Presentations are just docs that were printed wrongMost presentation advice focuses on actual event of a speaker giving the presentation. In conference setting, you’re informing, making a point, and, hopefully, entertaining. In a corporate setting, the actual delivery of the presentation is not the primary purpose of a presentation. Instead, a presentation is used to facilitate coming to a decision. Usually, you're laying out a case for a decision you want the company to support.

You know, maybe this would be a good notebook for my ChatGPT/AI stuff. I do a lot of it, and it’s fun to share. I’ve yet to find a good source of prompts (I don’t want to go to reddit or Discord - I really want just a curated list), but it’s sort of fun to develop them. One thing I’m not showing here is the programming I’ve been asking it to do.

You know how things go. Somedays, all of the sudden, it’s 4:17 and you have your last meeting of the day at 4:30, and it’s also your daughter’s third birthday, so you need to get to that. And while you managed to eat a really great sandwich, it also, turns out no one’s walked the dog all day! Thankfully, I also had the pleasure of talking with Ben today about two topics I’ve been thinking a lot about this week: how can infrastructure and developers get over their acrimonious history and start talking with each more, and, some thoughts on the Spring Framework.

These 5 tactics are good for a 13 year old student or an adult knowledge workerHere are the five test taking and essay test taking tips I shared with Cormac: If you’re doing the assignment in Google Docs, or whatever, of possible, copy and paste the questions into your document. This way, you have them right in front of you. You don’t have to answer the questions in order. On your first pass, just answer the ones you feel have an answer for.

The Narcissism of Small Differences in ChartsIn surveys, just because something is last doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s true the other way as well. Now, if there’s a huge difference between the first and last thing, then, sure. If 85% of people like the first choice, and 15% like the last, you’ve got a stew goin'. But, when the differences are small - let’s say all below 50%, you need to be careful with how you interpret the chart.

I very much so want to use this style for reports. Those charts are amazing.Feedback on today’s piece.Here's my final article. What do you think? Tell me your analysis of what I could have prompted you with to get your responses close to this final version. 🤖Your final article effectively discusses the challenges of solving the IT silo problem, the limitations of siloed organizations, and various approaches to tackle the issue.

If no one owns the problem, no one can fix it - The Silo Unifier’s ParadoxSolving the IT silo problem is challenging as there’s no one person responsible for the entire process. Each solo is owned by different groups like software developers, operations, security, project managers, and more. These groups often have competing goals, desires, incentives, and lift-styles/worldviews. Agile and DevOps practices attempted to break these silos, shifting activities like testing, security and ops “left” to developers, or centralizing shared services (“platforms” now-a-days).

Suggested theme song for this episode: Changing Infrastructure People’s MetricsI’ve been working on a new-ish presentation for Thursday. I went back and reviewed my colleague, Darran Rice’s comments in a recent talk on transitioning “traditional” infrastructure and ops people to a (as we’d say now) platform engineering approach. He worked at UBS until coming to work at VMware, so his advice is based on REAL WORLD EXPERIENCE, as they say. He’s got this great slide: