80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office - Hmm. It seems really hard to tell what the effects of remote working and in-person working are. People just have to make shut up.

Bike maker VanMoof also files for bankruptcy in Germany - I had no idea that this luxury bike company was in such bad shape. Their bikes sure seem awesome, but are hella expensive compared to the €80 beaters you can get that, you know, do the job just fine.

As HashiCorp adopts the BSL, an era of open-source software might be ending - Is it too soon to say that open source businesses no longer work? (Unless you’re a bit public cloud or you do open core?)

Checking In On ChatGPT - Text-centric AI best used for text-centric toil: “The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn’t quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more “boring” corporate tasks will always have its place."

PDFs vs. web pages: what’s better for users? - Bad things are bad, and using a thing for something it’s bad at (or when a better way exists) is also bad. PDFs are great, just not when it should be a webpage, or something else instead.

Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’ - Project versus product for happiness. Also, living life by waste book/commonplace book - something I certainly can appreciate. (Bit it a ringer it being Helen Garner, but don’t let that stop you.)

A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff

Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessions

I’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of MC script writing - creating it, and reading it. I wrote the MC script last year. And, you know, I’ve watched lots of main stage keynote dog and pony shows (and plenty of goat rodeos). Here’s some quickly typed out tips on writing the MC script:

1. The content is important, but the timing is more. You need to get a sense for how many words you can put in the slots. Then you can change the words around as much as needed.

2. Account for walking on and off the stage. I timed myself and it took me about 8 seconds to walk five meters, stop, and say, “Hi!”, including turning a corner at the start (like walking out from behind a curtain). So, double that to 16, round up to 20 if you want to be safe. If the MCs walk off as the people walk on, you can save some time. But, account for them maybe shaking hands, etc.

3. If the MC is introducing a video, then maybe you can just have the stage go dark and start the video as the MC walks off - saving that walk off time.

4. Read it out loud a lot, record it. This is for timing, but also to see if its easy enough to say the words, if it sounds “natural,” and if it can be read from a teleprompter.

5. I record each chunk on its own, watch the recording and time it, work on the text, re-record it, etc. This is better than doing it all at once and matches what the MCs will actually be doing too.

6. Instead of having the MCs walk on stage, you can always use the “voice of god” (VoG) for super quick intros. The voice of god is an unseen announcer. Keep these very short just name, title, and, optionally, topic, e.g.: “now please welcome Chris Christopher from Acme Inc.” This will shave down walking time and longer intro time. I’d use the same person for the VoG each time.

7. It’s good to do in-person intros (not VoG) for people you want to respect: executives, customer speakers, inspirational speakers, etc.

8. You should have the MCs be the first humans the attendees see and hear (there’s usually some opening thing, then they come out). The introduction can be super short, or long if you prefer. At a minimum it should be something like “Hi, I’m MC One. And I’m MC Two. Wow, welcome - this is so awesome, right? You’re tellin' me! Today you’re doing to hear some great stuff like this, and that, and that other cool thing. All your people are great, and the thing we’re here for is great. You’re going to hear about some great things that have been going on, some new great things we’ve been working on for you, and some great stories about people using and benefiting from the thing. Let’s get started with So and So…”

9. The MCs should generally acknowledge what was just said in the previous section, maybe adding something like “boy, that was great, right?” sort of thing. Their main job in the show is mix together the sessions and to introduce people.

10. Before you lock down the final draft, you probably want to have 30 to 60 seconds free for last minute additions and shifts. And then, on the day of, there’ll be changes for that, it’s probably good to keep the total MC script time about 30 seconds under allotted. This can be bonus time for other unforeseen things too.

11. The biggest job is the closing, or “house keeping.” The MCs should tell people what’s coming next, when significant, fun events are, and send them off with some encouraging advice, like to take the time to talk with people. You’re priming people for what to do.

12. Also, there might be some rookie mistakes you can help attendees avoid. For example, at some conferences, you have to reserve your spot in sessions, and they fill up fast. If that’s the case, you need to tell the audience - I never think to do that so I end up missing a lot of talks that were pre-booked. What are other things you can help them with.

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. Oct 5th & 6th Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Logoff

I was reminded this week that it’s good to get out of the house. You might not be surprised to know that I am terrible at that. People are actually great and life affirming to hang out with!

Also:

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about starting up livestreaming again. I don’t know - for whatever reasons. After way too much work on a few seconds of intro and outro videos,1 fucking around with a new YouTube thumbnail), and re-setting up OBS,2 I did a pretty successful PoC this morning. By “success,” I mean all the technical stuff, the content was just “hey guys!” type of stuff.

