The next generation of developer productivity – O’Reilly - As ever nowadays, developer productivity is the top problem. Also, full CI/CD (or just good pipeline automation) is still hovering around 50% as it has been for a decade or more: “Over half of the respondents (51%) said that their organizations are using self-service deployment pipelines to increase productivity. Another 13% said that while they’re using self-service pipelines, they haven’t seen an increase in productivity. So almost two-thirds of the respondents are using self-service pipelines for deployment, and for most of them, the pipelines are working—reducing the overhead required to put new projects into production.” // I’m a little leery of survey like this because these the conclusions you’d make from there results seem to always be the case. But also, I didn’t read it in detail.
Days Notes, August, 2023
I’ve been off the publishing grid for awhile, even off the consuming the Internet grid. This is a mix of partial vacation, taking care of some family things, an obsession with D&D, and the first break in my workaholic nature for…20…even 30 years?
It is time for a few new habits, rather than swirling around the old ones. The most counter-whatyoudthink is probably to start going into the office more. My work has an OK-good office in upper west Amsterdam.
80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office - Hmm. It seems really hard to tell what the effects of remote working and in-person working are. People just have to make shut up.
Bike maker VanMoof also files for bankruptcy in Germany - I had no idea that this luxury bike company was in such bad shape. Their bikes sure seem awesome, but are hella expensive compared to the €80 beaters you can get that, you know, do the job just fine.
As HashiCorp adopts the BSL, an era of open-source software might be ending - Is it too soon to say that open source businesses no longer work? (Unless you’re a bit public cloud or you do open core?)
Checking In On ChatGPT - Text-centric AI best used for text-centric toil: “The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn’t quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more “boring” corporate tasks will always have its place."
PDFs vs. web pages: what’s better for users? - Bad things are bad, and using a thing for something it’s bad at (or when a better way exists) is also bad. PDFs are great, just not when it should be a webpage, or something else instead.
Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’ - Project versus product for happiness. Also, living life by waste book/commonplace book - something I certainly can appreciate. (Bit it a ringer it being Helen Garner, but don’t let that stop you.)
What they don't tell you about conference MC script writing
A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff
Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessionsI’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of MC script writing - creating it, and reading it. I wrote the MC script last year. And, you know, I’ve watched lots of main stage keynote dog and pony shows (and plenty of goat rodeos).
Half-harpy
I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out.
To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really.