Speed up with Test-driven Development

Doing test-driven development is the best way to maintain software release speed and avoid “legacy” software slowing you down. what TDD is, why it helps you avoid legacy slow-downs, and shows that most people don’t actually do it.

Better, more decisive meetings

Most meetings should result in a decision. However, most meetings are not run well enough to get a decision. Today, I summarize the method Pivotal Labs uses to find The One Thing to Work On. It’s from the book – you can .

The mayonnaise measuring epiphany – better software with discovery and framing

How COVID changed IT priorities & spending, with Rita Manachi

(I don’t usually talk about the “show on the show,” but I’m trying something new here - quicker, smaller, hopefully daily things. Hopefully if I have smaller parts flowing through the system, it’s more sustainable. This will be longer than I’m hoping it’ll usually be as I have to clear out the inboxes.)

Everything I know about platform operations and platform as a product

Staycation

Last week the kids had off, so I took it off as well. They actually gave Monday and Tuesday off as well, but a week is about as long as I can stand to vacate my normal life. The unstructured staycation life is at first alluring, and then I’m near the end a regret not doing more. But, “relaxing” is supposed to mean…relaxing. “Doing more” sounds like work.

So they say.

It was a good chance to make some ornate food, so absurd things like bike my kids around to play Pokémon Go, and do some house cleaning.

Lizard brains in digital transformation

Lessons from child psychology: my daughter fell on her bike recently, twice. She actually did "well" at falling, in the framing of our DevOps think. She gets really frustrated to the point of paralysis - wonder where she gets that from!

How would I get her back up to get to school on time?

If it were me, I would just get back on the bike, angry as hell, upset at everyone, the world, and myself. For whatever reason, I'm someone who goes forward, full of anger. I don't take time to calm down. This is very bad. After decades of this - 3 or 4 - it's burned me out and I can barely function with simple things like my kids telling me they don't like cheese when I've just served them a cheese sandwich. (I mean, mysteriously, they love quesadillas, but cheese outside of two crisp and warm tortillas is bad?)

Kubernetes is an enterprise architecture

Five years ago, in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry days, we had a lot bravado. We almost challenged people, dared them to do something radically different. The mindset of doing daily releases, collapsing together multiple roles into product teams (business analyst-cum-product manager, developer, designer - this second a totally foreign concept to most enterprises) and then automating so much infrastructure that ops people were sort of not needed - it was a lot to process if you were a VP of Infrastructure in 2015, or even a CIO.

We would call this an "opinionated" platform. Brian Gracely was the first I remember to thoroughly describe what was going on here. His distinction between structured ("opinionated") and unstructured platforms was great. We should have hired that guy! :)

Whatever it was called, opinionated/structured meant that meant that we'd made choices about how you architect your application, packaged it, instrumented it, and run it. To get all the benefits - for it to even work - you'd have to follow these opinions. Early on, these types apps would be described as something like "12 factor apps" using microserves. I think we call them "cloud native" apps now.

Source: wikipedia.

I’ve been listening to . The writing is, literally, comic book simple. It’s so bald and direct, people say instead of show. There’s little artistry to it. The dialog and narrative quiping is often cringe-worthy. Instead, the artistry is in the stories, the world-building.

I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts. I don’t seem to work consciously. I write to unburden myself, to amuse myself, to arrange in order the things that bulge in my head, to make myself notice things.

-- Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1987 by Helen Garner

Well it's been it's been a long time. I'm not really sure what happens, I just get tired of things and need a break: need to balance out how I spend my time, find motivation.

No Subject

There’s little to report this episode. Things go on and on, over and over with just enough variation to keep me awake.

Movie at 11.

(I still struggle to take time at the end of the day, or any part of the day, to collect together all the wunderkammer- and commonplace book-ready scraps from the day into an organized pool. I still don’t clean up my room, as it were, each night.)

A happy madness

(1.)

¯_(ツ)_/¯

You wouldn’t know it unless you listened really carefully with a fine toothed comb to all my Internet bilge, but my mind gets unhinged easier. Or, maybe with such a mixed metaphor, you can hear it clear as a bell. This week has been like most others, up and down, terrible, and up.

