Coté

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?

Some notes on attending conferences, notes on enterprise open source comercio-community, asides and waste book…lots of links. Suggested epigraph and theme are on vacation this week. FOMO and Family at ConferencesFOMO is OK, but it is also not OK. All the things you’re missing out on are extra work that drive only marginal profit (for you). Better to enjoy your free time. Also, those FOMO’s might be worthless, or introduce risk.

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.

_Suggested epigraph: [see title]_ Suggested theme song: Middle Cyclone by Neko Case Current Status I am a big fan of not “talking about the show on the show,” but, obviously, in the little nerd-corner of the Internet that I mostly exist in, there’s a big export of people from Twitter to Mastodon. I setup two accounts there: @cote@hachyderm.io which is my “person” account and my cross-posting firehose account. The first is, you know, me.

It's hard to know if there's too much stuff should be doing, or if I have it project managed well enough that I don't need to worry about it right now. Below, a little bit on being cool with security in open source usage (survey says!) and the usual collection of interesting words seen, stuff I've produced, and links I liked. Suggested epigraph: “it’s pretty darn hard to protect a painting from somebody throwing a can of soup at 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.

Do you really like winging it, or do you like more structure? And, of course, the emptying of the waste book and links relevant to your interests. Suggested epigraph: “I don’t care that much." Suggested theme song: Why Choose by Shopping First, this Platform Engineering Follow-up Thinking I think what I missed in my thinking out loud was: I should just use that community’s own definition and work within the parameters of the intention and spirit of the thing.

Or, “is platform engineering just another excuse to use the infinity loop SmartArt in a PowerPoint?” Preface: I usually have a whole passel of random stuff in the newsletter, it’s my waste book, by design. This past couple of weeks I’ve gotten obsessed with figuring out what the deal with platform engineering is, I mean, beyond the obvious. Here’s my write-up so far. I don’t know, it’s a draft of an idea to see if it feels right.