Current status: there’s about two weeks left before the work year is over. I’m lucky that I get a lot of time off at the end of year. VMware gives a whole week. The idea of the world being shutdown and, thus, feel guilt free about doing nothing is more appealing than it’s ever been. I’m going to try a slightly new format this issue: “less.”

Suggested Theme Song:

Automating bullshit - OpenAI ChatGPT removes office worker toil

Well, it’s actually really amazing. The OpenAI ChatGPT is a great toil for eliminating office worker toil. Toil is a concept that comes from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering methodology:

Big one this week. My thoughts on Twitter; what to do with your past-self; CFP’ing; some music recommendations; as always, lots of links - some tasty ones on kubernetes market-sizing (a lot smaller than you’d think).

Suggested epigraph: “I woke up this morning Didn’t recognize the man in the mirror Then I laughed and I said, ‘Oh silly me, that’s just me.’“

Suggested theme song:

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 Conferences

Suggested epigraph: [see title]

Suggested theme song:

Current Status

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.”

Suggested Theme Song:

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:

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. That is my disclaimer! I'll send out the usual type of newsletter this weekend, or tomorrow. Sometime soon.

What is platform engineering?

I am going to start with this definition of platform engineering. It is three parts, and, like, I don’t know: who knows if it’s right? It is a proposal, what I can figure out so far. You and I will figure it out.

(I've been consolidating all the past places I've had newsletters. If you got this email in error, or don't want it, here is the unsubscribe link. I apologize for the merge-madness.)

Epigraph for this issue: it's probably fine.

Theme song: "Rise," Herb Alpert.

Epigraph for this edition: “Most things I worry about, never happen anyway.”

Or, equally well said.

Art as Therapy, or, The Buddha Had No Kids Part 2.

Hot new epigraph for daily life: There's probably a lot of things I should be doing, but I've gotten good at not doing them.

Mid-week edition

Boy, in this issue you have a ramble - and then I lost energy and needed to get on with my day. I've written this issue up many times over the past ten years and didn't do much work to find my previous typing. Also, with a little more searching and finding/paying for some analyst reports, you could probably get something useful.

May I suggest putting this on repeat as the background music for reading the blow?

Hot new epigraph for daily life: I don’t know man. I spend a whole lot of time not thinking about that.

Found at the Lobkowicz Palace.

Current Status

Two trips this week: Prague and Brussels. I did one of those too frequent business traveler things and returns home to Amsterdam for six hours between trips to visit family. It was good! Now there’s no trips until VMware Explore EU in BCN. Hopefully this means finally getting back to tiny videos, content writing…and several online talks (webinars and conferences) I have. I should hustle these to you, but in the mean time, you can find them on our webinars page.

This is a long edition. What can I say? The deal here is to empty out my “notebook” at least once a week no matter how short or long. I was in Warsaw for a day this week: Prague and Brussels next, and then not too much until VMware Explore EU in November. I hope.

Octopus getting into a bathtub, at Zachęta, Warsaw | Flickr

Explore cote’s photos on Flickr. cote has uploaded 1431 photos to Flickr.

Where does the obsession with SaaS/cloud revenue come from?

Most tech companies (as in companies selling tech, not Facebook & co.) are obsessed with converting their revenue to cloud and SaaS revenue. They want to show that they’re growing that revenue either on its own (the public cloud companies) or that they’re conferring traditional licenses software revenue to SaaS/cloud/subscription¹.

It's one of my daughter's birthday this weekend, she's 9. The days go by!

7 Interviews

At VMware Explore last week, Alex Williams and I did seven interviews. They were actually a presentation and then an interview. Check them out!

First, this delightful picture: .

It’s a mid-week newsletter. Why? It feels like something helpful to do, sort of therapeutic. I’ve left a few self-promotion, things I’ve made things off the past two newsletters. Lucky you they’re below!

