There is already a delightful article on all this, but… If I needed some kind of thesis or dissertation, how about the roll of alcohol in Wes Anderson movies. How is it used as a plot device, character motivation, and just overall establishing the Wes Anderson feel.

The rat in The Fantastic Mr. Fox is motivated by “cider,” it’s what made kept him going - an alcoholic. Mr. Fox makes a rash celebratory toast after, as he says, having had too much to drink already. The animals tunnels are then flushed out with a flood of Bean’s cider!

Bean is said to survive primarily on his cider, which is extra strong and custom made. We must presume he is drunk the whole time, drinking what looks like between two to three gallons of cider a day (though, perhaps his wife shares the cider so it’s slightly less). This is likely what makes him obsess over the fox and make the dumb decision at the end to keep sieging the animals out.

Despite this alcoholism, Bean retains all of his dexterity. He also has a vert Hunter Thompson look: tall, thin, and with a constant cigarette holder and drink in hand - also always with a pistol!

The beginning of The French Dispatch uses the delivery of a tray of drinks as a sort of pacing and structure. I don’t know the term, but that plate of drinks is what drags (directs? creates the path for?) the camera through the first scene.

Also in that one: in prison, Moses is slowly killing himself by drinking 14 pints of mouthwash rations per week" until he’s motivated to re-discover his art in his art class. As he says:

Well, I’ve been here 3,647 days and nights. Another 14,603 to go. I drink 14 pints of mouthwash rations per week. At that rate, I think I’m going to poison myself to death before I ever get to see the world again, which makes me feel very sad. I gotta change my program. I gotta go in a new direction. Anything I can do to keep my hands busy, I’m gonna do. Otherwise, I think maybe it’s gonna be a suicide. And that’s why I signed up for clay pottery and basket weaving. My name is Moses.

About midway through her lecture, J.K.L. Berensen, abruptly stops saying something like, “now, I’ll have my drink,” pulls out what looks like a portable martini set from under the podium, pours a drink, takes a sip, and then keeps lecturing.

What do each of the drinks say about the characters? Bill Murray’s character in The French Dispatch has a Prairie Oyster, harkening back to Kansas, but it has an actual oyster in it, something you wouldn’t actually have in Kansas (so close from the sea in the _1950s). And the actual person, Bill Murray, has a bunch of booze lore already.

And so forth!

Wastebook

• There’s a lot urgency about urgency around here.

• “Pre-emptive nothingburger.”

• Wow! COMIN' HOT! “We don’t run blogs because blogs are not journalism. We run news analysis stories or opinion columns (which are written in the first person and demonstrate an opinion). If you do not have an opinion that can be backed up by compelling and expert knowledge, do not write in the first person.” // The number on thing they’re missing is how much - if at all! - you get paid.

• I’d never argue with them. They’re way too smart.

• “The concept of a fey creature is a gamer-created mishmash of virtually all folkloric creatures that don’t eat humans, aren’t of godlike power, aren’t significantly larger than humans, are corporeal, and are basically of a human body type.” Tome of Adventure Design.

• “The kingdom of Wessex was now a swamp and, for a few days, it possessed a king, a bishop, four priests, two soldiers, the king’s pregnant wife, two nurses, a whore, two children, one of whom was sick, and Iseult." The Pale Horseman.

• “We do not 'leverage” anything." Google diction directives.

• “unlocked efficiency gains.” They found that lost key.

• “This floor has been taken over by sentient water coolers that stab people with their water dispenser faucets - which are now fanged - to suck their blood.” Here.

Relative to your interests

Only two today. If you want more links you should be subscribing to and reading Seroter’s daily reading list. I look forward to it each day…and often steal links from him!

• Apple Card Users Earned More Than $1 Billion in Daily Cash Last Year - I don’t really use my Apple Card, but I like the savings account. They should setup an auto savings option that buys into an S&P index, or those age-driven Vanguard accounts. That’d be #DefaultsLifestyle FTW.

• Handwriting beats typing for turbocharging your noggin - The sample size was only “36 university students,” but they did scan their brain.

Logoff

I haven’t “released” this video yet, so here, dear readers, you can get a sneak peak:

Sorry about the coffee mustache. It’s one of those things that happens as you get older.

I’ve been filming and putting up more tiny videos (and a few for work). Predictably, the how to have more fun with solo Dungeons and Dragons one is doing well.

I’m starting to like this short video format. It’s kind of like Tweeting used to be. 60 seconds is just for YouTube. Thanks to how quick I can edit with Descript, I’ve been making two versions: a 60 second or less one for YouTube, and as long as it should be for LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.

“They say all foxes are slightly allergic to linoleum, but it's cool to the paw, try it.”

Enshittification considerificated

This week’s Software Defined Talk, episode 451: How does anyone use the Internet? This week, we discuss what “enshittification” is, what causes it, and whether it can be prevented. Plus, stay tuned until the end to hear the Software Defined Talk origin story. (Sadly, we made no 451 Research references.)

Relative to your interests

• Enterprise developers: what they do, where, and how - Highlights for a recent survey of developer types.

