Category: Notebook
Highlights, marginalia, and asides.
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Macro-economic headwinds vs “The Terrace-in-April”
I feel like there’s an unspoken set of assumptions and a slightly hidden “operating system” for how societies run. This comes out a lot when I read dense macro-economic analysis like this one. Let’s see what Opus 4.7’s angle is on my question: If I look at this piece, it seems to be saying Europe…
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Claude Code for things that are not code – Claude Not Code
There’s a creeping notion that Claude Code (and OpenAI Codex, I guess) are very useful for things that are not code. In the Obsidian community, where you keep your decades of notes as plain text, markdown files, some people are using Claude Code to do analysis, reformatting, etc. of their notes. I can see that…
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What are people asking for when they want to see your tech’s ROI? I don’t think they’re asking for ROI at all.
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…
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Things I Like
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…
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How to find an are.na RSS feed
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…
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Everything is big in America & the men don’t wear designer purses
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…
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Urgency
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…
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Open Source usage survey
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…
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Platform Engineering Probably Doesn’t Mess with CaaS and IaaS
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…
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Getting more eyeballs for your boring enterprise tech videos – analysis and LIFE HACKS from four months of long and tiny b2b videos by channel and numbers
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,…
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Two Types of Digital Transformation
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…
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Banks are handling disruption well – Highlights
Thus far, it seems like the large banks are fending off digital disruption, perhaps embracing some of it on their own. The Economist takes a look: “Peer-to-peer lending, for instance, has grown rapidly, but still amounted to just $19bn on America’s biggest platforms and £3.8bn in Britain last year” “last year JPMorgan Chase spent over…
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The great OpenStack conundrum: with 15,000 members, why is adoption lagging?
This is the common OpenStack meme for coverage. Each Summit there’s more and more users – “customers” – but it will take a while before OpenStack is suddenly us an “overnight success.” Looking at it from a different perspective, OpenStack is one of the biggest, new model for open source development: they’re iterating on the…
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Press Release Quotes
As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a…
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