OBS should be all set up now so that I can quickly go in and just do them at near clock time. Thankfully, I have somewhere around or over 20 years of podcasting and just showing up and talking, so if I have a topic, or a question, I can go on and on…and on. Speaking of: if you have any questions or topics, send them to me. I questions-driven show is the best: no prep, and people tend to ask things I’d never think to talk about.

LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE…mofos.

I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out.

To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really. Also, I don’t think it’s really so sporting to have a first level character be able to do a harpy siren song thing. So, I made up a “half-harpy.”

We haven’t actually played this yet, so I don’t know if it “works.” I figure what you do is run it up against some goblins in an ambush, maybe getting a blacksmith to send you on a mission to find a lost apprentice or, like, investigate a pie-shop robbery. At first level, it’s always those fucking goblins, right?

Doing this was a great, I don’t know, exercise in AI stuff. I didn’t use ChatGPT for the text (I didn’t even think of that until now!), but I used Midjourney to make the paper and the images. Some notes:

1. I sort of figured out how to use the give it an image thing to start with; I don’t really understand it. I bet Adobe’s Firefly thing would be better at prompts where you upload an image and say, like, “except use a human head instead of a bird one, and add in human arms in addition to the wings.” That one of the female crouched down under the combat page is as close as I ever got, and that’s still not exactly right. If you put too much vulture in, you get those vulture faces. That’s why I added the line to the text that faces can range from human to bird-like - at least I typed that somewhere. And also the part about having either human or vulture feet. I would have preferred just vulture feet. Maybe I can figure out the prompts.

2. It is incredibly hard to figure out the prompt for “make a human with bird feed, a human torso, a human head, human arms, and wings. Make the hands have long talons.” I’d also like to say “make the people look normal!” Instead, they all come out hella heroic, chiseled, and mid-driffy. I tried all sorts of things, but the only thing that would change it was to say “chubby.” “Zaftig” didn’t work, norHer did “stout.” And, “average” or “normal” definitely did. There must be some prompt tricks for “make them look like normal people, not super-models.”

3. Without trying, one time it actually generated full on breasts for a female harpy! I always thought nudity was programmed out. This sort of makes sense: that’s such a thing with harpies that it’d be hard to program that out. All the other times, the female harpies were either dressed or had those nipple-less bulbs like you’d see on a creepy robot.

4. If you do enough of these, you’ll see the humans arms softly stretched out…just like statues and pictures of angels! It took me a long time to realize that, but clearly “human with feathered wings” sends it right to the centuries of angels, all of who always have their arms spread out in that lazy, well, angelic way.

5. My son wanted his characters to be a cleric, so I tried to make some religious symbols. I dunno.

6. That one eating is great! I’ll throw in a bonus of the female version:

   

   Here’s a link to my Midjourney profile if you want to see all the others that I didn’t use.

I have a one to two player adventure thought up. The one that comes with the D&D starter set is a little too much.

Wastebook

• Do I make plans based on what I want done, or what I want to be doing?

• The number one, recommended cure for procrastination is to just actually do the task.

• “Nature doesn’t tell stories.” Here.

• This is a good tofu recipe, except you should deep fry it. Deep frying is super easy, it just requires an insane amount of oil. Fill a wok, turn up the burner, and the cornstarch breaded tofu cooks right up just like you’d get in a restaurant. Why did I wait all these years?

• Speaking of D&D: The terrans are suspicious and fearful of the half-harpies - the ability to fly, the taloned feet and lack of high-intelligence (they’re “bird brained”!), vulture-like eating habits, and behavior makes them weird to the terrans.

Logoff

See y’all next time!

We try the Marks and Spencer Roast Beef and Onion Crisps, or Chips as us Americans would say.

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📨 📨 📨 📨 📨

Hunting for the cloud native and kubernetes pay-off

This is an excerpt from my talk yesterday with Bryan Ross, his theory here is fun, clever, and probably right:

Check out the full interviews, I liked it a lot. The podcast version will be in the Tanzu Talk feed tomorrow if you want to subscribe to that and catch it while you’re vacuuming the floors this weekend.

Container usage by workload in enterprises, share of wallet, and plans

You know I love getting more info on how much container usage (and, thus, an indicator of Kubernetes usage) there is in enterprises. IDC has a deck of charts out looking into what survey respondents say are good uses of containers and where they run containers. Here’s one chart. It shows which types of workloads actually run in containers versus what people think is a good idea:

Here’s a comparison of spend on “traditional” infrastructure versus containers. Spend doesn’t represent an actual count of applications running in containers (the pricing for each unit of infrastructure could be very different, all the way to free!), but it’s useful nonetheless.

