DevDaysDays Chicago

I’ll be at DevOpsDays Chicago in a few weeks, August 26th to 27th. If you want to go and haven’t registered yet, you can use the code PIVOTAL10 to get 10% off, which gets it down to like $170 or something. It’s excellent value for a tech conference, plus you can see me speak and staff a booth! While I’m up there, on Aug 26th, I’ll be speaking at the local Cloud Foundry Meetup.

Tech & Work World

Stacking the Deck

I’m working on the second part in my “cloud native journey series” (part one was an overview and brief summary). Here’s an excerpt from my draft on greenfield journeys, on selecting the right initial projects:

Selecting your first projects

If you’re a small team, or a small company, selecting the project to work on is likely easy: you probably just have one application, so select that! In larger companies, there are often 100’s, of not 1,000’s of application and projects you could pick from. You want to pick one that will have customer value (that is, be customer facing) and will give you feedback once you deploy it (people will use it a lot, it won’t just be shelf-ware). You also want to pick a small enough project that getting it into production is possible in a short amount of time, let’s say 3 months at the maximum. Finally, if things go poorly, you want it to be a somewhat low profile project so you can sweep it under the rug if things really go poorly so you can live to greenfield another day.

This last point is no doubt contentious to the purer minded of y’all out there, and I can sympathize. We should strive for truth and transparency! I’m sure you’re lucky enough to be in a corporate structure that rewards the value of failing (learning), but think about your peers who are not so lucky and work in caustic corporate culture that punishes any type of failure by “promoting” the former “VP of Having a P&L” to “VP of Special Projects.” In such cases, you’re given the chance to advance to the next place on the board by success, so you’ll want to pick a project accordingly. Of course, the point is that as you build up the success record of failing fast, as it were, you’ll be able to change said caustic corporate culture around…hopefully. While a bit dated, the 2010 booklet, The Concise Executive Guide to Agile has a detailed discussion and methodology that’s helpful for picking your initial projects.

There’s a different type of project you can choose as well, what I like to think of as a “moribund” project. It fits all the criteria above, but already exists and just needs to be shown some love. One of our customers, Humana, profiled this strategy. Their Vitality project wasn’t getting the engagement levels they wanted: just 3% of potential users. They wanted to triple engagement, getting it to 10%. As they detailed in their keynote at this year’s CF Summit, after reving that project with a more agile and cloud native approach, they were astonished by the increase in engagement to over 30% of potential users. They then parlayed this success into two other, small but important projects and are not on the path to transform how applications are done company wide, beyond the greenfield.

At ~3,500 words, I need to cut down the full piece a bit. We’ll see what comes out the other end of the chute!

Shameless Self-promotion

Some recent items from me/us:

• Software is awesome, Software Defined Talk #40 – When you can pay the sprinkler repair guy by using your finger to sign an iPad, things are looking up. Maybe it means we’ll have lots of microservices wrapped around government services, who knows. Also, we cover the strategy of choosing boring technologies, MongoDB, and The EMC Federation.
• Part two of my talk with Josh Long about the Spring Framework in cloud is up: we discuss Spring Cloud and how it works with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. There’s a full transcript up too if you don’t like podcasts. (And, see part one which was all about Spring Boot, and China.)

More from “cloud native” land

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the infrastructure niche of the tech world has gone crazy for “cloud native.” Consequently, I follow it a lot and type that phrase a lot. Here’s some recent items I’ve found:

• Cloud Native Application Platforms – Structured and Unstructured | Wikibon.com – this is, perhaps, one of the more perfectly aligned to Pivotal views of what all the container, cloud native, DevOps hoopla is all about.
• A Value Framework that Works for Transforming Your Application Portfolio – we’ve got a whole passel of people in The Federation who’ll help you get from legacy to cloud native.
• Modernizing Business-critical Apps for the Cloud – “Finally, CIOs need to understand if the juice worth the squeeze.”
• What’s Your Application Transformation Strategy?
• Five Things You Need To Know About Microservices – “For those not familiar with the concept, microservices is essentially a software architectural design pattern. The fundamental premise of microservices is that value can be unlocked through decomposing large, monolithic legacy applications into a set of small independent, composable services that each can be accessed via RESTful APIs.”

