I’m a Texan, so cold weather is always welcome. Rain and cold weather is even better. Here in Amsterdam, people apologize for the rainy weather, they seem to dread it. I suppose it you’d lived all of your 41 years in a gray and wet city, you’d be sick of it too. Just like I’m sick-numb to the heat of Hill Country. There are other tells to the Amsterdammers longing for sun: many of them have deep tans.

I was down in France, just around Paris this week to speak at an event. The audience gave me the chance to work on a military-centric version of my standard talk which was fun, and was well received. I dove even deeper into the ongoing US Air Force story of modernizing their software. It's chock full of pretty amazing results based on the simple act of doing agile and DevOps. Check out the slides, and hopefully I'll be able to give it in public sometime.

I've been in Berlin at a quarterly sales meeting this week. It's a big room of people, new and veterans. Traveling from Amsterdam to Berlin is just an hour, the old you spend longer in the airports than the actual flight thing. It proves out the whole reason for moving here though: business traveling in Europe is much easier if you're in Europe. It's even much easier than traveling around the US.

I've been in this quiet before the business-travel shit-storm for the past two weeks. Next week it slowly starts up. In the meantime, it's given me time to get back to writing on the cloud native book I've been working on it. There's links to some excerpts in progress below. Also, I made the entire WIP public if you're into that kind of thing. Original programmingGDPR, Observability, & more on the mystery of serverless, still with half-assed research - Software Defined Talk #144 — www.

We're in Amsterdam now, all moved into our house - rented, of course. I missed last week due to packing and moving. Original programmingMagic little scripts & favorite SpringOne Platform talks - Pivotal Conversations #110 — soundcloud.com SpringOne platform is coming up quick - next month! - so Richard and Coté do their annual favorite talks review. There's talk on agile, pipelines, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring, case studies, and so many more they don't have time to discuss.

We move to Amsterdam in 5 days. We're nearly done packing up our whole house. It's surprisingly easy to just get rid of things, all things: clothes, kitchen stuff, furniture. People say this all the time and it's true: you should get your house in shape for selling while you live there so you can enjoy it yourself. I doubt we'll do it - because, life - but having a true spring cleaning where you get rid of stuff as if you're moving seems like a good idea.

20 July 2018 We move to Amsterdam in 11 days. Cloud Native Journey, 3rd editionIn my capacity as an enterprise thought lord, I write up how large organizations are managing to improve their software every few years. It's the main thing I talk with people about and "work on." I've been working on a third edition of my main book(let) for about a year. There's finally some output after much research (you may recall a sample of it from last issue, the "

The problem with me and newsletters is that I constantly want to make one, but they're a lot of work. I long for the old blog days of just a splatter of content, a wunderkammer. Let's try this commonplace book format. Software Defined Talk Episode 141: Broadcom acquiring CA, AT&T acquiring AlienVault, the mysteries of cloud native vendor product management — www.softwaredefinedtalk.com We try to discern the strategy behind two acquisitions this week: Broadcom buying CA and AT&T buying AlienVault.

This week, news around Microsoft’s Azure Stack drove a lot of private cloud talk around these parts. Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what “Cloud-native Enterprise Architecture” means. Links and notes below. Also, if you’re into Software Defined Talk, we’ve created a Patreon account. One, if you just want to give us cash, hey, we’ll take it. And two, we’re trying to figure out member only content. I think we’ll try with some bonus episodes where we do extended/extra analysis of white papers, surveys, and other tech industries studies and things.

It’s a short week, what with July 4th on Tuesday. There’s a few podcasts below and bit less than a handful of links. Podcasts Software Defined Talk: “Do I just need some better medication?” or, advertising, antitrust, and talking to strangers Without advertising, there would be no capitalism, and, if you’re not constantly afraid of the DoJ knocking at your door, you’re probably doing it wrong.