About my studio - Working from home, artist edition. (1) no commute saves time and means booting up into work is faster and frequent: “there is also an advantage to not having a separate studio outside your home. When I did rent a studio in the past it meant that all my artwork in progress was elsewhere, and that required overcoming inertia to make myself go to my studio. When the artwork is right next to me then it’s simple to do a few minutes extra work on it – correcting a mistake or enhancing a part of the image – without needing to trek to the studio.” (2) you think about work more frequently, a good version of living rent free in your mind…work lives rent free in your house? “And having my work-in-progress continuously visible out of the corner of my eye while I’m decompressing from my day job – streaming a film, reading a book, browsing the web – means that I unconsciously reflect on it during my downtime, allowing flashes of lateral insight to spark in my head while I’m actually concentrating on something else.” // These more apply to solitary synchronized, creative endeavors. When it comes to synchronized collaborative management (“meetings”), maybe not so much.
UHF in UHD: Weird Al’s cult classic movie will get its first 4K release - “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a spatula.'” // this movie, and the VHS of Pee Wee Herman’s stage show are probably the basis of my humor, at first. Many summers watching stand-up and Doctor Katz on the Comedy Channel came later, but we’re probably equally defining. And, of course, the Phil Hartman era of SNL and the occasional Letterman when I stayed up that late.
The Ultimate Guide to building Developer Tool Websites - PLG for developers. Get them home pages set-up for the funnel!
Buy your platform, don't build it
When it comes to cloud native application platforms, we’re at an important evolutionary point: will the best practice for platform strategies be to build or to buy? Should you choose the components you need for a platform and integrate them together, or should you buy a pre-integrated platform? Unless you’re a handful of organizations, the practical answer is that you should buy the platform.
Before I get to why, what even is a “cloud native platform”?
Automation and the Jevons paradox - Always good to bring in Jevon’s Paradox.
60 to 100 days to onboard a developer - Highlights from the Harness State of Developer Experience survey
Today’s survey: “State of the Developer Experience 2024,” Harness/Wakefield Research.
Most enterprises need to automate their build and deployment pipelines. This is more than just building code and automating tests (which 71% of people are not doing), but also automating governance and security checks (which 41% of developers are not doing).
In my mind, this is the number one thing development organizations should be working on in 2024, and probably next year.
That time when Microsoft bought and killed Nokia phone unit - “Barely two years after it was announced, the whole thing fell apart and Microsoft wrote the whole thing off as a tax loss.” And: “Elop was right, but his solution wasn’t.” // “Disruption” is an easy word to say, but a very difficult one to solve. // And a D&D reference! “The Nokia board rolled the dice again on hiring another non-Suomi manager, Rajeev Suri, and this time hit a double D20 in D&D terms.” (Though, I’ve never heard of a “double d20,” but, sure, probably.)
Commoditize your condiments, or, open source business models considered
Business models are fascinating. Most business models come down to a type of arbitrage, at least as I understand it. You find something you have that you can sell to someone else, crucially, at a price above what it cost you to make that thing.1 In, let’s call it, The Capatalist Upbrining, there is a major intellectual jump where you understand that the price for a think is not determined by what it cost to make it, the costs of goods sold.
6 views on open source business models
On that random person in NebraskaOpen source is important for the entire industry, sell side (especially in the cloud era) and buy side. Things would go very bad if it did not exist as method of software production and innovation. (Source: see the QED from that one xkcd.)
Open source is a bad business model, it’s very difficult to grow and it conflicts with the VC need for a big pay off.
Volo’s Culinary Guide to Icewind Dale - We talk a lot about the downside of the Internet, the web, whatever. But the existence of this as a widely available thing is an example of why the Internet is great. I mean: when would this ever exist otherwise except as some obscure zine on a magazine rack at rundown university coffee shop?