Coté's Commonplace Book #44
There is no Thanksgiving in the Netherlands. WHO KNEW?! Winter is settling in here. As a Texan, I barely understand winter. But, also as a Texan, I find cold weather novel and fun. We’ll see if that lasts, but for now, it’s awesome. Also, biking turns out to be fantastic. Living all my life in Austin with it’s beautiful hills and oven-heat, I’ve never found biking pleasant. But here in Amsterdam I just make up excuses to take my bike out. I’ll find myself, all of the sudden, clear across town on an hour bike ride.
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Always be brand marketing. |
Original programming
It’s been a long time. There’s lots of Software Defined Talk episodes out there, Pivotal Conversations, and even some CASHED OUT. Ear-Hole time!
- I’ve moved my “blog” over to cote.coffee, mostly.
- “Draft” is too strong of a word, but I have all the sections typed out for my “how to cloud native” book, now renamed Monolithic Transformation. Hopefully it’ll bet published early next year.
- Digital WTF is a good enough title for a collection of my columns. We’ll see if I can get that one out too. I’m excited that good, old friend of mine might write a forward for it. Sleepin’ on a Cray, indeed.
- How to do a one minute pitch at DevOpsDays.
Finally, there’s some new recordings of my talks up:
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I finally found an ignite talk I did at SpringOne Platform. I was going to speak on metrics, but that seemed really boring. So, I changed it to how to get free shit at conferences:
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Relevant to your interests
There’s more links over at cote.coffee, but here’s some select ones and ones that weren’t linked.
The Longform interviews are right up my alley, they’re all about the process and work-life of writing. This one, in particular, is very humane and, thus, interesting, useful, and inspiring.
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If you don’t improve the business, it’s all worthless.
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The contra-take.
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Good example of a blameful post mortem.
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Reading
I’ve been reading some books of late just to pay attention to style and structure. I mean, the books need to be interesting and entertaining too. Also, there’s the usual mix of business books and whatever else.
- I Am Dynamite! - a new biography of Nietzsche. It’s good. Just academic enough to be educational, but not enough to be plodding.
- Consider the Lobster - a collection of David Foster Wallace essays. Good luck getting through the dictionary review. The John McCain article is classic Boys on the Bus. It made me realize that there’s an audience for seemingly boring, almost otaku-level topics like…how the press covers campaigns. Maybe that book on the enterprise tech industry would work after all. Also, of course, he’s a great writer with an even greater eye and moral/culture inquiry engine. There’s also his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which is almost too disturbing to listen to when you’re alone on long business-travel trips. Pair it with This is Water and you’ll probably even it out.
- The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, New and Revised Edition - one of the better ones out there.
- Introduction to OKRs - I really didn’t like that big name OKR book that’s out now. This is a fantastic overview and I feel like I understand what an OKR is and how to tactically use them to make work better.
- Make Time - spending time with personal productivity book is a big risk: most have nothing new in them and are full of - hey, I apologize, etc. - stupid case studies. This one is good and introduces an important new tactic: just flake out on people to buy time for your own projects. The idea of having one goal for each day - a “highlight” - is good too.
- The Fifth Risk - per usual with journalist politics books, it’s distracting disjointed (Lewis is, after all, a feature story writer), but it’s good content. I mean, you knew shit was fucked right? You just didn’t know that all the boring shit was fucked too.
Any finally...
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The dream is real. |
