Lots of original content this week, and unstructured tips on moderating a panel. Since it’s been two weeks, a passel of links too. We fear changeThis is a the first new talk I’ve done in awhile. It came out alright - I could do a lot more commentary on the existing organization change models, and I cut some tactics for management to make up for time in the conference agenda. Anyhow, I’ll have to find a conference to give a 30 minute and then 50 minute version…and find that extra content.

Nothing profound this time. Garbage Chairs of AmsterdamFree DevOps conference, DevOps Loop, Oct 4thPromotional gifA conference I helped put together, DevOps Loop, is next week. I'm putting together my presentation "fear of change." So far, I'm playing around with the notion of going over fear of change in more literary sources. There's plenty to be said for that fear, and change, in the corporate world - I've written three books on the topic!

How I find time to make thumbnails for my enterprise videos. Sorry, I flakedThe most operational self-help tactic I've learned in years is: get comfortably flaking out on things. Missing meetings, being late delivering things, being unreliable, skipping studying Dutch today (and tomorrow)…just failing at living up to your full potential.  This thinking works for me because it tells me an easy thing to do: just be OK not doing things.

How was your week? A free conference I helped make: DevOps Loop, Oct 4thNext month is DevOps Loop. It's a conference I've been helping out together and it has an outstanding talk list. I've worked closely with several speakers to curate talks on things I'm interested in and that they're excited about. Register and attend for free, it's October 4th. And now, the stuff: Original contentSoftware Defined Talk #319: We need two elephants — www.

The newsletter is back, for now. This is actually issue #156, but who’s really counting? Your author, as drawn by daughter.New book, freeSince sending out this newsletter I’ve published another book, which you can get for free: Many organizations are toiling away at their application modernization strategy. Most have created enclaves of digital innovation, but few have modernized the entire organization. Why? They start with practices and technologies before changing the most important part: their organization's mindset.

Hello there! My little booklet on how enterprises are improving their software organizations is finally out: Monolithic Transformation. It’s one of those little O'Reilly books, sponsored by Pivotal. I’ve worked on it for a couple years, frequently excerpting drafts of it and using it as the basis for the talks I give. You can get the PDF for free if you give Pivotal your email address. And, sometime soon, there’s a good chance you’ll see hard copies at Pivotal conferences booths.

I've spent most of my content-time this week editing Monolithic Transformation. It's rewording to simplify text here and there, and even better to slice out whole paragraphs. 18 pages in, I've reduced it by 3 pages. Let's say I hit 1 page per 10, then the 82 page book will whittle down to, what, 74 pages? Damn near the perfect length. Nov 30th, 2018, Amsterdam Original programmingSoftware Defined Talk #157: Brandon takes a victory lap & Australia muthafuckers!

There is no Thanksgiving in the Netherlands. WHO KNEW?! Winter is settling in here. As a Texan, I barely understand winter. But, also as a Texan, I find cold weather novel and fun. We'll see if that lasts, but for now, it's awesome. Also, biking turns out to be fantastic. Living all my life in Austin with it's beautiful hills and oven-heat, I've never found biking pleasant. But here in Amsterdam I just make up excuses to take my bike out.

There's an insane block of travel coming up for me in October, and then Asia in November. Figuring out a "road warrior" job is difficult, and I'm constantly asking if that's the life I want, away from family a lot. The perks - pay, seeing people and places, all the frequent traveler benefits, and also getting exposed to lots of customers and their store - is great. But, it'd also be nice to just be a hermit at home, spending most of my time typing away at things and podcasting.

I've been trying to figure out micro.blog as a platform. Hosting all my stuff over there seems much nicer than at WordPress. I think I've got all my stuff setup there now, at cote.coffee. Really, it's just a duplicate of what's here - mostly links. This week I managed to be in both London and Berlin. It worked out well for proving the reason I moved over here: much easier travel around Europe.