As a reminder, we’ve started the Tanzu Talk podcast back up, so you should subscribe to it in your podcast player, Spotify, whatever. I let it wilt on the vine for a good year or more (in favor of the videos and, you know, just staying sane by doing less work). Sadly, this means the downloads are, like, way down from their peak of 1,000 to 1,500 an episode (which is pretty good for the type of podcast it is, especially a corporate one). Anyhow, we’ll get the downloads back up - or not. That’s the first step to handling a negative thing, just add “or not” to the end of all your hopes and dreams and move on.

Notebook

Current Status

I am on a train going between Paris and Amsterdam, stopping at Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Schipol before going to Amsterdam Central. The train is nice, nicer than a plane to be sure. This is the last of a lot of travel for me - Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, then for vacation, admittedly, Paris.

“The last of” is a bit relative. Next week I go to Warsaw; the week after Prague and Brussels; and then nothing…until, hopefully, a vacation sometime in October for the kid’s break.

Well, onto this week’s newsletter!

This week: Getting better at making podcasts by listening to them, more business travel tips, upcoming talks of mine, links, and random notes.

Current Status

I’m at VMware Explore this week, I was at DevOpsDays Dallas last week. That’s right: two weeks of travel away from home. I don’t recommend that length of travel. Things start to get weird after about a week of work travel. On the other hand, it was nice to spend a weekend in Austin between the two.

The contrast between a small, volunteer-run conference like DevOpsDays and a big-ass “professional” one like VMworld will be fun to track.

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.”

(This is a habit to build up: waking up early, before everyone else. It can be hard to keep up as sleeping in is considered a great achievement in life. Life can be too much work to get time to work.)

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”:

https://twitter.com/VMwareExplore/status/1557547390156029957

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.

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. This humus one is OK; I can’t figure out humus. Roasting stuff is always the best. And if you want some inscrutable ones, see here.
• With the kids home at school for summer, I am starting to think about working in the office - going to the office! First, I need to finally get my VMware badge. Then it’s a 30 minute bike ride each way. That part is an excellent side-effect. I love biking in Amsterdam, and having it be a routine enables that “gym of life” habit.
• “beads of sensation in a mundane world” - I was in Vienna this weekend, I'd never been, it was great. There several (many?) old cinemas playing older films. Just up the street from my hotel they are playing a James Bond fest. That night it was The Man With the Golden Gun. Among many other things, it reminded me of a time when travel - any travel - was exotic and exciting: fun locations, undiscovered and only seen in airplane posters. It go me thinking: how would I do that now?
• Read this paper in developer toil and how to find it that I helped write. There’s also a teaser/summary published.

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.

WordPress.com’s interface for this is super goofy and ugly, but it will do the job. When you confirm your email, you’ll need to select how frequently you want to be notified: each time I post, daily, or weekly. If it was me, I’d subscribe at weekly. You can go in and change this as well.

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

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!

devopsloop.io  •  Share

Tech Marketing

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 Loop

Better 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. Anyhow, register for it and attend! It’s free, dude!

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. The lamb was good.

How to run fun and interesting executive dinners, events, etc

How to do fun and interesting executive dinners, round tables, etc. – online and in-person – Coté

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.…

cote.io  •  Share

Why urgency matters

Most software/cloud vendors have people who do competitive intelligence. Here’s what and who that work is useful for.

Uses for Competitive Intelligence

Jordi asked about the usefulness of competitive intelligence (at software/cloud vendors) in the Software Defined Slack. Here’s what I added to the thread:

Notes on what it’s like to be back, compare and contrast. Also, analysis of our recent kubernetes survey

Lots going on at the moment. We’re on vacation for two weeks, finally going back to Texas to visit. Most of our family hasn’t met our two year old, born at the start of COVID in Amsterdam. And while I’ve been back to Austin twice in the ~4.5 years we’ve been expats, the rest of my family hasn’t. That’s a long time to be away and leads to this pro-level thinking:

Me: “we should make sure to rent a place with a kitchen.”

Kim, my wife: “why?”

The last “platform” diagram you’ll ever need, chop the first paragraph. Scroll all the way down for two secret videos about kubernetes.

