Good strategy

Re: “Bad” Strategy

Strategy is people, and in a corporate setting, all the wonky parts of people are amplified. In the places I’ve worked, the lower down you go in the organization, the less relevant strategy is. What’s relevant is the actions you can take, not the outcomes the executes are going for with their strategy, let alone anything resembling a classic big-S Strategy.

Besides, unless you have a huge chunk of equity, you get paid the same no matter the outcome. Long-term you’ll suffer if the company goes out of business, sure, but short and medium term, you’ll just keep chugging along. Thus, for most workers, if the stated strategy doesn’t direct what actions to take (and not take!), it’s not very useful.

This also applies to OKRs. What’s missing from OKRs are the actions it takes to get from the O to the KR. This annoys me to no end. And, yeah, I read that OKR book a few years ago. You can’t set an objective and a realistic key result if you haven’t imagined the actions you’ll take to get there. Executives build the system that everyone works on, and just like an enterprise architect that no longer codes, if the executive has no idea, or even second hand experience of how the work is done, it’s hard to imagine what needs to be done to reach the KR. This means the KR is what they hope will happen, not what’s happen-able. To hedge: sure, I bet there’s just fine OKRs, but it’s too easy for people to mess them up.

Doing strategy in large companies is very difficult. One of the huge advantages of startups is that they can do MVP/lean strategy, if any at all. Big organizations often don’t - can’t - test and validate strategy content and adjust it every quarter or two to match what customers actually want.

Anyway, this is why the context and thinking around strategy is more important then the 25 to 30 words of the actual strategy. Fitting corporate strategy on a slide is a good start, but then outlining how it’ll be done is what really matters.

(Provoked from this good piece.)

Relevant to your interests

Cognizant Predicts GenAI Will Inject $1 Trillion Into the U.S. Economy - Seems like a lot of money.
Corn - “I've just had what feels like the hundred billionth reader inform me that, with all due respect, Hild is quite wrong to talk about corn in 7th-century Britain. And for the hundred billionth time I've politely responded that, actually, no, there's no mistake. To Hild, corn is wheat, not maize.”
IT leaders dial back cloud-first strategies as hybrid IT becomes more of an investment priority - People interested in lowering costs, on-premises and public cloud. I mean, who’s ever like “nope, I’m fine spending more when I could be spending less.” // “over a third of the study’s EMEA participants (36%) are taking a cloud-first approach to new application deployments, which is slightly down on a similar study carried out by TechTarget in 2023. Back then, around half of the participants indicated that their organisation was favouring a cloud-first approach when choosing the best environment to deploy new applications and workloads.”
Oh hey, check this out: With Tanzu CloudHealth, “[b]y enabling the [South African FSI Discover] to streamline its expenses and resources, the solution helped Discovery realize a 40 percent reduction in costs in less than a year’s time.”
AI startups require new strategies: This time it’s actually different - Good stuff.
Pairing and interviewing at Pivotal - People seemed to like this. Of course, there was survived bias: the only people who talked about it had gotten the job. Still!
Codefresh and Octopus: GitOps, K8s and VMs Under One Roof - The “greenfield aasumption”…I like that! // ‘“The ‘greenfield assumption’ has broken and is still breaking a lot of advanced DevOps software implementations by failing to accommodate the complexities of real-life environments,” Torsten Volk, an analyst for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), told The New Stack. “The vast majority of enterprises still have, and will have for many years, messy and heterogeneous environments that somehow need to be made part of CI/CD and GitOps.”’
Speaking of, an example of the greenfield assumption anti-pattern in action: “A widespread local presence and deep roots in the community have given Germany’s savings banks a high standing since they were founded around 200 years ago: Tradition breeds trust. However, traditional financial institutions today find themselves confronted by growing competition – not to mention the need to design more customer-oriented offerings. FinTechs, for example, start ‘from the green field,’ do not bring legacy mountains of data with them and offer customer-oriented services quickly and efficiently.”
4 Engineering Slides CEOs Love - There’s a good mix of “business value” and inward facing technical activities and health-checks.
Michael Joseph Lost and Found - Modern day hitchhikers and train hoppers.
Is GenAI’s Impact on Productivity Overblown? - Generative AI hasn’t been around long enough to figure out what to do with it, especially in enterprises. Before you spin up too many projects and budget, you need to experiment with and validate how you apply it. After around a year of using ChatGPT, I suspect it’s a lot like email, intranets and intranet search, CRM, etc.: it’s not good enough to replace knowledge work, but it’s a better tool than what we have. Also, in the article, the point that productivity is nice, but accuracy is better: “while changes in task completion speed are easy to measure, changes in accuracy are less detectable. If an employee completes a report in five minutes instead of 10, but it’s less accurate than before, how would we know, and how long will it take to recognize this inaccuracy?”
Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management - Understanding the EU’s position and motivation for the recent nerd/regulators fight.
How DZ BANK uses a Cloud Run-first approach to unlock big savings, with Google Cloud - “We are now three years into our modernization journey with Google Cloud, and we’ve seen significant benefits. Running containers on Cloud Run instead of on-prem VMs eliminates OS and infrastructure maintenance, delivering a 70% toil reduction. In addition, the pay-per-use pricing model has reduced our infrastructure costs by 90%.”