Quick Hits

• Healthcare survey in cloud use– When To Use Containers Or Virtual Machines, And Why
• The Lean Machine: Bringing Agile Thinking to the Database –
• Getting Mad at Work Can Cost Women $15,000 in Annual Pay – “If a woman comes across as angry or critical, she is rated as 35% less competent and worthy of $15,088 less in pay than a woman who doesn’t rock the boat.”
• An introduction to Wardley (Value Chain) Mapping – a nice way to figure out what you should focus on doing.
• VCE Study Makes Case for Converged IT – in case you’re interested in input on converged being a good idea or not.
• “Show Me The Money!” – Delivering DevOps Value
• The end of corporate computing (10th anniversary edition) – “I got plenty of things wrong in the article, but I think the ensuing ten years have shown that the piece was fundamentally on target in predicting the rise of what we now call the cloud.”
• The digital transformation illusion – Don’t just put old wine in new bottles, figure out if there’s something better than wine too: “How much of the current excitement – and achievement – of digital government is about making the old product better? And what might the new product be which will change the idea of government altogether?”
• RSA chief uncans insurance giant’s mega IT infrastructure review – a write-up of one company moving the boulder up the hill.
• EMC Documentum Goes Cloud Native With Pivotal Cloud Foundry – “deployment timeframes have been reduced by 75 percent.”
• The Case for Cloud Foundry | @CloudExpo
• Global SMB IT spend heading towards $600 billion – “It predicts that global SMB IT spend – defined as firms with between one and 999 employees – could reach $597 billion this year, equating to an average of $700 per full-time employees and just over $8,000 per SMB business.”
• Activist Investors – tips for what buyers should do when their vendors go private and otherwise get involved with activists.
• The 7 “Deadly” Wastes That Could Cost Your Company – a nice summary of wasteful process, referenced in Damon Edward’s DevOpsDays Austin 2015 talk, along with his addition “hero culture.”
• IT: Think Digital, Think Business, Think Big – n=250 survey that shows people want more from IT, but they feel IT is not up to the task: “A mere 43 percent agreed their IT department were successfully becoming more strategic, responsive, and valued as a partner; 58 percent rated IT as poor or making only moderate steps, the report said.”
• PaaS or Play? Cloud’s Next Move – MeriTalk – “respondents from a recent government study who have already used PaaS say they save 47% of their time, or 1 year and 8 months off a 3.5 year development cycle. For those who have not deployed PaaS, respondents believe it can shave 31% off development time frames and save 25% of their annual IT budget, a federal savings of $20.5 billion. As well, 90% believe PaaS is critical to data center consolidation goals. The report goes on to share how 52% see reduced costs, 37% believe they will achieve more automated IT maintenance, and 20% believe they will see greater shared costs.” Commissioned by RedHat: “online survey of 153 [US] Federal IT professionals in August 2013.”
• Google Losing $8B to $9B on Side Projects, Estimates Morgan Stanley – Trying to figure out the various lines of business in Google. I’m awaiting some details on their reporting structure. I don’t really see what the big deal is: it’s all still the same company, same stock, same people. We’ll see what happens.

Fun & IRL

7 Minute Workout

I’ve been trying to the old 7 minute workout via an app (there’s a NYTimes one up too). Not having exercised for, let’s see…none of my life, it sure is hard and just the right amount of time and pain that I keep doing it.

We’ll see what happens.

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

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Follow-up

• The piece on “cloud journeys” I excerpted from last time is now posted.

Tech & Work World

Cloud Native

I’ve been writing some pieces on “cloud native” of late. It’s a term we’ve been using at work to describe what we’re all about. Here’s an excerpt from an internal newsletter piece I drafted today:

You’ve probably coming across the term “cloud native” frequently. James Watters has an excellent post on the topic, but I wanted add some background for y’all here. We’ve made “cloud native” an umbrella term to describe what Pivotal Cloud Foundry does for our customers. It’s shorthand for how we make our customers awesome: our platform gives them the tools and processes needed to start deploying their custom-written software weekly, if not daily, along with the tools needed to keep that software running happily in
production.

With this platform and knowing how to use these cloud superpowers, our customers become truly agile: frequently changing both their businesses and IT processes to keep competitive, e.g., they can think of a new business idea on Monday and have it up and running by Friday.

Speaking of this, if you’re interested in migrating to cloud-land, check out an excerpt from Josh Long’s upcoming book, Cloud Native Java. on the topic. Also, of course, you can get the developer experience for free for two months.

Upcoming Conferences

• I’ll be at DevOpsDays Chicago, August 25th and 26th, speaking on the second day.
• While I’m up there, on Aug 26th, I’ll be speaking at the local Cloud Foundry Meetup.

Shameless Self Promotion

• Last week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: “Once we settle the important topic of lawn management in Texas, we discuss the circus around HP dress codes (and the actual lack of them), HP/Stackato, GitHub and the ALM market, and the odd fate of the GPL in commercial software land.”
• Torture your friends with three ways of modeling the ROI for DevOps.

