What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - “Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”

Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF."

Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.

Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.'

Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.'

IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!

Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%."

Use the last paragraph for something fun

Watching the video is more fun, but here’s he transcript you can’t be bothered:

The way you learn to write a conclusion to an essay or a paper or whatever kind of text you're writing in school: just totally forget that.

What you want to do when you write a conclusion is not summarize what you've done, return to your argument, and say how you've proven it out or whatever. You do that before the conclusion.

What you want to do in a conclusion is introduce a new idea, a new insight. I think of this as a treat that you're adding at the end. You don't have to discuss it that much. You don't have to prove it out. You're just throwing something out there that kind of intuitively connects and makes sense, or that you're just gonna say and possit.

For example, let's say you just wrote some text arguing that the croissant is the superior pastry. What you might do is spell that out, reach the conclusion, summarize why it's done, state that therefore the croissant is the best.

But in your conclusion paragraph, you can say, Oh, and one last thing, if you're really in a hard spot and you don't have tacos available, you can also slice up a croissant, smash it on a griddle and make a makeshift quesadilla out of it.

This creates a memorable thing at the end, something that's fun, instead of just being kind of like an obligatory summing up of stuff. It makes your essay more memorable and also more enjoyable to write.

So next time you're writing some chunk of text, do your conclusion in the middle of the essay, kind of summarizing things, and add an interesting note, a little dessert item, a snack at the end.

Stay in the sandbox - Software Defined Talk #493

This week’s episode: “we cover OpenCost’s big incubation milestone, CNCF's graduation rules, and a flurry of tech acquisitions. Plus, some thoughts on teaching kids about passwords.”

You can listen to it, or watch the unedited video version if you prefer.

Relative to your interests

• Moving off an AS/400 will take a couple years, discussion in reddit.

• Twelve Factor project has been open-sourced by Salesforce - “Heroku is replatforming on Kubernetes.”

• DevOps, LLMs, and the Software Development Singularity

• 3 Hour Layover in Schiphol - My tips on what to do during a 3 hour layover at Schiphol.

• Cooking eggs with an espresso machine - This looks like the creamy texture of hotel eggs, except with fresh eggs instead of powder. Also, finally a use for that wand thing on my coffee machine.

• US presidential election impact: Region by region, from S&P Global - As it says for regions in the world.

• Want ad in Twitter - This the most concise, accurate job ad for a VP of Marketing in tech.

• Sovereign cloud provides CIOs with solutions to data management challenges

• Spring Boot and Temporal - “46% of enterprise workloads use Spring…. That is 46% of the workloads. That means that nearly half the time when you are using your banking, insurance, medical records, telco and utilities apps, Spring is in play. Streaming? Yeah, Netflix is all in on Spring. ECommerce? Amazon heavily uses Spring” (based on JetBrains 2023 and Stackoverflow 2024 surveys).

• VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

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I haven’t actually had that croissant taco, I just made it up as I was walking. Maybe I’ll try this weekend and report back.

Comparing two years of Twitter engagement to a month of Bluesky engagement

Like everyone else, I consider giving up on Twitter daily, especially with the US election bullshit. I don’t really read much on there anymore (I’ve tried all the tricks, even subscribing some months ago), but I still post things hoping to get the eyeballs. Since Twitter shut down is APIs (or made them expensive, or whatever), it’s harder to automate posting. I use the free tier of buffer, which is fine, but I’d rather just use Croissant.

Is that even worth it to even post to Twitter anymore?

Here’s the overall views and engagement on my Twitter account for the past year:

And, then top Tweets in the last ~3months (the max I could select):

That top video got 359 views, the next one 271. These are horrible numbers. A few years back when I went short-form video crazy, I’d get thousands of views of most videos in Twitter (LinkedIn is was and remains really good too).

The main thing I care about now-a-days is my newsletter. Does Twitter drive views and subscriptions for my newsletter?

Here’s the past year:

Over all time (December 12st 2022 to November 15th, 2024), Twitter drove 3,786 views and 53 newsletter subscriptions. That means most of my traffic from Twitter was in the past, and no much has happened relative to that in the pas year.

In comparison, LinkedIn has driven 3,179 over the past two years and 76 subscriptions in the same period.

In the past two years, Bluesky is at 18 views and 12 subscriptions. Let’s look at the post-Hightower Shift Bluesky period though. Between October 19th, 2024 and November 15th, 2024 (today) Bluesky generated 10 views and 9 subscriptions. In comparison, for that same period, Twitter drove 79 views and 0 subscriptions.

Views are nice, but subscriptions are the number one goal.

I have something like 11,000 followers in Twitter (I started in 2006 and have had several high profile jobs since then). I’m nearing 900 in Bluesky post-Hightower Shift. If I’m doing the math right, I have a “do followers click on my links?” percentage of 0.7% in Twitter and 9% in Bluesky.

Anyhow. I haven’t made a spreadsheet, but when I look at these numbers it makes me think that when I comes to shameless self-promotion, Twitter is now garbage and not worth the time to even automate cross-posting.

So, yeah: ENGAGE WITH MY BRAND, MOFOS! Oh, and subscribe to what you’re reading right now, my newsletter!

Subscribe now

Sidenote: I’ve been watching the view counts on YouTube for my fellow infrastructure software, cloud, etc. B2B people. They’re generally horrible! After speaking with a few of them who suddenly shifted to good results, I found out the trick: buy ads, buy traffic. This works incredibly well in LinkedIn too.1

Now, if you’re doing sponsored YouTube video in this space (like a lot of people!) who get paid by vendors and others to post interviews with company people and customers on YouTube, it’s clear that you should take some of that payment to buy views. This means less profit for you, sure, but once you start getting 1,000+ views on your videos about, you know, service meshe, obscure networking protocols, RBAC for Kubernees, or whatever other boring-ass enterprise shit you’re hoping will compete with how to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine…

…wait, where was I? …oh, right…

If you’re getting sponsorship for videos, pay for traffic, and once you get 1,000, 2,000, especially over 3,000 views, you’ll stand out so much from your competitors, and likely your client’s own YouTube video views that you can do more videos, raise prices, etc. There’s probably a spreadsheet you can make. This applies to the tech companies doing this and creatives hustling themselves (if they have the cash).

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I have an episode for later today as well, hopefully.

Making Money with Open Source - Software Defined Interviews

We talked about a lot more than making money with open source in this interview with RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens, but the part was pretty good:

In this episode, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

You can listen on the episode show notes page, watch the original video (above), or, best, subscribe to the podcast to check it out. Doing these podcasts with Whitney has been great, we’ve go four of five more lined up, so there’s plenty more coming.

Wastebook

• Wilford Brimley oatmeal marketing: whatever happened to just buying computers?

• The problem is often lack of focus. What the executive has to do is give permission to cut all the other stuff out, and do the structural work for that: shutting down projects, closing divisions, even getting rid of people. In tech, this often means limiting chasing shinny objects, shutting down “moonshots.” Anti-innovation as it may be, these executives only focus on things that make money and immediately, intuitively benefit the customer. You have a strategy to run the business better, maybe even make more money. You don’t have a strategy to come up with a new product, create a new market. Which is fine: you’ll probably fail at that, like most everyone else. Your goal is to survive and thrive, not risk it all for glory and selling your shares at the IPO.

• “The Drooling Diplomat,” Dungeon Magazine, #63.

• “Reading is a form of necromancy.” Here.

• Even “Bitcoin Jesus” can’t escape the IRS.

• “I really don’t want cynicism to become my compass.” Noah.

• “Bull power for money stream.” Both at GoTech World.

• “We are all smart with browsers made by others.” Talk title at GoTech World.

• If you give people the chance to edit, they often will. If you just publish it, they will often say it’s good. -“Musk-a-Lago.” Recent reports.

Relative to your interests

• Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.

• Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware.”

• Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.

• Da Art of (Business) Storytellin’ - “Storytelling is not only important for advertising but for internal team alignment. We hear stories about Airbnb’s movie-quality storyboards around its office or Amazon’s Press Release Method. The key takeaway is that the company must align marketing and product. Slogans and one-liners must be brainstormed at the same time patents are being drawn. If the product team builds first, then asks marketing to find the story, it’s a recipe for disaster. It will lead to the customer expecting X but actually receiving Y.”

• “Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” // And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

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The T key on my laptop is sticking. How does one fix that kind of thing? (Notice how many T’s were in the sentence? I sure did!)

Not much to say, really. Weird afternoon. On such occasions, this is one of the many comfort clips that makes me smile.