Wastebook

“Unlimited Netflixing in Your Mind.”
A lot of executizing is removing context from your write-up. Background, explanation, proof, discussion - context. Most (American-style) executives wants to know the outcome, the conclusion, the decision to make, the next steps. Once they’ve decided they like the conclusion then they might be interested in understanding why it’s a good conclusion.
“Things are the way they are because they got that way.” Here.
“Revolutionizing Printing in the Modern Workplace” Sure to be a real heart-racer.
“Font security ‘still a Helvetica of a problem’” Here.
“The lunacy comes from a place of joy.” Sharp Tech, March 7th, 2024.
“Bring 2–3 wardrobe options, pressed and ready to go.”
“Some days you wake up and realise that you’re waiting on other people to do so many things that you yourself have become somewhat paralysed by the waiting.” Here.

We’ve got a little event coming up next month, Tanzu (Re)defined. Unlock the secrets of expert app development and delivery at VMware Tanzu's exclusive event. Dive into Tanzu Application Platform, Tanzu Application Service, and the Spring Framework. Discover optimization strategies for cost, performance, and security. Gain insights from Tanzu Labs' 30 years of app experience. Meet Tanzu's Executive Team and industry peers for practical strategies.

🌐 Register now.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Executive dinner on Java Security, March 13th, Dallas; DevOpsDays LA, speaking, March 15th, Pasadena “We Fear Change” talk; KubeCon EU, March 19th, Paris; Tanzu (Re)defined, April 11th, Palo Alto. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th.

Come to our little party at KubeCon EU, it’s Thursday night. Register for free here! And, if you’re going to KubeCon EU and haven’t registered yet, you can get 20% off with the code KCEU24VMWBC20.

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Every now and then I like to try to slip something fun into the corporate world. I came up with that event name, “Tanzu (Re)defined” and thought, surely, someone is going to say this is silly. But, people liked it.

Also, hey, if you like my stuff about work-life, you’ll really like my new video series over at O’Reilly. If you work at a big company, you might already have access to it. You should check it out!

I’m on a weeklong tour of the States this week. As I’ve said before, I’m more or less over business travel. I’ve done it for 19 years now, and with three kids, a wife, a dog, two snakes, and turtle at home…but these long trips are really too much now.

Many of the people I grew up with in business travel don’t seem to travel much anymore either. However, business travel is a huge part of my job - it just is. And it’s hard to envision what else I’d do that’d have as much value and, despite what I’m saying, fulfillment.

But, you know: also I can’t go around harrumph-y about it, I’m sure there’s people who’d gladly switch places. Must be nice!

Mar 10, 2024

“Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.”

Just links today.

Relevant to your interests

Two methods for designing better, more developer friendly platforms - Two ways to make good platform product management decisions: go to where the developers are, ask the developers // a little article by me.
Platform Engineering: Orchestrating Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure - A big overview of platform engineering. Also: Syntasso gettin' into the devrel game!
Forrester: Tips for assessing hybrid cloud management - All these years later, enterprise workloads are still running on all the clouds, public and private. // “87% of global cloud decision-makers say their organisations deploy enterprise IT workloads on public cloud, private cloud and in datacentre hosting facilities.”
Dell COO: AI will move to the data - (Enterprise) AI will go to where its cheapest to run, by whatever factors.
Why Kubernetes needs an LTS - Currently, you can patches for the kubernetes version you’re running for supported for 14 months (12 months of support and 2 months of upgrade period)," a year and two months. He wants to make it 2 years: “I would propose an LTS release with a 24 months of support from GA and an understanding that the Kubernetes team can’t offer an upgrade to the next LTS. The proposed workflow for operations teams would be clusters that live for 24 months and then organizations need to migrate off of them and create a new cluster.” // LTS-talk makes my head hurt, but I think the charts in here are OK. // Also, vendors love LTS as an enterprise feature, and it usually is worth paying for. But, it’s also a trap if you let yourself get locked-in to older versions.
CNCF Survey: Half of Organizations Spend More with Kubernetes, Mostly Due to Overprovisioning - “The survey participants shared their views on why running Kubernetes can get quite expensive. The main reason for overspending was overprovisioning (70%), accompanied by the sprawl of resources not being deactivated after use (43%). The second cluster of responses was related to the lack of visibility and insight into consumption and spending (40%) and the lack of awareness and responsibility at the individual and team levels (45%). Technical debt related to not re-architecting workloads migrated into the cloud environment for scalability accounted for 43% of the overspending. Further down, the respondents pointed to resource-hungry workloads (25%), fluctuating consumption demands (23%), and poor planning/prediction of cloud consumption.”

Wastebook

“Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.” Willy Wonka.
“The person continues to operate out of the old attitudes and strategies, but they are no longer effective.” Some Jungian shit.
“When all else fails, wear a mustache so everyone sees you as more man-like.” Here.
“Like, why would I want to look snappy in the office?” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

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See you next time!