Quick Hits

• Fulfilling the promise of enterprise asset management – a PDF. Just in case you need a quick read on EAM.
• The Life Cycle of Programming Languages – looking at the social side of chasing shiny objects.
• New Influence Quadrant shows ‘powerhouse’ firms in trouble –
• Digital tech, not digital ads, is the way ahead says Starbucks CEO
• Why Consumer Startups Dominate the Megaround Market – “In software, companies selling to IT have raised the most capital, then marketing, then HR, which is close consistent with software outcomes.” Hey, that first part is us!
• TheLegacy ERP Conversion Under Way At Dietz & Watson – Nice little case study as reportage: a regional deli supply company upgrades its legacy ERP system, which includes much custom coding from RPG to PHP. “The core ERP system includes product processing, sales analysis, and financials. Much of it was developed in-house, with the financials a customized version of packaged software from a vendor no longer in business. The system is very stable, according to Wolinsky.”
• Rackspace CSO: Work Together To Overcome Cloud Security Uncertainty – it’s always good to see new ways of talking about cloud and security.
• Go ahead, be sarcastic | Harvard Gazette.
• Maciej Ceglowski – Barely succeed! It’s easier! – a good presentation on calming the fuck down.
• Zorawar Biri Singh lands Cisco CTO post as firm shuffles its top brass – former head of HP Cloud when I was at Dell. He DJ’ed his own OpenStack Summit parties, so I’ll be looking forward to more of that!
• Building Microservices with Spring Cloud and Docker –
• Randy Shoup on Microservices, the Reality of Conway’s Law, and Evolutionary Architecture – this was a nice overview of how to think about when to do microservices.
• The Implications of Cloud Native – the term is everywhere, mang.
• Analyst Watch: Macro confusion about microservices – Al Hilwa at IDC jumps in.
• Why CNCF? Why now? – It will take some time to realize the full vision.
• HP acquires ActiveState’s Stackato PaaS business – VentureBeat – we discussed this in this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast as well.
• HP buys platform partner Stackato to beef up cloud development stance
• Next step in HP’s Helion transformation: Buy Stackato – “With this agreement, ActiveState loses the product it’s best known for. Copeland wrote that ActiveState will continue as a company, focusing on other products including ActivePerl, ActivePython, AvtiveTcl and Komodo IDE. He will stay with ActiveState rather than join HP.”
• Reflecting on the OpenStack Kilo Summit and Looking Forward to Liberty – “Puppet alone provides the basis for the majority of OpenStack deployments, at 56 percent. Puppet plus deployment tools that utilize Puppet (e.g., Mirantis Fuel, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, PackStack) provide the basis for 72 percent of all production deployments.”
• Open Source Usage in Large Enterprises – Across “100 C-Level execs” usage at their company: “When it comes to the actual usage of open source software (OSS) in large enterprises, only 21% of them use it across the enterprise and 25% have deployed it in a business unit. The other 54% are either at the planning phase (21%), or use it for Internet-related programs (13%) or are running a pilot program to evaluate it (20%)”
• Git a load of this: GitHub now valued at $2 billion – “The site reports it hosts 25 million source code repositories, and has 10 million registered users and 33 million unique monthly visits.” No word in the article in revenue or enterprise sales. We discussed this in this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast as well.
• Global Digital Infrastructure Alliance > Reports > Cloud Platform Choice: A Crucial Strategic Decision – Some charts on cloud platform and cloud project spend.
• 2nd Watch Survey: Big Data, IoT and Cloud are Driving Digital Marketing
• The Need for U.S. Digital Engagement – “Twenty years ago, 61 percent of the Internet’s 35 million users were based in the U.S. Today, the U.S. accounts for less than 10 percent of the 3 billion connected people worldwide. There are now 650 million Internet users in China (compared with 280 million in the U.S.) There will be as many as 550 million connected consumers in India by 2018 (more than double the current number).”
• Why EMC May Soon Buy Out – Not Spin Out – one new theory on what EMC will do with VMware.

Fun & IRL

No fun this issue, just work.

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

Meta-data

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It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below:

Get your lurn on

https://player.vimeo.com/video/121473651?color=01786e&byline=0&portrait=0

Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off!

Tech & Work World

Quick Hits

• Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 9.5 Percent in Second Quarter of 2015 – They say it’s an anomaly, high dollar and all that. Here’s the EMEA drill down: “Some 18.6 million desktops, notebooks and premium ultra mobiles found their way into outlets in the three months, that is down 15.7 per cent, or 3.47 million fewer units, year on year.”
• TechReckoning Dispatch, Vol. 2, No. 9. July 8, 2015 – “Holy platform power, Batman, we just invented PaaS!” See Troyer outline the walk to all these cloud platforms building “the PaaS that we don’t call PaaS.” Also, his newsletter is delightful.
• Here’s why you should expect airline disruptions to get worse – It’s nice how they turn it around at the end.
• Amazon moves nearer Platform as a Service concept with new developer tools – More for the “Amazon competes with everyone” file.
• In its Transition to a Service Company, Rackspace Embraces Azure – Rackspace to sell support for Azure, meaning they’re not just about OpenStack. Cats and dogs living together!
• Social media and closing sales quota – n=511, of mostly B2B sellers split between enterprise and SMB. From 2012, and a marketing piece, obviously. It says: use social media.
• How Docker has made life awesome for SOASTA DevOps – speeding up the creation of the work-station with promises of deploying your laptop into production, so to speak.
• Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps – Part 1, 2, and 3 – John Willis has a nice series up related the use of containers to DevOps, which I finally got around to reading.

