reading it. I wrote the MC script last year. And, you know, I’ve watched lots of main stage keynote dog and pony shows (and plenty of goat rodeos). Here’s some quickly typed out tips on writing the MC script:

1. The content is important, but the timing is more. You need to get a sense for how many words you can put in the slots. Then you can change the words around as much as needed.

2. Account for walking on and off the stage. I timed myself and it took me about 8 seconds to walk five meters, stop, and say, “Hi!”, including turning a corner at the start (like walking out from behind a curtain). So, double that to 16, round up to 20 if you want to be safe. If the MCs walk off as the people walk on, you can save some time. But, account for them maybe shaking hands, etc.

3. If the MC is introducing a video, then maybe you can just have the stage go dark and start the video as the MC walks off - saving that walk off time.

4. Read it out loud a lot, record it. This is for timing, but also to see if its easy enough to say the words, if it sounds “natural,” and if it can be read from a teleprompter.

5. I record each chunk on its own, watch the recording and time it, work on the text, re-record it, etc. This is better than doing it all at once and matches what the MCs will actually be doing too.

6. Instead of having the MCs walk on stage, you can always use the “voice of god” (VoG) for super quick intros. The voice of god is an unseen announcer. Keep these very short just name, title, and, optionally, topic, e.g.: “now please welcome Chris Christopher from Acme Inc.” This will shave down walking time and longer intro time. I’d use the same person for the VoG each time.

7. It’s good to do in-person intros (not VoG) for people you want to respect: executives, customer speakers, inspirational speakers, etc.

8. You should have the MCs be the first humans the attendees see and hear (there’s usually some opening thing, then they come out). The introduction can be super short, or long if you prefer. At a minimum it should be something like “Hi, I’m MC One. And I’m MC Two. Wow, welcome - this is so awesome, right? You’re tellin' me! Today you’re doing to hear some great stuff like this, and that, and that other cool thing. All your people are great, and the thing we’re here for is great. You’re going to hear about some great things that have been going on, some new great things we’ve been working on for you, and some great stories about people using and benefiting from the thing. Let’s get started with So and So…”

9. The MCs should generally acknowledge what was just said in the previous section, maybe adding something like “boy, that was great, right?” sort of thing. Their main job in the show is mix together the sessions and to introduce people.

10. Before you lock down the final draft, you probably want to have 30 to 60 seconds free for last minute additions and shifts. And then, on the day of, there’ll be changes for that, it’s probably good to keep the total MC script time about 30 seconds under allotted. This can be bonus time for other unforeseen things too.

11. The biggest job is the closing, or “house keeping.” The MCs should tell people what’s coming next, when significant, fun events are, and send them off with some encouraging advice, like to take the time to talk with people. You’re priming people for what to do.

12. Also, there might be some rookie mistakes you can help attendees avoid. For example, at some conferences, you have to reserve your spot in sessions, and they fill up fast. If that’s the case, you need to tell the audience - I never think to do that so I end up missing a lot of talks that were pre-booked. What are other things you can help them 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. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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I was reminded this week that it’s good to get out of the house. You might not be surprised to know that I am terrible at that. People are actually great and life affirming to hang out with!

Also:

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about starting up livestreaming again. I don’t know - for whatever reasons. After way too much work on a few seconds of intro and outro videos,1 fucking around with a new YouTube thumbnail), and re-setting up OBS,2 I did a pretty successful PoC this morning. By “success,” I mean all the technical stuff, the content was just “hey guys!” type of stuff.

OBS should be all set up now so that I can quickly go in and just do them at near clock time. Thankfully, I have somewhere around or over 20 years of podcasting and just showing up and talking, so if I have a topic, or a question, I can go on and on…and on. Speaking of: if you have any questions or topics, send them to me. I questions-driven show is the best: no prep, and people tend to ask things I’d never think to talk about.

LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE…mofos.

I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out.

To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really. Also, I don’t think it’s really so sporting to have a first level character be able to do a harpy siren song thing. So, I made up a “half-harpy.”

We haven’t actually played this yet, so I don’t know if it “works.” I figure what you do is run it up against some goblins in an ambush, maybe getting a blacksmith to send you on a mission to find a lost apprentice or, like, investigate a pie-shop robbery. At first level, it’s always those fucking goblins, right?

Doing this was a great, I don’t know, exercise in AI stuff. I didn’t use ChatGPT for the text (I didn’t even think of that until now!), but I used Midjourney to make the paper and the images. Some notes:

1. I sort of figured out how to use the give it an image thing to start with; I don’t really understand it. I bet Adobe’s Firefly thing would be better at prompts where you upload an image and say, like, “except use a human head instead of a bird one, and add in human arms in addition to the wings.” That one of the female crouched down under the combat page is as close as I ever got, and that’s still not exactly right. If you put too much vulture in, you get those vulture faces. That’s why I added the line to the text that faces can range from human to bird-like - at least I typed that somewhere. And also the part about having either human or vulture feet. I would have preferred just vulture feet. Maybe I can figure out the prompts.

2. It is incredibly hard to figure out the prompt for “make a human with bird feed, a human torso, a human head, human arms, and wings. Make the hands have long talons.” I’d also like to say “make the people look normal!” Instead, they all come out hella heroic, chiseled, and mid-driffy. I tried all sorts of things, but the only thing that would change it was to say “chubby.” “Zaftig” didn’t work, norHer did “stout.” And, “average” or “normal” definitely did. There must be some prompt tricks for “make them look like normal people, not super-models.”

3. Without trying, one time it actually generated full on breasts for a female harpy! I always thought nudity was programmed out. This sort of makes sense: that’s such a thing with harpies that it’d be hard to program that out. All the other times, the female harpies were either dressed or had those nipple-less bulbs like you’d see on a creepy robot.

4. If you do enough of these, you’ll see the humans arms softly stretched out…just like statues and pictures of angels! It took me a long time to realize that, but clearly “human with feathered wings” sends it right to the centuries of angels, all of who always have their arms spread out in that lazy, well, angelic way.

5. My son wanted his characters to be a cleric, so I tried to make some religious symbols. I dunno.

6. That one eating is great! I’ll throw in a bonus of the female version:

   

   Here’s a link to my Midjourney profile if you want to see all the others that I didn’t use.

I have a one to two player adventure thought up. The one that comes with the D&D starter set is a little too much.

Wastebook

• Do I make plans based on what I want done, or what I want to be doing?

• The number one, recommended cure for procrastination is to just actually do the task.

• “Nature doesn’t tell stories.” Here.

• This is a good tofu recipe, except you should deep fry it. Deep frying is super easy, it just requires an insane amount of oil. Fill a wok, turn up the burner, and the cornstarch breaded tofu cooks right up just like you’d get in a restaurant. Why did I wait all these years?

• Speaking of D&D: The terrans are suspicious and fearful of the half-harpies - the ability to fly, the taloned feet and lack of high-intelligence (they’re “bird brained”!), vulture-like eating habits, and behavior makes them weird to the terrans.

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See y’all next time!

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📨 📨 📨 📨 📨

Hunting for the cloud native and kubernetes pay-off

This is an excerpt from my talk yesterday with Bryan Ross, his theory here is fun, clever, and probably right:

Check out the full interviews, I liked it a lot. The podcast version will be in the Tanzu Talk feed tomorrow if you want to subscribe to that and catch it while you’re vacuuming the floors this weekend.

Container usage by workload in enterprises, share of wallet, and plans

You know I love getting more info on how much container usage (and, thus, an indicator of Kubernetes usage) there is in enterprises. IDC has a deck of charts out looking into what survey respondents say are good uses of containers and where they run containers. Here’s one chart. It shows which types of workloads actually run in containers versus what people think is a good idea:

Here’s a comparison of spend on “traditional” infrastructure versus containers. Spend doesn’t represent an actual count of applications running in containers (the pricing for each unit of infrastructure could be very different, all the way to free!), but it’s useful nonetheless.

What’s worth noticing here is (1) spend on virtualization has been flat. This suggests that, at least when it comes to share of wallet, virtualization is not being reduced by containers - though growth certainly is. That said, you could also say that containers are reducing virtualization, but that virtualization is picking up workloads from non-virtualized infrastructure. (2) More importantly, there’s a big growth in spend on containers (which we can feel safe in saying means a rise in importance of containerized workloads, and probably growth in those applications).

Software vendors - any company! - love and focus on growth, even if it’s in absolute terms tiny year/year of year. It sound much cooler to say that you’re involved in a market that has a 46% growth than, like, 0%…even if there’s shit-tons more money in the 0% growth company. But, you gotta chase those new dollar bills.

Finally, people’s plans. I don’t put too much stock in plans (as you may recall, moving all the workloads to public cloud has been just around the corner for about 10 or 15 years now). But, this is great for gauging people’s interest, especially for vendors who are hunting out what to sell, what to talk about, and how to drive interest for sales meetings. You know, and actual predicting about the future use of containerized workloads:

Again, the most obvious take-away is that there’s more growth in container usage, And, again, the important thing to temper your glee with is that the growth should be a combination of new workloads and migrating old works, i.e., this isn’t a “share” of containers versus traditional workloads.

Also, if you look at the charts, the container label is “Containers (Mounted in Virtual Machines and Bare Metal).” That’s a complicated! So, for some number of containers, we still have traditional infrastructure in use. The containers are more providing (yet another!) layer of packaging, execution, and management for apps on-top of already existing types of infrastructure.

As ever, we’re in the eternal first inning of cloud.

The charts have some further splicing up of the responses which is useful. For example, some of the charts separate out SaaS companies from others, which gives you a better picture of what “normal” organizations are doing (SaaS companies seem to use containers a lot more, as you’d expect). Also, there’s cuts on company size: companies with a 1,000+ people seem to use containers more than smaller companies. Check ‘em out if you have access (you likely do if you’re in a big tech company), or want to fork over $4,500.

Open source and security? The Conference!

Isabel Drost-Fromm sends me this: "in the wake of the Log4Shell kerfuffle I talked to several friends - all of them told the same story of professional engineering teams struggling to figure out whether or not they are affected back then. As a result with a few friends I started FOSS Security Campus, trying to address both, beginners through trainings and advanced engineers through the talk schedule. " It’s in Berlin, Sep 26th to 29th this year. Check it out!

Wastebook

• “I guess that’s the power of a good sandwich.” Here.

• “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” The White Album, Joan Didion

• “To be clear, I think the paradigm of let[ting] people enjoy things was borne of good intentions, but it has demonstrably resulted in a deluge of crap. There’s good stuff in there, but it’s more jetsam than flotsam: hard to find, harder still to get a hold of.” Here.

• “Hah…I love that story…” Life-hack on how to make boring stories funny.

What replaces the smoke break?

Smoking used to be a little time for a break, often standing up and walking outside. A time to touch grass, in big cities, more often concrete.

I like the romance of the smoke break, also the relaxing feel of it. Almost an off moment of mindfulness.

Now, I suspect people "check their phone" is the little break. But that doesn’t seem the same.

I suppose you could have an espresso, or a quickly to make a small tea? Get a cup of one of those and go outside to drink it, looking around aimlessly and talking idly with whoever is doing the same?

It can’t be eating something, or, like “taking a walk.” Those are their own things. But, the Swiss have a culture of interstitial meals, one at nine between breakfast and lunch, another at four between lunch and dinner.

But all that doesn't seem exactly the same as a smoke break - healthier, sure. There must be something.

Having never smoked, I've never really experienced "smoke breaks," but it seems...nice?

Relative to your interests

• Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”

• Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.” // Shadow IT exists because people need something that IT is not giving them.

• The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank.”

• Where’s Assaf? - Holy shit! That is scary to hear and I’m glad he is recovering.

• Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70 - “I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

• Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor.”

• What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.0! (Well, in two to three years when the exec’s vesting wraps up.)

• Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk.”

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.

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se landscapes from Oswald Achenbach are amazing. I saw one in the Musee D’Orsay (used above), and, as with all paintings that play with light, you can’t really tell from the screen how magical it is. Here’s another one, you canost imagine what it’d look like in person:

Suggested vibe for this edition:

The eternal principles of an (enterprise) app stack

These are not all of them, but it’s a start.

1. The function of an app stack is to allow your developers to be creative, use fast release cycles, and create software that can run in production: that stays up and meets whatever compliance (regulations, security, etc.) you need.

2. We keep trying to merge the dev tools stack and the runtime tools environment into one platform. The market rejects this over and over again. At some point, we should try listening.

3. It follows that: you will probably end up with a separate stack of developers tools, middleware, and runtime infrastructure. Perhaps our best bet is to focus on a common “API” (in the Kubernetes sense of that word, which, coming from a app dev background, I find an absurd use of that notion, but the street finds it’s own uses, etc.) that makes it easy to interoperate and integrate all those separate parts. Builders will build. At least give them some common set of patterns and interfaces.