Mar 5, 2024

How to avoid working too much

Surviving and Thriving in a BigCo

If you work in a large organization, you’ll like this new video series I did with O’Reilly. Check out the intro above, and here’s the topics covered:

Cultivate your Style and Character.
How does a BigCo Work?
Mentors are Nice, Champions are Better.
Asking Questions Leads to Homework for You.
Assign Homework to Filter out Vampires.
To Innovate, Hide Out.
Slides are Docs.
Always Have an Ask Ready to Go.
Embrace Work/Life Imbalance.

If you have access to O’Reilly, you should check out the videos. If you work at a large organization, especially in a technical role, you should watch them all! You can get some kind of certification if you take the quizzes (a sort of hilarious thing for this type of content, but whatever).

These are good videos, if I don’t say so myself. If you like my style of stuff, you’ll like these. Tell me what you think!

Microservices Modernization Missteps: Four Anti-Patterns of Rebuilding Apps - and how to avoid them

One of my colleagues has a post out going over four anti-patterns when you're modernizing to microservices: (1) Relying only on code and documentation for business context; (2) Unvalidated architecture; (3) Insufficient test automation; (4) Big bang releases.

I helped put it together, so, you know, I think it’s pretty useful stuff. Check it out!

Software Defined Talk podcast #456

This week, we second guess recent decisions made by Google and Apple. Plus, what social media sites is everyone actually using these days?

Take a listen! Check out the unedited livestream video if you’re really a super-fan.

Relative to your interests

We CAN Have Nice Things: Upgrading to Java 21 Is Worth It - “It’s (Jave 21) also morally superior. You won’t like the look of shame and sadness in your children’s eyes when they find out that you’re using Java 8 in production.”
Thanks Oracle! Java licence squeeze puts a rocket under Azul - “Oracle, by developer use, was probably 60 to 70% market share according to Gartner. This year, that’s down to 30%. ” // Meanwhile, since Jan 2023: “The Oracle Java Licensing change made organisations purchase a licence for their entire employee population if even a single employee or server has installed a_ licensable_ version of Java – which is widespread, often without organisations realising this. And Oracle, notorious for its ferocious audits over the years, is stepping up audits of Java users.”

Wastebook

“Every idea is a story of someone trying to solve a problem.” Here.
“Boy, are you going to be glad you opened this newsletter. Because you are about to learn about the lone banana problem.”
“A primer on space mining — and its impact on the IT sector.” From a 451 report.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Rare ceiling fan spotting in the Netherlands, at In De Wildeman, Amsterdam.

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After a week of pissing rain, it’s sunny hear in Amsterdam. We’ll see how the weekend goes.

I finally got my 2FA login for my Twitter account fixed. I’d been ignoring it since the Fall, just posting my content, and then got locked out sometime in December or January. There’s still so many people in my tech world there. It’s kind of weird, weren’t they all supposed to abandon it out of Elon-hate, or something? I feel like I chose the wrong path during all that nerd-wailing. I’ve got a large enough following in Mastodon, but there’s just not as much engagement as I’m used to (there are a handful of people there that I write back and forth with that are great, though). And since I missed out on the initial tech-invasion of Threads (since I live in the EU), there’s not much there. This stuff always comes down to years of curation and activity, which is hard to build back up.

I don’t think that federated dream (where Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky all interior) is ever going to come true: that was clearly just some hopeful-nerd talk last year. (And now that you an pay Twitter to remove all ads, what they should do is open up third party APIs for the Premium+ customers - they’re not missing out on ads anyhow - but, whatever). It’d be great to have an Adium-like app for all that shit. Dreams! Anyhow, speaking of quality content (or lack thereof!) I have a backlog of lots of my silly videos to post in Twitter.

Mar 1, 2024

devPRops - better put PR in your backlog

Better put PR on the backlog

Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. [AI culture problems as art]

The Gemini thing: the conversation around AI technology is now based on how it can navigate social and cultural issues, less if it “works.” These social and cultural issues eventually wear out - people forget - so you have to just stay alive and hold it back. Also, with AI (as with most technologies), you can fix the features/bugs that provoked the social and culture issues. In one way, the negative feedback is just “feedback” that you’d expect in the lean product methodology. However, with social and cultural issues, it’s difficult to accept failure as learning (product management feedback).

Social and cultural issues are usually negative, rarely positive.

Facebook means you can keep up with family and friends, previously we had letters and expensive long-distance phone calls. Now we bemoan screen time instead of saying “holy fuck, never mind a 1,000 songs in my pocket - now I have the Internet in my pocket!” I’d have to trust schools to adapt to my kid’s learning styles, pay a lot of time and money for private tutors, now they can ask ChatGPT to explain concepts to them in the style that works for them.

Also, with (business) software, the benefits are mostly boring: making it cheaper to run computers and software, speeding up or removing shitty office work (who wants summarize meetings that you didn’t want to be at in the first place?), removing the friction and bottlenecks of reaching new customers and interacting with newer ones (online bill pay instead of mailing checks; automating inventory instead of walking around with a clipboard and pencil). “People have forgotten, I think, just how big a deal having a common interface to all the storage arrays was with VMware like before,” Justin. When transferring money in the US is finally fixed (like it is in Europe), few people are going to writing and podcasting about that for months on end: “regional credit unions enable easy money transferring, yay!”