Are you actually changing?

(1.)

Improving the way you do software - doing agile, DevOps, or whatever - is about changing. If everything is working fine, you don’t need to change. The teams working on software (“developers”) change how they organize and operate; the people who build and operate the software in production change how they organization and operate; the compliance people change how they organization and update. I’ve written up a lot of this in recent books.

Managers, leadership, executives, they do must change how they organize and operate. There’s some good ideas and tactics in a recent book, Doing Agile Right - a lot about framing up the old, Taylorian way of command and control into delegation and trust.

(1.) Neither urgent, nor important

You can never step in the same digital transformation twice

(1.) Junk Enterprise Modernization

Getting excited about work has become hard. The struggle is doing the same thing over and over. There are two things there.

First. The kubernetes world has won among all us platform competitors from the past five or more years. All of us were fighting a PaaS war, but the industry and buyers turned out to just want IaaS. Kubernetes is low level, the operating system to the stack of software development. This means that the stack above it has to be built, enterprises are now waking up to the need to build a development stack ontop of kubernetes. They'll discover the need to change how they do software, build out the technologies, and so forth. This what we were doing at Pivotal in the past five years, and our competitors were doing. Once Docker, Inc. fizzled out, Kubernetes stole the focus from the application layer several years ago. You could argue that "events" (Kafka) were happening, and "microservices," but I don't know: that seems very early. Anyhow: now we're back at the beginning of explaining how to do software better.

A good story adds value to a product

Originally posted on my blog.

The more you can spread the narrative, the greater the potential force for your business. To what extent is impossible to know. As Shiller writes in his concluding paragraphs, “there are serious issues of inferring causality…these issues are not surmountable.” Even if we can’t measure it, or directly attribute causality, the effect of stories and narrative economics is real and powerful. (Source)

We're uncomfortable admitting that a totally made up “story” about a product increases the price for it. Luxury brands play off this: a Yeti is more expensive then a generic cooler, handbags and all that. The story of a brand makes the price higher. The same can be true for technology, no matter how targeted it is to engineers who believe they can't be beguiled.

We’re all doing webinars now

Two months is a long time to not be working. Well, to only do a little work. I’ll be back at work on Monday, and it’s hard to know what it’ll be exactly. This is an age of webinars (I’m sorry “online conferences”) which I have, I don’t know, 13 years of experience doing.

As we discussed in this week’s Software Defined Talk, webinars get a bad rap. I think that’s because most of the content is, well, crap. Good speakers don’t often want to do webinars and they don’t bring their best, they also recycle existing content. They save up their good work for in-person conferences. If these speakers do more webinars, the quality will increase.

Prioritizing design time by durability, not populist beauty

A refinement of the "less is more" tool:

Subtract rather than add: this rule must be understood in the sense of reaching simplicity, getting at the essence of the object by eliminating anything superfluous until no further simplification is possible.

Wherever possible one must make a choice of materials for the object and also a choice of techniques. For example, makers of motor-car bodies still produce thousands of parts and useless refinements simply to please the questionable taste of the public. The money they spend to gratify this taste (which apart from everything else changes each season) could be spent on making this worship of an ephemeral kind of beauty into a stable appreciation of authenticity. This would reduce production costs and lead to a simpler and more genuine product. An object stamped out in one piece, with the minimum of working hours needed for finishing, is the ideal that a designer ought to work towards.

— Design as Art by Bruno Munari

One-handed video editing

While on paternity leave, making videos is an easy, high value product to make. So I've made a lot!

The videos so far:

One minute videos on digital transformation

I’ve been dying to work on some project while on paternity leave. (Yeah, yeah, I know!) Small videos are a good project. I don’t like short videos, but the whole rest of the world seems too. Plus, they’re faster to make than long ones. I’ve made four so far. They’re fun!