4. Still, I think this assemble a best-of-breed pile of parts is, I don’t know, pretty stupid. You’ll always end up with an integrated, monolithic stack (a “platform” as we say now). Just make sure it’s not an accidental platform. Fully integrated platforms are proven to work. When you try to take them away from app developers who’ve finally given them a shot, the devs beg with you to stop standing up Kubernetes. (But, I have little credibility in my opinion here. I no longer do software, I just do slides.)

5. Building your own app stack is a bad idea 90% of the time. Everyone will think they’re in that 10%, but, do the math. If you build your own app stack, you now own it and have become a software company. Software must be a core part of your capabilities a. Is IT a “cost center”? Then this will hard to impossible. Buy an integrated platform and developer tools, whether that means committing to a public cloud or buying a layer of abstraction to layer on-top (“multi-cloud”).

6. Your app developers will dislike whatever you (the infrastructure people) do. They are wrong, if you do your job well. App developers always want to use the newest, most interesting thing. They will say anything to justify using it, and then they will hide using it. App developers don’t appreciate the need for long term stability, agility (you can change things, add new features quickly), and compliance/governance/security. App developers don’t care about the “ilities.”

7. Infrastructure people have the opposite problem: they overvalue the ilities and sacrifice app dev usefulness for them.

8. Of course, “the business” has one last “ility”: all for free, without changing anything…ility.

9. We tried service delivery to solve this, but despite intentions, it just created a wall of tickets that slowed things down and made stack evolution too slow. (How long does it take a brand new developer to make their first code commit? Even at Spotify, this is constant battle. Imagine what it’s like at a 80+ year old bank that doesn’t even track that metric!) Service delivery is very good at delivering a known and needed service, it is not good at building systems around constant change, i.e., software development and delivery. Otherwise: why would we be constantly talking about all of this? The system is defined by what it does, not what the builder’s intentions we’re.

10. Try something new! Try product managing the app dev stack. Talk with the app developers every week and follow a small batch cycle to improve the platform.

11. Technology matters a great deal. What also matters is that your process (how your work, how your organize, how you people manage - “culture”) adapts to the technology you’re using. You can’t force-fit technology into a culture. Try changing the culture to work with your technology. Change culture first. If you can’t change the culture, you need to change the technology. If you can’t change the technology, you have to change the culture.

12. The business does not want to be eaten by software. “The business” still doesn’t understand the value of software, that it can be the core enabler of the organization’s strategy, optimization, and growth/profit. I’m not sure they ever will, so you have to constantly prove this with metrics and success. “Speak the language of business” to the business. (It’s not like us tech people understand how “the business” functions either - we should do rotations, at least through the corporate strategy group…and vice-versa. Post-DevOps, the business/IT wall is the next wall to bring down.)

13. Above all else: (1) define what “working” is for you, and, (2) if your ability to build and run software to run your business and improve your business is working, keep doing that. Otherwise, change. Don’t keep doing things that don’t work for what you need.

14. Here is the obligatory common sense quote to put in big letters on a slide: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all," Peter Drucker.

Vacation is unhealthy for work, work is unhealthy for vacation

When start a vacation, I have to quickly detox myself from the daily habits of work: seeking and executing tasks; an eye on long term deadlines; carving out a space to operate on a large, mature company; interpreting and responding to strategy and group think; valuing delivery, making things happen above all else. In short, thinking about work all the time, using constant scheming to hedge against uncertainty. This mindset can’t be turned off, it even invaded my dreams from time to time. There is no work/life balance, there’s only work/life interruption.

When I’m going on vacation I have to stop thinking about work and thinking in that get shit done mentality. I have to stop thinking.

I’ve finally gotten the time that that flushing out work-mind takes to about eight hours. It used to be two days or so!

Vacation mode has no goal, little planning. Just reacting to possibilities, or not. There is no constant business case evaluation that drives action. Perhaps I’ll think a few days ahead to book museum tickets or a restaurant, or know that on Monday many things are closed. But I might decide to just stay in the hotel room for the night and read a book, or just sleep. My goal is to relax, and to do things that are relaxing. My goal is not to maximize the ROI of time or money spent. My goal is not to produce or deliver.

When I come back from vacation, the shift back to work is jarring, and difficult. It’s like I’ve finally experienced what it’s like to “be normal”: to have life be your job rather than your job your life.

For a long time this was fine, mostly. My identity was so based on work enough (almost completely!) that it was easy to shift back. But, just like recovering from a night of drinking, as I age, it’s getting harder and harder.

Well.

Back to work!

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.

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The weekend in Paris with Kim was great. We spent hours in the Picasso museum and the Musée d'Orsay. At some point, I want to figure out how to go to all of the little galleries in a town, the ones with new, contemporary art. I do not know how that “work,” though. How you find the “real” ones, what you talk with people about if you’re confronted, how you prioritize and choose them: how you succeed at it.

Kim helped me discover a pathology of mine: if I don’t know how something “works,” I am afraid of doing it. This is probably why it’s hard for me to learn new things, and, thus, change and improve. It also limits my, like, experience of the world. The negative effect is compounded by my living in Europe where I always don’t know the languages, cultures, norms, etc.

I used to have a set-piece with my therapist on this: going to the butcher. In our previous neighborhood here in Amsterdam, there was a much aclaimed butcher just down the street. We don’t have much butcher availability, really, in the States, let alone sprawling Austin, Texas. (Instead, the grocery stores have plenty of good meat.) I love meat, and the meat in The Netherlands grocery stores is, well, you know, not to my Texan liking. The butcher had the good meat though. But, because I didn’t know how “going to butcher” works and I don’t know Dutch, I never went. It was a double hump of not knowing how something worked. Kim once got me a t-bone for father’s day, and it was magnificent. Somehow, I could get over that double hump and start gettinggood steaks.

Hopefully I can get over this needing to know how something “works.” At this point, it’s what’s holding me back. Sure, what I need to do is instead crave “learning.” But we all know what we should be doing and thinking, the trick is getting there.

***

No links this episode. I barely read anything online since last time. Instead, I read A Waiter in Paris over the weekend. It’s fun to read a book set in the place you are, especially on vacation. It was a good book, you should read it if you like that kind of thing.

This week’s Tanzu Talk podcast (video above) is all about developer experience, and COBOL:

"75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly" reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?