My point here is not to bemoan this - it is what it is! - but to be prepared for it, to weave it into your operational strategy, your product management. Put PR in the backlog, call up your marketing and comms people, and have them take a seat at your daily stand-up meeting. You’ll need them and their contribution will be as valuable as any technical thing. devPRops.

“Rude” is culturally relative

I’ve lived in the Netherlands for almost six year, and as a Texan, this is still a daily struggle:

From the most excellent *The Culture Map*.

Dreams of Having it Both Ways

Phase 01: There is too much vendor lock-in and there are only, like, two viable options for anything. Why don't these people innovate anymore?

Phase 02: Oh my God! Have you seen how many choices there for everything?! <insert CNCF Landscape lulz here>.

Phase 03: GOTO Phase 01.

Relative to your interests

3 Ways to Help Struggling Open Source Communities - By supporting local meetup groups and sharing your time with organizers, you can help sustain our vital tech communities.
RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study - ‘"Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance," the researchers concluded.’
How startups beat incumbents - “big companies don’t like to take big risks even when the outcome might be large. The fear of failure is an order of magnitude more motivating than the desire to innovate or even the greed of success.”
Sabre completes migration to Google Cloud, closes 17 data centers - Starting in 2020, now in 2024: “Over the course of this effort, we’ve closed 17 data centers and moved more than 40,000 servers, 400,000 CPUs, and 50 petabytes of storage into the cloud.” Congrats!
Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives–But Why? - Keeping thought-leader’ing fresh is difficult. // “why are so many public intellectuals capable of generating insight, originality, or brilliance at the beginning of their careers, but are utterly incapable of fresh thinking a decade later?” // “Old attitudes die because generations that hold them _literally _die off. Such is the stuff of progress and disaster. Such is also the problem of the public intellectual. A public intellectual’s formative insights were developed to explain the world he or she encountered during a specific era. Eras pass away; times change. It is difficult for the brain to keep up with the changes.”
Me: “I want to start seeing (only?) more analyst estimates of kubernetes usage by app/workload (not just if people are using it). Not out of some desire to see it be small and poke fun at it, but just as with public cloud in the 2010’s to just know what’s actually happening. We need that annual (quarterly would be better) thing like the storage growth/data explosion thing IDC and EMC used to do.1 That’d be great for the CNCF to start estimating. All opinions about how hard it is are besides the point now: adoption and migration of workloads (and also new workloads) to it are the only thing that matters and is interesting).”
How I stay (more) focused with ADHD - “I often go to a café to write, and it helps me a lot to focus on writing. As much as I loathe noise and distractions, the café noise and presence of other people (known as body doubling, see below) help me to focus on writing. Unless, of course, I can hear and understand what people are talking about — in this case, I must hear the gossip.”
Why Do East Asian Firms Value Drinking? - Also, a lot of charts and ideas from The Culture Map, a great book for understanding differences in business communications across the globe.
TikTok Is For Millennials, It Turns Out - Everyone gets old. // “it’s probably smart to not assume that the kids are the ones responsible for whatever new weird thing is on your FYP. Those videos are probably being made by weird adults.”
What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath - “Yes, [as a journalist conducting an interview] you are manipulating people to a certain extent — to your point — in the way that I might manipulate somebody in therapy, but I would never feel the need to justify it, and your justification came so quickly. That’s why I was like, Hey, what’s happening that you felt the need to defend your answer?”
Gemini For Google Workspace Plays The Long Game Gemini for Google Workspace Plays The Long GameAI Insights artificial intelligence - Office workers are the new kingmakers. // “If you don’t give them something sanctioned, they’ll use bring-your-own AI tools such as ChatGPT on the web, opening your organization up to security and privacy risks and rendering their activities unmonitored by your IT team.”
30+ ways I’m using AI in everyday writing life as a technical writer, blogger, and curious human - Whole lot of prompts, many related to writing, but plenty of everyday things.
Legendary CEO James Keyes: Here’s how I saved 7-Eleven–and why I couldn’t save Blockbuster - Lesson learned: avoid being $1bn in debt during a financial crisis.

Wastebook

“It makes a sound like mixin' macaroni and cheese.” Here.
“parameters and pushback”
“Sam Altman tech CEO speedrun.” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Executive dinner on Java Security, March 13th, Dallas; DevOpsDays LA, March 15th, Pasadena “We Fear Change” talk; KubeCon EU, March 19th, Paris; Tanzu (Re)defined, April 11th, Palo Alto.

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I’m home for a few weeks, then traveling for two weeks: to the US for a three city tour (including DevOpsDays LA and that executive table above); the next week in Paris for KubeCon. I need to get on submitting talks to more conferences. I don’t know, man. Is there anything left to talk about?

It’s hilariously hard to find a link to these studies/PDFs some ~13 years late. But I assure you, they were a big fucking deal! It goes to show you how transient and, you know, PR-driven this stuff is. Also, the value analyst shops put on their work: only fresh for a year or two? Seems silly to me!

Feb 27, 2024

Potato chips that taste like Thanksgiving stuffing - what could go wrong?

Relative to your interests

Cluetrain at 25 - This was an important book to me when it came out. It probably had a huge influence on my professional life. All these years later, I think it was right. The biggest evolution, unexpected, was that the Big Bad Corporate Octopus took it seriously and figured out how to monetize the shit out the Cluetrain. Toot! Toot!
How to Stay Grounded Through Organizational Chaos - There’s a lot of good advice here, but the most important is here: “If your organization’s approach raises concerns or if you find yourself constantly questioning its strategies, it’s worth considering whether you’re in the right place. While “pretending that certainty exists is delusional,” it’s possible to find an organization that’s more aligned with your values, and where work feels less like a constant whiplash.” // The toolkit to examine if your company has a good strategy, operations/execution, and the stability needed to function…that toolkit is hard to assemble, use, and trust. // Also, I’ve become leery of the “the only thing you can control is yourself.” This is an easy mindset for a Roman emperor to have, and equally easy if you live in a big-ass clay jar with no other responsibilities or possession in life. But in the middle of those polls, the problem starts to be more than just your mental vibes, and getting to inward looking detracts from fixing the overall system.
What is a long context window? Google DeepMind engineers explain - “Previously, Gemini could process up to 32,000 tokens at once, but 1.5 Pro — the first 1.5 model we’re releasing for early testing — has a context window of up to 1 million tokens — the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model to date. In fact, we’ve even successfully tested up to 10 million tokens in our research. And the longer the context window, the more text, images, audio, code or video a model can take in and process.” // Once they allow uploading multiple files (in the EU, where I live), that will be something. There’s only so many tokens you can cut and last into a web browser field (literally, they cut it off!).
Tanzu Spring Runtime: Empowering Developers for Tomorrow’s Challenges - If you’re using Java apps to run your business, you should get this integrated stack instead of worrying about doing all the DIY work to take care of and update and secure that stack itself. Also, it means you’ll have support and training.
Addressing cloud waste: 4 steps to cloud computing cost optimization - “Organizations with little or no cloud cost optimization plans rush into cloud technology investments,” according to Gartner. “They end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70 percent without deriving the expected value from it.”
9 Things You Need to Know About the Threads Algorithm - Getting the juice. As ever, fucking around in the comments seems to help.
AI Companies Lose $190 Billion After Dismal Financial Reports - When share prices drop that much, it means that money was never there in the first place and was just made up fantasy-land shit. Nothing was lost if nothing was there.p
How I’d use generative AI to modernize an app - As it says
Kmart October 1989 : Tape-A-Thon - A pile of tapes of the in-store music is available. Amazing! Here’s an overview of it.
Giving Fifty Percent - “perhaps a lot of the extra effort we thing we’re putting into a task is actually comprised of anxiety and stress and maybe we could just relax and get the same thing done to the same level in roughly the same time, and be happier about it.” // This is one - accurate! - way of looking at the mysterious part of the creative process, whether programming, writing, whatever. The actual activity - typing, painting, cooking - is a small part of the overall, uh, “value stream” needed to create. When you ignore the value of all that other stuff, you damage the whole process. We’re just starting to understand this in enterprise software development: you have to pay attention to the entire span of time between an idea and a person using your app. It’s even more so in non-programming creativity. Taking a walk and seeming to “do nothing” is literally part of the process and if you remove it, you degrade the “business value” of the “business outcome.” There’s some more musing on this in this week’s Software Defined Talk - subscribe, mofos!
Quick Riff on Narrative Strategy - “Narratives as worlds. Consultant as world-runner.” // There’s something important here for marketing people: a lot of marketing work is actually the company figuring out it’s own narrative, studying what products it does, what customers it has, those customer’s jobs to be done, even how sales is done. “Strategy” is supposed to do a lot of that, as is product management. But at most tech companies I’ve worked at, marketing ends up being where that all comes together and becomes…legible? This can be very good, but it can also be very dangerous. Customers don’t really care shout your inner looking narrative; they don’t want to read summaries of your therapy sessions. They just want to know why they would give you money, how and why your product/service will solve their problem without costing more that it should. Investors want to read the transcripts of your therapy sessions, sure, but “the market does not.” If your find that your marketing is spending a lot of time on story telling, and not much on product, you should be very careful.
Related: in tech marketing, customers don’t care how hard it was for you to make the product. Just tell them how it’ll solve their program and that the pricing isn’t a rip-off or enterprise-gouging.
Fight Between Employees, Managers Over Return-to-Office Is Getting Messy - He’s not a fan of remote work. And, really, what worker is?

Wastebook

“sales inflictment.” Here.
“Hastily made hobo-porn.” Here.
“Woke up very confused at how my brain functions, but very excited for dream Margot Robbie’s financial future.” Here.
Move “having made something” to “making something.” - finishing something is just part of the larger joy of making something. It’s in the cycle of creation, feedback, and improvement that you find the real work. Savor the meal, but remember, the best part is knowing you’ll get to cook again soon.
“I now understand that tote bags are bumper stickers for pedestrians” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

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I forget if I’ve actually written this, or wrote it and deleted it from here… I’ve been thinking much recently about what exactly it is I do: do I still enjoy it? Is it still relevant? To put in a dangerous way: do I like my job?

