Coté
Against optimization - The idea that you need slack in the system intuitively makes sense, but it feels hard to prove ahead of time. The powers that be have to believe that things will go wrong, but they’re usually so focused on things going right (sometimes hubris, sometimes too much trust-by-ignorance) and pre-optimize. // “A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably."
3 traits of an entrepreneurial mindset - Yes, and…how can executives setup a system where behaving like this is possible, encourages, and continuously improves? That type of work is often bundled under the phrase “psychological safety” which can come off as too…humane? A system like lean presents as more cold-blooded and analytical: something you can manage in spreadsheets. You know, “business friendly.” I don’t know: need something here.
Urgent/Optimistic Meeting Matrix - So many business bullshit terms here!
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written - Fast to post, few approvals, technical peer review. // My experience: in general, you’re better to post on your own, and let whoever owns the blog figure out if they want to report it, rewrite it, or link to it. Besides: better to own your content and have to be part of your own “brand."
I have a beef with “content” - I think what they mean is “the cost of buying content is near zero.” Creating it has always been expensive, and always will be. Creators just are underpaid. // “I would argue, that the cost of creating content is not close to zero."
65% of developers learning to live with Kubernetes
State of Spring Survey 2024
The State of Spring Survey 2024 is out, you can get it for free, of course. Spring is widely used by Java developers, and Java is widely used for enterprise app development. Thus, what Spring people are doing is relevant to what large organizations are doing in software development. Let’s take a look at some of my hand-picked highlights1 from the survey:
Microservices are here to stay. While use has been decreasingly slight (with server less growing slightly), most all people say they use/do microservices.
Developers are still too close to Kubernetes: “half start with a Kubernetes distribution rather than a more complete platform a little surprising since so much extra work is required.”
Here’s the breakdown. In an ideal, platform engineering world, it would be the opposite with Kubernetes hidden from the developers: "Kubernetes use in Spring environments continued to grow this year, reaching 65% of respondents. More than half (52%) run a Kubernetes distribution (DIY, TKG, Rancher, EKS, etc.), a third (33%) use a platform based on Kubernetes (OpenShift, [Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes], etc.), and more than a quarter (26%) use a non-Kubernetes based platform (Cloud Foundry, Heroku, etc.).
Keeping up to date is a major problem, and, conversely, a major benefit. Most large organizations I talk with are several versions behind Spring. And while the survey does not break things down by organization size, things actually look better across org. size, with 55% of people saying they’re running the most recent version of Spring Boot: “While Spring Boot 3.2, the latest version, is in use by 55% of stakeholders, Spring Boot 2.7 appears to have become a sticking point, with 41% still running this version.”
Why are people staying with older versions? “Unable to prioritize remains the top reason for not upgrading (chosen by 48%). However, as more companies face the upgrade from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3, incompatible non-Spring libraries has risen sharply as a barrier to upgrading, moving from just 4% last time to 13% this time.”
The support window doesn’t stay open forever. This is another reason to shift down more secondary tasks to the platform - it’s easier to keep your frameworks, services, etc. upgraded if the platform is doing it for you and forcing you to do it. Once you wait a year, two years, etc., you really dig yourself into a hole that’s difficult to upgrade from. It’s not a silver bullet, of sure, but it’s better than the rusty bullets you’re probably using.
And, indeed, people are not shifting down at all, really, doing most of the work manually: “the majority (65%) reported they still do upgrades manually. The next leading result was Github Dependabot, used by 27%. More robust offerings like OpenRewrite didn’t even crack 20%.”
Upgrading means you get new features, but also performance and cost improvements. Not to mention both commercial and/or community support for patches and such. So, like: upgrade already.
AI ALERT!!! “A significant fraction (12%) are already
incorporating AI in Spring applications. That’s a higher percentage than
report using Spring AI (8%)” // The survey speculates that this difference is likely because people wanted to start doing AI stuff before Spring AI was mature enough to use. // Also, it shows you how little AI use there at the moment, squaring with the vibes I think we’re all getting that this AI thing is fixin’ ski down the slope.