Fun & IRL

Things are working out

It’s our 10th wedding anniversary (yay us!) so we’re treating ourselves to a little downtown Austin fun. We’ll be checking out the newish W down there. I’ll report back if it’s zaney. They got vinyl in the bar, man.

Leave your shoes at the door

This is my new favorite song. I listen the rest of ’em on repeat all the time now-a-days.

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

Meta-data

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• Subscribe: https://cote.io/memo/

I’m in transit between Minneapolis and San Francisco right now. The MSP airport is delightful, with a long mall at the base and concourses reaching out, it seems civilized.

Follow-up

• I had lunch with one of you today who said, “looks like you started up the newsletter,” to which I replied, “well, if I can send one more out and then not do it the third time, then yes.” So, here’s number two. Almost to fail-o-victory!

Tech & Work World

Coté Content

• The converging Red Hat stack, Go, and those damn analysts – Software Defined Talk #37 (cote.io) – I think this episode is a good mix of our approach: some industry analyst like chatter about Red Hat along with delightful patter about nothing in particular.
• Donkeys at DevOpsDays Amsterdam (cote.io) – recording of my talk from DevOpsDays Amsterdam.
• When the process is as important as the product – the recent Pivotal Conversations I did with Casey West is a good one: we talk about his previous company switching over to DevOps and continuous delivery think and how he helped lead that change. As always, there’s a full transcript if you don’t like podcasts. Casey is the newest member on my team, and I can see that we’ll be recording a lot more episodes.

Quick Hits

• Micro Services: Java, the Unix Way, 2013 – Nice talk from James Lewis on doing a microservices approach to solving a banking system problem.
• As Docker rises above (and disrupts) clouds, I’m thinking about their community landscape – “There remains a confusion between Docker the company and Docker the technology. I like how the chart (right) maps out potential areas in the Docker ecosystem. There’s clearly a lot of places for companies to monetize the technology; however, it’s not as clear if the company will be able to secede lucrative regions, like orchestration, to become a competitive landscape.”
• Just out: [Mobile] Developer Megatrends H1 2015 – “Only 20% of mobile developers target enterprises, but 46% of them makes over $10K per month, versus 19% for consumer-oriented developers.” The other thing to note is how close we are to having “mobile developers” just upgraded to simply “developers.”
• EMC IT Case Study, using Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• Aggregation is the New Virtualization: How Microservices Are Taming Distributed Computing – not perfect for the nerds, but good reading if you work in the marketing world like me.
• The Case for Startups to Make Radical Transparency the Top Priority – I’m suspicious of this kind of thing, but the direction is good.
• Who is the Go Developer?
• Microservice Trade-Offs – new piece from Fowler adding to the cannon.
• HP leads booming $6.3bn cloud infrastructure market – track public and private cloud momentum through hardware spend. I haven’t been able to find the break-out between public and private. I also like how they say that because spend on both is rising, it shows that people want “hybrid cloud.” It still begs the question: what are all those private clouds running?
• Spring Boot and Dropwizard in microservices development – long comparison of the two. Additionally, notice the requirements that are put together. If you wanted to all ironic: to make a microservice, you have to build a little monolith.
• Digital Ocean CEO don’t like OpenStack – You have to read it a few times, but I think dude just pooped on OpenStack: “At some point in the future, it would be good to see other open-source frameworks take a run at OpenStack, since today I feel like they [OpenStack] are the only game in town,” Uretsky said. “We come from the open-source world and would like to be able to contribute a project that actually delivers real value.”
• Microsoft Targets Hardware Business With 7,800 Job Cuts – Seems like the Nokia acquisition was a bad idea? “As a result of the cuts, Microsoft said it will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.”
• Mirantis climbs aboard converged infrastructure bandwagon – ‘Unlocked Appliances come start at six compute nodes and 12 TBs of usable storage and go all the way to 24 compute nodes and 24 TBs of usable storage. Put two together and Mirantis says you’ll be able to run “over 1500 virtual machines and 48 TBs of usable storage.”’
• Rebooting Gigaom Research – GigaOm Research to relaunch, using the same federation model and such.

Fun & IRL

“Nothing in particular”++

Suggested sound-track for reading this chart.

(Via @bruces)

That looks like relaxing chaos

I like the Power Ranger show too much. I don’t like the content too much, but the relaxation of what it looks like to be the show runner. The show has a predictability and stability to it, and an audience of adoring kids. And it looks like, if you get the whole Power Rangers idea and mythos, it’s hard to screw-up.

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

Meta-data

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It’s been forever since a memo! Here’s this week’s. I’ve tried to craft a work-flow that will allow me to collect links I want to share, in addition to shameless self-promotion and the occasional commentary in here…and actually send these out weekly. We’ll see what happens.