My focus for almost ten years has been “how large companies get better and building and running software” (hence my easy alignment to Pivotal - “transforming how the world builds software” and then getting all butt-hurt about Kubernetes destroying all of that). And what are the results? It’s easy to say not much, but I think I just get used to the new normal. I talked with a gaggle of C-types this week on the getting better at software topic and it was both well received and fun for me. There is still a tremendous amount of interest in the topic…because large organizations have a lot of “transformation” ahead of them still.

Still, what am I doing here? I want desperately to avoid being that old thought-leader that just says the same old thing over and over, for years. After awhile, it causes a “no thoughts found” Ker-chunking in my brain. Also, it’s so boring.

It’s easy to say (to myself, as I often do) that what I should do is re-learn Java and Spring and go down the stack some. There’d be so much interesting to learn and talk with people about when it comes to using AI in big companies. All of that “secure software supply chain” thinking and stuff applies to AI - it’s just more apps, tons of regulated data flying around…but it’s actually very close to “the business.” Talking about AI is a bigger, even more important field than talking about (or caring about!) Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, even Java itself.

There’s also been a severe reduction in the amount of business travel I do. Obviously since COVID, but also because of the more cost conscience state of my work and strategy fluidity over the past few years. It’s made me realize how many of my friends are road-friends. I don’t mean this in that “self-care” way of being dismissive about friends you make at work. I think that’s utter bullshit: friends are friends.

So, you know: what am I doing here?

Feb 22, 2024

I only give one talk a year, but I give it many times

Relative to your interests

Can we reenergize the transactional workforce? - Hmm.
Cloud without Kubernetes - Start by hiding Kubernetes, only touch it as needed. There’s enough work to do already.

Wastebook

“Unhappiness with air travel took a new turn when maggots rained down on passengers on a Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday.” Here.
The only reason I get away with all this shit is that I just started trying to get away with it.
I’m not procrastinating, I’m thinking.
“[jerkoff motion]”
“FUD-pedition”
“Goblins: The Unsung Heroes of Humanity’s Defense Against Sentient Toasters.” Gemini.
I don’t know anything about this topic, but I’m a professional public speaker, so I’m happy to talk about it for 45 minutes.

Speaking of Goblins

I’ve been working on a conference talk that pulls together D&D, generative AI (whatever you want to call it - can we just start saying “AIs” without having to expend the energy to roll our eyes at the nerds who correct us?), and boring ass enterprise software shit. Here is the talk I just submitted to DevOpsDays London and will start submitted elsewhere.

Are goblins the only thing holding back the AI Takeover? Benchmarking generative AI with Dungeons & Dragons

They say AIs will wreak havoc on human lives, from jobs to sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids 1 to feed its insatiable need for energy. But is AI really a substitute for humans? What better way to answer that question than having the AIs play a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master? D&D follows an intricate, yet ambiguous set of rules, requires constant creativity and unexpected imagination, empathy, and playfulness. Being a good DM requires skill at almost all the parts of being human. I’ve developed a sort of Turing test that uses a handful of D&D scenarios to test AIs: how it DMs a goblin ambush, role plays generic tavern encounters, and creates interesting open-ended adventures and world-building. More than benchmarking, this is an excellent way to learn how to create prompts, to understand what AIs are, and pretend like you’re working which you’re having fun playing games. This talk will cover my method, the results, and observations. (This talk proposal was NOT written by an AI…yet.)

Every time I pitch this idea to someone you can see their interest slowly light up. At first they’re like, “yeah, yeah, D&D - since I know what you’re talking about, thanks for reminding me how much of a nerd I am. I finally got mainstream society to accept me.” And then I go over it more, they’e very silent. Then they say, “holy shit!” and we talk for an hour more.

It’s not that far from playing D&D with an AI to figuring out customer service chatbots, think through brainstorming with an AI to figure out supply chain issues, or the “game” of ISO 9001 certification (you know, 9001, 9002, whatever it takes).

Really try'n' feel that cool linoleum vibe around here. I mean: but, they have stars on them, you know?

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

If you’re going to KubeCon EU and haven’t registered yet, you can get 20% off with the code KCEU24VMWBC20.

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I struggle to get the “software is what runs your business, not some enterprise side-hustle you keep reducing the budget for” idea across, and I really like this phrasing:

digital native business often sees technology as a central part to their business strategy, not just an enabler of strategy. They don't really separate business strategy from technology strategy. They look at technology investments different.

Good toast.

Wow, everything about that clip is perfect. The lighting. The angle. The wardrobe. And most of all, the acting. That film is amazing, I need to watch it again soon.

