“Analogpunk, or, Tools, Shoes and Misery,” Bruce Sterling SXSW 2024) - He has a skill for turning mundane objects into lectures and relating them to culture. Put in direct link to MP3.
State of Platform Maturity in the Norwegian Public Sector - Hans Kristian Flaatten - If you’re interested in how the Norwegian government is using cloud native stuff (like Kubernetes), this is a survey readout circa 2023/2024.
Platform engineering design and UX
Many of the videos from KubeCon EU are on YouTube now, just days after the the talks were given. That’s pretty great! Here’s three talks from the Platform Engineering Day that I really liked. They’re primarily focused on what I’d call designing and product managing a platform. I’m a fan of the “platform as a product” notion - I came across it around 2016 or so at Pivotal and saw many organizations apply it.
“Designing for Success: UX Principles for Internal Developer Platforms,” Kirsten Schwarzer, KubeCon EU, March, 2024. - - Good tour of applying design-think to platforms. That is, what do designers do on platform engineering teams. Some items: (1) Do at least one hour long user interview a week. This gives you an idea of what your users (developers) are doing, struggle with, how your improvements are helping or not, and give you data to decide what to do next. The last is especially useful for fending off The Boss and others who have suggestions that are not helpful: show them the data about what is, at least that you do things driven by analysis, not hunch. (2) Progressive disclosure - only show what people need for a given talk, not everything the tool can do. Can help with cognitive (over)load. (3) Errors are a good source for finding what’s wrong.
“Boosting Developer Platform Teams with Product Thinking,” Samantha Coffman, KubeCon EU, March 2024.
A lot of good commentary and advice on product managing the platform, some techniques, mindsets, etc. Chief among them: focus on the value/problem you’re solving first, then how you solve it second…also trying to quantify what the problem is so you can measure if it’s fixed, and prioritize it.
Sometimes, Lipstick Is Exactly What a Pig Needs! - Abby Bangser, Syntasso & Whitney Lee, VMware - How can you start to take a design/UX-driven approach to building your platform (you know, your pile of Kubernetes stuff to pull it all together for app developers)? Whitney Lee & Abby Bangser have a good mind-model to think about designing the interfaces (how people use parts of that stack). Thinking through how you design your platform “interfaces” for app developers is especially important if you’re building your own stack instead of buying one of the already integrated ones.
How to write a business book proposal
I’ve written a few (little) business books, reviewed several, and reviewed several proposal for business books. Here’s what I think works well in proposals you’re sending to publishers:
The publisher is in it to make money first, “important” content second. Your proposal is a business pitch, not an idea pitch. Make sure you talk about who the audience is, why they will buy the book, and why your topic (the market for the book) is hot, or at least, room temperature.
"Is a platypus a Kubernetes symbol?"
Wastebook“portal platform.”
#outmeated.
“Those sizzlers are nice.”
“Tell him I’m eating,” 9 minutes in.
“chair-use disorder.” Here.
“Is a platypus a Kubernetes symbol? Developers love to take scary things and make them cute.” (Overheard in the crowd before a Cory Quinn talk at SCaLE 21x.)
Also: “what about you, Charles, what are your thoughts on Terraform…and DevOps in general.”
KLAUS KREMMERZ.Relevant to your interestsStudy finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less - “A new study out of Germany suggests that once you let people try them, they tend to have a real impact on car use, and even car ownership.
What junior/senior developers and CTOs need to know about internal developer platforms
This is from last Fall at the SHIFT conference, but it still holds up:
Relative to your interestsWhy Are Pants So Big (Again)? - tl;dr: you can wear comfortable jeans again. // “There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself” And: “If you zoom out far enough, all the paroxysms around self-presentation arrange themselves into an orderly, eminently predictable swing between big and small – you could call it the pants pendulum.
Good strategy
Re: “Bad” StrategyStrategy is people, and in a corporate setting, all the wonky parts of people are amplified. In the places I’ve worked, the lower down you go in the organization, the less relevant strategy is. What’s relevant is the actions you can take, not the outcomes the executes are going for with their strategy, let alone anything resembling a classic big-S Strategy. Besides, unless you have a huge chunk of equity, you get paid the same no matter the outcome.