I’ve hosted a lot of executive dinners for work - maybe 50 or 60 over the past several years…? These are commercial oriented. At my work, we’re trying to meet new people to sell our software to, or people who know people, etc. Getting to know “executives” is directly related to the sales process. The secondary goal is more brand and thought-leadership marketing: just making the attendee aware of us and what we do, and, hopefully, our “vibe.” And the priorities after those two are what you’d expect: networking, fun/useful conversation, and doing some overall “community management” and participation.

Here’s some behind the curtain stuff on doing them, especially targeted at people like me who don’t like group conversations. I’ll skip over the “sales” tactics I use1 and creating the “content strategy,” and just focus on getting a good conversation going and structuring the at-table event. “Surviving moderating an executive dinner,” so to speak :)

Here’s what I try to do, big picture:

1. Have some kind of five to ten minute “talk” that defines a topic. With me, this is usually discussing agile development, DevOps/platform engineering, etc. In the last one I did I threw out the topic: “you should centralize and standardize the platform your app developers use.” That was a good one!

2. Find a problem with that topic, especially the “it depends” kinds of implementation topics. One of the problems with the centralize platform thing was: the developers don’t like it, and won’t use it.

3. Ask people what they’ve encounter, done, or found.

4. Get them in a conversational fly-wheel, all talking and exchanging ideas with each other as peers.

To do this, you have to bootstrap the group into talking and then maneuver things to make sure they keep sharing, and asking each other questions: monitor and spin the fly-wheel when it starts to slow down.

This is all difficult for me because I don’t really like talking with/in groups, so I have to force myself to be involved rather than just sitting back and listening. I love just sitting back and listening.

My introverted self believe this is all impossible. But, it’s totally possible: they all want to talk, listen, and exchange ideas…to learn - that’s why they came!2 - but usually they need help getting going.

What is an executive dinner

If you don’t know what an executive dinner is it, here’s what it is. First, it’s hosted by someone who has a commercial interest in the attendees. In my case, we’re looking to sell Pivotal/Tanzu products and services that help companies build and run their software.

You find some decision makers (they have needs and budgets) at companies that you want to sell your stuff to. You invite them to a sit-down dinner in a private room of a fancy restaurant.3 Everyone sits at a big table so they can see and (mostly) hear each other. The dinner lasts for 2 hours or so. People talk during the dinner. That’s what it looks like from the outside.

It’s like really high-touch, really-expensive lead-gen. I’ll cover the goals inline below.

(And, hey, I’m being totally transactional and mercantile here. Cold-hearted, HA HA! BUSINESS. It’s also possible, encouraged, and necessary to just be chill and, like, human. But, let’s focus on the business part.)

Finding things to talk about

In the at-the-table conversation, it’s good to call on people who will have something interesting to say, and be on topic. But these people are strangers, so you don’t know who those people are per topic. Here’s a trick that. Often, you have a pre-sit-down “cocktail” party as you wait for people to show up (like a 30 minute windows). People stand around, get drinks, and eat tiny food.

During this time, you move around the room and just get to know people.4 The good thing is, they all came for a topic and will want to talk about. You can just dive right into that topic, it’s not like fishing for topics at a playdate with mixed normals.

I usually ask people “what do you do [at work/in subject matter area]?” They’ll give a long answers! “Well, I’m the director of application development, so oversee three teams that work on our customer facing loan app.”

Next, I either ask them to:

1. Clarify things I don’t understand5 - “whoa - what does ‘generative cyber-analytical responsiveness’ mean?”

2. I ask for some more detail - “what kind of methodology do you use?” “Oh, why do you run on public cloud?” “Is Google Cloud good? Why not Azure”)

3. Or, I just say “is that fun?”

The last question usually throws people for a loop, and they have to stop and do some original thinking, breaking out of the usual small talk pattern. And from there, you just ask questions about why it’s fun or not. This usually evokes problems and challenges, or victories and success they have. And, the “is it fun” question also downshifts the conversation from professional to more whimsical.

So, you walk around and talk with three or five people in this pre-event. Now, you know three or five people who can talk about some topics. During the dinner conversation, you call on those people when the topics come up (or when cold-start bring the topic up), and you know that they have something (interesting) to say. “On that topic, Geraldine: we were talking about the challenges of managing 50 plus SKUs in the salty snacks industry earlier. What have y’all been doing to make that better…and does it work?”

Keep “intros” very short

Everyone is sitting, and you have to start. The main thing I’ve learned to avoid is having each person do an open-ended introduction. You need to know who each person is, but you have to really make people keep it short. Some people’s introductions include their “life story,”, and can extend to 5, even 10 minutes if you don’t manage it. Asking “what brought you here?” usually evokes a lengthy response. And these lengthy intros snow-ball: once one person gives an extensive into, the next people start modeling them and giving long intros. So, if you have 8 to ten people to go through, you’ve blown 10, even 15 minutes of time.

You can avoid this by not asking people to say what their interest in the topic is, this usually results in two or three people telling you everything about their involvement and experience in the topics, which can be 5+ minutes which ads up. It’s risky to ask them what they’re interested in hearing, but worth it to get topics on the table that you can refer to when boot-strapping.

I try to be blunt: “let’s go around and introduce ourselves, but keep it really short so we can get to talking: tell us who you are, where you work, and just briefly what you’re interested in hearing from the group [maybe even just one thing].”

Now, there’s a trade off you’re making here. Your sales people would love to hear an extended list of wants, needs, and problems that each person has. A huge point of these events is to do a lot of sales intelligence gather all at once, and knowing people’s background and examples of what they do is very useful for qualification and structuring “customer journeys,” etc.

Moderating - keeping things conversational

About ten or 15 minutes in, you have to watch for things turning into a series of lectures from individuals. People will just give “readouts” about a topic. You might also get people who are the “let me solve this problem once and for all,” dead-ending into a conclusion rather than people doing structured shooting-the-shit. In general, you just have to let that person sort of run, and then immediately call on someone else to share their experience, or change the topic. Another tactic for the readout people is to be like: “that sounds great, but how do you get people to decide to actually do it?”

Sometimes, only a few people talk. You want “most everyone” talking. So, you have to call on people who aren’t talking. Like, just specifically on a topic: “what do you think?” - “has that been your experience?” - etc. Or, you can try to bring the conversation back to the table by saying things like “what are the rest of you experiencing/doing?”

Sometimes the conversation stalls out, and then you have to do talking. Have some 2-3 minute monologs ready. I don’t have first hand experience most of the topics at these dinners, so I go over what other people have told me, things I’ve read, etc. When you’re re-starting the conversation, you have to do the “say something that can be objected to” thing, and then ask people what their experience is.

Another trick for managing the conversation flow, is timing the meal courses. We try to have the main conversation before the food (appetizers) is brought out. Group talking while you’re eating is hard.

Having the serving staff bring in food 15 minutes after you sit down gives you a natural hard stop: you can time box the focused, group conversation, and when the food shows up, transition to side conversations.

That shift usually happens when the entree is brought out. In the appetizer phase, you’re slowing down the single thread group talk, and people are starting to talk in pairs and small tuples. This transition kind of takes over the table, and then you have lots of little conversations going on, which is my goal for the rest of the dinner.

