Current status, a poem
Current status, a poem
I don’t know, man.
Whatever.
(Just click Publish.)
Original programming
What’s a Terraform (SDT)
This week’s Software Defined Talk episode:
Coté finally learns what HashiCorp does. Also, yellow rubber gloves.
I astound myself with the things I don’t know, like what all the HashiCorp tools do. Thankfully, Matt knows and explains it to me. I see a large part of my role in Software Defined Talk as the fool, the bumbling neophyte. If I’m ignorant of something, I ask (and rant). I don’t know: sometimes it seems like it’s bad for my career (I should really know what Terraform is by this point)…but my wife often says that really smart people always ask a lot of questions. Yay, my wife!
What’s a Tanzu (Tanzu Talk)
Over on ~Pivotal Conversations~ Tanzu Talk, we discuss what’s in the Tanzu portfolio:
VMware recently released and outlines its Tanzu and major updates to vSphere. To understand how the Tanzu Application Service, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere and VCF all fit together, we have Jared Ruckle on. He walks us through the portfolio, new names and products, and we discuss where the Tanzu products are positioned in the cloud native stack. Also, a discussion of Latin.
Books
I’ve been struggling (or, just being normal) to finish several books. I probably need to abandon them and move on. Anyhow, notes on some of the books I’m reading:
- The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - I just started this, some kind of Victorian technical, sort of sci-fi thing, I don’t know. I think I’d like a lot of Victorian literature if it were fast, less languid. I tried to start The Dream once and its opening - the cliche foggy streets of 1800’s London - was so evocative and curious-inducing. I think about that image a lot. Even that book, written in 1924, is just so…slow. I want more of that opening part though, just with some getting to the point.
- _Birth Partner 5th Edition_ - late in our life, our 40s and with two kids already, my wife and I find her pregnant! This has suddenly become a weird time to have a baby, with her due in mid-April. We were lucky to adopt both of our kids after years of biology being a trickster. Thus, we’re in an odd situation of being parents, but never having learned how pregnancy works. This book is good as an overview. Like most all books, it could do with some editing, but I suspect many people enjoy over-learning, or, as one review put it being “highly comprehensive” on this topic. Also of note, this is one of the few books I’ve read that seeks to be genderless: it works really hard to avoid using the word “mother.”
- Exhalation - the first short story here is a fun time-travel one. Then there’s a story about…Revolio Clockberg Jr.?
- The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History - I’ve stopped reading this book, but I think about its structure often. Churchill dictated much of his content (or, the first draft of it). As I think I’ve said here before, this book is like the dictations of your slightly interesting uncle reeling off a bunch of anecdotes about a historical figure. That format works if you’re really interested in the everyday life of a person, but it’s strange otherwise.
- The Corfu Trilogy - we’re reading this series to my son, we’re into book 2. Gerry, here, is exactly like my son. I (sadly?) think that if my son didn’t like Ark and videos of people being kicked in the balls so much, he would be exactly like Gerry - a young boy who spends all of this time finding bugs and lizards, and building up a zoo in his room. These books are one of the most relaxing, delightful things I’ve ever read. I find myself wanting to go back to the beginning and just read them on my own as a sort, I don’t know, church.
The koning of everyday life
From King Willem-Alexander, koning of the Netherlands:
I understand your distress at not being able to visit your loved ones, your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather in their care homes. Especially now when you only want one thing: to hold their hand and comfort them.
I’m an American so I fundamentally don’t understand monarchy. Rejecting that concept is, like, our entire deal. From afar, though, it looks like monarchs in Western society become the sort of care-taker of something important in everyday life: both pride in country and culture, but also some kind of model of the ideal citizen. I don’t know, again, that role is so foreign to me (literally – hahah) that I can’t analyze it.
I think US presidents and celebrities (are supposed to) fill this role for Americans, which has mixed results.
Relative to your interests
- Kubernetes Usage Expanding in Large and Small Companies, CNCF Survey Shows - my co-worker and podcast co-host does a multi-survey analysis of kubernates usage.
- “Tea for dong!” - ‘According to customers and vendors, pangolin scales and meat can be used as a form of medicine to cure a variety of ailments (it is said to nourish the kidneys), but primarily to invigorate men’s sexual performance and bolster female beauty. The exotic nature of the pangolin—and the illegal trading that is central to its distribution—has an obvious analogy in the masked palm civet cat, a small mammal native to India and Southeast Asia served as a delicacy in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, usually prepared with chrysanthemum petals and shreds of snake.’
- How to recruit moles - ‘To gather intelligence from human sources, intelligence officers have long used a logical and rigorous process. They must find potential spies, determine what information those targets can provide (and how reliably), develop a relationship of trust, convince them to commit espionage and handle the flow of secret information from those people.’
- Cocktails delivered to your door - ‘“We’re able to sell cocktails, which is pretty crazy,” Tober says. “[We] started coming up with a crazy hairbrained scheme to make craft cocktails and have everything done and super simplified.”’ Sadly, this was not sustainable and they shut down.
- NPS is not the best measurement of customer experience and design - ‘ I know of companies that have used NPS to evaluate new product ideas. But NPS is a pretty high-level metric, and there is some “noise” because it doesn’t measure CX quality directly. (Instead, it measures loyalty.)’
- Investigating how well you outsourcers/SIs will work together - ‘Since mainframe use is growing, not shrinking (50% of respondents in our Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Infrastructure Survey, 2019, said they plan to grow their use of mainframe over the next two years), it behooves enterprises to make the platform be as accessible as possible to modern developers.’
- Mainframe spending increasing - ‘Since mainframe use is growing, not shrinking (50% of respondents in our Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Infrastructure Survey, 2019, said they plan to grow their use of mainframe over the next two years), it behooves enterprises to make the platform be as accessible as possible to modern developers.’
- Survey on China IT spend: less - ‘As for the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on ICT spending [in China], 45% of the surveyed industrial users said that their spending would be delayed in the first quarter of 2020 and their annual spending is also expected to be reduced.’
- Hertz’s enterprise architecture modernization initiative - A rare look at a multi-year IT transformation project, and the outsourcing of it. The stack: ‘Angular2 at the top, Adobe Experience Manager down through MuleSoft and into a back end that consisted of roughly 1,800 legacy systems that they were trying to integrate into.’
- Learning leads to innovation - ‘In fact, from a recent Forrester survey, we discovered that companies that adopt a culture of fast failure grow revenue four times faster than the industry average. This comes from a survey of over 500 executives, directors, and innovation leaders that allowed us to identify fast failure as one of three core capabilities of becoming an adaptive enterprise.’
- Find your own path productivity - ‘Don’t ask: am I organized enough? Instead, you might ask: Am I shipping work in sufficient quality and quantity to cause the changes I seek to make? If not, what’s stopping me?’
- Inherently being optimistic - ‘Finally, and most importantly, as a leader, I’m aware that the expression on my face in a meeting tells everyone a lot about how it’s going. It’s not going well, but I’m choosing productive joy as my expression not because that how it’s going, but that is how I’d like it to be.’
- Necessity show flaws in security theatre - ‘Won’t airplanes blow up as a result? Of course not.’
- Staying at home tips - ‘They are useful no matter what people say. They help keep your hands off your face.’
- “Still winging it.” - ‘I’m not a great planner. I wing it, a lot. I listen to the world and try to tell which way the wind is blowing. When I say “plan” I really mean creating the possibility of opportunity. I till the soil to try and grow my own luck. I create options. And I invent things, relentlessly. I am solidly a second-division writer, at best, by any model and definition. But I’m still here because I work and think, a lot, to make new things and try new things.’