Grind!

How to build apps to run on kubernetes

OMGWTFBBQDEVSECOPS; how to give a DevOpsDays vendor pitch;

The Difference Between DevOps & DevSecOps

In this longer blog post, I go over how I’ve finally come to think about what DevSecOps is.

The pain of legacy software doesn’t hit until it’s too late. Scroll to the end for a secret video that only you will be able to watch.

Kubernetes for Developers, April 26–27 in Chicago

We’re kicking off our developer conferences later this month in Chicago, April 26th and 27th. It’s SpringOne Tour time! This year most of the talks have something to do with app development with/on kubernetes: not all, to be sure. There’s also finally some .Net content, and I’ll be talking about DevSecOps and Platform as a Product.

New kubernetes usage survey info, with IBM 5151 retro-dream charts. Scroll to the end to chill out your ear holes on the smoove waves.

Here’s an analysis of the most recent CNCF survey I did. It’s been on the shelf for awhile since we were looking for somewhere to publish it, on InfoQ it turns out. As you can guess, I liked making those charts.

Benefits of Using Kubernetes, y/y

Looking at what writing style is and how to weave it into your own thinking. Scroll to the end to see how to get all the Nutella out of the jar.

Inspiration for developing a style and aesthetics

Looking at what writing style is and how to weave it into your own thinking. Scroll to the end to see how to get all the Nutella out of the jar.

Inspiration for developing a style and aesthetics

Two pieces of writing advice for when your goal is to communicate, not (just) entertain. Scroll to the bottom for a Yacht Rock playlist.

Hold the reader's hand

Here’s a piece of writing advice that seems annoying at first, but is especially needed in most non-fiction books: tell people what you’re about to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. I’ll give you an example. I was reviewing a book draft recently and the author wanted to make the point that “digital is the new default” and secondary, that the scale requirements are different now. They then jumped into a list of example in business and regular life. It’s great to provide examples of statements like “digital is the new default,” but it’s jarring to just read through several section of this. By simply adding some short surrounding text, you can make the transition softer, less noticeable. 

“Digital is the new default. This is true across IT that’s used to run businesses and that consumers use. Let me show you a few examples of each.”

Family pets as OKRs in FY23. Executives to talk about getting better at software. Scroll to the end to see bacon frying.

IRL OKRs

New family member.

Objective: enhance our comfort, peace of mind, and sense of comradely by owning a dog.

You risk being thought a fool if you say “PaaS,” so let’s get a new phrase, and, please, don’t use “portal.” Scroll to the end for a steaming hot pancake.

Long break

Yeah, I don’t know. The stream of content comes and goes. Here’s some since last time. In case you’ve forgotten, this is my newsletter where I write barely thought-out and edited, uh, opinion pieces and analysis like the below. Also, there are links I’ve liked, things of mine that I want to shamelessly self-promote, and whatever else.

Like and subscribe!

You risk being thought a fool if you say “PaaS,” so let’s get a new phrase, and, please, don’t use “portal.” Scroll to the end for a steaming hot pancake.

Long break

Yeah, I don’t know. The stream of content comes and goes. Here’s some since last time. In case you’ve forgotten, this is my newsletter where I write barely thought-out and edited, uh, opinion pieces and analysis like the below. Also, there are links I’ve liked, things of mine that I want to shamelessly self-promote, and whatever else.

Like and subscribe!

The Dune books are almost annoyingly self-important; realistic cloud migration strategies; the year in reviews; and links!

Dune

I’m reading through the Dune books (the core six ones) and I’m struck by how incredibly self-important they are. That’s not the exact phrasing but they’re completely serious and humorless. Almost inhuman! 

Still, I’ve finished the first too more quickly than I’ve read any books in the past 12 months. While the pompousness turns me off - and, ironically makes me laugh at how over the top it is - they’re page turners because I want to see what happens next, especially when it comes to world-building.

A little bit on lock-in, some app modernization links, and an online holiday party for you to chill out.

