Suggested vibe for this edition: The eternal principles of an (enterprise) app stackThese are not all of them, but it’s a start. 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. We keep trying to merge the dev tools stack and the runtime tools environment into one platform.

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.

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.

Midjourney: Olan Mills style photograph of software programmers standing around a conference table in 1980s sitcom styleSoftware people are bad at estimatingHere are three ways that software people (developers, mostly) are bad at estimating: 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.

Midjourney: Medieval serfs defending a castle from demons in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, from venusinfurs.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 difficultRunning 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.

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.

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. Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet), Vincent van Gogh (1889).WastebookWe 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.

Beware of High Expectations in Enterprise TechHere are three charts. First, while everyone is freaking out about AI, it’s had little impact thus far: Shared by Mark Hinkle.Second, since 2020, usage of cloud seems to have leveled off at a 50/50 split between on-premises and public cloud: Source:  IDC, The Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure: Multicloud to Hybrid; Shared to Dedicated, doc #DR2023_T1_DM, March 2023But don’t worry, everyone is planning to move more to public cloud in the next three years.

Finding an estimate of how many developers there are in the world is difficult. Oh, there’s plenty of people making estimates, but those estimates vary so much that the estimates are suspicious. For example: Microsoft/GitHub recently said they now have 100 million developersusing GitHub. “We estimate that, as of Q1 2023, there are 35.6 million active software developers in the world,” says Slashdata (who the CNCF uses for surveys).

Only 22% of software developers say they have a clear understanding of what they need to do to comply with security policy, to make sure the applications they're writing for their organization, are good in a security sense. Now, it'd be easy to say the developers are just dopes and they don't know what they're up to. But I think what this is indicating is that figuring out how to practically do security policy at the software layer is difficult.