There were a lot of ideas and topics that we didn’t get to. Enjoy the episode, either as a podcast episode or in the unedited video stream.

“Platform Engineering is one of the hottest topics covered this year by The New Stack, but is it more than just a trendy buzzword? Is it really the killer of DevOps? Or rather, is it the missing piece to help deliver on the promises of DevOps?”

I reviewed a draft of this book and am quoted in it a bit. Jennifer Riggins writes good stuff, and this overview of platform engineering is comprehensive. As you know, dear readers, I’m delightfully flummoxed by what platform engineering is - at the moment, I think it’s just what we used to call “developer tools” with heavy injection of cloud native flavoring. This is fine, really.

You should check it out, it’s free. My work is sponsoring it, sure, but that doesn’t make it bullshit, at all.

Wastebook

• “No where is far, everything is here.” Howard Jacobson.

• “I ended up taking last Friday off because things happened at a time I wasn’t expecting, and sometimes I’m not good at adapting to that.” Sounds like me.

Relative to your interests

• How Infrastructure as Code Helps IT Teams Cope with Employee Churn

• Platform Engineering Not Working Out? You're Doing It Wrong, an interview - “Purnima Padmanabhan [head of the business unit I work in] of VMware discusses platform engineering and how it helps create a ‘golden path’ that speeds up not just development but overall agility for businesses.”

• Forrester VMware Executive Checklist for DevEx - “75% of IT and business executives say that their companies' ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly.” And, a DevEx definition: “DevEx represents the skills, tools, frameworks, and methodologies aimed at creating, maintaining, and enhancing code throughout the software delivery lifecycle from creation through production and improving developer productivity both individually and collectively.”

• When did people stop being drunk all the time? - Historical data suggests that people in the Middle Ages consumed about a liter of beer a day, around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

tl;dr: Open Source Congress in Geneva; How dangerous is the European far-right?; Tyler Cowen is an Information Monster; The Elon Effect; The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids; Delivery Needs a Strategy; How Larry Gagosian Reshaped the Art World; Netherlands residents among most accepting of non-binary people, study shows.

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.

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Let’s see if the “tl;dr” concept works for a header. These are articles that I asked ChatGPT to summarize for me instead of reading the whole thing.

Thanks, again, to my mom being in town to watch the kids (and dog!), Kim and I are going on a weekend trip. This time, it’s back to Paris. I mean, of course, right? Last time we were there I goofed up getting tickets to the Musée d'Orsay, so I damn well booked some this time. I haven’t been there in a long time, and even longer without the, uh, delight of having kids in tow. They love them some Van Gough, you know, and you just can’t peel yourself away from it long enough to see all the other stuff.

If you have any good recommendations for Paris - eating, strolling, museums, site-seeing, zoning out - send them along to me. The only thing I try to do each time is get some steak frites at Le Relais de Venise, above. We’ve been to Paris a lot, but there’s an infinite number of things to do there. What are they?

I have another video today.

You've heard of pair programming and you probably think it's bonkers. Not many people benefit from this practice. Here, I go over how teams in the US military have been using pair programming to improve how they do software and spread that change to other teams. Some real DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!

Check out the blog post I based this on, it has a lot more on how other agile practices are helping out programmers in the DoD. And, as I mention, of course, all them free books you can get.

Relative to your interests

• Passing the anxiety parcel - “And in organisations there’s a phenomenon I sometimes call anxiety pass the parcel… The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely it is that you are going to be indulged by those below you, in trying to pass on to them your anxiety…. You think you are giving clear and direct leadership, but you’re also in a way, on another level, saying to the people below you here, you, you have my anxiety.”

• Chris Elliott’s Friday Night Videos Collection, 1987–88 - This is the kind of thing that I ate a lot of in my media diet as a kid. With decades of perspective, I am intrigued by how this kind of stuff influenced me and my overall style.

• Open Source Congress in Geneva - There’s a lot going on in the open source world at the moment, apart from licensing hijinks. Many more real-world things, e.g.: ’With the war raging in Europe, US/China rivalry heating up and AI promising to completely redefining our way of life, it is of little surprise that Open Source communities have increasingly heard alarm bells go off. As an overarching community, we’ve deal with export controls and suddenly being told to exclude contributors to projects. We’ve seen valuable contributors from certain countries excluded simply because of actions their leaders took that they had absolutely no path to influence. Some even fled their country and moved their entire families and lives. We’ve been asked how to handle contributions of AI generated code by hundreds of maintainers. We’ve had to defend and remind people that OSI is the organization that decides what licenses qualify as “open source” (particularly with SDOs). We’ve even had the perpetual “are you dead yet?” argument thrown around. Even if you consider just the regulatory issues facing open source in 2023 - including the CRA, PLD, AI Act (EU), Securing Open Source Software Act (US) and other examples - it is clear that the least various Open Source organizations can do is to educate the lawmakers on the consequences of their [in]actions and then prepare for the inevitable fallout (if they don’t listen). This includes preparing for things that will, if mandated by law, put an additional burden on all of Open Source organizations…' And, Roman goes on to list some.

• DevRel Management and Leadership: Guidance, Skill Development, and Book Recommendations.

• Banking as a service: The role of banks in powering the fintech industry - It does seem nuts to be a white-label bank, that is, someone else is the front-end and “owns” the customer: ’"As the low-cost provider to somebody else who owns the relationship, you’ve just sold your soul to the devil. … [W]e need to own the customer relationship, and we need to deserve to own the customer relationship through an offering that doesn’t need that fintech platform on the front end."’ // However, this is also the classic setup for disruption. The incumbent can’t go downmarket, follow the new model because it would damage their business, is not profitable compared to other things they could do, and just seems stupid. We’ll see.

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

There’ve been some good blog posts on the Tanzu blog recently, but they don’t seem to get many views. So I wanted to see if I could drive some traffic to one of them that I liked.

In the video above, I tried multi-cam editing but by filing one video (on my iPhone) directly into Descript, and another one (with my “real” camera) with QuickTime. Syncing them up in Descript was pretty easy. Detail has a better method for cutting between scenes (a very good, clever method, with key shortcuts, that cuts the video and switches to the other camera at the same time). It’s weird that Descript doesn’t have multi-cam recording, but, whatever.