• Container Networking: From DIY to Buy - People don’t cover Kubernetes networking, they say. And it’s yet another hassle: “the networking burden falls on DevOps teams who have not traditionally been (and should not be) responsible for network deployment and management. To do so, they need to learn about Layers 3 to 7, border gateway protocol (BGP), subnetting, network address translation (NAT), and the like, but that’s a fairly long training path.”

• Everything’s a Dungeon: A Different Approach to Exploration Design - How to think about the “node-paths” of an adventure, in a dungeon-crawl, city, etc.

Wastebook

• “I was trying to play a simple fantasy rogue adventure, but the AI is obsessed with half naked busty women.” Yup.

• “1 hour of flying toasters.” Here. (I feel like there’s not enough toast in this one.)

• Looks like we need to re-send the memo.

• “Displeased unhappy bearded Caucasian man with cone hat on head and party horn in mouth looking at camera with bored dissatisfied expression as his birthday party sucks.” Here. (And, see below for said bearded Caucasian man.)

• “Some research has found that asking people to simply set aside half an hour a day for worrying allows them to avoid worrying during the rest of their day.” Here. By “simply,” they mean “only.”

• “Also, for the record, this woman is the woman who was thrown out of a Walmart for cleaning their bathroom, but she is NOT the woman who went and stocked shelves at a Target.” Here.

Logoff

I’ve done a lot of slide work today for my upcoming “We Fear Change” talk.

As Mark Cathcart, Distinguished Engineer at Dell and previously IBM, once said to me, shit-eating grin on his face looking up from his cubical, “I used to be good at my job. Now I’m good at PowerPoint.”

This presentation I’ve been worked on today gets buck-wild right from the start:

First, we’ll see if I actually use this. Second, what’s going on here is this. I really want to use that Wayne’s World bit.1 It’s what I named this presentation after! But, when you start a presentation you don’t just go cold into the title slide, you have to mess around with wires, wait to get the signal to start, etc. So I needed some kind of resting slide before the title slide. What better than toasters? Then, you can just put “slide zero” up - the toasters - and go into the title slide when needed, making sure you can time the, you know, joke.

Yeah.

We’ll see if I actually use it next week.

IT COULD BE TOO MUCH.

The “p” in IDP is for portal, not platform.

I think about this headstone often. It’s a well known, eye-rolling cliché is that, of course, he meant to let art flow through you effortlessly. He was, after all, a poet.

For those of us who can’t just pour the muse out of a bottle, there’s something more to “Don’t Try.” And that is: stick to what you’re good at. If you’ve developed a skill (or, I guess, an outlook on life) make sure to do it a lot, by default even.1 You also don’t need to show off and get validation for it, just do the work. Don’t try to do more than you’re good at in day-to-day life.

Of course you should learn new things, improve, and push yourself. But not that much. If you’re always focused on how you could be better, you’ll get depressed. You know, gratitude journals about how well things are going, and how good a person you are just the way you are.

There is also the Don’t Try of getting too involved outside of your area of concerns at work.

And, there's the Don't Try that therapy is always telling me: all these things you're tormented about are actually not that bad, most are even "nothing." You are the one tormenting yourself because you're trying too hard to care, to think things matter when they don't. Instead, don't try to see what's not there, just accept what the flow of life. It's probably fine.

Anyhow. I could probably try to make this point better. But, you know…

Update your Java apps to do that FinOps magic

If you run Java apps, chances are high you run Spring. This year, you should make sure you've upgraded to the latest version: you'll get huge performance boosts like uses 70% less memory and faster boot-up times that I can't even calculate the improvement for. Check out my pal DaShaun demonstrating these improvements in this quick video.

That means saving money if you can FinOps your way into using less beefy, costly cloud doo-dads and shutting down long-running Java process because you can’t afford the VM startup-time delays. Also, many older versions will not longer have support available. Upgrading is easier than you'd think and it'll get you these free payoffs. Plus, you know, actually new functionality and happier developers.

And, if you want a free way to see if your app can get these benefits, check out our Spring Health Assessment report. It’ll look at your app and take a swing at how you can make it run rul-better-like.

Wastebook

• Reading Rainbow: Business Book Edition - “Synergies in the sky! I can crow CAGR twice as I high! Take a look, it’s in a PowerPoint, Reading Rainbow!” Yes, and, who would be the host?

• GUM IS TERRIBLE WHEN OUTSIDE THE MOUTH.

• “It’s not something I keep a tab open for.” _Dear John Letters, Jan 18th, 2024

• Well, you know what they say about “hope,” right? What? Yeah, neither do I. That’s probably why I ain’t got none.

• One powerful benefit of getting older is the default stance of knowing less about pop culture and generally not caring. As an aging Gen-X’er, you can really amp this up by taping into your mutant super-power of not giving a shit about anything. If you’re getting older, and you find yourself getting upset more and more, then you’re doing it wrong, and just giving yourself the shits.

Logoff

Awhile back I mentioned that I was asked to contribute to a 2024 predictions round-up. Here’s the final article, converted to an interview style with just me.

Tell me the last new condiment you tried that you didn’t like.