Travel

I’ve been traveling a lot recently and have more coming up. The main thing is going to lots of DevOpsDays. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to speak at them, but the main part I like is talking with old friends and meeting people who are trying to sort out what exactly DevOps is and if/how it applies to them.

I’ll be at DevOpsDays in Minneapolis next week, and I may be at the Pittsburg and Chicago one.

If you’ve missed them, you can see recordings of my talks from Austin and Amsterdam (you have to go 40:30 in to find mine).

Tech & Work World

All about me…

• I’m starting to upload the recorded rehearsals of talks I give, to accompany the slides. Check out this one on “going cloud for enterprise architect types.”.
• Since last time, there have been many podcasts, all in the usual topics of infrastructure software and development. Check out the most recent Software Defined Talk, Lords of Computing, and Pivotal ones.
• Enterprise DevOps interview with iThome Weekly (cote.io) – an interview I did on DevOps going mainstream.
• Also, if you haven’t been following along on the blog during this dry-spell of newsletteration, since last time I had some content on the problems with sizing the PaaS market, tips on briefing industry analysts for larger vendors, and a look at the DevOps and cloud market for corporate development/M&A minded people.

Quick Hits

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry analyst overview, Jay Lyman at 451 – normally, this would be behind the 451 paywall, but we licensed it just for you: go check it out for free.
• New global IT spend forecast from Gartner – $3.5t in global IT spend for 2015 predicted. 2.5% growth in adjusted dollars.
• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2015 – with special attention to the ascension of Go and Swift.
• The hidden value of automation – a case of continuos delivery improving things: “They started with 95 percent resource utilization in maintaining legacy processes, and a mere five percent of resources free to invest in new innovation. By the end of their transformation, just three years later, the percentage of resources available for new innovation was up eight times to 40 percent. In addition, with the introduction of automation, low-value and frustrating efforts such as manual testing, porting code, etc. were reduced to a bare minimum.”
• Docker death blow to PaaS? The fat lady isn’t singing just yet folks • The Register Forums – this article and, more importantly, the comments for it are a good snapshot of the “Docker vs. PaaS” conversation. It’s admittedly a small one, but I think it’ll become more frequent this year.

Sponsors

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

Meta-data

• Elsewhere: @cote, cote.io, memo@cote.io
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• Subscribe: https://cote.io/memo/

There’s few links today, just some pointers to now published material that I’ve alluded to recently, and some moaning on needing to be a better team-player.

Follow-up

• We got up to 100 subscribers, so good job there, y’all ;)

• As several people wrote, the word I was looking for in that discussion of lower case letters is “semiotics”, the study of symbols.

• The podcast I excerpted from on the operational needs of cloud platforms (and people who don’t capitalize words) is now up. There’s audio, of course, and a full transcript.

Tech & Work World

I am not scalable

I’ve been struggling with extending my reach of effectiveness at work. That is, working well with others. When it comes to “getting things done,” I’m very good at it if I do all of it on my own, and every knob and wing-ding from concept to delivery is under my control. Once someone else gets involved in more than a faceless way, things slow down. I almost give up because I can’t stand to wait.

This is very much so driven by the blogger culture that I “grew up in” over the lat 90s and 2000s. You would just type, hit publish, think of new edits, hit publish again, etc. It gets enforced by a (non-pairing) programmer mentality where you can do all you need on your own (short of last code review, perhaps), pretty much.

In the white-collar world, things are rarely like this. First, there’s often at least one other person who has to approve your work. This is often to the benefit of the message and making sure the company does well. Second, there are often “gate keepers” who control the release of product into the world.

Each of these steps (and others) are intended to add value to the end product, but I still struggle to value those steps myself and, thus, find the value in them. Obviously, that’s an annoying problem for all people involved. Now, watch me click publish…

New Podcast

I (re-)started a new podcast today, here’s the first episode:

How to demo your cloud poop, don’t smoke corn silk, and other advice for people who lived in the 1930s – Lords of Computing Podcast 001

After catching up several times over the past few months, John Willis and I decided to reboot our podcast from long ago. In this first episode, we talk about putting together good demos for cloud platforms, among other things.

We’ve re-named it the Lords of Computing, borrowing an ancient domain name I’ve had forever. Take a listen, and subscribe! (This will be three podcasts I do regularly now, which is great: it’s one of the things I like doing most.)

Fun & IRL

No fun today, just work. I did notice that there was a half pot of coffee left at 3pm today. Something was going wrong.

Sponsors

• Two free months of Pivotal Cloud Services – interested in checking out Pivotal’s Public PaaS? Sign up for two free months to try it out. Also, check out why we think PaaS is a silly phrase.

