Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? - Plan to never get past slide one: “Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment."
Second Wave DevOps - The tools keep changing: “Let’s face facts: our implementation is what’s letting us down. What worked for John and Paul in 2009 is, in broad strokes, exactly what we have been asking every single DevOps practitioner to do since. We’ve replaced all the individual tools in the system multiple times (look at the CNCF Cloud Native Landscape for the evidence): less automated infrastructure, more infrastructure as code; less monitoring, more observability; less data centers, more cloud; less svn, more git; less virtual machines, more docker; less capistrano, more kubernetes; less hudson, more github actions. The problem isn’t that we haven’t optimized each individual part of the system enough. We’ve built more efficient tooling at every step. But the way the whole system is put together? The experience of using it? That’s basically identical to how it was in 2009, and it’s the reason we’re stuck."
Survey: Majority of US Workers Are Already Using Generative AI Tools, But Company Policies Trail Behind - “The new survey finds that 56 percent of workers are using generative AI on the job, with nearly 1 in 10 employing the technology on a daily basis. Yet just 26 percent of respondents say their organization has a policy related to the use of generative AI, with another 23 percent reporting such a policy is under development."
iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates - A concise list. The journaling app comes out later this year.
A handsome grandfather clock
A NEW CAR!The first episode where Bob has his real hair.
I’m not sure how it happened, but The Price is Right is a major show in my life canon. The music, the camp, the excitement and sincerity of it all - it’s perfect in every way. At my first job at a dot.com in the late 90s we would gather every morning to watch it on a huge projection screen.
The Poetry of Pricing - “Pricing is a signal. It’s a conversation between seller and buyer containing information that both parties will exchange. On the part of the seller it suggests both the cost of the offering and the value it provides. Buyers are inclined to see if they can stretch to the next higher increment given the increased value proposition."
Taking a careful approach to AI in marketing - There’s a lot of analysis that we should all be doing with marketing, but it’s often hard to get at data and figure out what to do with it. // “Fifteen percent said that more than a quarter of their tasks today are intelligently automated, but they expect that to increase to 78% in five years."
The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World - “I remember feeling giddy most of time we were in production, not from the legendary amount of pot consumed, but from anticipation that we were going to blow people’s minds. We were excited and felt lucky to have an audience for our artwork."
Tech companies should do regional events more
Small, regional events are probably better than the mega-conferenceI’m starting to think that small, regional events are much - like much - more important for enterprise software sales than the big, annual events. In enterprise sales (where you’re looking to work for a few years to build up multi-million dollar deals), you’re usually targeting a couple hundred mega-organizations (plus all the governments, large cities and states, and large universities). You know: banks/insurance/etc.
How Can CIOs Communicate the Business Value of IT? - Talk with biz-normals about how technology can make the organization better, not on the activities that’s required to do so: “IT demonstrates value when we enable business outcomes, not when we report effort expended, resources consumed or work done…. Highlight the impact technology can have on business outcomes, so the value in the investment is recognized and IT gets the funding it needs.”