There’s more in the survey, which you should check out.
And, highly related, we put out the Spring Appliction Advisor today to help you upgrade all that old Spring. I saw my pal DaShaun demo it last week and it was good stuff.
Relative to your interests
AI Patterns - A marketer’s candy store of enterprise AI value-props and positioning. Also: their persistence of private cloud.
The Emerging Technologies That Will Drive The Future Of Payments - “A 2023 Forrester survey indicates that 63% of business and tech leaders plan to increase their investments in emerging technologies in the coming year. Yet despite this fervor, only 18% reported high success rates in their previous year’s tech initiatives.”
What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news? - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - “[F]requent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA.” But: “Younger people are much more likely to use generative AI products on a regular basis. Averaging across all six countries, 56% of 18–24s say they have used ChatGPT at least once, compared to 16% of those aged 55 and over.”
Wastebook
“And as far as your 16 ounce of Maple and Sage [sausage]: I don’t eat that. I’m not from the North. I’m a Texas man.” Randy Taylor.
New AI as summarizing tool theory: don’t ask it to summarize, ask it to rewrite it in AP style in less words.
AIs are only as reliable as humans, but something slightly more.
“Trend reversals travel through earnings calls like cold viruses through kindergartens.” Via.
Conferences, Events, etc.
Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.
SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DATEV Software Craft Community online, June 6th, speaking. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.
Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.
Logoff
This week’s Software Defined Talk is an interview Matt Ray recorded with Amanda Silver. I haven’t listened to it yet, but she has several excellent posts about doing platform engineering at Microsoft for, like, all the Microsoft developers! So, you should check it out like I’m going to do.
Microsoft was super-cool and paid for Matt Ray’s travel. Maybe I can hit them up for some of that: Software Defined Talk on the road! It’ll be like my analyst days, except this time I’ll insist on Marriott hotels. Probably. Actually, for sure.
Maybe.
Why “hand-picked”? I don’t know, I think it’s because I’m sick, just had two cups of black tea of some kind (I got a new teapot from Ikea and tested it out with some old loose tea Kim got me a couple of years ago in Paris). It’s not like I reached my hand into the PDF and picked out charts. Though…that’d be pretty cool. Maybe next year.
What does the public in six countries think of generative AI in news? - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - “[F]requent use of ChatGPT is rare, with just 1% using it on a daily basis in Japan, rising to 2% in France and the UK, and 7% in the USA.” But: “Younger people are much more likely to use generative AI products on a regular basis. Averaging across all six countries, 56% of 18–24s say they have used ChatGPT at least once, compared to 16% of those aged 55 and over."
AI Patterns - A marketer’s candy store of enterprise AI value-props and positioning. Also: their persistence of private cloud.
The Emerging Technologies That Will Drive The Future Of Payments - “A 2023 Forrester survey indicates that 63% of business and tech leaders plan to increase their investments in emerging technologies in the coming year. Yet despite this fervor, only 18% reported high success rates in their previous year’s tech initiatives."
"Right Now, It's Like This"
Enterprise AI in Healthcare
Here’s my interview with my co-worker, JT Perry, on actual uses (current and possible) for AI in healthcare. It’s good! Watch it all:
There’s a podcast version if you prefer audio only.
Wastebook
“a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will ‘seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto–through creativity and technology–working with creators.’” Here.
“I don’t do anything. I’m just the center of a rat king of chaos.” ROtL.
And: “I’ve eliminated everything but: Wallet, keys, phone.”
“All those movies I wasn’t allowed to see but I read parodies of them.” On Mad Magazine.
“the productive uses are marketed under their application rather than their mechanism” Here.
“Joan Didion’s dreamers of the golden dream… on a double date, Ken downed a beer to show her he could piss farther than his friend.” California-style.
Success dysmorphia.
After some practice, if you know you’re doing the thing, you can make yourself do the thing without knowing you’re doing the thing.
“Malicious compliance” - It’s a thing.