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

Meta-data

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• Archives: https://cote.io/?tag=cotememo
• Subscribe: https://cote.io/memo/

Follow-up, Follow-forward

• The column I excerpted from last time is up, over at FierceDevOps: Software-defined businesses need software-defined IT departments. Tell me what you think; they asked me to write a monthly piece, so I’d love to get some ideas for topics going: got any?

• I got some good feedback on the podcast sponsorship meanderings. Apparently, there’s pretty good money in tech podcasts. The next thing I’m curious about is if the advertising actually works…or how people even measure it.

• We have 98 subscribers right now – exciting! Tell one of your pals to sign up so we can get above 100 for the next one.

• I’ll be at ApacheCon (in Austin) next week. We’re hosting a related event during the conference if you’re interested; I advised them on pizza ordering (either Home Slice or Conan’s – we’ll see what happens). It’d be fun to chat if you’re there. A few weeks on, I’ll be at DevOpsDays Austin, giving a talk and hanging out. The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up and, as you might guess, I’ll be there as well.

Tech & Work World

no caps

Today, I bring you an excerpt from an upcoming Pivotal Conversation episode with Andrew, due to be published this week:

Coté: You know, I was thinking. There’s something I wanted to ask you. You have, like myself, pretty broad experience in the IT world over a couple of decades now, which is odd to think about. I think you’ve had your head in a slightly different silo than I have, in the early days. I think you can answer something that’s been bugging me. What is up with people who don’t use the shift key? Like they never capitalize anything. They have good punctuation. They don’t capitalize the beginning of sentences. Am I over thinking this? Is there … I feel like a lot of technological people that I know, I shouldn’t say a lot, there’s a fair amount of them who don’t capitalize things. Because they’re sort of like programmers or operators, I know that they pay close attention to syntax. I feel like it must be a conscious choice. Right? They must have decided, sort of like: one day I decided I’m not going to put 2 spaces after a period. Done. I never do that. Right? So, I ask you again, what’s going on with people who don’t capitalize things?

Andrew C Shafer: I think it’s just a hipster…I sometimes do that. It actually is conscious.

Michael Coté: See. This is … I’m not passing any judgment. I have no judgment to pass at all. I’m genuinely curious. When that affectation is applied intentionally, what the semantic thing is going on there. Is it, what’s that fancy word, like the study of symbols? Symbiotic? There’s some sort of symbiotic thing going on there.

Andrew C Shafer: Quite frankly, I don’t know how philosophical you want to get, in an encore performance here, but I don’t actually see the point of capitalization. Seems redundant.

Michael Coté: Now, that’s a statement right there. I like it. That’s something meaty. I think, this has been my theory.

Andrew C Shafer: With punctuation and spacing, what purpose does capitalization…

Michael Coté: Yeah. Yeah. It can all be inferred, basically. Right? You know. This would also highlight why, if this was like 2002 and we were complaining about the kids with their T9 texting, that would be a whole other discussion of no capitalization. In this case, I think it’s this subset of people who are technologically inclined. I feel like the answer you just gave is probably what’s going on with a lot of them. It’s like, I want to have an economy in my writing that strips out anything that’s unnecessary.

Andrew C Shafer: Yeah. It’s a protest against hierarchy.

Michael Coté: Namely the hierarchy of typefaces that are taller than others.

Andrew C Shafer: Exactly. We don’t need a class system.

Michael Coté: We need a class system. That’s an entirely different type of “class system” we’re talking about. Not separating things out in their value. More logos space class system.

We then talk some sort of tech stuff. I’ll drop in a link to the episode once it’s published. Or, just subscribe to the podcast feed to get it once it’s published.

“the feeling of being informed when you get to the very end”

Ben Thompson pointed out this good, short interview with The Economist’s Tom Standage

I love their Espresso app, and here’s some stats on it:

It’s $3 per month. It’s doing well: We’ve had about 600,000 downloads. Weekly reach is about 200,000 readers, daily reach is about 120,000 readers. 175,000 weekly subscribers have enabled free access to Espresso. So in all of those ways, it’s good.

…I don’t know all those term well enough, but let’s take a stab. I’ll assume “daily reach” means people paying for it regularly. So, the revenue could be something like:

$3 X 200,000 = $600,000

I’m unsure if that 175,000 weekly readers is on-top of the 200,000. I’m a weekly (digital) subscriber (through airline miles!) and I added it (meaning, I don’t pay “extra”). Anyhow, like many people I probably don’t actually read the weekly edition of The Economist cover to cover, but I do tend to read the daily Espresso.

Someone in tech needs to do that model. It’s a great format: a few hundred words per story with a summary of 3-4 stories at the end, and then the usual Economist numbers fest. If you could draw lines around “enterprise IT” (that is, not Apple, Google, Facebook, and all that), I think you’d have something pretty good. You’d need to define the companies, technologies, and topics you cover there, and then just take the Espresso approach. Their “model” is world news and business, of course: much larger. Scoping down to just some chunk of the IT world would be easy enough for 1, maybe 2 people to boot-strap in. And fun!