Developer Productivity

One of my co-workers worked at Uber for awhile on their internal developer tools and platforms. In this week’s Tanzu Talk episode, Cora and I talk to him about what they did, why, and how as well. Check out the video below, or the podcast episode if you prefer that.

Relative to your interests

• Pitchfork & The Death of the critic - Death of the critic? No, as always, when the medium changes, how the job is done is changes. // “The culture critics who spent days creating words of criticism now have to evolve to use today’s tools to help others think differently, try new things, and have an influence. Playlists are the new words. Followers are the new readers. Critics of yesterday are now ‘tastemakers.’ While anyone can be a tastemaker, to be good, and have real influence, one still needs to have skills that add up to a professional critic – broad awareness of modern and past works, other aspects of life, understanding of popular culture, knowledge of society, and contemporary politics, economics, and global context.” // Socrates hated writing. His medium was talking. He feared that writing would ruin philosophy. Plato learned the new medium, and the reach was more powerful effective and durable. A 60 second video may not seem like a critical piece, but if it contains critical analysis and, even, recommendations, of course it is.

• Why Agile doesn’t work for most IT pros: The bigger you are, the harder you fall - I thought they’d stopped doing the State of Agile surveys, so it’s fun to see a new one.

• Bell Labs & Google: bookends of the same sad story? - “Whether it’s Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, or IBM Research Labs, the story is always the same: corporate overlords are so married to the staid predictability of their cash cows that they fail to make bold decisions. Middle managers who eventually rise to the top lack the imagination or risk-taking capabilities to put their companies on new growth curves.” // I don’t like this as a complete failure explanation. The missing piece is something more like innovation in business models: figuring out how to create a business out new products and new features, and often failing to! The comments from Google people are right, though: you need some kind of innovation and product driven leadership to keep the product going. In contrast to the usual innovate or die mindset, an appreciate for cash cows: yes, your company is “just” a cash cow with predictable, low growth revenue. That is how most businesses function and it’s perfectly fine: you just have different expectations as an investor and an employee. You are low risk, you are steady, and likely you are part of how society functions. You move slow and care for things.

• Related, incremental improvement (or “drift”): “In other words, to build a great data business, today’s startups don’t have to come up with particularly novel ideas or get a bunch of bets about the market right. They just have to rebuild what’s already there, but more deliberately and on more certain ground than the original pioneers could.”

Wastebook

• I have no idea what they’re doing, but they’re obviously not very good at it.

• Two models of judging “value”: (1) how much value you can create, (2) how much value you can take. You can grow a forest, or you can harvest a forest. You can lower prices, or you can raise prices. You can collaborate, or you can take credit. We aspire to turn all those or’s into and’s, but we mostly do one or the other.

• All process improvement can be learned by how to manage the flow of laundry and dirty dishes. And we should take the overwhelming nature of those as therapeutic council that you can never master it consistently. Especially when you have kids.

• “On the other hand, the frenzy is destabilizing.” Here.

Logoff

It’s a regular hurry up and wait situation at the moment.

All Talk, No Tools

I like heuristics you can use to figure out what’s “really” going on at work (well, in any system, I guess). When it comes to Big Change, one of the heuristics I like to use is to ask if the organization is using new tools.

My colleague Bryan Ross has a new post up on using this test.

For example, if you’re in some big digital transformation initiative - like migrating to cloud, converting your app dev style to cloud native, getting more agile/DevOps/platform engineering - are you using new tools? Are you at least upgrading your existing tools to get new functionality? If you’re not, there’s a good chance you’re not going to actually change. Worse, if management is avoiding changing and adding budget for new tools, you’re also likely not going to change.

Sure, this isn’t always the case, but it should make you suspicious. Tools are how you get most things done in IT; just talking doesn’t write code too well, deploy it to production, or troubleshoot it when things go wrong in production. Tools will generally embody how you work and what you do (and vice-versa). So, if the tools aren’t changing, it’s likely that how you work isn’t going to change, and, thus, the outcomes won’t change.

Check out Bryan’s post! It’s part of the series he’s been doing to write-up his version of a series of goofy videos I did last, this one in particular.1

How to walk on ice

Here is me making some kind of life-inspirational video. PROSPER!

Relative to your interests

• Workers are filming their layoffs, then posting them to TikTok. What could go wrong? - Where there’s information asymmetric, there’s generally bad power-dynamics. And when The Kids hack that asymmetry, The Olds generally lose their shit.

• The Class Missing from Business School - What is the best way to do this an IC? ‘1. Shifting mindset from “How do I accomplish this?” to “Who should be the right person to accomplish this task & how would it fit into their goals?”’

• 2 Ways to Reduce Bottlenecks with the Theory of Constraints - Things get a little confusing when he all the sudden says to finish things to the right of the bottleneck, but I think that just means to first finish all the work that has no bottleneck and can be shipped. It’s cleaning your room before getting to work. All that unfinished work is its own bottleneck, I guess. What I think is always (or just often) missing from theory of constrains, value stream thinking is (1) innovation, and, (2) controlling marketing demand (marketing and sales). I guess you could call demand a bottleneck, sure, but at some point you’re just reinventing the universe to bake an apple pie from scratch.

