What VMware’s AI Vision Means for Your Job - Figuring out how AI will affect tech stuff.

Survey finds relatively few Americans actually use (or fear) ChatGPT - 30% to 40% (for young adult males) seem like a lot too me. // “Ongoing polling by Pew Research shows that although ChatGPT is gaining mindshare, only about 18% of Americans have ever actually used it. Of course that changes by demographic: Men, those 18-29 and the college educated are more likely to have used the system, though even among those groups it’s 30-40%."

The Ultimate Guide to Developer Counter-Productivity - Focus on outcomes, not activities…mostly. So long as the activities are good and lead to outcomes. // Yes, and…many tasks may not seem directly tied to value, but they are. If you don’t measure where a shelf goes on a wall, when you hang it, there’s a good chance it will look shit. If you don’t take your compliance training in a bank, the bank could be operating illegally. If you don’t take time to meet with other teams (people), when it comes to needing to work with them, it will be harder. Also, if the outcomes you’re unproductive developers are getting are greats, who cares about LoC.

Man, Myth & Magic The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Mythology 21 Volumes In 1 - This is the kind of stuff I’d pursue and spend hours looking through in the 80’s.

Dark Mode: How Users Think About It and Issues to Avoid - A lot more on dark mode than you thought was possible to write about // “Aesthetic appeal and improved accessibility are the strongest arguments for supporting dark mode."

Mindsets and Tactics for New Leaders of Software Teams - Seems like good stuff.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

If you can’t be at DevOpsDays Des Moines later this week (or stackconf in Berlin next week) to see the final version of this presentation, here’s my first time running through it. It container about 20 minutes of…uh…bonus material.*

• Meaning, things I need to cut.

Trees do not grow in straight rows

This picture clarified what it’s like to be an American living in Europe.

Everyday, you’re confronted by how old everything is. The word “old” deserves attention, and explains the whole point. To an American, “old” tends to be a negative term. (Well, a left leaning American, at least.) But in Europe, you are surrounded by old and there’s a certain comfort to it.

I live in The Netherlands, and the thing you realize quickly is that there is very little “nature” in The Netherlands. Westerners having been living here for thousands of years. The entire country has been touched by and designed by people. In fact, if it weren’t for human engineering draining swamps, digging canals, and literally building new land in the sea, the country wouldn’t be. Like. Exist.

The rest of Europe is this way too: unnatural. There isn’t really space in Europe that hasn’t felt the hand of humans. Sure, in the larger countries, there are places where humans have decided not to mess around. But, for the most part, nature in Europe has long - like, really, long - been civilized: conquered.

Here is what I tell my fellow flâneurs. As you amble about Amsterdam and all of Europe, notice how many trees are in a perfect row. And notice how old those trees are. Trees do not grow in a perfect row normally. People did that.

In America, there are not that many trees in a row. There are huge parts of America that are just…there. To be fair, I wouldn’t say there are “unknown” parts of America, but it’s much different than Europe. There’s nothing like West Texas in Europe, and (the Texan in me does not like to type this) that is just a tiny part of the American wilderness.

What we don’t have in America is what’s in the picture above: a connection to hundreds of years back. The way we’re raised, we know about back to 1776. Before then, it’s a confusing blur. Does any American really know what the French and Indian War was all about? And it’s only in the past several decades - my lifetime! - that we acknowledge and are curious about anything that happened before Europeans came to America. Now, that is a good centuries long history we (in all the Americas) should be visiting and drawing on more.

But. I don’t want the problematic aspects of the American-mind to distract from a compliment I’m trying to give Europe. All of That is there for us Americans to deal with: I am not glossing over it.

This endless history that Europe has is so hard to reckon with as an American, and I feel like it shapes the European mindset. What would be like to walk around a museum and feel a direct connection to something painted 464 years ago or 458 years ago.

Ironically, the second thing to reckon with is more recent in history: World War 2. So much of Europe through the flâneur’s eyes is defined by that war. When you walk in Amsterdam, you see buildings from the 1600s. When you walk in Germany, with rare exception, you see only buildings built after 1945.

If you don’t get it, let me tell you an anecdote from an English friend. He was traveling in Cologne, Germany, I believe, and noticed how new and modern all the buildings were, how the roads were perfectly formed to accommodate cars. How thoroughly modern everything was. After talking with a local German a bit, he said, “this is remarkable! How is it that everything is so fresh and new.” To which the German, gravely replied, “well, you should ask your great friends about that…”

And that brings us to the third thing. Living in Europe, I’m confronted a lot by that date: 1945. We Americans think of Europe as peaceful, socialists…“Freedom Fries” and all that.

What our short aperture of history misses is that it’s only since 1945 that Europeans haven’t been trying to kill each other constantly: basically, all the time, like, non-stop. Before 1945, it was near constant war in Europe. Us Americans might think the Europeans awfully pacifist and do-nothingniks, but you have to appreciate how done and utterly tired they must have been after 1945. Perhaps, forced to become enlightened, even. Centuries and Centuries of war and senseless death had finally exhausted, wiped out, and almost killed this entire part of the world.

You walk around the museums and the old parts of the cities that still exist and you constantly realize how old, how lived, how experienced, and how in the future everything here is.

(Us tech people scoff at the EU and their whacky regulations, but, well, I mean, if it gives you something else to do instead of constantly being at war, is it all that bad?)

SUPERSTREAM - Sep 6th, 2023

Next week at an O’Reilly Superstream hosted by Sam Newman, I’m talking about platform team practices I’ve collected from seven years of talking with platform teams. My colleague Whitney is also giving a talk, and she always has great presentations. You should come check it out!

From a 2015 Pivotal Deck

This is back when all of us in the industry were trying to freak out the enterprise market. It worked…?

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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See y’all next time!

Not much today.

Halloween Clown Tailwinds

“Among outfits, the best performers have been those linked to clowns, which increased by 43% year over year.”

Somewhere, there's a financial analyst who really cares about the increase in clown costumes this Halloween.

Wastebook

• “So I quit my job as an engineer at Memorex’s disk drive plant in Santa Clara, California, and we flew to Kuala Lumpur. We found an un-air conditioned hotel room for $10 a night above a brothel with genial trans prostitutes and ate $1 meals served on banana leaves from the nearby restaurants. After a few weeks, we decided to get out of the sweltering heat and check out Singapore. It was just as sweltering there. After three more weeks, we’d had enough and no longer had an urge to go to Indonesia.” Here.

• “Consumers make choices for many reasons: price, convenience and marketing. Maybe politics. The other day I went to my local Walgreens to buy toothpaste and ultimately chose not my favorite brand but the only one that wasn’t under lock and key. I didn’t want to wait for an employee to liberate the Colgate, so Crest it was. Needless to say, I did not use Google to find out which brand was more committed to bodily autonomy. What can I say? I was in a hurry.” Here.

Relative to your interests

• Can you trust ‘open source’ companies? - ’There’s nothing wrong with making money. But, I’ve gotten really tired of projects that use open source for their start and then turn their backs on the philosophy that made them their first hundreds of millions. At the very least, they need to stop pretending they’re open source once they’ve moved to a “Look but don’t touch” or “Look but don’t profit from it” license.'

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey - Measure outcomes, not efforts.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

As mentioned yesterday, I’ll in Des Moines next week to speak at DevOpsDays Des Moines. They were kind enough to invite me to give a keynote, which I’m looking forward to.

If you want to go, registrations closes today, I believe, so get those tickets now.

More upcoming:

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

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I’ve been working on my slides for the above DevOpsDays talk. Here’s a picture I made for a slide. It’s transparent! So far, I’m doing a combo of two types of DevOpsDays talks: “vulnerable autobiography” and “list of good ideas.” I have’t gotten to the second, but I think the first is OK.