Software people are bad at estimating

Here are three ways that software people (developers, mostly) are bad at estimating:

1. Estimating the feasibility of writing code for new features, that is, the risk of failure - if the new feature is difficult to impossible to write, or just doesn’t work altogether. Generally, it’s a lot harder than it seems because of all the things apart from the actual feature. What will the new feature conflict with, will it be compliant? Will the code changes mess something up? How about the new edge cases, exceptions, and error handling you’ll need? And, if you’re shipping in multiple countries, you’ll need to worry about regional differences, requirements, and laws.

2. How long writing and shipping new features will take. I’d start by tripling any estimate a developer gives - if their estimate was right, you’ll be happy. Of course, if they can demonstrate that they’ve kept their promises over the years, believe developers a little more. But even then, you’re going to be asking them to do new things, take new risks, so they’ll need to re-calibrate their velocity.

3. The value/impact of new ideas and tech. Developers generally think that new technologies are good and valuable…pretty much simply because they’re new. They’re very influenced by fashion (that’s how us thought leaders keep employed!), and very eager to try new things before they’re tested and proven. Before they’re “boring.” Developers will respond to this passion by wanting to do new things, often just because they’re cool. Sure, they’ll tell you there’s a - if they even use this term! - business reason, but, you know, it’s not like they got a study from Bain on that. Likely, it was just a blog post from someone at Netflix or Spotify. For example, serverless, microservices, kubernetes, etc.

This third is related to “resume driven development,” where developers pick a new technology to use to learn how it works and fancy up their resume. However, it’s not as direct as that: developers are always seeking better tools, methods, and thinking.

These new things may be better, but until they’re proven out, it’s very risky to use them in you’re a large organization. If you already have tools and methods that, basically work, you don’t want to take on the risk of using a potentially GROUND BREAKING new technology that, more than likely, will be less than that, and even slow you down.

In the past few years, many people suffered from this with kubernetes. Their developers said they could build out Kubernetes-based platforms, and many failed. There’s not a lot of conference talks from those people, but when if you’re trying to sell to infrastructure people, you hear those stories a lot.

Webinars are good

(Meta-note: I did this video today to test out Detail some more. I was looking for how quickly I could make a multi-cam video and do the round-trip, idea to publish. Detail still doesn't have non-destructive editing [at least, as far as I can tell you can’t go back to any clip and re-adjust your cuts, you can only got back in the Ctrl-Z undo queue), and I can't zoom the timeline in as much as I'd like. I like adding text to videos [you can see how the text is behind my head in the above thumbnail], but I couldn't figure out how to have the text appear for just a moment, instead for the whole "scene." I usually use Descript [or Lumafusion if I'm feeling "pro-am" or purely on my phone], which I'll stick to. I sure do like the whole vibe and mindset of Detail, though.)

Wastebook

• NPC syndrome - I always feel like I’m a character in someone else’s story. I feel bad for them, defer to them, work on what they need. I feel good about that when it goes well, shamed when it doesn’t, and resentful when I don’t get what I want. (I should think of myself more as the main character?)

• “Dads don’t say ‘rad.’”

• There’s really nothing new to say shout all the Twitter stuff. It just continues to be stupid and driven by a misunderstanding of…real life. Each wave brings some articles trying to analyze it, but the answer is all the same: that dude doesn’t know what he’s doing, and doesn’t know so much that he can’t tell that he doesn’t know. This is something. Also: people who are not “normal” will do weird things given the chance, power/money, and enough years to fart around. This can result in good, abnormal results (getting electric cars, rockets, satellite Internet into the market), but also results in a bunch of bad, abnormal results. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc.

Chart Party: CFOs and CEOs Prioritize Growth, While Other Priorities Differ Slightly

Relative to your interests

• “My Bluesky experience so far has been mostly terrible…” - “I really don’t like the website interface – it feels like something I might have put together myself. Notifications fail to clear, and the same posts are always just there for some reason. I don’t follow enough people, is no doubt part of the problem.”

• Does ‘Buy American’ Policy Make Sense? The Answer Is Key for Your AI Portfolio Too - “The bottom line isn’t that the digital revolution has had no impact on productivity, but that the gains from offices and factories introducing enterprise software and smartphones have mostly accrued to the makers of enterprise software and smartphones. American corporations rule the world because they make tech, not because they use it better.”

• AlmaLinux discovers working with Red Hat isn’t easy - Some follow-up, “how it’s going” meme-style stuff from the RHEL open source drama.

• Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness. - ‘Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds. The rules aren’t particularly unique: Get fit, pick up a skill, talk to women instead of watching porn all day. But if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.’ // Also, towards the end, the most action packed description of a Zoom call you’ll ever read. // Possible good traits: “Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.”

• The DoD: A Compelling Case for Extreme Programming - Good overview of why/how the practices in Extreme Programming (XP) help the needs of the military, and fit the constraints and challenges they have. For example, spreading knowledge with paired programming manages high turn over in staff.

• Free Lunch - Some strong Amsterdam type vibes here. // “Free Lunch is an all-caps display font that would look comfortable in a butcher shop window. Or a lunch counter menu in 1955. Or printed on the waxed paper that wraps a half-pound of Swiss cheese from your neighborhood deli. A little playful, great for headlines and logos.”

  

• Workin’ for the Man - This is how most all request driven processes (you have to file a ticket) end up being gamed by users: “So I think the winning technique is simply to flood their input queue with issues and eventually one will find a chink in the armour and reach an intelligent human being who Just Fixes It.”

• Nobody cares about your blog. - The post is pro-blogging, obviously. We should try to bring back blogging (or blogs masquerading as newsletters, whatever). With the collapse of Twitter, there’s lots of text based people who need an outlet.

• Oracle’s revised Java licensing terms 2–5x more expensive - ’a hypothetical organization with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable for the “Named User Plus” (NUP) license as per the legacy subscription model. That organization is also running Oracle JDK on 5,000 processors, and as such would pay $742,500 for NUP licenses and $900,000 for processor licenses under the legacy deal. The new Universal Subscription model would cost it about $3,118,500, a 90 percent increase in price.’

• Why they’re smearing Lina Khan - Outcomes based regulation: “There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click. The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!”

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

After reading an IDC report on Dell acquiring Moogsoft, I wrote a long piece with advice on hardware companies acquiring software companies. Also, a list of other types of acquisitions. I did this kind of work at a previous job (Dell of all places!), so I feel I have some first hand experience. However, since the place I’m working at is in the process of being acquired, it seemed like a bad idea to publish it. Maybe one day! Here’s an older (2016) piece on the topic - it’s not too great. The thing on estimating is from that longer piece.