Ending it

Closing out depends on what you want. Eventually you need to announce the formal end of the event, and throw out a “what’s next”/call-to-action. In our sales focused dinners that means saying “hey, this was great! We’re here to talk about how we solve these problems, so feel free to talk with us more.”

I don’t like the retro/summing up/what’s your take away thing like you might do at work. That’s just extra work you’re asking people to do, and also it’s usually lame, and no one’s going to do anything with it (probably).

At the end, do your CTA, just thank people, and close out. Also, people are both tired, full, and maybe booze-buzzed - not the best time for “read outs.” I used to hang out after as people moved to the bar. But, following the Ann Richards Evening Activities Principle (roughly quoted: “well, y’all, I’m leaving now, because nothing interesting/useful/good happens after 9pm”), I usually leave. Sales people sometimes stick around.

Also, sometimes it just doesn’t work. This especially true if you have free-loaders, cynics, and too heterogenous of topic areas/SME’s. When that happens, wherever: you usually met 1 or 2 people that are interesting.

Oh, and the organizing it part is a whole other thing that I don’t have a lot of experience with. We use agencies for that. They have big lists of people, and the other thing they do is gently encourage people to show up. They’ll call them the day before, and sometimes they call them if they haven’t shown up to see why. This will get some people who dropped out to decide to come! The organizers also move around in the background to time things like the food delivery above and to welcome stragglers, shuffle them into the room.

Cultures

I’ve done these events in several European countries, and, of course, America. If you’re not acculturated to different cultures, it’s good to go in with some sense-making tools. Apply these tools with care: they’re stereotypes, generalizations, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Americans are pretty good at organically getting a conversations going. You have to be careful with them when it comes to individuals dominating the conversation, and the “readout” person above. American business culture is surprisingly hierarchical: HiPPO, and all that.

UK people and the Dutch have the relaxed, gregarious American stereotype, but much less HiPPO: they tend to speak as equals.

Despite stereotypes, most (other) continental Europeans are like this too: but (if you’re American) you have to get ready for continental European bluntness: where they tell you you’re wrong and that’s considered polite and helpful - I think of it as “free advice.”

Also, there can be language frictions. I only speak English, so there can be barriers with the French, Italians, Spanish, and Belgians. Germans are usually confident in their English (and, of course, the Dutch are bilingual, so English is no problem). But, in the world of IT, everyone speaks English very well, they just may feel like they don’t. In those cases, I try to make fun of myself for being a dumb-and-lazy American, linguistically, and that usually opens things up a little.

Motivating myself

Have I said, yet, that I don’t like talking in groups? This means that if I don’t catch myself, in a dinner like this I’m just maneuvering to run out the clock. That’s not commercially good! How do I motivate myself to do this thing that comes very unnaturally to me and also feels…not fun?

First, it’s my job. It’s amazing how “get over yourself” effective that is for me.

Second, I’m want to hear what have people to say, if it’s interesting. I was talking with Sasha Czarkowski yesterday, and I realized that one of the main reasons I don’t like group conversations is that I fear being stuck in a boring conversation.6 So, a lot of my tactics in dinners are about keeping things interesting to me. This risks going off commercial-topic, sure. But I have the job I do because I’m interesting in what my work does and what people do with our ideas and products. So, driving conversations to what I’m interested in is rarely off topic.

Presentations

I haven’t mentioned presentations because those are a bad idea for in-person dinners. Contrary to that, if you’re doing an online event, I think presentations are excellent, maybe even required. I wrote up more on that in my previous how to do executive dinners article.

I have the easy job

The other thing to keep in mind is that I just show up and talk. There is a lot more that goes into these events. You’ll need a professional field marketing person to lead and own the event: actually planning, arranging, running everything, and making sure it has tracked ROI. You’ll need people (probably an outside agency) to recruit people and call them, even day of, to remind them to show-up. Most importantly, you’ll need someone who makes sure all the post-event activities happen. These are not your sales people, it’s that field marketing person.

Anyhow. There you go: now go do some executive dinners :)

Also, here’s an older write up (from 2022) of some more of my tactics and general strategies for these kinds of event. It covers much of the above, but has a lot more on my experience doing them online (during COVID), and more detail managing the event (pre- and post-), which is the hard part.

Logoff

That was long! I’ll save the strange finds and links for next time.

If you like this kind of thing and you’re not reading it in your email, you should subscribe to my newsletter. It’s all I have after the social media fragmentation we now swim in like a bunch of pirates clinging to a cracked strip of wood.

Have you tried having less?

Standardized. Centralized. Consistent. Those words I use over and over when talking about platforms. In large organizations, you’ve got hundreds, even thousands, of applications. There are likely tens of “platforms”: the stacks of runtime and middleware goo that all those apps run on. Maybe even hundreds if the company is large enough, old enough, and has gone through enough acquisitions (most all global banks).

The more of those platforms your have, the more time you’ll spend managing them, governing them, securing them, and figuring out how to trouble-shoot problems. This is just, like, intuitively the case: instead of knowing how one thing works, you need to know how five (ten, 20, etc.) things work.

Here’s a chart on all this from our recent State of Cloud Native Platforms survey:

This used to be called the “State of Kubernetes Survey,” but it’s been slightly generalized with the rename. Still, I’d mostly think of these finds as Kubernetes-centric.

These are large enterprise challenges, and you see that in some other questions.

First, “management” is much more concerned with governance at scale and strategic risk management. They’re worried about more than just one app, or just one platform, but about the long-term health of the organization. You see that they care more about these types of concerns when compared to individuals:

And, when you look at things these larger organizations worry about, it’s back to governance, control, and consistency:

There’s all sorts of reasons that large organizations run a lot of different platforms. But, clearly, they work towards running less.

There’s more fun findings in the survey, check it out for free! I’ll probably pull some more charts out of in another newsletter episode.

Also, on that “consistency” thing, here’s more from Whitney and Oren about the benefits of having less platforms:

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th. VMware Explore Barcelona, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

What does it mean when you’ve been carrying the same overdue things in your to do list manager (OmniFocus) for months? It doesn’t mean they’re not actually due. I think it might mean that they’re thing you wish you would do, but don’t need to do: false urgency? They’re things you don’t want to lose track of…that could be due…or not? Managing these items is challenging.

Once again, I am bringing you only links and funny pieces of text.

Relative to your interests

• Measuring Engineering Productivity, at Google, circa 2020 - “If the decider doesn’t believe the form of the result in principle, there is again no point in measuring the process.” // Some great advice in here about improvement programs. Come up with metrics and needs from the (economic/strategic) stakeholder who has the power to make changes. Ask them what metrics they care about and study those. Otherwise they won’t care about the results. // Also, this is why you should seek out pre-meetings with The Bosses when they ask you for reports. You want to find out what numbers they actually care about, and what actions they can take afterwards.

• Docker Launches 2024 State of Application Development Report - Survey for future newsletter analysis.

• PDF to Podcast - Could be super cool.