What’s worth noticing here is (1) spend on virtualization has been flat. This suggests that, at least when it comes to share of wallet, virtualization is not being reduced by containers - though growth certainly is. That said, you could also say that containers are reducing virtualization, but that virtualization is picking up workloads from non-virtualized infrastructure. (2) More importantly, there’s a big growth in spend on containers (which we can feel safe in saying means a rise in importance of containerized workloads, and probably growth in those applications).

Software vendors - any company! - love and focus on growth, even if it’s in absolute terms tiny year/year of year. It sound much cooler to say that you’re involved in a market that has a 46% growth than, like, 0%…even if there’s shit-tons more money in the 0% growth company. But, you gotta chase those new dollar bills.

Finally, people’s plans. I don’t put too much stock in plans (as you may recall, moving all the workloads to public cloud has been just around the corner for about 10 or 15 years now). But, this is great for gauging people’s interest, especially for vendors who are hunting out what to sell, what to talk about, and how to drive interest for sales meetings. You know, and actual predicting about the future use of containerized workloads:

Again, the most obvious take-away is that there’s more growth in container usage, And, again, the important thing to temper your glee with is that the growth should be a combination of new workloads and migrating old works, i.e., this isn’t a “share” of containers versus traditional workloads.

Also, if you look at the charts, the container label is “Containers (Mounted in Virtual Machines and Bare Metal).” That’s a complicated! So, for some number of containers, we still have traditional infrastructure in use. The containers are more providing (yet another!) layer of packaging, execution, and management for apps on-top of already existing types of infrastructure.

As ever, we’re in the eternal first inning of cloud.

The charts have some further splicing up of the responses which is useful. For example, some of the charts separate out SaaS companies from others, which gives you a better picture of what “normal” organizations are doing (SaaS companies seem to use containers a lot more, as you’d expect). Also, there’s cuts on company size: companies with a 1,000+ people seem to use containers more than smaller companies. Check ‘em out if you have access (you likely do if you’re in a big tech company), or want to fork over $4,500.

Open source and security? The Conference!

Isabel Drost-Fromm sends me this: "in the wake of the Log4Shell kerfuffle I talked to several friends - all of them told the same story of professional engineering teams struggling to figure out whether or not they are affected back then. As a result with a few friends I started FOSS Security Campus, trying to address both, beginners through trainings and advanced engineers through the talk schedule. " It’s in Berlin, Sep 26th to 29th this year. Check it out!

Wastebook

• “I guess that’s the power of a good sandwich.” Here.

• “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” The White Album, Joan Didion

• “To be clear, I think the paradigm of let[ting] people enjoy things was borne of good intentions, but it has demonstrably resulted in a deluge of crap. There’s good stuff in there, but it’s more jetsam than flotsam: hard to find, harder still to get a hold of.” Here.

• “Hah…I love that story…” Life-hack on how to make boring stories funny.

What replaces the smoke break?

Smoking used to be a little time for a break, often standing up and walking outside. A time to touch grass, in big cities, more often concrete.

I like the romance of the smoke break, also the relaxing feel of it. Almost an off moment of mindfulness.

Now, I suspect people "check their phone" is the little break. But that doesn’t seem the same.

I suppose you could have an espresso, or a quickly to make a small tea? Get a cup of one of those and go outside to drink it, looking around aimlessly and talking idly with whoever is doing the same?

It can’t be eating something, or, like “taking a walk.” Those are their own things. But, the Swiss have a culture of interstitial meals, one at nine between breakfast and lunch, another at four between lunch and dinner.

But all that doesn't seem exactly the same as a smoke break - healthier, sure. There must be something.

Having never smoked, I've never really experienced "smoke breaks," but it seems...nice?

Relative to your interests

• Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”

• Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.” // Shadow IT exists because people need something that IT is not giving them.

• The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank.”

• Where’s Assaf? - Holy shit! That is scary to hear and I’m glad he is recovering.

• Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70 - “I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

• Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor.”

• What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.0! (Well, in two to three years when the exec’s vesting wraps up.)

• Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk.”

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.

Logoff

se landscapes from Oswald Achenbach are amazing. I saw one in the Musee D’Orsay (used above), and, as with all paintings that play with light, you can’t really tell from the screen how magical it is. Here’s another one, you canost imagine what it’d look like in person: