Coté's Commonplace Book - Issue #35
20 July 2018
We move to Amsterdam in 11 days.
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Cloud Native Journey, 3rd edition
In my capacity as an enterprise thought lord, I write up how large organizations are managing to improve their software every few years. It’s the main thing I talk with people about and “work on.” I’ve been working on a third edition of my main book(let) for about a year. There’s finally some output after much research (you may recall a sample of it from last issue, the “metrics” stuff) and delay (travel is not healthy for writing). Here are three excerpts, drafts put up to answer the question “is this a thing?”
What the actual teams doing the software look like, mostly, in contrast to functional organizations, or, as the DevOps kids style it “silos.”
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Mostly: actually work with auditors and understand what they need, and, automate.
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Figuring out which metrics (“dashboards” and “KPIs”/“OKRs,” if you prefer) to track is almost impossible because it’s situational. As one of my enterprise friends, John Mitchell at Duke, put it, “we are all in a ‘it depends’ situation but the business value piece is critical and never absent.” Here’s my attempt to write something useful up. (By the way, John has a great, vision-esque manifesto on metrics I’ll put in the final version.)
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More Coté Content
I’ll tell you a secret: something people ghost-write things for me. About ½ of this content (maybe 2/3) is mine, but I wrote it with a PR agency person. It’s not too bad.
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Found books
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Stay curious
There’s an interesting essay in the role of curiosity as a shield for things:
- It’s makes relationships better: I’m frequently told curious about what a person’s talking about to drive conversation and connection.
- Here, curiosity is a way to dig deeper, a way to shield yourself from low self-confidence when told something you’ve done is bad.
- In general, it makes things more exciting and interesting.
- It should allow for some risk management when exploring alternative options, the 13th man thing of making the counter case.
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Working, for fun and profit
‘For a business to thrive, each employee must ultimately be worth three times their wages to the business. That means if someone is getting paid $60k per year, their worth to the business likely exceeds $180k. People often underestimate what they are worth. One way people, especially more junior employees, underestimate themselves is by failing to spend most of their time on things that are really hard for them to do. All employees (not just entry level employees) should strive to have at least 70% of their time doing things that are really difficult. These are the tasks that require the most thought, rigor, and attention. And these are the tasks that result in the most growth.’ Of course, this assumes a capitalist view of work. Work is there to generate profit, not help people pass the time (find value in being alive) and making sure they have the means to eat and such.
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The first 15 or 20 minutes of this podcast has some great advice about “creatives” becoming “leaders.”
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“Taking criticism is the search for actionable feedback.” Related: curiosity is a good shield against the world crushing your self-confidence.
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I think the idea is, they know the devil’s advocate is a game, so they don’t take it seriously enough to be useful:
“When someone truly believes something different than you do, it has a stimulating quality for your own thinking. When you’re roleplaying, you can’t argue with the person who’s pretending, if you will. People are under the illusion that since the information is the same, the two conversations should be equivalent. They put a devil’s advocate in because they think you’re going to get somebody who gets you to think about the alternative, and you’re not going to get mad at each other. What they underestimate is that devil’s advocates don’t make you think about the alternative decision. Playing devil’s advocate does not have the stimulating quality [one] hopes for. I don’t think it has to do with the information that devil’s advocates state. I think it has to do with the fact that they believe something very differently than you do, and that challenge is sort of like a smack on the head, if you will, that gets you to start to rethink the issue. And so there’s power in that.”
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“To eliminate this unnecessary ‘junk,’ you will use two of my favorite tools: a high-pass and a low-pass filter. The high-pass filter will remove all of the junk below 300Hz (it allows the highs to pass) and the low-pass filter will remove all of the distortion and hiss above 3400Hz (it allows the lows to pass).”
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‘There is a tendency to think that joint evaluation is always better since it is the “full information” condition. Sunstein pushes against this interpretation because he argues that full information doesn’t mean full rationality.’ Placing value on something is situational and filled mostly with personal (or organization) judgement.
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Business
“The conundrum of stuck wages [for “non-managerial workers”?] has vexed economists for more than a decade, but their underlying assumption had been that as joblessness drops — it’s at 4% now — companies will be forced to push up wages to attract and retain workers. Now that that hasn’t happened, the feeling is beginning to creep in that this is the new normal.”
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“In other words, workers end up in jobs where they are less productive than they might be. Too many individuals who should be workers become entrepreneurs or are self-employed. Efficient businesses are taxed and penalised, while subsidies help sustain unproductive ones. Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction”, in which capitalist competition drives out weaker firms and rewards stronger ones, is paralleled in Mexico by “destructive creation”, quips Mr Levy, in which the environment favours the entry and survival of weak businesses that hinder the growth of stronger ones.” I don’t understand any of the economic jibber-jabber in there, but I like a good “big systems and complicated” story.
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Yay, capitalism.
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Computer maths
“This marks IBM’s third consecutive quarter of revenue growth, following five years of year-over-year revenue declines. In the quarter revenue rose 4 percent.”
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‘Many developers are disconnected from business goals and customers. When asked about their company’s top business priorities, software developers are significantly more likely to respond “don’t know” than are their managers. The majority of developers also don’t get measured on — or have awareness of — user or customer satisfaction metrics. Without the context of a larger workflow and vision, a former developer and IT consultant told us that developers “are treated like — and end up behaving like — a cog in the machine.” Instead of building toward a business outcome or customer impact, developers’ guiding light continues to be an abstract requirements document.‘
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WSO2 revenue: “The company will do probably around $50 million in sales this year. We’ll grow 60 percent year over year.”