Feb 16, 2024

This apple has a butt

Never use slide notes

Relative to your interests

Organize Your Change Initiative Around Purpose and Benefits - ‘An easy method of finding a change project’s purpose is to continuously ask, “Why are we doing the project?” Usually, you need to ask this question three to four times to get to the core purpose.’ // Does anyone actually have this level of clarity? When would executives have/make the time to do this work?
The Wrong Way to Use DORA Metrics - Metrics used to figure out how to fire people are a bummer.
Majority of applications will use cloud-native technologies in two years - ‘Respondents expect the majority of applications to incorporate cloud-native technologies within two years. Currently, 41% of organizations are using cloud-native techniques for more than half of their applications, but this figure is expected to rise to 61% within two years, reflecting an acceleration in the use of cloud-native application architectures. In addition, prior surveys have found cloud-native adoption to be strongest at organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue and among digital transformation leaders. This survey finds the use of cloud-native application architectures to be strong across organizations of all sizes, industries and digital maturity, confirming that cloud “nativity” is the default platform for software deployment.’
three personas of the ai ecosystem - JJ goes over three roles/people you’ll encounter in AIrel.
IDPs Give Developers More Freedom to Write Code - We’re merging the functionality of automation (usually Kubernetes automation) too much into the concept of IDPs. Automation stands on its own, and when we talk about it as just a feature of IDPs, things get too confusing. It’s tone for IDPs to be a MoM. Historically, a unified suite of ops functionality is hard to sell: people always want to swap in their own components, and the coders have to prioritize across too many different features. And now, we’d also throwing in developer collaboration sites and tools. Imagine if you combined Atlassian, CI/CD, Chef, and your entire developer tools and portal stacks into one product. It’s better that we keep these things as separate concepts that, sure, can be pre-integrated together. But automation is its own thing. I mean, do you like big suites of tools? They are always confusing and you often don’t want to switch over to using all of those pre-integrated tools.
These are really great. I feel like it’s the last thing that ever needs to be said on social media, it finishes all that “is this good/bad, etc.” talk that’s constantly going on, and also is instruction for how to be a human on social media, or in meatspace. The other project over there is fun. And, you know: man, I still love flickr even though I’ve largely abandoned it a year ago.

Wastebook

“…because we’re running a business here, not a shit-show.”
“Apple TV+ has become HBO.”
“Malibu Country Mart.”
“Ridiculous, but dry.”
Be your own best friend. Listening, supporting, validating, cheering up, accepting.
“Almost weekend!”
“Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ‘21st Century Linux.’” 2011.
“[Waves egg sandwich around.]”
“And on and on…”

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

If you’re going to KubeCon EU and haven’t registered yet, you can get 20% off with the code KCEU24VMWBC20.

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This story is a good reminder of what “fun” looks like.

Speaking of, we found an apple that has a butt:

If you’re an “executive” and you’re curious what’s up with Tanzu now, we’re hosting an in-person conference in April on just that topic. It’s sort of like a multi-party EBC - if that makes sense to you, it’s something you might just like. We used my suggestion for a name: Tanzu (Re)defined.

Feb 15, 2024

The easiest presentation format that works

Why did Kubernetes Win the Kontainer Wars?*

John Willis finally explains why the underpowered, not fully ready, overly complex container orchestrator from Google became the cloud native juggxrnaught.

Also, there’s much whole lot more DevOps and Demming talk in the interview I did with him last week.

*Also, sure: I know that the victors never like the “war” framing. Yup.

Wastebook

“Well, we lost a lot of material things, but the great thing is, we’re all still alive, and Mom only broke one hand, and now Dad can buy a new toupee, and that will look lots better!” Bruce Sterling.
“Superior And Relentless Alignment.” Here.
“an army of fleece-clad adult toddlers” Kara Swisher.
The customer is always right, except when it comes to pricing.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

DevOpsDays LA, March 15th, “We Fear Change” talk; KubeCon EU, March 19th. Executive dinner in Dallas, March 31st.

If you’re going to KubeCon EU and haven’t registered yet, you can get 20% of with the code KCEU24VMWBC20.

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I have some links laying around here somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced them.

////

I could totally do this, except it’d be PowerPoints instead of music…? I guess I’d need some music in the background, sure.

Also, if I shoot the video in my entire house, does that mean I can write off my entire house as my home office?

Feb 13, 2024

ChatGPT can't take over the world until it can play D&D

What I’m doing here is trying to figure out some benchmarking tests to rate all the AI systems out there. The “application” I’m using is Dungeons & Dragons, in particular, having it be a Dungeon Master. Today, I tested out one of the more difficult parts of D&D, combat. There’s a stack of rules, and then crossed with different monsters, player abilities, terrain, etc., there’s a ton of combinations and possibilities.

In the video today, I wanted to test out how it handles combat. I used a road ambush scenario (perhaps the most popular scenario in D&D) from The Lost Mines of Phandelver to test out the ChatDM.

It went really well, actually!

I’ll do another ~5 minute post-game analysis of what I learned and next steps soon. In the meantime:

ChatGPT 4 has improved a lot at combat since I tried it last. I think its ability to write and run code helps. It also can track hit points and ongoing status of the players and monsters.
It was pretty impressive at remembering the spatial nature of things: where the goblins were, my players, and what that meant for attacks.
There’s some minor, but important tuning to do. For example, if the players are walking into an ambush, don’t tell them they’re walking into an ambush.
It wasn’t great at interesting and clever tactics. But with some coaching it did what you’d expect goblins to do.

Anyhow: I think it was very instructive.