Quick Hits

• The economics of the podcast boom – more on what it says.

• U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015 | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project – some insights from many surveys. My main take-away: mobile is the platform.

• Tectonic Set To Shake Up Google Style Containers – everyone is releasing the orchestration layer, building up a cloud platform. The next year will have all sorts of marketing education around it. We get questions from lots of customers and prospects saying, basically, “WTF, y’all ? Can you tech vendors make up your collective mind, I gotta ship stuff?”

• Piston positions itself as more than OpenStack – and, indeed, Piston is looking beyond just standing up an OpenStack IaaS.

Nice chart on Uber growth:

This chart on Uber’s growth is just incredible. From @BradStone‘s story in BW: http://t.co/FkZ2OUATWA pic.twitter.com/QQwbYsRcEp

— Kim-Mai Cutler (@kimmaicutler) April 7, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

As you’ll recall, I threw together this one from rumored revenue in the Wall Street Journal:

I like to use these charts to illustrate how fast a software defined business can grow and that, you know, it’s a thing.

Fun & IRL

Eating Right

We visited with friends for Easter this weekend.

On the way, I enjoyed a rare road-food treat at Sonic:

To make up for that, our friends made excellent food each night, for example:

I didn’t get a picture of the lamb-chops. Or the omelet stuffed with left over smoked pork.

#WorkingFromHome, lanyard signaling

A reader wrote in:

One tip on working from home from a friend that works at Cisco. He wears his Cisco badge on a lanyard when he works at home, so even when he goes to get a drink from the fridge the family knows he’s still “at work”. He just holds the badge up when his wife asks him to flip the laundry or take out the trash. For me, I’m still trying to get French doors put on my home office door to help w/the noise. Looking forward to your tips.

Man, I think my wife would kill me if I did that, but it does get to the point. Sometimes signaling is all that’s needed. My wife is very good at responding to a door closed signal. Whether it’s locked or not she assumes that means no interruptions and will keep the kids out, even I actually don’t mind. So, I have to be very mindful of door closed or not.

Sponsors

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Follow-up

In reponse to the analyst access commentary from last time, a reader wrote in:

Are you familiar with Securosis? They’re a security-only analyst firm.

Their business model is pretty different – everything they publish is free, and make money through sponsorship and inquiries etc. They have a model they call totally transparent research. I don’t know how much they make – but apparently they make enough to cover themselves.

Tech & Work World

Working at Pivotal

I started a new job earlier this month at Pivotal. I haven’t had time to write an informal overview yet, but instead I did this interview/post on the official Pivotal blog.

There’s also a follow-up piece that I haven’t promoted too much yet. I’ve been busy. Hopefully I’ll have my feet better under me.

So far it’s been great, I’m really liking it. We have so much cool stuff at Pivotal and are getting crazy traction, with around $40m in Pivotal Cloud Foundry bookings last year.

Quick Hits

• 2015 IT Budget Report – Spiceworks does a good job surveying the SMB (less than 1,000 employees) IT base out there. There’s always good stuff in there.
• Win Sun, lose Sun: How Larry’s bet on old-world systems hurt Oracle – a nice analysis of the Sun acquisition 5 years later. We discussed it, and more on the topic, in last week’s Software Defined Talk Podcast.

• VMware is bringing key Google services to its cloud

• Kyle Hilgendorf on VMware/Google cloud partnership

• Perforce study on CI/CD – they commisoned a study from Evans, looks legit enough.

Fun & IRL

• Watch Run the Jewels’ New Video for “Lie, Cheat, Steal” – these guys!

Sponsors

• This Memo is sponsored by The Craftsman PM – Amp up your skills and get to the top at this Whole Product Workshop Feb 21-22 in Austin and Mar 7-8 NYC. Grab a spot at 10% off for just Cote Memo readers (use code: cotememo62) before it’s all gone: http://bit.ly/cotememo62

• FRONTSIDE.IO – HIRE THEM! Do you need some developer talent? When you have a web project that needs the “A Team,” call The Frontside. They’ve spent years honing their tools and techniques that give their clients cutting-edge web applications without losing a night’s sleep. Learn more at http://frontside.io/cote

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Tech & Work World

Having an opinion, or not

In the types of jobs I’ve found myself in over recent years – analyst, strategist, “content producer” in the form of podcasts and blogs – you have to generate a lot of opinions. The best actually seem to really care about the things they have opinions over and can express, at length, why they think like they do. Think about the ATP crew or any of the other podcasts out there: they really care about Apple! Ben Thompson is another font of opinion, and his content is very interesting for it.

I seem to have powered down my opinion engine of late: I just haven’t cared as much. I find myself taking a “wait and see position” more than not: in the technology space, I’m more interested in learning how people are using technologies and about how the actual technologies work than having a strong opinion about which their metaphysical essence.

