A happy madness
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.
Rest assured, dear reader, that I have read all the books; listened to all the podcasts; had all the conversations with the professionals; reflected on all the selves; read all the philosophers, priests, self-help shit-heads, and monks; and have purchased and patinaed all the tools.
At this point, it’s just bouncing back and forth, falling down holes and staircases and trying to make sure I’ve remembered to leave ladders and secret passageways that go back up.
“Sink as far down as you can be pulled up.”
Here’s three ladders from this week.
(2)
Maintaining
Trying out optimism today: relaxing my expectations and going with things.
The problem will be loosing track of work and responsibility, but, likely, it’ll be OK.
I can’t let the kids become hedonists, but I can go easier on them
And I might be able to be mindful of becoming angry.
(3)
Tiller
Maintain a focus on small actions, small wins that add up. There are many hours in the day, days in the week, and the year. There’s lots of time to get things done, and lots of time to lose. Just use them more than lose them, and they’ll add up.
So too with happiness.
(4)
(There’s always something nice happening right in your own home.)
Original programming
Podcasts
- Michael Coté’s Discount Webinar Barn, aka, The Webinar Episode, Software Defined Talk #245 - Come with us as we solve life’s greatest mystery: lead-genless webinars. Coté also gives his 10 day in review of Hey email. Also, theories on grilling hamburgers.
- Interview: Kylie Grenier on Digital Transformation - Brandon interviews Kylie Grenier from DXC Technology. They discuss Kylie’s experience in leading digital transformation in the public sector, her time as a Cloud Futurist at Cisco and how she helps clients build digital transformation strategies today. Plus, Kylie offers some tips on how to get a new job. Brandon, as always on this one.
- This one goes out to all the cross-country truckers, Software Defined Talk #243 - Extracting configs with awk, Apple announces stuff, and salad dressing. That’s the topics. Mostly.
Talks, presentations, webinars, etc.
Since last we met, I’ve done two webinars, which is a lot more than normal (one a week!):
- Kubernetes for Day 2: FedOps - this is a discussion between Craig McLuckie and me about how kubernetes thinks, why VMware cares about it, and how ops people’s activities change in a kubernetes world. Check out this excerpt that’s lead-gen free! It’s a bit like the interview I did with Justin Garrison awhile back.
- Using agile software to enable an agile business - the latest version of my standard talk: This presentation explains why getting better at software is important and can help improve your business. It presents the product model of software development, in contrast to the typical project model. It then describes three common barriers to change and how some organizations overcome them. There are three case studies of real-world, large organizations used throughout as well to illustrate the major ideas. The video was made to be translated into several different languages, so I speak slow and haltingly…and don’t have the inside jokes and asides that I usually do.
THE_BILLS_PAY_THEM
Be sure to go download one, or both of my free books on the digital transformation bullshit:
…I mean, they’re actually good and helpful, not total BS.
Relative to your interests
- Emoji’s in email subject lines - ‘Overall, emojis seem to be a double-edged sword: they can negatively impact users’ attitudes, but they can also attract some attention and move the focus on the visual aspects of the email (which, in itself could be good or bad). Over usage will wipe out their benefits, likely leaving us only with the drawbacks. ‘ I have some commentary over on my blog.
- Do more of what you like to get less depressed - ‘The risk then is that people withdraw further. They choose easy but unrewarding behaviours instead, such as staying at home (even as lockdown is lifted or as new social opportunities arise). At first, this makes good sense. ‘This withdrawal is driven by people’s desire to avoid the negative emotions that they’re experiencing when they try to do these activities,’ according to David Richards, a professor of mental health services research at the University of Exeter. McMillan agrees, adding that this behaviour ‘works in the immediate term because it makes you feel better’. The difficulty lies in what this inactivity sets up in the long term. The risk, he says, is that ‘it moves you further from what you need to do to get something out of the world’.
- Language leads to imagination - ‘As they cultivated these habits, mentally stimulating themselves and paying careful attention to the results, humans did something else, too. They created the sense that there was a private world inside them, where their real self lived and thought, a world that sometimes seemed more real to them than the one around them. In a sense, they created their own conscious minds and selves.’
- The lost money was never there in the first place - ‘From that perspective, it’s easy to see “where the money went:” It never existed in the first place. If my stock had a quoted price of $100 on an exchange, and that price fell to $75 per share, that means the forecast of the present value of future earnings for that company fell. The stock is a claim on the future stream of profits; the estimated value of the stream fell because of new taxes, new regulations, changes in consumer preferences, or the invention of a new competing product.’
- Cloud Foundry moving to kubernetes - ‘“Each project team is using it as an opportunity to re-architect, the way that their component of the system works to include more projects from the broader cloud-native open source community, whether it’s inclusion of Fluentd or Prometheus, whether it’s the deeper integration with Istio, whether it’s re-imagining how our own code can exist as [custom resource definitions] within Kubernetes,” Childers said.... Both of those projects build on CFF’s increased focus on the Kubernetes ecosystem. Childers previously explained to SDxCentral that Kubernetes remains a hard platform to use in production environments and that it was focused on easing that integration. It targets the Cloud Foundry platform as the simplified, nice, and easy-to-use layer on top of Kubernetes to build “the best enterprise developer experience” and avoid “any of the infrastructure conversation.”’
- Gartner’s container TAMing - ‘the analyst firm predicts swift growth revenue growth for the likes of Red Hat, Rancher and VMware, with this year’s sales of US$465.8 million to become $944 million in 2024.’
- Agile doesn’t work in a broken organization - ‘While delivering software has evolved, I constantly encounter efforts to perfect and enforce adoption of practices derived from a context that doesn’t necessarily exist – and maybe never did.’
- Meetings are the bloodwork of organizational change - ‘Most of the time spent in meetings is spent on information sharing and updates on short-term operational details — sometimes known as “death by PowerPoint” — rather than on confronting and resolving tough strategic and organizational issues.’