And, on Quest’s venture portfolio during the Dell acquisition:
‘About that same time, Quest was getting acquired by Dell. And then Vinny calls up one day. He was starting a venture capital company and asked if I would like to get involved. He owned 30 or 40 percent of Quest, so he made a huge fortune. I’m like “Well, Vinny, that sounds really interesting, but I’ve just decided to start this company Codenvy. We’re really excited about it. We’re gonna go build this Cloud IDE.” And he says, “Great. Come on board as a partner. Manage our dev ops investments, and we’ll make Codenvy one of our investments as well.”
‘And so sure enough, he launches Toba Capital, and he buys back all the investments from Dell. So all the investments that Quest had, Dell didn’t have an investment arm. And so there’s a dozen or so out there, WSO2 and Sauce Labs and a couple others. And he just buys ’em back. And then he starts investing more into these companies. And at that point in time started investing more aggressively in WSO2, and I joined its board. And Toba eventually increased its position over time pretty significantly. And I was involved in about four or five different boards on these dev ops companies while I was running Codenvy from 2012 to 2017.’
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A “horrible mistake.”
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“The vendor has been adding to its stable of paying customers and now has more than 40, many of which are Fortune 500 enterprises. It did not report annual revenue, but we estimate it to be under but nearing $10m.”
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“Steve Singh took over as CEO a year ago and has presided over a growing number of customers – more than 500 enterprise customers to date – and associated revenue. On that note, the company announced it expects to grow bookings beyond $100m in 2018.”
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“I tend to (rather crudely) break down what digital transformation could mean into three broad categories: (1) Digital access – taking a paper or telephone based process and whacking it online with an e-form (quick to do, few benefits except a bit of convenience for web savvy users); (2) Digital efficiency – taking that process and digitising it end to end, involving the replacement or integration with back office systems, removing unnecessary admin touch points an so on (takes longer, more difficult, but yields better results); (3)Digital transformation – taking an entire service and rethinking it from the ground up, knowing what we know about networks and connectivity (really hard, but could ensure the relevance of that service for the next 20 years).”
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People got all excited about this, and good job for someone writing it up and getting attention. It’s seemed obvious for a long time: if you’re not using containers, kubernetes, etc. to run your custom written applications, what else are you suffering so much for?
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Doing SMB in LATAM is the easier than “enterprise.”
“the uptake of offerings like cloud [$3.9bn market in LATAM] is still timid across the region. This is because businesses lack the revenue to make the shift to the cloud or do not have sufficiently skilled people to use them” Doing SMB in LATAM is the easier than “enterprise.” |
Books
Reading: I’m still reading Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City. Coupled with the other book on Amsterdam history I read, it proves the Tyler Cowen reading theory that you should read multiple books on the same topic: the details and different perspectives fill out more. I started reading (listening to) Wait, Blink: the structure is interesting, and the repetition of phrases is curious, and peering into people’s stream of consciousness thoughts is fun. This book is probably best listened too (like some poetry) than read.
From Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City:
Always shaped by water:
And:
A holy site based on vomiting:
Always merchants:
The Iron Duke, slowly dying: “I do not know how it is possible that I am alive, and so I believe that I am not.”
Finally:
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Well, Whitman was a walker in the city. Whitman came of age in Brooklyn at a moment when the modern urban metropolis that we can still see in the New York cityscape today in all of those 19th century buildings that are still there — when that was happening.
Whitman’s consciousness is educated by the vast architectural sprawl of his city, and then by all of the people who came flooding into this city, including not only northern Europeans from England and from the Netherlands, as Whitman’s family did, but runaway slaves from the South, and the Irish fleeing famine.
The whole stately procession and unstately bedraggled procession that begins to parade up and down Broadway with Barnum and Bailey’s — there was no Bailey — with P.T. Barnum’s circus opening in the Crystal Palace and the site of what would become Central Park. How could you not have a democratic consciousness when so much diversity is just springing up around you at every second?
Books as information tool and lifestyle are complex.
“Displayed books gesture forward and backward to acts of reading and rereading; of purchasing, posing, moving, and unpacking; of passing time and dropping into its folds.”
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Notebook
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Word-salad: Computer, serverlet, synergies, serializable, resolution, parking lot, backlog, CMM Level 5, UML, YAML, Yak, DevOps, cloud, wine, scotch, IPA, doner kebab, AI, ML, RDF, Web 2.0, Digital, The Blockchain, killer app, dark launch, bulkhead, circuit breaker, Josh Long, TDD, BDD, TCO, ROI, Incentive, cats, scooters, Silicon Alley, 5G, wifi, Leverage, competency, cross-platform, interoperable, immutable, compatible, OASIS, WS-Deathstar, Zipkin, .Net, Touch Base, Empower, serverless, meritocracy, vest, rest & vest, IPO, omni-channel, proactive, mainframe, serverless, FaaS, Maps, Circle of Code, Onsi, XP, pairing, small batch, user-centric, Allstate, Liberty, platform, Death-by-DIY, GRC, PCI, HIPPA, AWS, GCP, Azure, 5’s, transformation, MIPS, MPP, Win32, hoodie, hipster, Watters, whiteboard, value-line, 3 ring binder, The Almighty Thud, actionable, conference, remote, headset, drill down, doubleclick, gig, coffee, monetize, mindset, scalable, stratechery, The Four, FANG, Not That One, VSM, value-add, long tail, short tail, fat head, no head, headless, Reliability, SRE, kanban, lean, andon, culture, Westrum, Monkeys on a Ladder, Rats on Drugs, latency, MTTR, availability, ITILv2, helpdesk, free t-shirt, USB-C, printer ink, successful, learning.
Molas
Both of my parents lived in the Canal Zone. I have a lot (30 or 40?) of molas.
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And finally
I’m trying to use tumblr more. It’s a cesspool: most of the people who follow me are porn-hustlers. But, it’s fun to look at and so easy to reblog too.