• How CIOs can ease the generative AI transition for developers - “AI-powered coding tools are expected to become fairly ubiquitous within enterprises in the next four years, according to Gartner research. The analyst firm predicts around three-quarters of software engineers will add AI coding assistants to their workflows by 2028, a considerable jump from the 1 in 10 enterprise developers leveraging the tools early last year [2023].” And: “why would I hire junior developers who can write crummy code when I can have a generic AI do it for me.”

• The breath of the gods - Video influencer technique: have the video format/style match the medium. // “I have uploaded a different version to the great algo­rithmic mills, where the breath of the gods upon a scrap of video can propel it” And: “The smile, with the wince: that’s the overall expression of the 2020s internet.”

Original Content

In this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: “we discuss the AI Hype Cycle, Apple Intelligence and other announcements from WWDC. Plus, Coté concludes the episode by using as many phrases as possible from Taylor’s Urgent/Optimistic Meeting Matrix.” Also, why having a picnic with ChatGPT is like talking about concrete.

Watch the unedited video recording, or listen to it as a podcast.

Wastebook

• “It’s fun to talk about failure when you’re no longer a failure.” ROtL #539

• “young folks that bring some of that drama” are not invited in dine, but the “grown and sexy” are welcomed. Here.

• “If you can’t create photorealistic images, you can’t generate deepfakes or offensive photos of people.” Here. // As we develop in this week’s Software Defined Talk, Apple’s AI stuff feels non-threatening (to humans). In contrast, most other AI things seem threatening to people’s jobs and abilities.

• “There is a big difference between tech as augmentation versus automation. Augmentation (think Excel and accountants) benefits workers while automation (think traffic lights versus traffic wardens) benefits capital. LLMs are controversial because the tech is best at augmentation but is being sold by lots of vendors as automation.” Dare Obasanjo, via.

• “I’m searching for something. That email from someone that will sweep me off my feet. The job offer. The opportunity that gift wrapped from the universe just for me.” Here.

• “sharing the enormous cuts of beef bonded our group.” Good steak in Nuremberg.

• Monte Cristo: what if a grilled cheese sandwich, but unhealthy.

• “The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.” Evelyn Waugh, via.

• “My neighbor’s dog barks in my RAM.” Borg chatter.

• “with 1970s sausage fonts thrown in.” Moron font.

• “There’s nothing worse than selling things to people.” Noah.

• If you have no sleeves, there’s no danger of people seeing your heart.

• Automating a series causal dependent activities that previously required a meatware-buffer.

• “Think before you act, and then you will be forgiven.” TJ Watson, the IBM fella.

• You create, we computer.

• “The undisputed leader in workforce agility”

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

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I gave a new talk this week, at NDC Oslo: my round up of developer productivity metrics and fixes. Here’s the live streamed version (if that link messes up, it’s at timecode 7:30:20), I’ll put a link here when the stand-alone cut comes out. Also, here’s the slides.

I build up a case that focusing on “inner loop” developer productivity is fine, but you’ll get much better gains focusing on putting CI/CD in place and using a centralized platform. Hey! Who guess it’d be aligned with my commercial interests. Also, I believe it, which is handy for my ethical wellbeing. I’m giving this talk at DevOpsDays Amsterdam next week, and I’d like to think I’ll evolve it a lot. Maybe I will.

Hello there!

Wastebook

• “I spent my early childhood in a 15-minute city. It was called the 1950s.” Here.

• “a cybercriminal selling data from these breaches told its researchers that they had been able to compromise a Snowflake employee’s ServiceNow account using credentials stolen via infostealer malware, bypassing SSO provider OKTA.” // Security in 2024. What a bowl of dropped pasta. Here.

• Money is real: “Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people. That team might cost $50 to 100 million in salary a year. So as a CEO, when you hear from your eng leaders that ‘Engineering is an art, and you can’t predict how it’s going to work,’ it’s frustrating. They’re sitting there thinking, ‘They’re telling me this is art, but I’m spending $100 million on this art each year.’ That’s not reassuring.” Via.

• “suddenly everything is a bit of a glitched-out swirl” Warren.

• “CEOs holding a chip on stage in 2024 is like the latest TikTok trend.” Brian.

• A nursing home as a refrigerator to keep people until they die. A Man With Two Faces.

• “my trusty AI-free sunglasses.” Bag check.

• Sunday shopping list: “Bike nut. 48 Bottom of chair leg felt pads.”

• “Nancy Barbato Sinatra died in 2018 at the age of 101.”

• And: “I can remember times when she would be on the phone with her ex-husband [Frank Sinatra], and the next thing I knew some eggplant was coming out of the freezer to thaw so that she could make him some sandwiches when he showed up.”

• “the single finest collection of mood songs ever recorded” This.

• They’re like the hippies of Northern Europe.

• I only use slide builds for jokes.

• “Such risk, so diversify, much portfolio theory.” The Crux #96.

Relative to your interests

• Urgent/Optimistic Meeting Matrix - So many business bullshit terms here!

• How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written - Fast to post, few approvals, technical peer review. // My experience: in general, you’re better to post on your own, and let whoever owns the blog figure out if they want to report it, rewrite it, or link to it. Besides: better to own your content and have to be part of your own “brand.”

• I have a beef with “content” - I think what they mean is “the cost of buying content is near zero.” Creating it has always been expensive, and always will be. Creators just are underpaid. // “I would argue, that the cost of creating content is not close to zero.”

• Developer Experience: What not to do - In summary: don’t be enterprise software. Less crass: be easy/instant to install and run, and have good docs that explain how to do [I’d say 2 to 3 example apps/uses]. Even better: be a SaaS, at least have that as an option. All of this advice is pretty difficult for a full on, private cloud platform to do. You can’t just “install a cloud” in a few minutes and mess around with it. Let alone, like, multi-region, etc. I think. Maybe someone could figure it out? That would actually be a good sign: if your platform is easy to install for demo’ing, it will probably be easy to install for reals.

• 3 traits of an entrepreneurial mindset - Yes, and…how can executives setup a system where behaving like this is possible, encourages, and continuously improves? That type of work is often bundled under the phrase “psychological safety” which can come off as too…humane? A system like lean presents as more cold-blooded and analytical: something you can manage in spreadsheets. You know, “business friendly.” I don’t know: need something here.

• Against optimization - The idea that you need slack in the system intuitively makes sense, but it feels hard to prove ahead of time. The powers that be have to believe that things will go wrong, but they’re usually so focused on things going right (sometimes hubris, sometimes too much trust-by-ignorance) and pre-optimize. // “A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably.”

• How to build a successful agile development culture – and why your business needs one - An overview of agile development I co-wrote. The most distinct thing about the Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs) methodology is following XP. The second most distinct thing is balanced teams. The third: actually following the practices.

• Cloud Native App Platforms: New Research Shows Struggles and Hope - Building your own (Kubernetes) platform takes a long time: “61% of respondents indicated that at least one of their platforms is custom-built, the journey from concept to implementation is far from smooth. Alarmingly, 41% of these organizations took more than a year to develop a minimum viable product.”

• Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped RTO would make staff quit - Also, people on the office feel the need to “look busy.”