“what’s that font, boss?”
dongle hell - legacy of the VP of Cables.
“Three civil brawls bred of an airy word”
Relative to your interests
Excuse the navel-gazing - “TikTok heavily favors videos edited inside their app. YouTube is mainly a thumbnails game. And who knows what Instagram wants.”
The AI Trust Fall - Even though humans are more error prone than computers, we trust the work of humans more…perhaps because we understand their errors much better and how to debug them. You know, because we’re humans ourself. In contrast, with AI’s, we have no idea what’s going on nor how to fix errors. This feels like some mystic, Talebian wisdom like the benefits of getting Fat Tony to eat more humus and drink more wine for long life.
JPMorgan ramps up prompt engineering training, AI projects - AI to replace executive jobs: “Another AI tool allows employees to query a model meant to respond as Michael Cembalest, current chairman of market and investment strategy within the asset management division.” // With the insane comp. that executives get, maybe AI would be a lot cheaper!
Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say - “Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users.”
Huge Google Search document leak reveals inner workings of ranking algorithm - Reverse engineering Google search ranking based on method calls from leaked code.
Interview - WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana on being acquired by major investor - “In the last financial year [CY2023?], WSO2 achieved revenues of $100 million”
Survey reveals generative AI employee fear - Lots of hopes and dream, not enough projects and experiments: “IBM’s research found that less than half of organisations are focused on GenAI pilots – and another 24% are doing nothing at all. But almost half (49%) of the CEOs polled expect to use GenAI to drive growth by 2026. According to IBM, this is very ambitious, as only purposeful transformation will make it possible.” // You could say this is falling behind or bad, on the other hand, I doubt most of them have solid ideas of what exactly to do with AI beyond better search and intern-level analysis, that is: “what problem are we trying to solve?”
Cloud Native Platform Tales: JP Morgan Chase and Comcast
Great panel below from CF Day US. You can hear from some long-time platform people, here, using Cloud Foundry:
Books
I haven’t mentioned books I’ve been reading for a long time. That’s because I haven’t been reading much! I have all the boring-but-real excuses.
Right now:
I’m almost done with The Crystal Shard. I read this long ago, and I’ve long forgotten it. Since I’ve been playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I figured I’d visit it again. It’s fun to read, but I don’t think I’ll commit to reading the other 32 books in the series. (Side note: I keep thinking, if you work at Wizards (who owns D&D), do you have to read all the books, plus theater D&D seres, taking extensive notes. Rather, if you’re lucky enough to actually wok on D&D as your job, I bet you get to read all of them. SO MUCH LORE.)
I just noticed that Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer and The Committed - both amazing) has a member out, so I got the Audible of it. It’s read by the author, which is usually great.
Alex Williams told me I should read In Emergency, Break Glass, so I bought it haven’t started it yet.
Based on a create Conversations with Tyler interview, I started reading Career and Family. I wish I had a physical copy of the book, I think I could take it in much better by looking at the whole page instead of scrolling on the Kindle. (I think that about a lot of books. But, the chance that I’ll have a book at hand versus my phone is so wide. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m reading a lot when it’s just my phone. Something to ponder!)
All Fours - I remember liking one of Miranda July’s books, and since the audio version is read by the author, I bought it. I started listening to a little in Atlanta, but, I don’t know: it’s hard for me to casually listen to fiction when my mind is work-mode, even if that’s just driving to a conference. Listening to fiction while I’m commuting around somehow lessons the value of the book to me.
The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived - the story of mid-century IBM, via a biography of Thomas Watson Jr.
Conferences, Events, etc.
Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.
SpringOne Tour London, June 5th. DATEV Software Craft Community online, June 6th, speaking. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.
Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.
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As you can see, I’ll be in London next week. London is my favorite place, I love it there. There’s lots travel and speaking coming up.
Meanwhile, we’ve got one of those stuffed-head, air-y brain sicknesses going around at home. It got me this afternoon finally. I could manage cutting and pasting the above, but luckily I’d type dit all ‘afore.