The changing nature of “open”

In our tech world, the idea of “open” has changed a lot in the past few years. Instead of it meaning “open to everyone,” the classic notion of “open source,” now it more means “open to everyone except our competitors.”

Making money with open source is difficult

Running a high growth business on open source is difficult; you’re giving up on the easiest, most obvious thing to get paid for: the software itself. You can do an open core model where you are selling closed source software that uses/wrap around/ships with/improves/etc. the open source software. You can do the Red Hat thing where you sell support for your compiled open source project (and, I think, some closed-ish source “stuff” around it as well - this has become very confusing). But there’s not too much else. You have to come up with some excuse to charge people money for the free software. Or, the open source software can be part of an overall strategy that drives other revenue: the old razors and razor blades thing.

Once public cloud became mainstream, another model emerged: get paid to run and optimize the open source software. Run your Linux servers in the cloud, run your Postgres and Big Data stuff in the cloud, run your Spring Cloud stuff in the cloud, etc. This model works great for open source: the seller and the buyer get all of the benefits of open source and the seller can actually make money.

Attack of the channel!

The problem is that running a public cloud is expensive. Paying for all that infrastructure is expensive, and paying for the people who keep it up and running is expensive. So if each vendor wants to do it, they’re kind of stuck. They need to enter a new kind of business, being a managed service provider…a public cloud. Many have figured out this out as evidenced by the many SaaSes that are out there. I think most of them just use one of the public clouds and run their stuff on-top of it.

However, you then get into the problem of those public clouds wanting your business. Because you have open source, they could do exactly what you’re doing: sell operating the open source project. One of the first cases of this was Amazon running Elastic search. And there’ve been more, and there will likely be more. If there’s enough demand for running an open source project, the public cloud providers see an easy business model. And compared to their resources, the public cloud companies likely are better positioned.

To prevent this, many open source projects have tinkered with their licensing to basically say “this is totally open, except if you’re Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud. But totally open and free for other people to use.” There’s all sorts of ways of enforcing this: it’s just fine-print shit, so who cares to catalog it?

Recently, Red Hat did this move as well, except it doesn’t really seem to be about public cloud providers. It was more focused on the classic problem of distributed open source projects, here, Linux. There were several “cloners” who would take the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code, build it, and then sell it as a cheaper RHEL. Red Hat found a loop-hole (though, you only call it a loop hold if you don’t like it, otherwise, you just call “the license terms”) that would allow them to prevent their competitors from easily getting the source code. A close reading of the GPL license they use says that you only have to give the source code to customers, not everyone. So, Red Hat can decide that its competitors can not be customers, and, therefore, can not get the source code. Well, you can imagine the likes of Oracle, SUSE, and the others quickly figured out some tricks to get around that…sort of mooting the whole move by Red Hat?

Closing Up Open Data and APIs

There’s another type of “open” that’s long been morphing. In the 2000s, the people building the web were very interested in open formats: XML, JSON…things that were basically plain text that you could read. They were also interested in fully open and free to use APIs for everything. Famously, Instagram used this openness to help build its social network. You’d create an Instagram account and you could use the Twitter API to suck in all your friends there. Over thousands and thousands of people, this means Instagram can start to duplicate all of the social networks inside Twitter, for “free.” Twitter no longer allows this, and few other social networks do as well.

And, most recently, Twitter has been just shutting down free API access.

In the post-Twitter world, there’s a lot of talking about ActivityPub (the open protocol used by Mastodon) and whatever alternate thing Bluesky uses. While ActivityPub works for Mastodon - and, like, is Mastodon - so far all the promises of open APIs in the mega post-Twitter Twitters has been just that: talk. Perhaps they’ll come out! When they do, we’ll need to see just how open and flexible they are. Could you write a complete clone of the Threads app with full functionality?

And, of course, Reddit also messed with its free APIs locking out alternate clients.

AI

Most recently, Facebook opened its LLM framework, but if I heard right, only for people that have less than 700,000 active monthly users. This means people like IBM could take it and sell it to even their largest customers: JP Morgan Chase, for example, has “only” around 300,000 employees, which is, [checks math] much less than 700,000. (Well, OK, except for use by every solider in the US military, etc., and you’d have to slice up the US government “customer” into agencies and groups of agencies.) But, tp the public cloud companies and Facebook, it’s much more closed than open.

And when I use ChatGPT, the URL includes the phrase “OpenAI.” But…that’s not the type of “open” I knew in the 2000s. Here, I think “open” more means “has an API that you can pay to use.”

Waiting for the close of open

My sense, then, is that the nature of “open” is changing. There is much resisting from us old guard people, but you can start to see the Planck Principle playing out, perhaps not in a morbid way but more in “how much energy do I have left to give a shit” way:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Here, there’s not a “scientific truth,” per se, but more a principle of how the web wants to be. Rather, how the people building the web want it to be.

It feels like those people increasingly aren’t really interested in open.

Here’s some long running experiments to test that hunch:

• Will Red Hat revenue from RHEL increase? If so, the users of RHEL care a lot less about “open.”

• What will ActivityPub look like in Threads, Tumblr, and other mega sites? Will it all naturally fit together with Mastodon, or be, like, weird? If it’s weird, both the people building the web and the users will care less about “open.”

• Will there be more cloud providers who have no commercial relationship with open source projects they run? Same.

We’ll see!

On-premises, air-gap Kubernetes Management

We have a great Kubernetes management tool, Tanzu Mission Control. But it’s only been available as a SaaS up to now. In enterprise sales, you always - always - eventually need an on-premises, off the Internet version. Militaries and spies use this, but there’s plenty of people who are heavily on-premises (based on four years of IDC estimates, I’d say that at least 50% of enterprise workloads are on-premises).

Anyhow! The most recent version of Tanzu Mission Control can run on-premises now. Air-gap and all that shit! Here’s an article about it, as well. Check out this interview I did with Corey Dinkens on the release. If you don’t like video, you can listen to the podcast.

Subscribe to this new .NET newsletter

My co-worker Layla started a new .Net newsletter, “Hooked on .NET.”

Subscribe if that’s your thing!

Who’s freaked out about AI, and who’s chill with it?

From Nicole Greene at Gartner: “38% of respondents to that same Gartner Consumer Community survey stated that they are very comfortable or somewhat comfortable, with an additional 27% taking a neutral position on the use of genAI in Marketing. That means 65% of consumers are mostly ok with marketers using genAI, and there are a lot of low risk ways to bring genAI to your marketing team right now.”