There is no six page memo in remote schooling

There’s so much hidden skill in working with online tools for school. My kids and my mom show me this each day when they work on school:

Re-living the present before fantasizing about re-living the past

I fantasize about how I could have lived my past days better, been happier and gotten things done. Just enjoyed living instead of muddling through things. When I'm putting myself to sleep nowadays, I sink into the same pre-sleep dream-scape: I'm always riding a bicycle, maybe ten or eleven years old. But I'm exactly me, as I am now, that day, and I've been transplanted back into that Michael. I get to relive life over, with all that I know now. I've thought through how I'd get money (something we forget we had none of as a kid), how I'd make sure not to be identified as a genius so I could stay in the same grades and meet the same friends, and then I think of the fun things I'd do, the projects I'd work on.

I'm telling you this to make the point: I rarely ever think of how to make my present life better, how to even make it OK.

Instead, I muddle through my days because I'm in that anxious state of not knowing what to do, what to prioritize, and future FOMOing.

Starting in on Hunter Thompson

Someone asked me the best way to start in on Hunter Thompson, what book to read.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is his masterpiece. After, or during that, pick and choose pieces from The Great Shark Hunt. His piece on the Kentucky Derby is, I don't know, much more important than Fear and Loathing: there was nothing like it in literature until he wrote it and so much of what we now consider good writing, even intellectual living, flows through that breach.

Hunter Thompson is the continuing path through a tube made by Franklin, Nietzsche (while German, yes, he completely destroyed eons of European thought, freeing up room for everything, anything new), through Hemingway, the Marshall and Eisenhower interstate plans, Vietnam and Nixon into how Americans think about our interactions with life. After him comes hip-hop, and then here we are. He's like a comprehendible, cynical, but pragmatic Walt Whitman, clearing out all the crud that clogs the tubes.

Nothing to give up on

Most of how people tell me to fix myself is to give up, or give into things. I’m not calibrated well to do that. At this point in my life, I’ve already given up and given in to all the things I can. I only have a handful of things I want, and do when I can’t get or achieve them, is drives me mad.

For example, administering my kids home schooling is impossible to do well; we have a newborn; my wife is bed-bound until her c-section heals; I have to do everything, but I’m not even working. To keep sane, I have to compromise, prioritize, give up and give in.

Current status, a poem

I don’t know, man.

Whatever.

(Just click Publish.)

Cook eggs in olive oil

You should olive oil to cook your eggs with. I was visiting with some friends of our several years ago, one of them from a Houstonian Greek family. He was making fried eggs for us, and poured a big pool of olive oil into the skillet. “What the hell?!” I said in my head, “you’re cooking that in olive oil?” I asked him. Sure, why not? he said, I always do.

For whatever reason, this was mind-blowing. I’d been cooking eggs in spray-bottle oil and butter when I wanted to treat myself - if I was going really crazy and wanted to Arkansas it I’d use left over bacon grease like my grandma.

But, since then, I’ve cooked eggs and just about everything else in olive oil.

They found $5 billion in the couch

I did a calculation like this too quickly and really goofed it up on this week’s Software Defined Talk, doing some double counting (I think?) and otherwise just messing it up all crazy-like. This wild estimate is, hopefully, less wild.

There's a couple weeks backlog here.

Scuba

I went scuba diving for the first time a few weeks ago. My son liked it so much we went twice. I was worried at first - I don't take well to learning new things at all, I fear it. But this time it was great and, even, relaxing. There's a lot of garbage voices that fill my head all day long: I have that thing where, though it's easily provable that it's the opposite in my life, I can't ever focus on good things - I can only see good when I look outside of myself.

New book from me, free too!

I have a new “report” out from O’Reilly and sponsored by VMWare/Pivotal. It’s focused on how “The Business” can help out with digital transformation: .

Developers require janitors

Rightly, people put a lot of value on developers:

Open source can’t be used for differentiation

Despite 20 years of using, analyzing, and marketing open source, I still don’t really understand how vendors can use it strategically. The only thing I know so far is that to make money you have to sell something.

If you give away your product for free, competitors will just use it, and extend it, adding proprietary differentiation. This is what Amazon does that freaks out open source startups. In addition to just using the open source software as their own products, they add the differentiation of running and managing it for you, and putting it into the whole of AWS. [Insert here.]

