October 2, 2022

“A picture in the style of van Gough, two office workers sit in cubicles, one of them is so large he pushes the other against his desk”

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.

Sometimes you forget that, like, good things are out there, are possible. That you can do more than the same grind. de Botton’s whole deal is, sort of, that good art - culture and philosophy, outlook - does this for you: reminds you about smiling and pulls the corners of your mouth lips gently up. I fall more often into the Toby Ferris school of thinking…which, by design, leave you confused, but just confused enough to shrug your shoulders and go, “well, I suppose I better get onto lunch.” Or, as us gruff Internet people would say: “cool story, bro.”

Anyhow, that’s all by way of saying, this is music from Louie Zong is wonderful.

“Incredible, a perfect stylistic fit. I love these little experiments you do, and this one was really a delight.” One comment says…and my mind goes down a tunnel of remembering fun and joy in life. Whether any of this is true, it gives you the chance to learn from the following story (this is a key mind-tool you learn from Ferris, esp. in his Brueghel book, one of my favorite books of all time): he sat down and though, “it’d be fun, even worthwhile, to make Nintendo game music in the style of Django, complete with the whole, like, atmosphere of scratchy records and tin-y audio. So. Let’s do that!”

And then, as a niche interest, the Business album is another world-building…thing. Even the track names are perfect: “Consider The Market!”, “Groovy Graphs! (B), and, of course, “Close The Deal!”.

In the case of Business, without getting too cynical about life, what you have is something that defuses the importance and stress of, well, business. In that weird half ironic/half “I’m gonna do the shit out of this and make it the perfect thing for what it is mode it operates in, you listen to it and think: oh, right, that mandatory physical safety and GDPR training I have to do is so silly! Hahahah. Business! Let’s kick back and click.

In most therapy I’ve had - and self-study from Western self-help books to Buddhist Lite stuff - there are always results you get to: (a) everything is actually OK, you just can’t see that, and, (b) you are the problem, you must change yourself.

Those notions are repulsive if stated so bluntly - as the kids put it now-a-days, it’s gas-lightning.

I mean, if I wanted a challenge, to work at something, I can just do that every day without trying: getting my kids to school, changing a poop diaper, remembering to be nice to the people in my life, and, eventually, doing something for myself. Also, there’s taxes to pay, and it’d be cool to plan a vacation before all the AirBnB’s with heated pools in northern Europe are taken. Oh, but wait, I also need to go and learn how to meditate so I can sit with the garbage voices in my head; or maybe I need to re-engineer my mental perspective to reframe the way I think about my life - have I read Atomic Habits yet, or whatever that TED talk about how babies respond to smiling versus frowning faces?

Or, put another way:

Yes, [the Buddha] did have at least one kid, who he left behind with his wife , when he went off into the jungle to meditate and seek enlightenment.(Bear in mind he may well have had more unofficial children as, being a prince, he most likely had a personal harem of women at his palace). It is said that when Buddha returned to his wife after his enlightenment, she asked him why he could not stayed behind in his palace and have attained enlightenment . He had no answer for that.

In contrast, good art addresses the core problem at hand: you’ve been suffering through an endless course of shit. Why not eat something that tastes good? That will probably cheer you up without you have to self-actualize, or whatever.

Or, the answer is simple: just go listen to some good music, have a meeting in the hall of fire, and you’ll be ready for a little bit more ready, maybe even happy for a couple of hours before you can go find some new art, get to sleep, or have a good meal.

My upcoming talks: legacy trap, state of kubernetes

I’m doing two webinars¹ next week that you should check out:

• Escaping the Legacy Trap - this is an overview of our upcoming booklet. It’s actually pre-recorded: Marc and I recorded it on Friday. It’s great stuff! Marc has been a great co-author because he’s added his own takes, style, and framing to what we’ve been doing. Similarly, in this webinar he set the framing: “let’s talk about the making of this book, and talk about the book” instead of summarizing the content. That made it more, as people say, “natural” and “conversational. Anyhow, you can watch the talk for free, with it’s world premier on October 5th at 10am California time. Also, out booklet should be out real soon now.
• Learn why Kubernetes is here to stay, State of Kubernetes 2022 - this one is October 6th, I’ll be doing it live. I wrote up the findings of our State of Kubernetes survey this year, and here I’ll go over it with some more commentary. Also, at the end will be a little overview of what VMware does here - most people are curious about that, so check it out.

Waste Book

• “I had a moment of indecision as to whether it would be chivalrous or condescending…” here.
• The next time some is like “social media is destroying humanity,” send them this, and be like, “you’re ideas are boring. Unsubscribe.”
• A summary of Joan Didion one-liners: “Evil is the absence of seriousness. Drop the whole idea of knowing the truth. Whatever you do, you’ll regret both. Crazy is never interesting. Stop running away. Write it again.”

SpringOne conference, Dec 6th to 8th

Developer, DevOps, platform engineer, digital transformation executive…just looking for an excuse not to go into work…

These are all great reasons to attend SpringOne this year, December 6th to 8th in San Francisco. I’ll be there! I don’t remember which talk I’m giving, but it should be fun…for me! Hahrhahhhaaa…

Anyhow, I think about 40% of the content is now posted so you can check it out.

When you register - YOU MUST REGISTER! - use the code COTE200 to get $200 off.

My content

• A pretty excellent Tanzu Talk News podcast. I think, here, we have fully gelled and figured out the format.
• TAMs are a Trap - this week on the Software Defined Talk podcast, Brandon and I discuss the rate of Public Cloud adoption, Google’s Simplicity Sprint and OKR’s. Plus, some thoughts from me on slippers, “house shoes” as they used to call them when I was growing up.

Relevant to your interests

• Matt on Tumblr — Why “Go Nuts, Show Nuts” Doesn’t Work in 2022 - What you want to watch here is how a CEO does something rarely done: write like a real person, make clear points, and talk about a difficult subject all while doing a great job further establishing the culture of their company.
• DBMS Market Transformation 2021: The Big Picture (Gartner) - One estimate is that half of databses running in public cloud: “The biggest DBMS market story continues to be the enormous impact of revenue shifting to the cloud. In 2021, revenue for managed cloud services (dbPaaS) rose to $39.2B – it now represents over 49% of all DBMS revenue.”
• AWS CEO says the move to cloud computing is only just getting started - “Essentially, IT is going to move to the cloud. And it’s going to take a while. You’ve seen maybe only, call it 10% of IT today move. So it’s still day 1. It’s still early. … Most of it’s still yet to come.” So 90% of IT is run on-premises?
• Financial Considerations of Moving Abroad - Good basics to think about, esp. the taxes part and making sure to setup all the bank accounts.
• Tacos Are a Staple in Austin. How Is Inflation Impacting Taco Spots? - “Tacodeli’s prices for ingredients and supplies have increased in the double-digits.”
• Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius - “it’s some real fantasy-baseball bullshit” And: “There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see.” Here, the author means us little people’s thoughts about the billionaires - that they’re magical, we can’t see their business work so we assume so - but it applies in the other case as well (as it does for anyone!): when there’s some difficult problem, if you don’t know why it’s difficult, it seems easy to solve. You know, the whole run the government like a business thing, etc.
• File under “yay, capitalism!”: “I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance. No one sits down and says ‘let’s make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!’ Finance, as an abstract entity, just sort of does that on its own.” Matt Levine on the problem with “finance.”
• Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered - “In fact, just like many of us, McCarthy says what he likes to do most is stay in bed. ‘Some days I get my books and typewriter and just stay there all day — or even a couple of days.’”