Wastebook

• If you listen to the opening of “Breezin'” at half speed there’s some new magical thing that happens. Somehow it did this by accident today, and I thought I’d put on some kind of super high quality setting that let you hear the studio for real. It was a slow waking up of the song, like morning coming up.

• “I mean, even if the Pope uses it, isn’t the purchase a bit expensive?”

• “A gentle breeze blows, Birds singing in harmony, Nature’s symphony. DevOps buzz abounds, But failures linger around, Words won’t fix the sound.” Here.

• Also: “continuously devops microserverless. with software and humans.”

• ‘The lover of life makes the world his family,’ he wrote. ‘He is an “I”, insatiable in his appetite for the “not-I”.’ Here.

Relative to your interests

• Lines of Code - When there’s no perfect and easy measure, you have to (“end up”?) use the ones you have that are good enough.

• 55 - AI-Powered Content Strategy, Claude 2 from Anthropic, and Major Google Bard Updates - A super-packed episode of using AI stuff for marketing.

• CMOs Need to Give Generative AI a Chance, Before it’s Too Late - “In fact, 53% of respondents in a recent Gartner Consumer Community survey stated that they think that genAI will strongly or somewhat negatively impact society.” // But if you break it down by industry, as they do with a nice chart, things are slightly different.

• People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars - “Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls.” Meanwhile:

• What connected-car services are consumers willing to pay for? - There’s some fun stated-preferences versus revealed preferences in there.

• Change takes a long time - This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time. There’s usually a lack of urgency, but this is a benefit for most of those large companies. The employees, management, and share holders want stability, predictability. Also, they don’t want to spend money unless they really, really…really…have to. Few people like change unless it’s needed.

• How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock - “There’s always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn’t allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero’s morbid speeches, and so on.”

• What the Government Email Account Hack Says About the Future of Cybersecurity - Always be securing all the things.

• personal organization - “Here’s my one piece of advice about personal organization: (calendars, tasks, planning, tracking): Think hard about your needs, pick a system, and then do not under any circumstances change it until at least one full year has passed.”

Things I had ChatGPT summarize for me: Identifying Key Industry Analysts; IBM Acquires Apptio for Hybrid Multi-Cloud FinOps; How Five Companies Built to Outcompete; Product and Platform Shift: Five Actions to Get the Transformation Right; Characterizing People as Non-Linear, 1st Order Components in Software Development; IncrementalOps: A New Approach to IT Operations; If Your Innovation Effort Isn't Working, Look at Who's on the Team; The GigaOm Pivot - Rebuilding the Analyst Business for the Digital Enterprise; What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Discourse; China notes, July '23: on technological momentum; The New Media Goliaths; VMware’s Alex Barbato on How Agencies Could Enable DevSecOps Teams to Advance IT Modernization; VMware Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed Announcement; Kubernetes: Innovation Enabler Or Implementation Detail?; Infosecurity Europe 2023, Forrester’s Thoughts; Is DevOps Tool Complexity Slowing Down Developer Velocity?; Dell Technologies Announces Intent to Acquire Moogsoft.

Upcoming

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

July 19th Improving FinTech with cloud native think, speaking. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. 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 Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking.

Logoff

See y’all next time!

Ever wonder why there’s not more t-shirts at tech conferences? Marketing people hate getting t-shirts for booths at conferences. In last week’s Tanzu Talk about platform marketing I went over why:

Tech conference attendees love t-shirts. They’re also good for brand- and idenity-marketing: if you’re wearing the shirt, you’re likely a fan. Or, at least, you tolerate the brand.

You don’t see a lot of t-shirts at tech conferences because marketing people usually hate t-shirts. Here’s why

First, t-shirts are expensive compared to, say, pencils or other weird, branded doo-dads. But, there are even more annoying aspects.

Second, you have to decide what’s on the t-shirt. Even if it’s more than just a simple name, do you put that centered on the front, on the sleeve, the back? Then there’s type: do you have a polo shirt, a t-shirt… will programmers wear a polo shirt? How about ops people? And if you want a new, custom design on your shirt: forget about it. That’s going to be a lot of meetings. It’s a bunch of bike shed meetings.

Third, how many of each sizes and styles do you get? Predicting the right distribution of sizes it tough. You have to anticipate how many of each size (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL, etc.) will be needed. Additionally, geographic factors must be taken into account as American sizing differs from that used in other parts of the world. Predictably, American sizes are larger than European sizes.

The cut of the shirts is a related issue: how many “regular” versus women’s cut do you get?

Back when I helped with the planning and booth staffing for DevOpsDays at Pivotal, I used to be pretty good at predicting the size and cut splits for DevOpsDays. But this was built up over years of experience for a specific conference for a specific type of attendee.

You can imagine picking a t-shirt cut adds another uncomfortable dimension to this planning: you have to think about people in terms of body size and gender, and predict how many will be at the conference. This is something our corporate training (and, you know, the general goal of trying to be a better person) tries to rip out of your brain and corporate decision-making machine. You’ll literally be talking with co-workers saying things like “well, this is the American mid-west, so we better order more XXL’s than we do for Amsterdam” or “well, this is Bologna, so order a lot less women’s cut than we would for San Francisco.” (And by the way, should I even be saying “women’s cut”? I guess “fitted”?)

Forth, shipping these t-shirts introduces even more potential problems. If your conference is outside of your country (or, like, the EU), you’re gambling that customs won’t hold up your shipment. Or, you’ve figured out how to pay customs, adding expense and complication. Also, the shipment might just get lost. I’ve seen both of these happen a lot over the years. In addition to being held up and the additional cost and cognitive load of dealing with customers, what do you do when the box does finally show up, days after the conference? Do you talk with the conference people and somehow ask them to ship it back? Will FedEx/DHL/etc. do that for you? Or just you abandon the t-shirts?

Speaking of, fifth, once the conference is over you, there's often a surplus of leftover t-shirts. These typically fall into the extreme size categories of XS or XXXL, leading to unnecessary waste and inefficiency. And, even if you got past customers, you need to figure out shipping the t-shirts back. This is actually the easiest part, really. Most conferences have a courier come to pick things up, or you can schedule the pick up. Then you just ship a return label with the box, ask the people doing the booth work to tape the label on (make sure to ship some packing tape and scissors in the box!), and make sure the box gets the courier.

