App StoriesI’m working on a new idea for a project - a series of interview and case studies about applications inside, you know, large organizations - my ongoing interest. These are my favorite types of stories: why an application was needed, how people came up with what to do, how they wrote the app, encountered changes as they went, and what they learned through that process. If you’ve got a story like that, perhaps I could interview you for this project.

That’s a chart from our recent State of Kubernetes survey that I’ll probably use a lot this year. Here’s my commentary on it from a blog post this week: In our surveys, I’ve been using the software release cycle question to represent developer benefits. For the most part, the faster developers can release software, the better their software will be. There are exceptions, but not many. The sooner you have people using your software, the more feedback you’ll get about the quality, usability, and overall usefulness of your software.

What Computers Do At BanksHere’s two diagrams from a 2021 BCG report on banking that show, basically, everything that IT does for the business part of retail banking. First, the “value streams,” or lines of business and products: Second, what the typical IT stacks look like to support these value streams: Pretty good stuff! And, if you’re into that, I also liked this white paper that goes over the general deal with modernizing banking apps, services, etc.

This tech is so complex that you really should be using it Here is a tech marketing anti-pattern that I agree with. It makes me think of another one. Let’s call it “you don’t realize this yet, but what you want is very complex!” All of us in the tech world have done, and will keep doing, this kind of marketing, be it a presentation, a blog post, a commissioned survey, posts on Bluesky and LinkedIn, or whatever.

Developers using kubernetes are seeing a steady growth in benefits as represented by shortening release cycles. 60% of respondents say that their developers are more productive with kubernetes. That's according to the VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey. Check out the full survey for the full findings, including more on the operational benefits and challenges, security needs and considerations, and multi-cloud usage and motivation. You can watch the video in YouTube as well, for whatever reason.

Just links this episode. DevOpsDays Austin is back for the 11th year! You should go for two days of DevOps, cloud computing, DevSecOps, and more on May 4th to 5th, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Learn more at https://devopsdays.org/austin, the schedule is live! You can get 15% off the registration price when you use the code FRIENDLY_NEIGHBORHOOD_SDT_23. Relevant to your interests On the shift to oat and the milk hysteresis curve - Coffee problems.

If you work at a company, or in an open source projects, you’ll have a lot of chances at a tech conference to sell your organization’s stuff: products, cloud services, consulting, promoting your project, or just yourself. You’ll get a lot of opportunities to do this, especially if you’re a sponsor of the event and have a booth, or are giving a talk. I’ve been in this situation many times over the pat 18 years, and here’s what I try to do.

That’s from a 15 minute version of my platform talk. I focused just on the seven tips to get your platform group started and scale it. I’m recording this for a conference, but I think I’ll need to record it again - which means this version is a bonus video! 🤖 Fully dedicated to “juggling everything developers need”ChatGPT4 did a pretty good job converting the transcript for that little video into a “blog article.

Now that you know how Amsterdam works, here’s some sites and fun things to do. You know, straight up tourist shit! I’ll throw in a few things I left out from yesterday’s Amsterdam advice too. My wife, Kim, helped out with a lot of these. Also, apologies for typos and stuff. I have some other work I need to get to. Oh, and also, I’ll be speaking five times at our KubeCon booth (see below for a listing) on platform engineering, whatever “shift left” means, and some other topics that I should really go remember before I give the talks.

How Amsterdam WorksComing to KubeCon EU? Here's tips on Amsterdam from an American expat - me! I moved from Austin to Amsterdam almost five years ago. For those of you coming here for KubeCon, here’s some tips, things to do, and other advice on having an enjoyable time. This first part is, like, how everything works, a manual for getting comfortable with the city, sort of API and docs. I’ll follow-up tomorrow with the “fun” stuff.