Claude Code is being utilized beyond coding, particularly for analyzing and reformatting plain text notes, suggesting that AI may emerge as standalone applications rather than being integrated into existing software.

I’m thinking through the topic of ROI for infrastructure software again (obviously for our PaaS stuff). I get asked about this every year or two. Each time I look at it, I get more confused. This ask always come from sales, presumably because the buyers are asking it. But, I don’t think the ask is about the basic ROI calculations: the amount we paid for this tech is less than the amount of money we make using it.

There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1: Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long it takes to get the good stuff/the point. I know the context, I want the fix.

I like are.na - it’s fun, and not icky. Having to pay a little bit to post more than 200 items has a great filtering effect on the content. Anyhow, I wanted to include the things I put in are.na here, on micro.blog, but finding their RSS feed is elusive. Thanks to Fridaycat, I found how. If you look in their source code, you can see that all you have to do is append /feed/rss to the end of an are.

I’m a Texan living in Amsterdam, so when I come back to the States (Dallas and Austin this time), I noticed things about American that I never did: People are eager to be helpful, especially when you have a bunch of kids. Everyone offers to help with luggage. A cashier will race back to the shelves to find a replacement for a broken item, or verify the sales price.

I’ve started writing this bit two times (see the community one and the one on ICs vs. managers for what happened instead). If Twitter fails - or I stop using it - I’m looking forward to recalibrating my sense of urgency. One thought going around is that no one would want to rebuild Twitter (I hear it most in the Ben Thompson Podcast Universe). I haven’t verified the business-side, but that seems true from the business angle: Twitter isn’t, like, that great of a business and has failed to figure it out like the Facebook Conglomerate.

Some commentary on a recent survey commissioned from my work, VMware. Unsurprisingly, open source is used by almost everyone. When it comes to what I care about software development, open source is indispensable. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a developer who only uses closed source software, if not whole systems like kubernetes or Cloud Foundry for running their applications. It’d almost be impossible. And, indeed, in our State of the Software Supply Chain survey this year, 2022, 90% of respondents said they were using open source in production.

From the report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Platform Engineering,” Paul Delory and Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Gartner, Oct 2022. The authors don’t take a strong position here (?), but I think their vision of platform engineering sits above the infrastructure layer. See the diagram above, for example. The platform engineering group doesn’t mess with that stuff. This seems right to me. Everyone loves a Gartner prediction: “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

Looking at four months of numbers, here’s my theories of how to get more attention for my enterprise tech videos: Make short ones, each with one point - 1 minute to 10 minutes. Post the videos natively to Twitter, YouTube, or whatever channel - don’t rely on people clicking on YouTube. YouTube is, in general, the worst performer for eyeballs. LinkedIn is the best all around performer (but, I haven’t found detailed analytics, like seconds watched versus just auto-play).

There are two types of digital transformation. First, literally. You had an analog process (booking appointments at the barber shop with phone and paper, planning tanker refueling schedules with a white board), and now they’re replaced by pure software. These transformations are often about optimizing an existing business process, gaining huge cost and time efficiencies (bottom line revenue, profit) and resulting in higher customer productivity and satisfaction (top line revenue, “growth”).