• 9 Questions to Help You Figure Out Why You’re Burned Out - This is concise and good. Yes, and: what to do? How do you determine when you are “too good” of a worker, sacrificing yourself for the good of the company without proper compensation? “Too good” here means that you yield a high profit to the company. What is the proper profit? What are the morals of the company (which is, really, just people) taking too high? The employee? Should you quit a six figure job because you’re burned out? Then you have the stress of falling from the middle, especially when you’re older and need a high wage: see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling.

• Zoom CEO envisions AI deepfakes attending meetings in your place - AIs “are terrible tools for delegating decision making to. That’s currently my red line for using them: any time someone outsources actual decision making authority to an opaque random number generator is a recipe for disaster.” // I would go a step further: if you can replace the office work with AI, it probably shouldn’t have been done in the first place. It was “bullshit” work. Or! It was work that person asking for it could have done on their own.

• Developer Productivity Metrics at Top Tech Companies - Good stuff! Lots of emphasis on happiness/satisfaction. These are all from tech companies, though: no tradition enterprise responses (right?). Yes, and: what would it look like if you surveyed the top three organizations in manufacturing, banking, pharmaceuticals, and tax ministries?

• How to Evaluate Video Performance in Developer Relations - The answer: track CTAs.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

I’m in the middle of three weeks of speaking engagements. The first was directly for the company - our own conferences that we do either for the general public or tailored to just one customers/prospect. The second are ones that I submitted talks to. I’m finding speaking at conferences difficult, topic wise. The CFPs are so far in the future that, often, the topics and talks I submit are no longer relevant or, at least, interesting to me.

Comically, this year at cfgmgmtcamp, Adam Jacob was like: I’m not longer interested in whatever I proposed, I’m just going to do a talk I want instead. And, fuck it even more, not even slides, just sticky notes in Miro. You get to do this when you’re a famous speaker.

Using that maneuver has mixed results. Adam did OK with it: his mix of entertaining/enrapturing and trend-marginalia (sort of like Bryan Cantrill, but in aphorisms) is good. However, as with many otherwise good presentations, I suffer from the plumber problem: seeing every seam, every compromise, every missed opportunity in a talk. You (which is to say, I), have to turn off the “keynote expert” part of my brain and enjoy the vibes despite the misaligned smart art of infinite loop gifs.

I am no perfect talk maker either!1

Which is to say, here’s a new talk - rather, the slides for it. I’m giving it at NDC Oslo this week, then DevOpsDays Amsterdam. I proposed this long ago, back then the McKinsey PDF got the nerds all upset.

At the time of CFP’ing, I think I was thinking, “this nerd fight is annoying.” Since then, as published here a lot, I’ve been looking at all sorts of surveys about developer productivity, Kubernetes/platform use, etc.

Now, the conclusion I come to is the one I often do: If you want to be productive, stop trying to be productive, and just focus on putting in place best practices. As preface, I layout the history of developer productivity, mostly in my career.

I don’t know. I think it’ll be good. Maybe. Probably.

State of Spring Survey 2024

The State of Spring Survey 2024 is out, you can get it for free, of course. Spring is widely used by Java developers, and Java is widely used for enterprise app development. Thus, what Spring people are doing is relevant to what large organizations are doing in software development. Let’s take a look at some of my hand-picked highlights1 from the survey:

• Microservices are here to stay. While use has been decreasingly slight (with server less growing slightly), most all people say they use/do microservices.

  

• Developers are still too close to Kubernetes: “half start with a Kubernetes distribution rather than a more complete platform a little surprising since so much extra work is required.”

• Here’s the breakdown. In an ideal, platform engineering world, it would be the opposite with Kubernetes hidden from the developers: "Kubernetes use in Spring environments continued to grow this year, reaching 65% of respondents. More than half (52%) run a Kubernetes distribution (DIY, TKG, Rancher, EKS, etc.), a third (33%) use a platform based on Kubernetes (OpenShift, [Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes], etc.), and more than a quarter (26%) use a non-Kubernetes based platform (Cloud Foundry, Heroku, etc.).

• Keeping up to date is a major problem, and, conversely, a major benefit. Most large organizations I talk with are several versions behind Spring. And while the survey does not break things down by organization size, things actually look better across org. size, with 55% of people saying they’re running the most recent version of Spring Boot: “While Spring Boot 3.2, the latest version, is in use by 55% of stakeholders, Spring Boot 2.7 appears to have become a sticking point, with 41% still running this version.”

• Why are people staying with older versions? “Unable to prioritize remains the top reason for not upgrading (chosen by 48%). However, as more companies face the upgrade from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3, incompatible non-Spring libraries has risen sharply as a barrier to upgrading, moving from just 4% last time to 13% this time.”

  

• This is another reason to shift down more secondary tasks to the platform - it’s easier to keep your frameworks, services, etc. upgraded if the platform is doing it for you and forcing you to do it. Once you wait a year, two years, etc., you really dig yourself into a hole that’s difficult to upgrade from. It’s not a silver bullet, of sure, but it’s better than the rusty bullets you’re probably using.

• And, indeed, people are not shifting down at all, really, doing most of the work manually: “the majority (65%) reported they still do upgrades manually. The next leading result was Github Dependabot, used by 27%. More robust offerings like OpenRewrite didn’t even crack 20%.”

• Upgrading means you get new features, but also performance and cost improvements. Not to mention both commercial and/or community support for patches and such. So, like: upgrade already.

• AI ALERT!!! “A significant fraction (12%) are already

  incorporating AI in Spring applications. That’s a higher percentage than

  report using Spring AI (8%)” // The survey speculates that this difference is likely because people wanted to start doing AI stuff before Spring AI was mature enough to use. // Also, it shows you how little AI use there at the moment, squaring with the vibes I think we’re all getting that this AI thing is fixin’ ski down the slope.

There’s more in the survey, which you should check out.

And, highly related, we put out the Spring Appliction Advisor today to help you upgrade all that old Spring. I saw my pal DaShaun demo it last week and it was good stuff.

Relative to your interests

• AI Patterns - A marketer’s candy store of enterprise AI value-props and positioning. Also: their persistence of private cloud.

• The Emerging Technologies That Will Drive The Future Of Payments - “A 2023 Forrester survey indicates that 63% of business and tech leaders plan to increase their investments in emerging technologies in the coming year. Yet despite this fervor, only 18% reported high success rates in their previous year’s tech initiatives.”

• 5 Ways to Master Security with VMware Tanzu Platform

• What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news? - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - “[F]requent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA.” But: “Younger people are much more likely to use generative AI products on a regular basis. Averaging across all six countries, 56% of 18–24s say they have used ChatGPT at least once, compared to 16% of those aged 55 and over.”

Wastebook

• “And as far as your 16 ounce of Maple and Sage [sausage]: I don’t eat that. I’m not from the North. I’m a Texas man.” Randy Taylor.

• New AI as summarizing tool theory: don’t ask it to summarize, ask it to rewrite it in AP style in less words.

• AIs are only as reliable as humans, but something slightly more.

• “Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens.” Via.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DATEV Software Craft Community online, June 6th, speaking. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

This week’s Software Defined Talk is an interview Matt Ray recorded with Amanda Silver. I haven’t listened to it yet, but she has several excellent posts about doing platform engineering at Microsoft for, like, all the Microsoft developers! So, you should check it out like I’m going to do.

