Coté

This is the first of a few videos and blog posts I have on our annual Kubernetes survey, which you should check out if you’re into that kind of thing.

Much like financial debt, technical debt is helpful when managed responsibly, but like real debt, tech debt can also stop growth and innovation in its tracks. My colleague Bryan Ross has a piece out on tech debt with five ways to address is. Here’s a summary of it. Think of technical debt as the accumulation of compromises on development quality to save time. Some examples of these choices are postponing unit tests, running outdated software, or focusing on end-user features at the expense of internal processes.

I’m a Texan living in Amsterdam, so when I come back to the States (Dallas and Austin this time), I noticed things about American that I never did: People are eager to be helpful, especially when you have a bunch of kids. Everyone offers to help with luggage. A cashier will race back to the shelves to find a replacement for a broken item, or verify the sales price.

I’ve started writing this bit two times (see the community one and the one on ICs vs. managers for what happened instead). If Twitter fails - or I stop using it - I’m looking forward to recalibrating my sense of urgency. One thought going around is that no one would want to rebuild Twitter (I hear it most in the Ben Thompson Podcast Universe). I haven’t verified the business-side, but that seems true from the business angle: Twitter isn’t, like, that great of a business and has failed to figure it out like the Facebook Conglomerate.

The text contrasts short-term publishing with long-term orchestrating in work environments, highlighting the different roles of individual contributors and managers.

The people in my tech community who talk about community find Twitter so vile that there’s little discussion of the good parts. It was a great place for discovering, building, and “doing” community. And it still is, though mixed in with all the other stuff1. This history of DevOps, cloud stuff, and everything that followed - open source, even! - would be different if Twitter weren’t around. We’d be in…listservs? Blogs?

Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the early adopters, you have to show how you make it better and are evolving the project without hiding it.

Some commentary on a recent survey commissioned from my work, VMware. Unsurprisingly, open source is used by almost everyone. When it comes to what I care about software development, open source is indispensable. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a developer who only uses closed source software, if not whole systems like kubernetes or Cloud Foundry for running their applications. It’d almost be impossible. And, indeed, in our State of the Software Supply Chain survey this year, 2022, 90% of respondents said they were using open source in production.

Here’s what I’ve learned in doing 30 (maybe more like 40?) executive events in person and online over the past four or so years. Over my career, I’ve done these on and off, but it’s become a core part of my job since moving to EMEA to support Pivotal and now VMware Tanzu with executives. At these events, I learn a lot about “digital transformation,” you know, how people at large organizations are changing how they build software.

Allow me to indulge in some trans-Atlantic compare/contrast’ing. I was back in Texas and Chicago for a few weeks recently, so of course noticed some difference between Europe and America. It’s the tiny differences that stack up. Talking about them can be an annoying tic of expat people. But, whatever. It’s been over two years since I’ve been back, and here’s things that stand out: All the small talk - now that I understand most of the talking I overhear (unlike in the Netherlands), I’m hearing all the small talk people have.