“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.
I did a video series with O’Reilly going over my advice for surviving and thriving (“working,” I guess) in a big company. “You should watch it, it’s really good,” raves the man who made it.
So, you should check it out.
“Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.”
Just links today.
Relevant to your interestsTwo methods for designing better, more developer friendly platforms - Two ways to make good platform product management decisions: go to where the developers are, ask the developers // a little article by me.
Platform Engineering: Orchestrating Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure - A big overview of platform engineering. Also: Syntasso gettin' into the devrel game!
Forrester: Tips for assessing hybrid cloud management - All these years later, enterprise workloads are still running on all the clouds, public and private.
How to avoid working too much
Surviving and Thriving in a BigCoIf you work in a large organization, you’ll like this new video series I did with O’Reilly. Check out the intro above, and here’s the topics covered:
Cultivate your Style and Character.
How does a BigCo Work?
Mentors are Nice, Champions are Better.
Asking Questions Leads to Homework for You.
Assign Homework to Filter out Vampires.
To Innovate, Hide Out.
Slides are Docs.
Always Have an Ask Ready to Go.
devPRops - better put PR in your backlog
Better put PR on the backlogArt for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. [AI culture problems as art]
The Gemini thing: the conversation around AI technology is now based on how it can navigate social and cultural issues, less if it “works.” These social and cultural issues eventually wear out - people forget - so you have to just stay alive and hold it back.