The Land of Cockaigne, Bruegel

Lock-in

One of the most frequent objections/benefits/discussion points in software is the idea of “lock-in.” This usually means “if I pay someone for something, I’m using something only they have, and I’ll be locked into it.” With public cloud, it applies to cloud services as well. I’m never really bought into lock-in as a huge deal. I think there’s always lock-in, no matter what. When thinking about lock-in, the question isn’t so much avoiding it, as figuring out how much you want to take on for what benefits.

A little bit on lock-in, some app modernization links, and an online holiday party for you to chill out.

The Land of Cockaigne, Bruegel

Lock-in

One of the most frequent objections/benefits/discussion points in software is the idea of “lock-in.” This usually means “if I pay someone for something, I’m using something only they have, and I’ll be locked into it.” With public cloud, it applies to cloud services as well. I’m never really bought into lock-in as a huge deal. I think there’s always lock-in, no matter what. When thinking about lock-in, the question isn’t so much avoiding it, as figuring out how much you want to take on for what benefits.

What does “multi-cloud” mean? There are multi-definitions. Har har. Also, securing cloud applications and custom software in state and local governments. Also: kubernetes is not for developers…?

Approaching Rain, Southwest Texas, 1922 Julian Onderdonk

The many meanings of "multi-cloud." (Well, two at last.)

I really like the recent O'Reilly cloud survey. There’s a lot going on in there especially when it comes to seeing how people use cloud, concerns they have, and so forth. The major take-away for me is that people use all the clouds and, of course, still have a huge amount of “not-cloud,” on-premises IT.

Original content

DevOps Metrics for Technical, Business and Culture Transformation

This is the talk I gave at VMworld this year. It goes over three types of metrics to use in all your digital transformation, get better with software stuff. While I don’t list very actionable (yeah! check out that work use!) metrics for culture, I think the novel thing in this talk is the suggestion that you track culture change with metrics. Also, I revisit one of my favorite case studies, the IRS.

Developers don’t actually want to change the batteries.

Bruegel

Original content

Developers don’t actually want to change the batteries.

Bruegel

Original content

Excuses to keep doing exactly the same thing, if not even less.

From The Fight Between Carnival and Lent.

Original content

Software Defined Talk Episode #326: Just Jump In

This week we recap Datadog’s announcements, discuss Sequoia’s investment pivot and hot takes on Facebook’s intent to rebrand. Plus, some thoughts on heated pools…

www.softwaredefinedtalk.com  •  Share

Another take at writing up why app modernization is important for business, and the usual links to stuff and my recent podcasts, etc.

Smuggling in Modernization

I’m working on a project I call the #legacytrap. Trying to explain to executives (CIOs and non-IT executives) how important it is to modernize your old stacks of IT, mostly stuff used to support all that in-house software that runs the business. I have a slide I use that summarizes the problem in surveys:

Lots of original content this week, and unstructured tips on moderating a panel. Since it’s been two weeks, a passel of links too.

We fear change

This is a the first new talk I’ve done in awhile. It came out alright - I could do a lot more commentary on the existing organization change models, and I cut some tactics for management to make up for time in the conference agenda. Anyhow, I’ll have to find a conference to give a 30 minute and then 50 minute version…and find that extra content.

Nothing profound this time.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam

Free DevOps conference, DevOps Loop, Oct 4th

Promotional gif

How I find time to make thumbnails for my enterprise videos.

Sorry, I flaked

The most operational self-help tactic I’ve learned in years is: get comfortably flaking out on things. Missing meetings, being late delivering things, being unreliable, skipping studying Dutch today (and tomorrow)…just failing at living up to your full potential. 

How was your week?

A free conference I helped make: DevOps Loop, Oct 4th

Next month is DevOps Loop. It’s a conference I’ve been helping out together and it has an outstanding talk list. I’ve worked closely with several speakers to curate talks on things I’m interested in and that they’re excited about. Register and attend for free, it’s October 4th.

The newsletter is back, for now. This is actually issue #156, but who’s really counting?

Your author, as drawn by daughter.