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!

Paris, 2022.

Simplifying the Complex, Focus, and Saying Yes, or, it takes a years of saying “yes” to have the standing to start saying “no”

I am always eager to please someone and eager to demonstrate that I know things (whether I actually know them or not). With strangers, and in a work-context, the first is a lot of work, the second impossible to do frequently.

The ultimate way to please someone, again, at work, is to say yes to their requests. This is how you end up overloaded, rather, feeling overloaded. Saying yes is easy and gets immediate points for pleasing someone…and myself for feeling useful, justified in being employee.

Finding out what someone needs if they don’t tell you precisely takes a lot of questions, listening, tuning. And then you have to do the work. And hopefully you understand it, and will do a good job.

Knowing things takes even more work. The stressful thing is talking with people about all of that, being an “expert.” This becomes a real thing at a large conference like my work’s last week. There are so many announcements, narratives, and the people driving the content always attempt to paradoxically be both comprehensive and concise. To make a set of 30 products “simple.” And often they aren’t even product, they’re ideas as mechanical but vague as “capitalism” or “public transit.”

Simplifying all of that is an impossible tasks. Those of you, dear readers, who are analysts, press, and marketers have seen this first hand from all those sides.

Anyhow, those two things - wanting to please people and wanting to seem knowledgeable - make for stressful times.

In contrast, I think of a lot of Big Deal Luminaries in our infrastructure world. They often are saying one, simple thing in their talks and conversations. One idea like “developers should have better tools” or “security is important.” I’m characterizing them as overly simple because I can’t think of specific things - it’s lazy newsletter musing time!

I get frustrated with these clear, focused answers because they often don’t have details, they don’t give you something to do. They are not “actionable,” nor comprehensive and encyclopedic.

But, people like that simplicity! The people presenting this stuff are the Big Deal Luminaries! They must be doing something right.

…the stock-answer to the kind of anxiety that wanting to please people and wanting to demonstrate knowing is to say “no” more often. I always fret that saying “yes” has been default is what has gotten me where I am. I don’t think I can start being one of these optimized worker people who say “no” more than often than not. That just seems…really lazy? Really annoying? Not helpful to the group? But maybe I can start saying “I don’t know” more to both questions.

Here is what is difficult to figure out when it comes to focus culture at work: what are you giving up when you start being one of these “no” people?

The Beggers, Bruegel, 1568

Upcoming Talks

I have many talks, webinars, coming up:

• Sep 8 - Escaping the Legacy Trap: How to modernize the applications that are holding you back - Marc Zottner and I are finally finished with our book on application modernization. This is an “executive” book, not about code. The goal is raise awareness and understanding of “legacy” among managers, and give them an idea of how to start putting together their strategy and plans to address it. It builds on the work Pivotal/VMware Tanzu has done with customers over the past 5+ years. Book out soon!
• Sep 13 - How to Measure Developer Productivity with Metrics and More - we’ll go over some current, en vogue metrics and then discuss their use with some practitioners from GAIG, Kin + Carta, and Garmin. As we’ve been developing this, the part I’m most interested in is how metrics can make individual’s work-life better.
• Oct 6 - Learn why Kubernetes is here to stay – State of Kubernetes 2022 - I’ll over our Kubernetes survey, giving my analysis of what it means. I did a blog post and some videos from back when we released it.

Urban simulacrum at the edge of the suburbs

Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky “Character dwellings” which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm.

From Call for the Dead, 1961

More from John Le Carré

Leamas said he’d stick to whisky, and by the time the coffee came he’d had four large ones. He seemed to be in bad shape; he had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth toward the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape

Also:

“[As Germans,] I am afraid that as a nation we tend to overorganize. Abroad that passes for efficiency.”

Both from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. What an odd ending for that book.

Software Defined Talk #375: For the Birds

This week we discuss VMware Explore, Snap’s move to multi-cloud and the Galaxy Brain take on thought leadership. Plus, Matt Ray’s latest Raspberry Pi project is for the birds…?