I think there’s at least two more scenarios I want to add to this “test suite”:

Role playing of some sort - maybe a meeting in a tavern where you have to learn some information. Maybe just getting past some guards at a gate, parlaying with some hobgoblins.
Open-ended exploring - you walk into a village and explore it, resulting in something. There’s a lot of adventures that work this way. The Village of Hommlet in The Temple of Elemental Evil is a good example of this, or just loading up, like, the Boulder’s gate or Waterdeep overview and seeing what happens when the character scurries about.

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That’s all for today.

Well, a little bit more.

I talked with my old pal John Willis about this project today. He’s been going bonkers with AI so he had a lot of feedback and questions. According to John, what I need is something called a “vector database” and a “rag.” I’ll see if we have any of the second in the wash.

Feb 8, 2024

A ChatGPT prompt for solo roleplaying Dungeons & Dragons

Here’s an overview of the prompt I’m currently using to play D&D with ChatGPT:

In my mind, I’ve got as new talk that evaluates several of the AIs out there based on how well they can play Dungeons and Dragons. After using ChatGPT for about a year, I have first hand experience that makes all the hype - good and negative - seems a lot less amazing. ChatGPT is practical, it’s quick, fun, and even creative. But, it’s not perfect at being a D&D dungeon master right out of the box. It takes a lot of work, adapting, and work on the player’s part. This feels like a good test case to learn and experiment with what exactly all this AI stuff can do in all domains, business or fun.

While it’s a game, Dungeons and Dragons has extensive rules, almost endless lore and commentary on the Internet, and an open ended nature that means you can do anything. To work well, it requires strict adherence to a lengthy set of rules, but a lot of judgement in how they’re applied and interpreted. And, at the same time success at Dungeons and Dragons requires a lot imagination, creativity, and, well, making shit up.

That’s just like business strategy, marketing, product development, maybe therapy, law, and most things that are high-value activities. I mean, what do us humans do except try to predict what is going to happen next and predict what should happen next, or, predict what we want to happen next?

Put another way, I think if I can get ChatGPT to play a dungeon master well, I can probably get it to do other human-creative things well.

Furthermore, there’s a lot of these generative AI things out there. How would you rate them? Usually you take the same problem/task, come up with some criteria for grading the thing’s performance, and then run that test across all the options. That’s the second part that I want to do: come up with a way of rating and judging the performance of each AI setup. In this case, when it comes to being a dungeon master.

If I come up with a few criteria and test cases (like, an adventure to play on each), I can evaluate ChatGPT versus Bard versus a Tanzu OSS stack versus Bing/CoPilot versus Claude (whenever it’s available in the EU) versus Watsonx, etc. & what have you.

We’ll see! This could also just be an elaborate excuse to play D&D instead of organizing my desk drawers.

The, uh, “analysis” of my prompt above is based on a session I did live today which you can also watch if you’re into seeing it all happen step by step. It ends right as combat starts with some goblins, which I’ll have to pick-up next time. In that livestream recording, you can see the tool-chain and technique I use for solo playing with ChatGPT, along with some commentary on the project.

If you want to check out the prompt more, it’s in the description of the video.

My Content

Write the letters - Software Defined Talk #452: This week, we examine the balancing act CEOs face between maintaining operations and pursuing growth, the IRS's attempt to automate tax filing, and defining success in thought leadership.
How to get over your fear of public speaking.
For conference presentations, use your own visual style.

Relevant to your interests

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope - More studies.
To CEOs and VCs Suggesting Tech-Staffing Cuts - He’s not in favor of the app architectures of the past 15 years. Nor kubernetes, or Scrum.
Can Enterprise DevOps Ever Measure Up? - A check-in on developer productivity and DevOps metrics.
Gartner Survey Finds Sales Analytics Has Less Influence on Sales Performance Than What Leadership Expected - “Eighty-four percent of sales leaders agreed that sales analytics has had less influence on sales performance than what leadership expected.”
GitHub Copilot Research Finds “Downward Pressure on Code Quality” - The AI generates too much code and does not favor code re-use.
AI Design Patterns - As it says! This is from a VCs perspective, collecting together the patterns they see.

Wastebook

“He was getting his team to paint a fence.” “About ten percent of the drowned men had their flies open.” Here.
“Repatriating the partner margins.” Here.
“I wonder how long it would take to reach product-market-fit if I start with a double-sided spoon…” Derek Sivers.
“I just replied to an email from 2018.” Current year: 2024. Here.
I don't understand very much but I know a lot of things.
“I recall hearing a presentation by a GE senior executive at a conference I attended almost ten years ago. Accompanied by a surfeit of PowerPoint, the executive spoke about how GE was reinventing itself as an information technology company. Yet the talk, with its generalities, platitudes and bureaucratic and taxonomic framing, sounded like the corporate America of a bygone age. I walked away from the session convinced that the company had no future. The successful tech people were … crazier than that, more ambitious and more focused on what their companies can and cannot do well. And they don’t use PowerPoint.” Here.
“I’m a shower idiot!” Tyler Cowen.
“Dungeon Crawler Carl.”

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

DevOpsDays LA, March 15th, “We Fear Change” talk; KubeCon EU, March 19th. Executive dinner in Dallas, March 31st.

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Weird.

Feb 7, 2024