Most developers have adopted devops, survey says - I’ll have to look at this more, but: “29% of developers used continuous integration to automatically build and test.” This means that 71% of respondents are not automating their builds and tests. // “Grady Booch first proposed the term CI in his 1991 method, although he did not advocate integrating several times a day. Extreme programming (XP) adopted the concept of CI [circa 1989] and did advocate integrating more than once per day – perhaps as many as tens of times per day.” // 35+ years later, here we are at 71%. WTF? Something is weird here, or just 🤦.
Do software companies actually have good margins? - ’In other words, software development costs are COGS. Not literally; not according to the accountants. But in practice, if you can only sell SaaS software—and retain customers—by promising a steady stream of new releases, how are the expenses associated with developing those releases functionally any different than the money you spend on servers and support agents?’
Things I Like
There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1:
Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long it takes to get the good stuff/the point. I know the context, I want the fix.
“Management avoids firing people with paper trails.” Corporate Camouflage
The podcast fake-out video
LogoffThat’s it for today. Like and subscribe, hey guys.
(I should have made that full room video in black and white, maybe with a glitch and fast-rolling time code. But, what are ya gonna do?)
The State of Platform Engineering surveys - Perforce/Puppet 2024
When I look at recent platform engineering surveys, the results are positive: people see the value in platforms and platform groups. I’d say this is because platforms are helping speed up the app release cycle by automating a lot of the infrastructure work app developers would otherwise need to do, baking in/automating security and compliance, and, to a lesser extent, standardizing how apps are built, run, managed, and optimized.
Here’s my notes on one of those surveys, the one from Perforce/Puppet.
Solo Roleplaying D&D: Make full character sheets for NPCs
When playing solo D&D, try making full on characters for the major NPCs. This can be more fun because (a) making characters is fun, especially higher level ones, and, (b) you get more faceted NPCs instead of just stock, one-dimensional characters.
I’ve been playing through Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and I applied this one of the duergar dwarves, Durth. In the published adventure, he’s a Duergar Mind Master.
Enterprise AI, D&D with ChatGPT, & DevBurgerOps
Lots of original content this week, starting with this prediction about “enterprise AI”:
I also made these since last episode:
Another go-round at figuring out playing D&D with ChatGPT. It went pretty well! Here’s my retro/analysis of it, and here’s the actual play session with inline commentary.
I was the guest co-host on this week’s Cloud Foundry Weeklywhere we discussed the new features in the Tanzu Application Service 6.0. We, of course, spent a lot of time on the generative AI beta stuff that’s included.
Amazon Isn’t Killing Just Walk Out But Rather “Pushing Hard” On It - Hmm, hopefully we’ll see some nuanced corrections in all them news outlets…
Notes on how to use LLMs in your product. - “Even the most expensive LLMs are not that expensive for B2B usage. Even the cheapest LLM is not that cheap for Consumer usage – because pricing is driven by usage volume, this is a technology that’s very easy to justify for B2B businesses with smaller, paying usage. Conversely, it’s very challenging to figure out how you’re going to pay for significant LLM usage in a Consumer business without the risk of significantly shrinking your margin”