Tag Archives: presentations

“Culture is a Lie,” Paul Czarkowski – Highlights

A good, and fun talk from Paul. He tries to refocus DevOps-y energy from “culture change” to more practical things for individuals to do.

Highlights:

  • You can’t change culture from the bottom. Leaders change the culture, they define it.
  • Culture is behavior.
  • If you want to change culture, you need to change your leadership.
  • Culture: as a practitioner, you can’t change it. And if you’re in a leadership position, you’re incentivized not to change it.
  • “If you choose to die on a hill, you’re gonna die on that fucking hill.”
  • Corollary: “If you don’t decide to die on a hill, you won’t die on that hill.”
  • Generative orgs can create microservices.
  • Others will make monoliths.
  • Most people spend more time justifying not working than working.
  • People who do good work will be pulled down.
  • Most people around you aren’t bad people, they’re just a product of their surroundings.
  • As soon as you start fighting the organization, it’ll start fighting back harder than you.
  • Often said: if your company is acquired by a larger company, leave.
  • Then, some examples of automating governance.

Using agile software to enable an agile business

The most recent version of my “big picture” talk:

This presentation explains why getting better at software is important and can help improve your business. It presents the product model of software development, in contrast to the typical project model. It then describes three common barriers to change and how some organizations overcome them. There are three case studies of real-world, large organizations used throughout as well to illustrate the major ideas.

Also available with Korean subtitles.

Link: One Simple Way to Eliminate Distractions in a Board Meeting

The best board meetings are discussions and debates about the business yet many executive teams spent their time wanting to walk through hours of slides on how great they’re doing. Humans do much better when they’re participating than when they’re being lectured to. The most value you’ll get out of your board is when they’re speaking and offering you feedback and experiences from others companies in which they’re involved.

I recommend that executive teams send materials out 72 hours in advance. I recommend that CEOs do 1–1 calls with board members prior to the meeting to walk through the high-level financials. And I recommend that boards have 2–3 strategic topics that they consider during the in-person meeting. If you run your board this way you’ll maximize the time you have together as a group and keep your board engaged.

This need to “pre-sure” is super annoying – what’s the point of the meeting then? – but key to any meeting. The, point though, is to use the meeting to discuss and decide, not to just be informed.

Also:

Final bit of advice. Some teams print out materials and hand out a printed binder during the board meeting. Don’t be this team. While it’s tempting to have a bible for your board members you’ll just enable them to “scroll ahead” and look at future slides when they’re bored. If you serve up their distraction then you only have yourselves to blame when they don’t pay attention.

Sometimes board members print out your decks or financials in advance and bring their own print outs. It’s super easy to politely say, “If you wouldn’t mind I’d love it if you would leave your notes in your bag. I don’t want to be controversial but I would love to try and have everybody fully engaged in the discussion and to do so I want to make sure everybody is on the same page at the same time.

It takes some bravery to tell your bosses (the board) what to do, to be more professional and polite. The results are probably enjoyable by both sides of the table, though.

Source: One Simple Way to Eliminate Distractions in a Board Meeting

Rethinking Enterprise Architecture

In the cloud, DevOps, agile, whatever is hot and new era, the role of enterprise architects is rarely addressed. There’s probably plenty useful for them to do still. I’ve been trying to figure out what those things are recently.

Also, see the slides, which are usually more up-to-date. There’s also a recording from DevOpsDays Charlotte.

Not actually a DevOps talk

I get asked to talk on DevOps a lot. Here’s my current (late 2016 and 2017) presentation, going over the why’s, the how’s, the technologies, and the meatware that supports including some best and worst practices based on what Pivotal customers do. See the newer slides with big pictures on most slides, and some of the older slides

Also, here’s a more blatantly pro-Pivotal (and longer) version that you might have seen, esp. if the talk title was something like “Digital Transformation in the Streets.”

Much of it draws a lot on my cloud native journey booklets as well.

Come see me in Poland

I’ll be in Poland next month speaking at two events:

It’d be great to see you there as, you know, I don’t get to Poland much.

DevOps for Normals

This is one of the talks I give at DevOpsDays and other places. You can check out a recording of me doing it early on at DevOpsDays Austin (slides), and there’s many iterations on it. Here’s me doing it at SpringOne Platform 2016, and the slides for DevOpsDays DFW, 2016.

If you’re like me and you prefer the internet over meat-sacks, for more Pivotal material like free books and two months of free PaaS, check out my Pivotal page. Also, for some discounts to various conferences – including a few DevOpsDays – check out my discount code page.

Better ways of developing software or, coding like a unicorn, government edition

I’m often asked to come speak on, well, the topic of “tell us about the new, interesting stuff out there that makes software development better…but don’t be pitching me anything.” This is my most recent cut at that kind of talk.

You can check out the slides as well.

See these slides and the government edition of them too. This presentation changes slightly each time I give it. Here’s the first, rehearsal run of it as well.

Cloud Native, the why and what

We launched the Austin Cloud Native Meetup this week, on March 2nd. Marcello and I gave talks, first defining what cloud native is and then doing a demo of what a cloud native setup looks like.

Here’s recordings of the three parts, an intro, defining “cloud native,” and the demo:

Intro

Cloud Native, the why and what

Check out the slides as well.

Demo

Up Next

We don’t have the next meetings scheduled, but we do have people committed to giving talks. Diego Lapiduz said he’d come talk about the work 18F is doing with cloud.gov (you may remember him from a Lords Of Computing podcast episode and the frequently cited ATO reduction of 9 months to 2 days). And we’ll also have Amit Likhyani come down a reprise his talk from the Dallas Cloud Native Meetup, “Tibco’s Journey on Cloud Foundry”.

So, keep your peepers peeled – and sign up with the MeetUp group – and we’ll see you next time.

Docker industry research roundup, circa 2015 – Austin Docker Meetup, Jan 2016

I was asked to be on a panel for the first Docker Austin meetup of the year, tonight, Jan 7th at 6pm. Here’s some slides I put together in my capacity as “person who used to put together slides like this and is trying really hard not to do his job pitching Pivotal to avoid being rude” (well, except for a shameless plug or two):

See ya there!

Update: I’d wanted to put a TAM in – the money Docker and containers are going after, this from Gartner:

chart.png

While matching it to virtualization is a poor match (you’d probably also need some systems management and maybe even appdev numbers in there), I think looking at the current x86 virtualization TAM is as good as you’re going to get with a conservative approach.

My reasoning is that if “the market” is willing to pay this much for virtualization now, that’s the kind of foot-print and allocation we should start looking at for “containers” (over more of a 10 year time span, probably).

For this kind of hand-wavey, way future looking TAM’ing, what’s a plus or minus a billion or so anyhow?