Microsoft was super-cool and paid for Matt Ray’s travel. Maybe I can hit them up for some of that: Software Defined Talk on the road! It’ll be like my analyst days, except this time I’ll insist on Marriott hotels. Probably. Actually, for sure.

Maybe.

Enterprise AI in Healthcare

Here’s my interview with my co-worker, JT Perry, on actual uses (current and possible) for AI in healthcare. It’s good! Watch it all:

There’s a podcast version if you prefer audio only.

Wastebook

• “a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will ‘seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto–through creativity and technology–working with creators.’” Here.

• “I don’t do anything. I’m just the center of a rat king of chaos.” ROtL.

• And: “I’ve eliminated everything but: Wallet, keys, phone.”

• “All those movies I wasn’t allowed to see but I read parodies of them.” On Mad Magazine.

• “the productive uses are marketed under their application rather than their mechanism” Here.

• “Joan Didion’s dreamers of the golden dream… on a double date, Ken downed a beer to show her he could piss farther than his friend.” California-style.

• Success dysmorphia.

• After some practice, if you know you’re doing the thing, you can make yourself do the thing without knowing you’re doing the thing.

• “Malicious compliance” - It’s a thing.

• “what’s that font, boss?”

• dongle hell - legacy of the VP of Cables.

• “Right Now, It's Like This.”

• “Three civil brawls bred of an airy word”

Relative to your interests

• Excuse the navel-gazing - “TikTok heavily favors videos edited inside their app. YouTube is mainly a thumbnails game. And who knows what Instagram wants.”

• The AI Trust Fall - Even though humans are more error prone than computers, we trust the work of humans more…perhaps because we understand their errors much better and how to debug them. You know, because we’re humans ourself. In contrast, with AI’s, we have no idea what’s going on nor how to fix errors. This feels like some mystic, Talebian wisdom like the benefits of getting Fat Tony to eat more humus and drink more wine for long life.

• JPMorgan ramps up prompt engineering training, AI projects - AI to replace executive jobs: “Another AI tool allows employees to query a model meant to respond as Michael Cembalest, current chairman of market and investment strategy within the asset management division.” // With the insane comp. that executives get, maybe AI would be a lot cheaper!

• Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say - “Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users.”

• Huge Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm - Reverse engineering Google search ranking based on method calls from leaked code.

• Interview - WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana on being acquired by major investor - “In the last financial year [CY2023?], WSO2 achieved revenues of $100 million”

• Survey reveals generative AI employee fear - Lots of hopes and dream, not enough projects and experiments: “IBM’s research found that less than half of organisations are focused on GenAI pilots – and another 24% are doing nothing at all. But almost half (49%) of the CEOs polled expect to use GenAI to drive growth by 2026. According to IBM, this is very ambitious, as only purposeful transformation will make it possible.” // You could say this is falling behind or bad, on the other hand, I doubt most of them have solid ideas of what exactly to do with AI beyond better search and intern-level analysis, that is: “what problem are we trying to solve?”

Cloud Native Platform Tales: JP Morgan Chase and Comcast

Great panel below from CF Day US. You can hear from some long-time platform people, here, using Cloud Foundry:

Books

I haven’t mentioned books I’ve been reading for a long time. That’s because I haven’t been reading much! I have all the boring-but-real excuses.

Right now:

• I’m almost done with The Crystal Shard. I read this long ago, and I’ve long forgotten it. Since I’ve been playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I figured I’d visit it again. It’s fun to read, but I don’t think I’ll commit to reading the other 32 books in the series. (Side note: I keep thinking, if you work at Wizards (who owns D&D), do you have to read all the books, plus theater D&D seres, taking extensive notes. Rather, if you’re lucky enough to actually wok on D&D as your job, I bet you get to read all of them. SO MUCH LORE.)

• I just noticed that Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer and The Committed - both amazing) has a member out, so I got the Audible of it. It’s read by the author, which is usually great.

• Alex Williams told me I should read In Emergency, Break Glass, so I bought it haven’t started it yet.

• Based on a create Conversations with Tyler interview, I started reading Career and Family. I wish I had a physical copy of the book, I think I could take it in much better by looking at the whole page instead of scrolling on the Kindle. (I think that about a lot of books. But, the chance that I’ll have a book at hand versus my phone is so wide. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m reading a lot when it’s just my phone. Something to ponder!)

• All Fours - I remember liking one of Miranda July’s books, and since the audio version is read by the author, I bought it. I started listening to a little in Atlanta, but, I don’t know: it’s hard for me to casually listen to fiction when my mind is work-mode, even if that’s just driving to a conference. Listening to fiction while I’m commuting around somehow lessons the value of the book to me.

• The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived - the story of mid-century IBM, via a biography of Thomas Watson Jr.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DATEV Software Craft Community online, June 6th, speaking. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

As you can see, I’ll be in London next week. London is my favorite place, I love it there. There’s lots travel and speaking coming up.

Meanwhile, we’ve got one of those stuffed-head, air-y brain sicknesses going around at home. It got me this afternoon finally. I could manage cutting and pasting the above, but luckily I’d type dit all ‘afore.

The Tanzu Platform - platform engineering in a box for private cloud

This week, at my work, we launched the Tanzu Platform. This is both actual, new things and strategic tuning of many of our existing products. In brief, we’re focusing a lot more on private cloud PaaS now, and private cloud data services. (Sure, you can do public cloud stuff too, and our customers tend to both, with a lot of private cloud.)

The Tanzu Platform needs some kind of IaaS “dial tone” (either VMware or Kubernetes) and then you can run a multi-tenant, global PaaS, get integrated DevOps/platform engineering tooling, enterprise security and governance, and get integration benefits all the way up to the app layer with things like the Spring Framework (for Java). When platform engineering people talk about building a platform, that’s exactly what the Tanzu Platform is: a platform.

And, if you’re working at a large organization, chance are you already have the Tanzu Platform in place. This also means you probably have generative AI in a box available to add. No need to ponder building a new stack from scratch.

Unlike a lot of the work being done right now in platform engineering, the Tanzu Platform has existed for many, many years, is used in numerous production environments with uncountable applications. That is, it’s proven, comprehensible, usable, integrated, and available. If you want to know what platform engineering is in product/stack and in practice, look at the Tanzu Platform and Tanzu Data Services.

(I didn’t, like, run that by anyone at work this Saturday morning. It’s how I think of it. So, like: opinions are my own not my company’s, etc., etc. You can read the fully corporate-pondered overview on the weblog.)

Learning to love Enterprise Software

Speaking of the Tanzu Platform, I talked about it in the first segment of this week’s Software Defined Talk episode. The episode opens with me commenting on the new, unnamed expensing software I get to use. Then after a brief Tanzu Platform discussion, we spend most of the time talking about Microsoft Build, and a little bit about the prospect of Raspberry Pi IPO’ing. Listen it, or watch the unedited video. Or both!

Right-side Up Pyramid Style

I read some contemporary, public-facing philosophy recently. My degree is in philosophy (and English), so why not? My thought: who is this written for?1 It was just a bunch of circumlocutious writing with endless references to Continental philosophers - even Kant! And don’t get me started on how much the word “Hegelian” came up.

One could say my mind has been warped by corporate communication (PowerPoint, industry analyst reports, Mento memo’ing) and blogging…but, really: just the medium of how we communicate now - clear, concise, to the point - is a big challenge for philosophy writing, and I assume humanities writing in general.

There’s no need for that baroque style we call “academic”! You could just come out and say what you’re thinking.

But, the art of philosophy writing has always been obtuse. To make it visual, humanities academic writing is like abstract art: you have work at it to see what’s there, appreciate what’s going, get some utility out of it.

However, I think that’s one of the major points of academic writing. There’s a sport to reading it and liking it.

So much of philosophy writing - and literary academic writing - is entertainment for those writing it and reading it. Is there a dichotomy there: writing for academic perfection and pleasure versus writing for clarity and action?

If Kant or Hegel were bloggers, or, better, Tweeters, what they were saying would be so much different - the medium would change it. And, I probably would have read more of them. You could look at different mediums in philosophy to see how the medium changed the outcomes: Plato with “dialogs” (really, just very boring plays, contemporaneously they’d be movies/TV, or Broadway musicals), Nietzsche with aphorisms (contemporaneously, greeting cards, smug coffee mugs, and bumper-stickers).

Anyhow. Back to inverted pyramid mode.

ChatGPT on MacOS

I have access to the MacOS ChatGPT thing now. It's the same as the other desktop GPT overlays I've used like Jordi Bruin's stuff. Too bad for Jordi! Or, maybe, too great, cause now he’ll do some new, great features.

I didn’t use his stuff because it was just a wrapper for the web ChatGPT Plus, or you had to put your own OpenAI token in and get metered usage. I’ll see if I end up using the desktop ChatGPT from ChatGPT more. That kind of nudge to change behavior - it’s the official one rather a third party - would be an interesting…uh?…”UI bias”

I think the only "new" thing it gets you is the voice interaction which was only on the iOS app previously. I like this on the mobile app, but connectivity made it hard to use. Maybe with my wired, gigabit connection on my desktop it’d be better.2

It still doesn't have the ability to download the transcript for a single chat session. This seems bonkers.

Also, the UI is exactly like the web UI in layout, functionality, etc.

OK, there is a slightly new thing: collapsing a screenshot workflow into an app feature. Once you give it access, you can have it auto-upload a screenshot:

I didn’t give it access to record my screen. I mean, obviously they’re on their own ethical vibe over there.

Wastebook

• All jargon is meaningful, just maybe not to you.

• Coté’s calendar style: quick to decline, slow to accept.

• It’d be fun, if when I fly from a distant time zone to another (ATL to AMS), when I opened my laptop it had a moment of geo-confusion just like me. Error: where am I?

• “Sort of a lunch-pail occupation.” Gruber.

• The obligation to argue accepted truth, as opposed to the obligation to plan your family’s annual vacation.

• “If a developer hasn’t gulped down their AI pills and pulled on their Copilot pants, Microsoft doesn’t seem that interested.” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DATEV Software Craft Community online, June 6th, speaking. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

I’m back in Amsterdam after a week in Atlanta. The new, “expat goes back to the States” thing I noticed is that some Americans will wear a short-sleeved golf shirt with slacks and figure that’s good enough work attire. Also, they tuck in the golf shirt.

I can’t imagine Europeans doing this, or, really, wearing golf shirts at all outside of…golf. Even a t-shirt would be more “normal”: there’s something about the plastic sheen of a golf shirt and those two or so little buttons on-top that makes it so much different than a t-shirt. Now, a polo shirt…this might be acceptable if it was properly branded with a classic polo brand or “Boss.”3 I’m not sure though, I’ll have to start noticing.

And, as ever, what they do over in UKI might be more Yankee-Continental than Continental-Continental.

Just wastebook and links this episode.

Wastebook

• If you’re a writing type suffering from imposter’s syndrome, spend some time as an editor. You’ll soon discover that writing is incredibly hard, so if you can pull it off, you’re the real deal.

• “Preview The Magnitude Of Our 2024 Agenda” - subject line of a Forrester email.

• Alex: “So you want training data for my replacement?” Son: “Well, at least until they unfreeze your brain.” Here.

• “‘Culture’ is a kind of catch-all in social affairs that can be deployed to explain almost everything everywhere, and so it usually explains nothing at all. If the advice your theory yields is “change the culture”, then you have no meaningful advice.” Here.

• “A Man Was Ordered to Build a Fence to Hide His Boat. He Asked an Artist to Paint the Boat on the Fence” Here.

• “business websites with personality” Here.

• “While developer led motions are awesome, all roads eventually lead to steak 🥩 dinnahs and hard-core enterprise sales to pay the bills!” Here.

• “Then he gets up from the table and shrimp fall out of his pockets and he walks out of the boardroom trailing shrimp everywhere, this is what corporate finance is all about.” $11m on shrimp.

• “the classic difficult-childhood-because-his-parents-made-it-too-easy” Here.

• ‘Yet again, I kinda sort of understand what he’s saying, but I have no idea what any of that means in concrete reality beyond, “we will collect lots of data on inhabitants, and make adjustments based on patterns.” And again, I’m not sure you need a cyberpunk city to do that.’ Here, from 21,000 words on Saudi Arabia.

• “Who the fuck wanted to spend 44 billion dollars on a toilet?” Burn Book.

• We need more life advice books by people who don’t have time to write one.

• “manufactured serendipity” Here.

• "Be an active bystander."

Relative to your interests

• What Factors Explain the Nature of Software - “The only way to know exactly what software we want to build is to fully specify it: without doing so, there will be gaps between our vague ideas and harsh reality. However, a complete, abstract specification is, in general, at least as much work as creating the software itself – in many cases, it is substantially more work.”

• Vercel Momentum - “Vercel was started in November of 2015 so it has taken over 9 years to cross $100M ARR - one has to be patient in dev tools and it doesn’t always work out!!! Harness started in 2017 so it too took 7 years to cross $100M ARR, but it also had a more focused model to sell to larger enterprises as a devops infra provider from the very beginning.”

• BP AI use for developer productivity - “A passing mention in BP’s latest quarter: 'Due to GenAI and in-house built developer productivity tools, we have increased the output of our software developers by around 70% year-over-year” and cut external developers by 60%.'"

• The Forgotten War on Beepers - Back when pagers were ruining the youth.

• Enterprises struggle to show the value of AI projects - “’Organizations who are struggling to derive business value from AI can learn from mature AI organizations,' Leinar Ramos, senior director analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. But it’s a small group: only 9% of respondents in Gartner’s survey are characterized as AI-mature.”

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Surpass $675 Billion in 2024 - Cloud: lots of money.

• Crocodilia: How Crocs became a clog-selling profit machine - I need a pair!

• As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple News be a lifeline? - Wow! // “the Beast on track to make between $3–4 million in revenue this year from Apple News alone — more than its own standalone subscription program, and without much additional cost.”

• The #1 Platform Engineering Problem You’ve Never Heard Of: Platform Decay (Webinar Recap) - Avoiding the accidental platform and platform sprawl. Gartner Identifies the Top Five Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024 - (1) Software Engineering Intelligence, (2) AI-Augmented Development, (3) Green Software Engineering, (4) Platform Engineering, (5) Cloud Development Environments. “Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams, up from 45% in 2022.” // What’s weird about this prediction is the question: “uh so what have the PaaS, DevOps, and SRE people been doing this whole time?”

• Using AI to generate web forms from PDFs - With Enterprise AI, the app is still the hard part: “What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes and data architecture. It reminded me that, in order to capitalise on the potential of AI technologies, we need to really invest in the other stuff too, especially data infrastructure.” And: “What really slows transformation is bureaucracy. It’s getting permission to use a tool like this, and to make improvements to the underlying service.”

• Internet use statistically associated with higher wellbeing, finds new global Oxford study - “The study analysed data from two million individuals aged 15 to 99 in 168 countries, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa and found internet access and use was consistently associated with positive wellbeing.” // At this point, who knows? Like everything else in life, it’s probably how you use it that matters.

• Why We Hate Working for Big Companies - Capitalism knows the central planning committee is bad, so, logically, Capitalism runs on corporations that are central planning committees.

• Everyone hates Workday - “Workday reveals what’s important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that’s OK, because the people above you don’t actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don’t really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it’s good for the company.” // This gets close to something, but doesn’t have enough empathy (understanding?) of executive life to sound right. More like: the purpose of a large organization is to perpetuate itself as is. It only changes if there is a crisis or a huge improvement to be had (10x? 20x?). Workday is good enough: all the effort you would put into fixing it would just result in the same general outcomes. You would take on the risk of it failing, and get little improvement of things went well.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Atlanta Executive Dinner on Enterprise Software Dev, etc., May 22nd. SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

Logoff

I’m in Atlanta this week for two events (see the dinner one above). I’m in a Residence Inn this week - which has a kitchen (no oven, though). Usually I’d go to Whole Foods to eat from the hot bar for at least one meal, but this morning it wasn’t open yet. I realized I could just buy some eggs and salsa, and an avocado. I always buy avocados in the States: they are not good in Europe. I also realized I could buy a steak! (Hard to get American style steaks in Europe). Amazing!

//

I had a long conversation today about a gap in the enterprise software journalism and analysis world. There doesn’t seem to be enough reporting there - the focus is on crushing iPads more, AI now-a-days, sure. The problem with the space is, how do you make money publishing about it? A lot of companies end up getting sponsored by vendors, which is totally fine.

//

I also recorded an interview with JT Perry about Enterprise AI in healthcare. It was great! It should be out later this week.

//

On the way over here, some Americans complained about how hot it is. First, in Schiphol, then in the Atlanta airport SkyTram. What they meant was the AC wasn’t cool enough. Long ago, when I was traveling for RedMonk with James, he and the other Europeans would always complain about how cold it was in American conference rooms. They seemed insane. Who wouldn’t want cold AC? But now, living five years in Europe, I get it. I didn’t even feel like it was warm. And when I walked into my hotel room, it was freezing! I turned it up from 60 degrees to 70, and that seemed right. I still like cold AC, regardless of tempature. The crispness is impossible to get otherwise.

//

That Gartner prediction about platform engineering above (“Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams, up from 45% in 2022.”) has really “chipped my chops” as one of my friends like to say. There’s something weird with the current conversation around platform engineering. I get all the newsletters on the topic, read all the stuff. As I mentioned above, what have we been doing this whole time with “platforms”? Did they not exist?

Here, we have Paula and Colin talking about platform as a product in 2019. The book Team Topologies was out in 2019. A year before that, 2018, you had the Bottcher/Thoughtworks definition of platform. Cloud Foundry was released around 2011, and was at the beginning of its stride in 2015. There’s Heroku, of course, the late 2000s. And then DevOps, SRE, and centralized tools groups of Netflix and Google fame spread through-out there. I guess that’s five years since 2019. Of course, those ideas were germinating for 2 or three years ahead of that (just proposing a book, getting a book accepted, writing a book, and then waiting for it to come out probably took a couple years, 18 months at least?).

It seems weird. Lots of people don’t even automate their build. One surveys says that only 35% of respondents apps are are using DevOps for management. So maybe it is actually something new? Rather, maybe actually doing it is something new.

I look at these years of conversation about the platform topic and I get a little queasy: are we just going to keep talking about this over and over, giving it new names here and there? Are enterprises giving themselves the chance to see their “transformations” through to fruition? It feels like introducing a platform into a large organization, in a big way, takes three years, maybe even five.

I’m not sure: but there’s a good conference talk in there! Maybe I can work it out for my upcoming “Developer Productivity Is Waste” talk (NDC Oslo and then DevOpsDays Amsterdam). The premise would be something like “developer productivity is a symptom, a signal of actual problems. It’s just how you measure something, not an ends to itself.” I mean, I guess that’s the problem with any metric: when you think improving it is the point. The point is actually “why aren’t we doing better, and how would we fix it.”

In the case of all this platform stuff, based on how “new” platform engineering is, and the other surveys I’ve looked at recently (low CI/CD usage, low DevOps usage), the answer seems like: because you’re not doing much to improve it.

Really up-lifting stuff!

Just links and waste book today.

Wastebook

• “If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it,” me, 2011.

• Follow and mute.

• “Dell’s employees, whom I believe are mostly adults and not small children, will be given colour-coded ratings to shame those who don’t come into the office enough.” Justin Warren’s newsletter, “The Crux #93.”

• “Largest companies most likely to deploy via YAML” - slide title from cloud native platform survey.

• “A Lot of Spain Looks Like Arizona… Except for the Parts of Spain that Look Like Massachusetts.” Here.

• And: “Not only is there a €1 coin, but a €2 coin too, in addition to 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent coins. So if you pay for a €2.65 bottle of wine with a €10 euro note, you had better prepare yourself for the hail of loose change coming your way.” Ibid.

• Her job was a “velvet coffin.” Here.

• At the splash-pad in the park. There was a couple here that had a rice cooker with them. I imagined this conversation as they were finally getting out the door: "The rice is done, give me a few minutes to put it in a container.” “No! It’s go time, the kids finally have their shoes on and are not upset that the color blue exists. Just grab it and let’s get the fuck out of here!”

• “The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.” Here.

Relevant to your interests

• I asked my co-worker Whitney what “Kubernetes security” means, and she sent me this presentation of hers. It’s fantastic! Exactly! At some point, it becomes a crazy board of stuff. There’s no way an application developer, or even an ops person should have to keep up with all of that. Things get super-bonkers if you’re building your own, custom platform. At some point, you assemble all the components from the CNCF hot-pot bar, and you’ve got a unique platform that you now own security wise. GOOD LUCK!

• Aligning with User Needs with Rod Johnson - “Spring Source ended up not monetizing Spring at all — but rather worked on monetizing with products that were complementary to Spring. ‘We monetized Spring by not monetizing Spring, by using it to open the door.’” // Great interview if you’re into the whole open source business model thing.

• AWS CISO: In AI gold rush, folks forget application security - “the places where we’re seeing the security gaps first are actually at the application layer”

• The Presentation Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making - “If your very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi, don’t mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot.” // Seems a little too turns out… // This replication study show that it sort of works. Furthermore that if you include an expensive item for free on the bundle, people see the bundle as good. // I generally think this kind of BOGO stuff is a scam and pricing tricks. So when I see it, I get suspicious that I’m being tricked.

• Notes on Spain - “Not only is there a €1 coin, but a €2 coin too, in addition to 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent coins. So if you pay for a €2.65 bottle of wine with a €10 euro note, you had better prepare yourself for the hail of loose change coming your way.”

• Dan Vega - Spring Developer Advocate, YouTuber and Lifelong Learner - Dan and DaShaun are great devrel people, and they’ve built a great corner of the Spring community, in just a year!

• Boomi Dismembers TIBCO Through Acquisitions - “TIBCO’s mistake was cobbling together a bunch of unrelated products and not investing in a cohesive user experience. I’ve called it the ‘TIBCO Frankenstein’ to my clients. TIBCO needed to build a unified user experience across its integration products. But with the sale of Mashery, it appears that ship has sailed.”

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Atlanta Executive Dinner on Enterprise Software Dev, etc., May 22nd. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

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I wrote up a preview of our new State of Cloud Native Platforms survey today, probably published on The New Stack. We used to call it the State of Kubernetes Survey, which I’ve covered each year.

Anyhow, I’ll stick a link here when it my weblog post comes out.

Today it’s just a links and wastebook clean out.

Two Recent Garbage Chairs on Amsterdam

I’ve found a few Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam recently. Truth be told, I stopped looking. When I moved here, the locals were bemused about all my photos “I never really thought about that,” they’d say, “but; yeah, there are a lot of garbage chairs!” I’ve got to get that sense of wonder back.

(I seem to have deleted wherever I kept the archive of all these. I should set one up again. In the meantime, here are some video commentaries on some Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.)

From Google Gemini on the above (who knows if it’s true?):

The image you sent me is titled “CAFÉ HAVELAAR” and it was created by Dutch artist Anton Pieck (1895-1987). It is a pen and ink drawing of a man standing outside of a cafe. The man in the image is likely a customer or employee of the cafe.

Pieck is known for his illustrations of fantasy worlds and fairy tales. His work was also inspired by the Art Deco movement and Expressionism. This particular drawing is a realistic depiction of a scene from everyday life.

The CAFÉ HAVELAAR drawing is not one of Pieck’s most famous works, but it is a good example of his skill as a draftsman. The drawing is detailed and atmospheric, and it captures the feeling of a quiet moment on a city street.

I like the phrasing of “not one of his most famous works.”

That feels comforting, like:

“What did you do today?” the man in the well fitting suit standing at the end of my desk asks.

“Oh, you know,” I say raising my eyebrows, smiling lazily, standing as I wipe my hands on my pants, “just finished up not one of my famous works.”

“Ah, very good,” the well-fitted suit man says, “shall we go get a beer?”

wfh, artist edition

From “About my studio”…

(1) No commute saves time and means booting up into work is faster and frequent:

there is also an advantage to not having a separate studio outside your home. When I did rent a studio in the past it meant that all my artwork in progress was elsewhere, and that required overcoming inertia to make myself go to my studio. When the artwork is right next to me then it’s simple to do a few minutes extra work on it – correcting a mistake or enhancing a part of the image – without needing to trek to the studio.

(2) You think about work more frequently, a good version of living rent free in your mind…work lives rent free in your house? But, it’s your work, living in your head, not The Man’s work.

And having my work-in-progress continuously visible out of the corner of my eye while I’m decompressing from my day job – streaming a film, reading a book, browsing the web – means that I unconsciously reflect on it during my downtime, allowing flashes of lateral insight to spark in my head while I’m actually concentrating on something else.

These more apply to solitary synchronized, creative endeavors. When it comes to synchronized collaborative management (“meetings”), maybe not so much?

Relevant to your interests

• Au petit Cordon Bleu - Fun, 1930’s cookbook.

• The Ultimate Guide to building Developer Tool Websites - PLG for developers. Get them home pages set-up for the funnel!

• Automation and the Jevons paradox - Always good to bring in Jevon’s Paradox.

• UHF in UHD: Weird Al’s cult classic movie will get its first 4K release - “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a spatula.'” // this movie, and the VHS of Pee Wee Herman’s stage show are probably the basis of my humor. Many summers watching stand-up and Doctor Katz on the Comedy Channel came later, but were probably equally defining. And, of course, the Phil Hartman era of SNL, and the occasional Letterman when I stayed up that late.

Wastebook

• “Just realized French Onion Soup without enough broth is a soggy onion sandwich.” Galaxy brain level shit from Matt Ray.

• “It’s really a celebration of personal freedom and surplus wealth.” Here.

• And: “huffing the fumes of Timothy Leery’s corpse, or whatever.” Ibid.

• “Yeah, in France they don’t have refillable drinks but you can buy cigarettes instead of fries.” Here.

• “The result often reveals the unconscious clichés of the users.” Here.

• “Coffee badging” Here.

• “What I didn’t know about Battersea is that the lower-level floors are a mall, with Apple’s offices taking up the higher floors.” Here. // This is something I really like about London: all these hidden away nooks and crannies, sometimes whole malls! You can see how Neil Gaiman could have come up the “London Below.”

• “slop” - spam/AI generated copy and images.

• Sometimes you’re at a trade show after party, and someone with a camera and fancy mics is like, “hey, want to record a little interview?” You want to say yes, because what the fuck else are you doing at that after party? Here is an example of two masters at work, delivering the perfect pitch for that moment (clear explanation of the problem solved, clear explanation of the product/solution, check out the 2 unnamed customer references, the one named reference, name-check the VC investment, giving a tiny briefing on the state of the company [which only an analyst would care about, but which is important to drive thought leadership, buzz, and story], a notice very little filler words and stammering, mention of TAM, etc., etc.), relaxed, keeping the answers short, pedigree of the CEO (themselves). Also, the interviewer, Dave, is good too: look at all those takes and survey numbers he can weave in there. All in 9 minutes and 26 seconds. (I’ve known Aaron for a long time, so I may be a bit biased.

• The past is only in the present if you think about it. #DadTalk!

• Another day, another Euro.

• Can you imagine there being an answer that would be helpful? If not, don’t bother to ask the question. The question you’re thinking of is probably more of a statement.

• “disadvantation” Context.

Have you had a chance to check out my series of videos full of my advice for working in a large company? WHAT?! If you have access to O’Reilly’s stuff, you can watch these. If you work at a large company, there’s a good chance you have access. Anyhow, check them out. There’s four five star reviews our of five reviews, including these accolades:

That’s right. Watch em!

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Atlanta Executive Dinner on Enterprise Software Dev, etc., May 22nd. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. Cloud Foundry Day (May 15th): 20% off with the code CFNA24VMW20. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

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There’s more school holiday the rest of this week, if you can believe it. I have to tell you: these Europeans might be on to something.