Hug your manager

“the real action in any administration is executive in nature: knowing what regulatory buttons to push, which enforcers can really go for blood, who to put where, and how to manage them.” - Emily Stewart via Ezra Klein

I talk too much

I've had several meeting with new people at work recently. This happens when your company is acquired by another: everyone wants to get together to see what your deal is and if there's a way to work together. You setup new teams to pursue the bright new feature and they have to figure out what their deal is and who they'll do it.

There's lots of "intro" meetings. "You two should talk with each other!" I'm encountering a problem I'd forgotten about: nothing ever happens as a result of those meetings. A whole new set of actions and next steps and even fundamental understandings of what the problem and goals are pops up later.

In these settings, I'm the one who talks a lot: on any given topic, I drop in all the context and walk through all of the scenarios I can think of. My thinking, writing, and analysis style is that one where you don't really know what you're thinking until you're done.

I’ve got a backlog of links and other stuff from the past few weeks. My son wants to play Minecraft with me right now, so I’m just sending you this. Links, as always, relevant to yours interests, and more ephemera coming next time.

Museum bilge

The Buddha had no kids

Walking back from the Maritime Museum with a friend I asked him, "how are you so happy all the time?" They explained that they just thought about what was rational. Getting upset and angry didn't get good results. You had to think through and sort through the best, or workable options.

Personal rationality - that's the thing I lack. I can't argue, prove out my actions and feelings. I just, I don't know, don't believe the lines or argument. It's similar to how my kids just can't understand that we need to be to their school at 8:30am so it's imperative to put their shoes on right now, not watch TV, play with an iPad, or draw with permeant markers.

Indecipherable note to self from 5 Dec 2019, 9:22pm on my iPad in Amsterdam

“It’s all incremental change.”

A fake simulacrum

At the Amsterdam zoo, during my kid’s art class, I go into the bird house, the section of the aviary made up like the Southwest. Listening to the birds, it make me long to hear the grackles of Austin. It feels like home, makes me smile and close my eyes. They’re not as beautifully cacophonous as the grackles, but the geographic feel is enough.

Looking at the name cards later, I see they’re some birds are from North Africa, also “North and South America.” (That easily made combination of two hemispheres shows how people’s view of the world is shaped by where they are. Those of us from those Americas would never belittle each other by simply conjoining them. Each place is solidly its own, nothing to be combined as if it was all one sound.) This simulacrum, then, isn’t to be found in nature: cactuses and Southwestern ground birds mixed with African dessert and birds.

Workaholic

1.

I am slowly giving up on the world. Well, the world of following things so closely that that endlessly read RSS and newsletters and press clippings. The astute of you may have noticed I follow no one in Twitter. My sense, my drive, that I have to be working all the time and on-top of things is dwindling. I am telling you this because my identity is defined by being a workaholic.

I mean, here I am, writing, editing, and sending this instead of reading some comic books or just staring at the wall here in this shitty airport on a Friday night.

Leading failure

Another excerpt the book I’m currently working on - check out .

This week, I’ve been finishing up the first, full draft of my book, The Business Bottleneck. I’ll send it over tomorrow, on Monday, so it’s mostly finished for now.

As always with a text at this point, it’d be nice to go through and marble it up more, even add more content. I don’t think I’ll get around to talking about hiring, skills development, and compensation, for example. But, whatever, you’ve got ship.

I don't want to see anyone

Yet in many professional exchanges you may want to disguise your actual state of mind. Even in more intimate settings than the office texting has replaced phone conversations. If being heard makes many people self-conscious, imagine being seen. Bartleby has a face that only a mother could love—which is why, although he occasionally appears on The Economist’s podcasts, he is rightly absent from its films. He has no desire to be seen by the other people with whom he is communicating—or to see himself in a corner of the screen, a process that automatically makes him want to fidget. If a public-relations type suggests a video interview with someone, your columnist always opts for a phone call instead. ... A videoconference can be highly useful on occasion. But not every meeting requires it. Before switching on the screen, ask yourself: “Is my face really necessary?”