• The Value of Open Source Software by Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, Yanuo Zhou :: SSRN - “We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist.”

Wastebook

• In our little town, if you leave trash outside of the trash bin, you get fined. There’s a guy who comes every two or three weeks to figure out who put that trash out the: he rifled through boxes to find any that have addresses on them and takes picture of it. I presume these people get fines. That guy must have the worst job ever. No one likes what he does and thus they look at him in distain and even shame. He’s on law enforcement and would probably like to do something more impactful than trash patrol. The whole policy is absurd. Amsterdam doesn’t do this (we live in a small enclave village), and things are fine. Setting a policy that creates a job like this should tell policy makers that something is wrong with the policy.

• “Indefinite hyperbolic numerals.” Here.

• Improving productivity assumes one, often unstated first step: you want to get things done with less effort and cost, or just done at all. I argue that in most cases, people don’t want to get things done, or, often, they don’t want to get things done efficiently. One angle is to ask who benefits from the productivity. If it’s not the people doing the actual work (the workers), they won’t have much motivation and, likely, won’t care, and won’t want to do it. Would you put a lot of work into a project you got nothing (new) out of?

• “This is not the cliff hanger any of us need right now.”

Logoff

It’s Solo D&D update time! Last time, I told you that playing solo D&D with ChatGPT was going well. I’ve found the limits of my prompting abilities, though. And, probably, ChatGPT has hit a limit too. It’s just not very creative, and it can’t run mechanics very well. It’s great at co-creating and being a sort of sounding board. But it’s bad at action. And, action is at heart of Dungeons and Dragons: if there’s no action, you’re more just writing a book.

So, I’ve been doing a lot more solo D&D in my head, and not really using ChatGPT much at all. I went a few weeks not really getting much playtime out of the time I spent on it - I’d be reading published adventures, making maps, etc., but I never seemed to get around to actually playing.

Playing a module on your own that’s intended be played by a group is weird. There’s no surprise about anything so you have to be disciplined not to cheat. I mean, this is pretty easy if you remind yourself that the point of the game is to have fun, and challenge is fun. If you cheated at solitaire, what would be the point?

This weekend, I started playing through The Final Voyage of Draengr Thar, which turned out great! That guy makes good, little adventures. This one was pretty much all action focused - there’s some room for role-playing, but most of it is just movement, investigation, and, yes, combat in caves. I did this kind of thing early on in playing solo D&D, but I kind of lost track of it…or I feel into thinking up more story-based adventures.

My theory is that there’s a few reasons why the fun slowed down for me:

1. I’d create an environment where there was little conflict. Everything was fine in The Elderwood. If you want action, you want conflict. So, I made up some story that there was a multi-year battle between involving devils. Then, in the aftermath, everything was still messed up with all sorts of weird and dark parts of the land left. Thus, you can get more of the “murder hobo” or Hexcrawl style play where anything can happen, where random things fit in because there is no pre-defined structure and campaign, and where there’s more conflict, thus, action.

2. I don’t really like dungeon crawls, but those are easy to to pack in the action. So, if you throw those in there, you have more action. I’m pretty sure you can convert “dungeons” into cities and forests and stuff as well.

That’s all I’ve got so far!

I’ve tried using several of the solo adventure oracles and systems, but I just can’t seem to get into them. I think a lot of it has to do with #1 above: I want too much control over the environment and campaign, I just need to go with randomness. I do really like this GM Apprentice tool that rolls a lot of those systems into one.

…

I implore you to click on the video above because I live for the views, but if you (like me!) can’t stand video, here is the transcript:

Synergies is actually a very useful precise word in the business world but it gets overused and it's not well understood.

What it means is that if you combine two or more things together, you gain a capability that they didn't have on their own.

You often hear this in terms of M&A, where two companies are going to come together, and they get new products, access to market, new innovation, that combined with each other allows them to come up with a new product.

The downside of "activating synergies" is that the easiest, quickest way to activate synergies is to fire people who are duplicative in HR, finance, even in the product delivery groups, [and, well, any group, really] you can "activate the synergies" of getting rid of people and saving that money, which is not great for actual workers.

I would say that's more sad synergies [I really shit the bed there, I should have said "sadnergies"] than good synergies.

But it sure makes [the stock market] happy!

See the other entries from The Business Bullshit Dictionary, watch them all and share them with your co-workers!

My Content

• Don't be perfect, be resilient, or, how to walk on ice.

• Software Defined Talk #450: Workers of the world, don’t let HR hide in darkness - This week, we discuss the role of DevRel, Remote Work and Layoffs. Plus, Matt reveals his latest keyboard recommendation. // I’ve been neglecting to post links to our episodes for many weeks. If you’ve been missing them, don’t worry, we’ve still been doing them weekly: check out the episodes.

Relative to your interests

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 6.8% in 2024 - IT spend for software estimated to grow 12.7% y/y from $913m to $1.02bn in 2024. // That’s the highest growth rate in each category. // It’s good to be in software.

• Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples - Lots to read here if you’re into the whole developer productivity metrics thing.

• Red Hat Developer Hub: An Enterprise-Ready IDP - “this new Developer Hub is designed to tackle common DevOps challenges, including complexity, lack of standardization, and cognitive overload. It features a self-service portal, standardized software templates, and plug-in management, all underpinned by enterprise role-based access control (RBAC) and robust support systems.” // I love that the reporter picked up on RBAC as a major (differentiating) feature - or that Red Hat would list it. That’s like saying “yes, but this car has tires!”

• A quote from Bryan Cantrill - ’Tools are the things we build that we don’t ship—but that very much affect the artifact that we develop.’ // In favor of the DIY stack. // This line of thinking is commercial poison for most tech vendors/clouds. // But, the reaction to that poison might say more about errors in pricing more than “value.” // Also, we’re not all re-inventing enterprise hardware.

• CIO ‘change fatigue’ dampens enterprise IT spend - Enterprise people will talk about AI, but not spend money on it: ’Generative AI, however, won’t have a major impact on IT spending, Lovelock said. “2024 will be the year when organizations actually invest in planning for how to use GenAI,” said Lovelock. “IT spending will be driven by more traditional forces, such as profitability, labor, and dragged down by a continued wave of change.' On the other hand, consultant surveys paint a picture of much activity. And, elsewhere: ‘Lovelock said vendors were introducing AI to solve problems – such as reducing customer churn or getting better value for marketing – that companies had been trying to solve for 25 years. “Most of the use cases that we see coming forward are, in fact, something that has already been done. We’re just saying do it better, faster and cheaper.”’

• Voices in your head - I read this and I think: yes, and I have become exhausted hearing and running from voice to voice like a harried thought-waiter seeing what new orders and desires the voices have. Some are happy and delighted and leave good tips, others have sent their steak back for the third time, others would like to tell me about their grandchildren as I struggle to hold a tray of tacos and table 6 keeps eyeing me for the check. I used to be able to serve all the voices, but now it’s just a slog. Maybe this is part of what fuels the turn to cranky conservative as we get older: we just want a break. Mix that with fear of the young and new (driven by lack of understanding and fearing your support, money, and identity are being destroyed, or worse, laughed at and mocked), and you have a potent force to drag you to the dark side. Outside of that: good advice for figuring editing content.

• IBM Consulting orders a return to office - and means it - This always the story. The Federal Reserve of San Francisco says: “We conclude that the shift to remote work, on its own, is unlikely to be a major factor explaining differences across sectors in productivity performance. By extension, despite the important social and cultural effects of increased telework, the shift is unlikely to be a major factor explaining changes in aggregate productivity.” And yet, management insists that things are going poorly. In the middle part of my career that I’m in, I’ve worked with “executives” almost exclusively. Most are curious and pragmatic - they “make it happen” inside whatever constraints they have, using whatever tools work, old or new. But the inability of (some) higher level management to adapt in this remote work era is so weird. They’re capable and crafty, that’s how they got the reward of toiling in the glow of the executive suite, but they just can’t wrap their heads around a new way of working. And the whole thing gets even more painful to think about when surveys like this show that management also wants to keep working from home.

• Mourning Google - Here, I submit the late term success of Google: even those who loathe it can’t help but use many of the services from it because they like the services and they work. Search may be a gewgaw swamp of As Seen on TV quality shit…but people’s stated preference is using Google services every day.

• Your Child’s Favorite Teacher May Soon Be a Chatbot Yeah, the idea of having a student peer simulator is pretty good for kids who are - however you want to say it - resistant/incompatible with traditional pedantry methods.

Wastebook

• You know children are a lot like chocolate syrup. It’s great in almost any quantity on anything. But if you were to submerge yourself in it for too long, you’d suffocate to death.

• “specific resource allocation decisions.”

• “Which is basically, more often than not, my feeling on the entire generative AI movement now. None of it seems to be making anything better, just a different kind of annoying.” Here. // I would rejoin-quip: yes, and it’s making the pre-existing annoying things slightly better.

• “It’s mostly pass-the-sickbag stuff.” Here.

• “I’m gonna go and see Van Halen, and come back at 10. And we’ll have this conversation then.” Dear John Letters #52.

She actually asked to do this. They grow up so fast!

Logoff

Aside from the usual bucket of edits here and there, I’ve wrapped a video course I'm doing with O’Reilly. One of the editors there (“my editors”?) was really interested in my how to survive and thrive in a BigCo oeuvre, so they asked me to make a series out of them.

I thought this was, like, kind of ridiculous, but I’ve never turned down someone who gave me a specific content assignment. They came up with the suggested topics - which was what I was spacing out on - and we were off to the races. It’s eight 3 or 4 minute chunks (with an 8 or so minute one on presentations, predictably, since that’s like a huge part of my life). I could look at the timelines and schedules and shit for when it comes out, but, it’s like, sometime (I got some other work I need to get to - that landing page copy for an “invite only executive event” isn’t gonna write itself!)…and I’ll obviously annoy you with repeatedly linking to here it.

Anyhow, although this is an uncomfortable amount of polishing my own toot-horn, it came out really well. I don’t mind saying: I somehow managed impress even myself!

In the next few months (next month, maybe even?) you’ll be able to watch it in O’Reilly Safari. Chances are high your big company already pays for a seat for you!

This year we’ll see a lot app platform teams struggle to get developers to actually use and appreciate their platforms. I know this because this has happened to every platform team I’ve talked with over the 9 years when they’ve put Cloud Foundry in place, failed to appreciate the “Kubernetes is not for developers” paradox, and are now putting “platform engineering” platforms in place. The solution is marketing and developer advocacy, and good old fashioned trust building. These are things that IT is traditionally not good at: it’s never been their job. So, this year, it’s time to fix that!

My colleague Bryan Ross wrote up his real-world experience doing platform advocacy and marketing recently, and I got him to give me a quick overview in the video below:

If you’re in the platform, DevOps, even kubernetes rodeos, you’ll get a lot out of his article.

Wastebook

• Don’t worry about where the fence is, just swing.

• Daughter: “I can’t read that book yet because I’m still reading this book.” Me: “you know, you can read more than one book at once.” Daughter: “What?! No you can’t. WHO TOLD YOU THAT?!”

• “A real holiday. No weird stuff.” Hilda, s3e1. (Good luck with that!)

• If that’s what I need to do to get a seat at your table, then your table sucks.

• “I don’t know why people lose sight of the fact that having fun is one of the very best parts of being a human.” Here.

Relative to your interests

• Google lays off “hundreds” more as ad division switches to AI-powered sales - How Google is using AI to replace human’s role in sales: ‘Google has been packing Google Ads—its most important product—with tons of generative AI features lately. One is a natural-language chatbot that helps people navigate the large selection of ad products; another is a system that can just make ad assets like images and text on its own based on a budget and goals given by the ad purchaser. Google’s generative AI ad system is part of a product called “Performance Max” which works by autonomously remixing and tweaking your ads using the click-through rate as an instant feedback system. Google used to have humans do sales guidance for its products, create art assets, and decide on text and layouts, but now AI can do it a thousand times a second.’

• A Theory of Grift - “the heart of a grift is that you get something that, in a technical sense, is what you paid for, but that is also not worth what you paid for it.” Who gets grifted: “grifts tend to target the middle of whatever the relevant bell curve is. There are a lot more average people than non-average people, so the market is bigger. And their averageness makes it easier to reason about their motivations.” Meanwhile, some management consulting suggestions for the health and wellness grifters out there.

• HOWTO: Change your behavior - Advice in that tidy style the nerds love.

• How High-Performance IT Improves Business Through Technology - I never like the way I word the concept of “business/IT alignment” when it comes to software development, that is, using your software to run, innovate, and grow your business. It always sounds so marketing-y. Similarly the word “enterprise” is a term of art that is incredible precise and helpful in my field but it feels weird and slightly eye-roll-y. And, of course, “digital transformation.” Anyhow, some good wording in this piece.

Logoff

People make fun of LinkedIn and do a lot of performative throwing-up about it. Even I do that! But, over the years it’s been very valuable to me and helped me do my job. With the shit-showing of Twitter I don’t have much access to the 11,000 people I built up over there since 2006,1 but LinkedIn has been great for that for many years, especially now.

My only worry is that most of those people are co-workers, but I’m starting to notice many more people from other organizations. There’s nothing wrong with those co-workers and I like having them in the audience as well, but I also like to get to people outside of my immediate social spheres.

And, even if it does just remain co-workers, it’s alway good to be well known in your company. Better, I’ve heard over the years that the silly videos I do are useful for education and training and, of course, to give other people stuff to post themselves.

So, LinkedIn: it’s good stuff!

Upgrade That Spring!

If you do Spring stuff in a large enterprise, you should check this thing out.

Relative to your interests

• AI for Economists - Some prompt formations and stuff for the ChatGPT and friends.

• Signs that it’s time to leave a company - Attempts to get people back in the office are something to watch in 2024: “I do think there’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time.” Also: I like this kind of advice because it focuses (1) on analyzing and judging the “culture” of an organization by how it runs its business day to day, not just the vibes, (2) pointing out that high growth companies are (like celebrity diets) the weirdos, not the instructive norm that you can imitate 100%. I’m most interested in this transition from high growth to “just normal” - few people write about that in tech.

• The Cloudcast: 2024 Look Ahead - Surviving the Q1 Kickoff - There’s a lot of good advice in here for surviving and thriving in a big company. Find out how the money is made, seek to spend less/do more with the same budget, support that, keep doing what worked last year, don’t get involved in bold (and thus risky) new ideas. The point of a big company (1) is stability and cash flow growth (profit), (2) good compensation and a secure job for staff. The second gets lost on all the startup frenzy: customer one of a big company are the people working there.

• Applying the SPACE Framework - Developer productivity metrics through context.