Notebook

• Choice survey response on one of my talks last week at VMware Explore 2022: “He seems a bit jaded.” And a comment that represents most of the other feedback: “[I’d have liked] just more technical content and less wordy slides. The speaker was phenomenal though. Engaging and hilarious.” Those both sound about right.
• “Authority theater.” Merlin on RecDiffs “190: Three Whys Later”
• “CEO camp - or wherever they go to get their ideas.” John, Ibid.
• In Paris this weekend, at the museums. Nude women dominate in comparison to nude men.
• “The present work may have been among these pictures…. the models’ permissiveness and the artist’s accessibility to them implied that these oils were post coital-renderings, the women still flush and basking in the afterglow.” 1917. Either that, or the artist is peeping at the lady getting out of a bath, a regular Susanna and the Elders situation where the artist is the old dudes leering…indeed, a popular scene for old paintings, around 1555 for the Susanna in question.
• Even today, there is less interest in nude men: “I must mention, a dick painting may be the most impossible thing to sell, ever.” Also, as other articles note, nude pregnant women aren’t too popular.
• They are like “Juno with cow’s eyes.” An art dealer on Picasso’s series of bathing women.
• If you’ve stayed at a hotel two, especially three times and liked it, just always book that hotel. No need to “try out” other ones. It’s better to have a sure thing.
• Also: it’s usually better to stay in a newer hotel. Older, marble-encrusted ones seem interesting, but they’re usually broken down, at least odd with bad wifi.
• (I may experienced this opposite of this recently…upon checking out of a hotel I was trying, I reported that the shower head did not work, and had no been repaired the day before when I mentioned it. The hotel had not been renovated since 2005, I was told: I believe it!)
• For the record, I like the Le Méridien Etoile in Paris. I have stayed many times. Nice, crisp room, next to a metro stop, large breakfast buffet, and just a block from Le Relais de Venise.
• Couples at the hotel breakfast are always bickering with each other. And long-term couples elsewhere. It’s as if they’re (1) always seeking to establish the truth, making sure they’re heard, and, (2) [I think because they’re so familiar with each other] lack the social graces of being smooth and polite when doing so. They - we - get so upset at each other over these fights about “no, the coffee machine is broken” “well, I will ask them to fix it” “but, no, it’s broken, it won’t work.” We all do this, and, really: who cares? Being heard is so important to people though - it seems more trouble than it’s worse. Otherwise, it’s like they’re in the bad Westrum column of the.
• Baby t-shirt idea: What did I do this time?
• “Well it looks like a plane, but it’s a train.”
• This is an example, sort of, of Dutch mentality. On a plane, when there’s turbulence and the seatbelt sign is on, the flight attendants come through and make sure people have seatbelts on. They use the flash lights on their Apple Watch or phone; they pull bankers off sleeping people to check…gently and politely, of course. American flight attendants will walk through and ask, but not be so intrusive.
• License plate seen in Amsterdam: “Uzbek G.”
• After one of my talks at VMware Explore the A/V guy gave me a great compliment: “usually I understand what people are talking about at these [computer conferences] but I understood a lot of what you were saying - and I was laughing at your jokes too. That was good!” I get that every now and then form the A/V people and it’s one of my favorite types of feedback.
• Staying in character becomes a thing more and more, a defense against getting people upset when you complain. “Oh, really?” you say in response to a story of woe you hear, when you’re really thinking “why would anyone be that stupid?” or “wow, how did that happen?” when you mean “that person is horrible.”
• “all these options for future [ways of doing payments] as part of being a contemporary person.”

$200 off SpringOne, the best developer and DevOps conference that has ever, or will, exist

Our long-running SpringOne conference is coming up December 6th to 8th, in San Francisco. The talks are on all parts of application development and DevOps/SRE/etc. operations. You know, apps and kubernetes stuff . Most of the talks are selected, but not listed yet. I’m giving one on the legacy trap book. You can get $200 off if you register with the code COTE200 .

Stock Questions from Alex Williams

Alex is a great tech reporter. I’ve known him for awhile. Last week, while doing some interviews with him, I asked him non-offensive ways to ask a few questions. Here were his suggestions

• “Who uses this?” or “what problem does this solve?” - those are good alternatives to “why does this need to exist?” and “isn’t there already something that does this? Why do it again?”
• “Who are you peers?” - people hate going over who their competitors are, let alone admitting that they have any! “There really is no one who does what we do” is a bullshit answer. Even if there is no one that matches feature-to-feature, there are substitutes and there’s share of wallet competition. However, lack of “real competitor” is very, very rare.
• “What gets/got you so excited about this?” - for example, open source community management, solving the eternal software build problem, etc.

The best notebook is the one you have

My earliest professional comics work was all roughed out in crappy notebooks on the back table of a late-night burger bar with a Biro, scribbling away at three in the morning while drunks and ravers with nerve damage staggered in and out of the place.

Warren Ellis

Relevant to your interests

• Good overview our app dev stack for kubernetes, the VMware Tanzu Application Platform - free report from IDC going over “TAP,” some brief mentions of kubernetes momentum they’re seeing in surveys.
• Business Dudes Need to Stop Talking Like This - On thought-leadership language: “business-dude lorem ipsum.”