I too despise video calls, as I despise most work calls. It's not just my own face, but seeing other people's faces is distracting. I've got nothing against their faces, really, I literally find it distracting and squeamish. I don't like looking other people in the eyes. I'm not sure what that it is, but it's hard - taxing, it takes a lot of energy and attention - for me to see people. Well, people I'm not deep friends with.

In most calls - it's usually zoom - I try to cover the video remote displays. Weirdly, there's no way to turn off remote video. That feature would be so, so nice for me. Doing this is difficult, though.

Do you still need an IT department?

Another small chunk from my book in progress.

At this point, it's easy to ask "do I need an IT department? I mean, they seem to be kind of a hassle and grit in my magic innovation of rapid differentiation." Famously, IT was predicted to cease mattering sometime in the 2000s. What this argument meant at the time was that previously complex, proprietary, and expensive infrastructure and software was set to be simplified, opened up, and sold dramatically cheaper. An on-premises email server doesn't "matter" because companies can get email cheaply, even for free. The same is the case for word processing and spreadsheets, and even the most complicated databases and programming models. Enterprise applications for ERP and CRM are a bit more secure in their "mattering," but even the price of operating systems has effectively, or literally, gone to zero. IT is still needed, but large swaths of it are commoditized and should take up less time of your organization's budget and attention.

Here, I like to distinguish between two types of IT.

Here in Barcelona, still, for a Gartner event. Can’t get enough of a beach town, right?

Enshrine urgency: always run in the yellow

Organization structure, or, Plato never worked at an enterprise

A small chunk from my book in progress.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4OIw1IJfiP/

Traveling is catching up with me. It’s exhausting, in all the ways. I’ve been traveling constantly this Fall (with a week here and there of being home. I’ve been business traveling for - let’s see, starting in 2006 at RedMonk… let’s round up a little bit and minus out the two years I parked myself in Austin at Dell - 12 years.

The work is valuable and good, and it drives a tremendous amount of . But.

No escape

We’re vacation all over the island of Ireland this week, the four of us. It’s exactly what you’d image: green, friendly, rainy sometimes, full of sheep, and huge oceans.

The cliche of unplugging on vacations applies: insert that virtue signaling here. Of course you can’t escape thinking about the real world. Right after this, I have a team meeting in Chicago, flying directly from Dublin to it; a consultative meeting the day after; and then I need to finish a draft of my second book by mid-November. Plus, there’s all the real life stuff to worry about: should I be forcing my kids to be more academic, or is it OK that my son gets really excited about hatching a dragon egg on some rando iPad game? Shouldn’t my daughter know how to write basics by now? Am I being a good enough husband? Should I be getting up earlier to go see the sights more?

I call these thoughts The Garbage Voices: those little languid demons that poke through my mental defenses at twilight and at the witching hour. It’s impossible to separate signal from noise when it comes to The Garbage Voices, so I dismiss them all: you still hear them though. Ignoring something doesn’t make it go away.

"Stories" & infrastructure software

First, "business" explained:

When it all comes down to it, what is a business? You are an organization that has identified a pain point that people are experiencing. In order to remove that pain point, you are offering a product in exchange for money. It sounds so simple.

Second: "stories." I'm always conflicted about marketing-think being too cutsey. You know, the whole "RandoCo. isn't a company that delivers 3D things in 1 to 2 days from point A to point B. No, RandoCo is a company that transfers delight." Or whatever. As I like to say, I want pizza in my pizza box, not a DVD."

Moderating a panel and interviewing

None of this is intended to be pedantic, or whatever. It's just the things I think of when moderating a panel or interviewing someone on stage. As ever with my advice, it's also driven by my content aesthetics.

Orchestrating

Followup, Austin BBQ

I'm told that Terry Black's is where you want to go for BBQ in Austin nowadays. They say it's Tasty Meats Paul's choice. As always in things food related, his recommendations supersede mine.

Original programming

Things to do in Austin for foreigners short on time

I navigate life, mostly, though food, rather, . Thus, my suggestions for things to do in Austin are primarily about things to eat. Also, I have a nine year old and have lived in Amsterdam for a year. So, my knowledge of “the hot spots” is about a decade out of date. Some of the places I recommend below may even be closed!