• Citi retires 6% of its legacy applications – and 20,000 people - I’m pretty sure those 20,000 are across the whole company, not just the people whose software was modernized as the headline sort of implies. Also, check out the chart for IT things they did, indicative of what they’re proud of and what matters to enterprise buyers.

• Max Ernst. Volume III: La Cour du dragon (Volume III: The Court of the Dragon) from Une Semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux (A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements). 1933–34, published 1934 - Looks pretty cool.

• This workplace battle is over - Axios summarizes a recent work from home survey: ‘“Maintain hybrid work” was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey conducted in October and November. A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year. “Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a recent note. About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, per Goldman.’

• The trouble with DevRel - “When awareness and adoption are no longer issues, the role of DevRel needs to change. It becomes less about creating content than it does interacting with and growing the community, fostering goodwill, nurturing customers, and providing feedback. Sadly, this is hard to justify when budgets get reduced and headcount is flat. DevRel then becomes an easy target for elimination.”

• ING says supermarket revenue will drop sharply due to ban on tobacco sales - On July 1st, you can’t sell cigarettes, etc. in Netherlands grocery stores. So, ING predicts prices for everything else will go up to make up for lost revenue: “When excluding tobacco sales, the sales in supermarkets are on the rise, according to ING. The prices on the shelves appear to be headed for another one percent increase, after a sharp rise in prices during previous years.” It seems like something is wrong with capitalism if that happens.

Wastebook

• “it’s unhelpful to say ‘let me know if I can do anything to help,’ because when you are going through a stressful life change, the last thing you need is for someone to demand that you make another decision.” Here.

• “Instagramming videos of the donkey he lets roam around his kitchen. It seems like a good life.” Here.

• I’m trying to use Google Docs as my note taking tool for work. It’s hard to get over the feeling that I’m using Word to take notes when I should be all tech-hipster and use markdown files instead. Also, if it’s an official corporate tool, you comply with all the corporate data security governance, you can share with employees, and (depending on what the admins have done?), you can use the Google AI stuff (well, I haven’t actually tested this, work has it turned off).

• “Efficiency 2: Cost Savings Boogaloo.” Here.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

cfgmgmtcamp, Feburary 5th to 7th, “We Fear Change” talk; DevOpsDays LA, March 15th, “We Fear Change” talk; Platform Engineering Day at KubeCon EU, tentative, March 19th. I’ve got a couple of CFPs out there: Devoxx UK and DevOpsDays London.

Logoff

I’ve been a lot more focused on making videos for YouTube since COVID, like many people. I’m tired of all those thumbnails of people looking shocked or upset. I make a lot of them too! They certainly don’t help me reach a lot of views. How about I stop making them?

Not much today, just cleaning up the queue.

Wastebook

• “Look, it’s a Cybertruck!” - yelled out by a Bay Area co-worker I was talking with on the phone as they drove into work.

• “In one way this is ‘just’ the evolution of the comment section.” Here.

• If you’re saying something you believe to be true, you don’t need to tell people you “honestly think it’s true” or that you “actually think” it’s the case. That’s just, like, assumed when you’re talking. When you say those things, true or not, you’re running the risks of (1) pointing out that when you don’t use those phrases in other statements, you’re not being honest, and, (2) point out that your claims are unbelievable and likely risky-to-bonkers.

• “There are no large language models in vacuum cleaners.” Ben Thompson on CES 2024.

• “She’s like you, but lacks a sense of humor.” Ahsoka, s1e7

Relative to your interests

• How to become a platform engineer - Also a good list of the Google Cloud products you’d use to do “platform engineering.”

• What I Learned Selling a Used Pencil on TikTok Shop - “Within two minutes, I had hundreds of viewers. I asked them how they ended up there but nobody answered. I put on a face filter. I played carnival music. I showed them my dog. One informed me that the same pencil was much cheaper at the Dollar Tree. Another asked me if I had diabetes and then promptly left — much to think about.”

• Gartner Says 50% of Critical Enterprise Applications Will Reside Outside of Centralized Public Cloud Locations Through 2027 - “’Through 2027, 50% of critical enterprise applications will reside outside of centralized public cloud locations… 'Enterprises are beginning to seek placement for workloads that have not migrated to the public cloud,” said Dennis Smith, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. ‘This represents approximately 70% of all workloads.’” I think that means they’re estimating that 30% of enterprise workloads (apps) are in public cloud.

• Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group - “When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee.” If you’ve ever been asked to create something for free, or had a big organizations cheap out on you, that is so wickedly funny! My newer theory on this is that organization would actually be fine paying you, it’s that the individual asking for the work doesn’t want to go through the dumb-pain of working with procurement to get the money. Their toil avoidance is understandable.

Out and about

Conferences, talks, events, etc. that I’ll be at.

I’m speaking at cfgmgmtcamp on February 5th, and then DevOpsDays LA on March 15th. I’m hoping my talk get accepted for the platform engineering day at KubeCon EU, but we’ll see if I manage to escape the “wait list.” If not, does that mean I can speak at Cloud Native Rejekts? I’ve got CPFs out to Devoxx UK and DevOpsDays London - we’ll see what happens. So far, no webinars or online conferences planned.

Do you have any conference recommendations?

Logoff

Another week in the bag! Sadly, it won’t be possible to go get 85¢ tacos tomorrow morning.

Here are the other three things I’m going to watch in 2024. By “watch,” I suppose I mean “I really hope something interesting and definitive happens here instead of just a continuation of what was going on in 2023.” I put the first one (our old k-friend) in yesterday’s episode.

1. Backstage - in 2022 and 2023 Backstage became super popular, at least in interest. I don’t know how widely it’s used now. It solves a legitimate problem (a framework and community for building a DevOps-oriented intranet for app developers - an internal developer portal to use the clunky word for the category of tools). How widely will get used? Is it easy to use and does it deliver the benefits, or just result in the same old thing? “Platform engineering” and Backstage have a symbiotic relationship now - though, ironically the progenitor of platforms engineering a concept/category isn’t exactly a Backstage company, I think.

2. Java migrations and changes - Oracle has changed licensing terms for their Java VM, there are older versions of the Spring Framework rolling  out of community support, and large enterprises are forever in the process of migrating and modernizing their apps. There’s a lot of motivation to change around your Java stack, and when it comes to price, things actually happen a lot more than when the motivation is more abstract ideas like “digital transformation.”

3. Remote Work - tech people are in limited supply for the demand from every organization to use software as its primary way of running the business. This is always a problem. Over COVID and the last few years, many of these workers have come to cherish working from home - and if the share prices of companies is any indication, working remotely, well, works. However, many executives seem allergic to the concept. I think you can make cases for both positions: it just depends on how you engineer the company to run. As long time pro remote work executives like Matt Mullenweg (of Autommatic/WordPress) have said, you can build a system of work where remote work is great. And many of us saw this happen during COVID. As executives try to bring people back to the office, workers have a bunch of bluster that they’ll rebel and quit - and some other companies may be happy to hire them and have them work remotely. But will people go back to the office? Will executives relent? It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I wrote a little bit more about this in yesterday’s links.

Relative to your interests

• Dutch online grocer Picnic raises $388 mln from investors, Gates Foundation - Back at cfgmgmtcamp 2023 in line waiting for some Belgian cafeteria food, I talked with some Dutch people, and we were working up an analogy to these little trucks to DIY infrastructure stacks. I didn’t verify this, but they said these little trucks are custom made (at the very least, highly customized). This made sense for Picnic’s business model: they’re all about innovating how food is delivered and the grocery delivery business. These cars can fit down narrow Europe alleys, are meant for close city delivery, etc. In contrast, already established, brick-and-mortar grocery stories like Albert Heijn and Jumbo just use stock delivery trucks. I think UPS customized trucks at some point too. I’m guessing airlines don’t get custom planes built, but might have some slight variation on the interior (the “front end”).

• CIO interview - author of The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing - It’s been a long time since I read this book, but it’s good. It’s one of the few management books that focuses on the pragmatic, normal state of things instead of importing you to switch to a utopia culture…that is often unattainable and a distraction from just figuring out how to deal with unrealistic, cruel, and often uninformed requests from The Business. “[The work is made up of] responses to the toxic cultures that exist in many firms. CIOs are often asked to cope with budget cuts yet deliver more, and the organization will not tolerate failures. She says: ’It is a manipulative technique, but if they defend themselves, they are accused of being aggressive. I genuinely believe that we have to be able to defend ourselves. ’”

• Marines using cheap commercial tech to hide command posts in plain sight - Nextgov/FCW - Some reverse-flow variation of “the street finds its own uses.” The other implication is that the security of consumer grade networking and IT is probably good enough, at least balancing the trade offs and benefits of secrecy and blending in.

• Book Recommendations from the AWS Enterprise Strategy Team - Some books for IT/business stuff (you know, “digital transformation”).

• The New News Business - “everything that happens in a marketplace falls into just three categories: transaction, conversation, and relationship. In our First World business culture, transaction matters most, conversation less, and relationship least.”

• Developer Productivity in 2024: New Metrics, More GenAI - A round-up of all the developer productivity stuff from last year. It makes me think: what if developers are actually as productive as they can be? Put another way: how productive should developers be? Does anyone even know?

• How to Choose Developer Events - Good advice.

Wastebook

• “spatial computing apps.” Here.

• “Letterman is hurting inside and the way he is dealing with it is putting on a Velcro suit and throwing himself off a three-story building.” RoTL, _Jan, 2024

• Oftentimes in the corporate world, success is rated by “sure, we didn’t win, but imagine how bad it’d be if we hadn’t even tried” rather than rated by “did we win?” Related: the best way to make money is to avoid losing it.

• “We’re gonna have to pull this from the Dorito budget.”

• Last night I dreamt that the Netherlands consulting firm ITQ invited me to their conference as an an analyst without knowing I wasn’t one. When one of them remembered that I worked at a vendor, they told me about a support ticket they had open with AppDynamics. They were cheery as always.

Logoff

We’re recording Software Defined Talk today/tonight (Jan 10th, 2024). Check out our YouTube channel to see the unedited recording, always with a few streamer-only treats.