T-shirts seem like a really good idea, but they’re super tedious and costly to do at a conference. It’s why you don’t see more of them. It does mean, however, that they’re one of the rarer and more valuable things. Also, the bigger and more mature the company, they more capabilities and knowledge they should have about t-shirts. Big companies should be the ones giving away the most! But, since they’re often so penny-pinching, big companies don’t give t-shirts away too much. Oddly, it’s the smaller companies, the startups. This is likely because they’re being asked to burn money (rather than save it), the marketing people are probably more, like, “go getters,” and they might just be a little naive about how annoying it all is.

I think a vendor should always have t-shirts. It’s worth all the problems to get that brand and “in the club” feel. But, I wouldn’t want to be the one in charge of it.

(I wrote a long post years back on designing tech conference t-shirts. I should find that!)

Relative to your interests

• A4 Issue 1 July 2022 – Notes from the Drawing Board - This kind of thing is fantastic.

• Throw someone a pep rally - Two thumbs up!

• “that’s the American spirit!” - Yes, exactly this: “America’s public culture really does valorize pragmatic problem-solving.” As he writes, for example: “I remember going to Germany in, I think, 2009 with a small group of American journalists. We were in some eastern city in a van driving down a narrow alley when we had to stop because there was a Smart Car incorrectly parked in the alley, leaving us with no space to pass. Our van driver couldn’t back out and he couldn’t go forward, so he said we’d just have to wait. A middle-aged American woman in the group said that was absurd, and that yours truly and a few other younger guys on the trip could just get out, pick up the Smart Car, and move it. The driver said, “no, no, no, it’s not possible.” But she insisted that the four of us get out and move the car, and so we did, kind of like in the Mentos ad. We got back in the van, and she said to the driver very definitively, “that’s the American spirit!” // Now, that said: you have to also remember that after millenniums of war, Europe has been at peace for 78 years. So, things are going well on that front, perhaps the most important of all things.

• 202306 - ’If you take a single pull request (PR) that adds a new feature, and launch it without tests or documentation, you will definitely get the benefits of that PR sooner. Every PR you try to write after that, before adding the tests and docs (ie. repaying the debt) will be slower because you risk creating undetected bugs or running into undocumented edge cases. If you take a long time to pay off the debt, the slowdown in future launches will outweigh the speedup from the first launch. This is exactly how CFOs manage corporate financial debt. Debt is a drain on your revenues; the thing you did to incur the debt is a boost to your revenues; if you take too long to pay back the debt, it’s an overall loss.’ Also: “Tech debt, in its simplest form, is the time you didn’t spend making tasks more efficient. When you think of it that way, it’s obvious that zero tech debt is a silly choice.”

• DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – July 2023 - Trends!

• The Rise Of DIY In FinOps - “But some DIY efforts do work. These tools are generally powered by teams of between 15 and 45 engineers acting as a dedicated product and support team that builds new capabilities, maintains and updates the tool as new cloud services emerge, and troubleshoots any existing user issues. The most famous example is Target, which dedicates two teams focused on the data pipeline, data acquisition, dashboards, and engineer persona application and has built everything from the ground up.”

• No one has an “appetite for risk” - “I think there is a better way to express what we aim to express when we say ‘risk appetite.’ What we are talking about is the organization’s failure tolerance. How often is it okay for the organization to experience security failures? How big can the failures be (impact) and still be tolerable?”

• IT spending soars, generative AI investments barely leave a mark - These forecasts have been confusing in recent years. They’re always increasing, and yet the trends are always cost savings: ‘“Digital business transformations are beginning to morph,” said Lovelock. “IT projects are shifting from a focus on external-facing deliverables such as revenue and customer experience, to more inward facing efforts focused on optimization." The trend is reflected in where spending growth is highest. Gartner expects software, the fastest-growing segment, to achieve a double-digit growth rate of 14% on the year, as organizations reallocate spending to squeezing more value out of ERP and CRM applications, as well as other core platforms that deliver efficiency gains.’ // Also, yeah: with AI it’s way too early in the corporate planning and strategy cycle to be allocating lots of cash to it. It’ll just be small PoCs for at least a year.

Upcoming

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

July 19th Improving FinTech with cloud native think, speaking. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. Sep 6th to 7thDevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15thSREday, London, speaking Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking.

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Tonight, I have my last online talk of the month - for a long time actually. It’s with Alvin from Forrester. They’ve put a lot of thinking into modeling and planning taking care of legacy IT stuff. We have it planned out as, you know, podcast-y discussion. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from him. Check it out!

After that, it’s hopefully time for a lot of content creation. Hopefully, this will mean helping out some of my marketing friends with stuff they need and plans for engagement and that shit. Also, I have a list of tiny videos I want to make. Do they work? WHO KNOWS. But, they’re fun and satisfying to make.

We’re back from a three day weekend in London for our anniversary. I tried very hard to eliminate all “productivity,” so I have very little to say today. I did want to ADVERTISE for a thing I have tomorrow. So I’ve gathered up some waste book for you today.

Wastebook

• We should revise the Peter Principle not to be insulting (reached the level of your incompetence), but burnout driven: reached the level of being able to put up with more bullshit.

• “I know my price. Because I developed my identity outside of work, there’s a cost that comes when work infringes upon it—if it ever costs me a larger part of my identity and my life, I know it’s not worth it.” Here.

• I like systems that can be successfully applied, with only medium effort. It must be executable by many organizations, not just the exceptional ones. This principle weeds out the systems that sound good, but can never be done widely. It can be hard for the genius to come up with the perfect systems, but should be easy for us regular folk to implement it. This applies to individuals as well. Related:

• If you’re so smart, why are we all still so dumb?

• There’s tasks that need to be done by a date. And then there are tasks that have the potential to help me meet goals I don’t even know I have yet.

• In praise of source cream - It is good. Despite growing up eating Tex-Mex, it is something I never really got into until recently.

• Travel hack: you only have to keep the tray table up during landing and take off. So if you’re waiting for the plane to load and take off, you can put it down. I like to hunch over while I’m waiting, you know reading books or news or whatever. So I put the tray table down to lean on it.

• This is a good book, and I enjoyed reading it.

Tomorrow Darran Rice and I are going to be talking about how cloud native apps can make your financial services strategy better. Plus, a little security, legacy software fixes, etc. Watch it live, July 19th at 3pm Amsterdam time, and you can ask questions. Or, just save it to watch later.

Upcoming

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

July 19th Improving FinTech with cloud native think, speaking. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking.

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See y’all next time!