I find that “having an opinion” also guides a lot of managing teams. A manager should have an opinion about how the team runs, what their work product looks like, how they’re rated, and ways to improve. That takes a lot of opinion, expressing it, and enforcing it. At an individual level – managing yourself – the same applies.

This leads me think that we need opinions to simply tell us what to do day to day and how we should rate how we’re doing. It feels something of a wrong conclusion: you’re not supposed to be overly subjective in “managing.” And yet, it seems to me that most interesting – not always the most profitable – “work” is driven by a strong opinion, and following it to its logical conclusion.

Quick Hits

• Ten Years of Podcasting: Fighting Human Nature (Soundcloudbusting) – a nice historic rundown of podcasting.

• Fin – To paraphrase Davy Crockett, “you may all go to hell, I’m goin’ to North Idaho.” It’s always interesting to see a bridge-burning “exit interview” in print.

• Some recent cloud charts: 451 put out some new survey work (n=700+), and Piper Jaffray had some that made them conclude that Oracle has some good upside. I find that if you look at too many cloud usage and enterprise sentiment surveys, they tend to contradict themselves, so be careful, buddy.

• Advice for being an industry analyst – in case you missed in it the blog, I reappropriated an email on the topic.

Fun & IRL

Whenever I dig around in the attic, I came across the two (!) boxes of Dungeons and Dragons books I have up there. It makes me long to DM again. After coming across this “Three Sad Wizards” module and listening to the first episode of Total Party Kill, I wrote up the beginning of an adventure that night sitting up in bed.

Here’s the summary I tapped out at the top:

“The player wakes up in a dungeon with no memories of who they are and must quest through the valley of five rivers [can you tell I’ve been reading Game of Thrones?] to discover their past. The player should either be a warrior or a thief, they can decide which at some point early on.”

Sponsors

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Follow-up

• The Docker piece I mentioned last time is up. Check out the summary on my blog, and 451 clients can read it behind our paywall.

• Because Docker links always come in pairs, here’s the recording of the closing panel at DockerConEU, where I was one of the panelists. Software Defined Talk listeners will notice I’m wearing one of my recommendations. No Kirkland products, though, sadly.

Tech & Work World

Whatever happened to “mark as read”?

Like most old cyberspace people, I lament the death of Google Reader and RSS daily. I still use Feedly (coupled with Newsify it’s alright – I wish Flipboard would work with Feedly but, you know, it doesn’t, because monetization or some crap, I guess), so I have that going for me.

Now that are so many other options out there for “reading interesting links,” I find that what I like about RSS readers is that they mark a story as read. Things like Flipboard, reading tumblr, HN, and all that seem to lack that feature – I don’t want to see the same thing twice, or, more likely, five times.

Which brings us to the “fun links in your social networks app du jour”, Nuzzel. It’s nice enough, but like all the other apps like it, it has no mark as read feature. I keep seeing the same stuff over and over. (And if you recall how I actually use Twitter, ignoring my “real” timeline in favor or a list I made, apps that depend on the Twitter timeline are borked for me).

As I alluded to above, Flipboard was the best when it worked with Google Reader – I could load up all the social crap it works with, and Google Reader, and it was tidy, marking as read my RSS stuff and letting me swipe through all the other nonsense that would sate my FOMO goblins.

So, a plea to all you FOMO app people: add mark as read to your app. Even better: add Feedly integration, they must have APIs or something, right? Make it an in-app purchase! I bid 20 quatloos on the new comer!

(The reason I really like Newsify – the one feature I can’t live without, as it were – is that it marks as read as you scroll, like the old Google Reader! The Feedly app sort of does that, but it doesn’t have real scroll, instead it flips through pages, making me have to shift my eyes from the bottom of the screen to the top each time I “scroll.” I know, this seems like a tiny thing, but when you read as many feeds as I do, it’s now.)

Quick Hits

Like most folks, I was gone for two weeks. These may be a bit stale.

https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/550370028437385216

• What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs – it’s a good read, if only to confirm that running big tech companies is hard, esp. esp. “old” ones. It’s also good because it’s the “primary content” for all those follow-on stories in blog land that excerpt from it. Now, that’s value!

• PaaS for Realists – I can’t get enough PaaS talk now-a-days. Send any good pieces you’ve found.

• The Open-Office Trap – there was a lot of writing about open offices and remote working over Christmas, the second prompted by a recent Paul Graham piece (which I still haven’t read). This rebuttal piece is the best so far, and there’s some good ideas in an HN thread which prompted some slight commentary from myself. Also, this from Sinofsky.

• A Dispatch from Cloud City – 2014 Retrospective – this has been going around and it’s a good read for one of those links that keeps popping up in my “links from your social networks app du jour” (this week: Nuzzel, see above).

Fun & IRL

• Smugglin’ cookies!

Sponsors

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