Coté

# Family Trip All the family vacationing is done. With three kids, and one a two and half year old, the principal that a “vacation” is much different than a “family trip” is certainly true. On a family trip, you must take advantage of the ad hoc vacation as it presents itself. Kim and I found many such moments. Renting a house with a pool helps, having your mother along to help with the kids helps too, making sure to wake up early to have an hour of two on your own helps…but it difficult to achieve when you wake up at 6am and think “I am on vacation, so I will sleep in.

 PROMO! My company’s big conference is coming up soon, VMware Explore (the new name of VMworld). Thinking of my own plans: I HAVE A LOT GOING ON. Anyhow, it will be fun. You should check out the catalog and register to come. Here’s one of my goofy ads, er, “videos”: twitter.com/VMwareExp… Notebook “It takes a lot of work to do nothing.” This smash burger recipe seems crazy, and weird to make.

# Programming Note Never mind about that WordPress newsletter thing. I need to stick to a normal one, so here we are back here. If you are annoyed by thrashing about, I apologize. You should be able to [unsubscribe here]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Notebook This week’s dad advice: if you’re going through a door that locks behind you, be sure to bring the key. This is a simple eggplant recipe. I think I need some better tahini and fresher olive oil, some herbs to put on-top, and then it’ll be an easy one.

Well, not that dramatic… If you enjoy this newsletter, you know I struggle to keep up with it. It’s annoying for me, and perhaps for you. So, I’ll try something new, being less perfect. You can subscribe to get notifications of posts I make to my blog, the more fragmentary version of this newsletter. I don’t want to force this on you, so you’ll need to re-subscribe by submitting your email address here.

Scroll to the bottom for my daughter’s favorite joke. Cynical Tactics for Change Management Most people don’t want to change. And why would they? What they’ve done to this point has been successful: they’re still here! Most people want stability in their day-to-day life, not the risks of trying new things all the time. So when you’re changing how you think about and build software, you need to make changing seem like the safest choice over staying the same.

Catch-up on four tiny videos, links, and wfh thinking. DevOps Loop, June 22, 2022 — devopsloop.io If you haven't registered yet, you should attend one of the conferences I help put together, DevOps Loop. I've spent a lot of time with several of the speakers to think up talk topics - they're ones I'm looking forward to. It's free and online, so it's super easy to attend. Check it out, register, and attend!

This is a bit of a ICYMI edition. I've been posting on my blog a lot more, so I'll give some pointers to that. DevOps LoopBetter clean up my desk.Our second DevOps Loop conference is coming up on June 22nd. It's free, and we've put in a lot of work to get an interesting line-up of topics, that is, speakers. I've worked with many of them to come up with new (or new-ish) talks.

I’m in Istanbul for a talk at Java Days Istanbul tomorrow. I’ve been publishing stuff to my old blog a lot at cote.io/notebook, which is fun. Here are two things, one a quick link to a piece I’ve been sitting in for awhile about doing “executive dinners” and then a write-up of the need for urgency to change. Pardon the lack of formatting a such, I’m on my phone in a hotel lounge tapping this out.

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.