Developers require janitors
Developers require janitors
Rightly, people put a lot of value on developers:
At the same time, if you look at the dollars, the business value at play in the developer layer - a lot of money there. It’s a very rich, offensive opportunity as well - both defense and offense…
This is the core RedMonk theory - it drove much of their analysis when I worked there eight years ago, and it still does.
It’s generally true, but with nuance: developers don’t spend the money directly. (Rather, they don’t spend as much money as operations people.) The way they architect their applications drives the infrastructure needed to run those apps and the supporting middleware. This drives operations to buy and support that infrastructure. That’s where the spend is.
Generally, you don’t use the same infrastructure (both hardware and software) across shifts in application architectures, which seem to happen ever 5 years or so years (“switch back to monoliths? But I just built out my microservices datacenter!”). This drags in a lot of infrastructure spend.
Part of what made VMware valuable in the 2000s - I think, I have no proof of this - is that you could keep using much of the same infrastructure. On the other hand, after that, the shift to SaaS (Salesforce, Office 365, ServiceNow, etc.) and IaaS - public cloud - drove new infrastructure spend (in SaaS it was bundled into the price of the apps, and at much lower prices because the cloud providers bought in bulk - “white boxes” and all that stuff that freaked American PC makers in the late 2000’s).
Cloud native architecture - writing distributed apps to run stateless in containers, supported by stateful services managed in some other magical way - drives new infrastructure needs. It’ll drive lots of hardware and software spend, whether “multi-cloud” or “mono-cloud.” It’ll drive lots of services to migrate and modernize. It’ll drive all sorts of spend.
Meanwhile, I doubt developers will do much of the direct spending. But the ops janitors who are always sent in to cleanup their mess…er, I mean, rather, enable the developers to do wonderful new things, will spend a lot.
Programming note: web blog
I started using my blog again. You know, every five to ten years a blogger/twitter/internet tries to give up and then a month or so later comes back from it. This time, it was a good clean-slate: I’d deleted all my stuff across my blog, medium, even slideshare! So, it’s fresh and new over at http://cote.io.
This means that if you want to follow along between newsletters, you’ll find much of the content here on the blog, if you subscribe with RSS, or whatever.
There’s all the links, but even some original text content I typed up!
I have extra commentary that’s not in here on some of the link posts, like this one.
Here’s a quick way to scan the entries: https://cote.io/notebook/.
I don’t know, whatever.
Original content
Coming soon!
Almost done | Michael Coté | Flickr
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Notes
Posted on the blog since last time.
- The ethics of selling software, the find the good first test
- Make your conference talk about one small thing
- Governance hacks – business cases
- “[M]ost of the time he didn’t even write. He dictated.”
- Successful pundit tactics
- Write every day even if it’s not on topic
- Kubernetes for developers
Software Defined Talk
I wasn’t on this week’s episode, but it was fun:
How do we fix Privacy? How do you compete with AWS? Is the iPad a hit product? We discuss all this and Matt Ray teaches us how to decouple applications from the operating system. Plus, we offer more advice about tacos.
Pivotal Conversations
I had a fine discussion of Kubernetes and stew with Paul and Richard, on Pivotal Conversations:
We’re kicking off the new year with Paul Czarkowski talking all about kubernetes and…soup. First, we discuss Paul’s take on drinking broth, especially bone broth.
I spent a lot of time editing this one! There’s chapter markers in it.
Advantages BigCo’s have
- money, lots of money
- customer reach and employees on the ground globally
- large, often diverse customer base
- safe, existing cash flow
- with diversification, stability
- existing partner/channel relationships
- stable employees
- good sunk costs - already laid out lots of capital over 10 to 100 years
- known brand, can build trust
- outside of smarty-pants tech people, usually respected (your parents would be thrilled if you got a job there out of college)
- can do M&A, big and small
- mastery of operations (they know how their industry works, gets milk to the grocery store, burgers to the drive thru, cars delivered from Japan to Dayton)
- well known valuation, well known shareholder expectations
- (if the executives and share buy backs stopped taking it all) ability to do shit-ton on stock options
- while slow, they blow up less often based on a single, bad idea (Jucero versus Coke)
- usually friendly with regulators and government - often outlasts governments!
- Oh, also, did I mention: has lots of money
Short, mythic words
‘Audiences prefer short homely words of common usage,’ he says. ‘The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understanding than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek.’
— The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History
Unaccounted for
Things I’ve found, but not looked at yet.
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): Bloated Bureaucracy or an Enabler for Business Agility?
- Conference in Iceland, bring a new person.
- Aginext Conference - Aginext Conference 2020.
- CIO Recommended Reading List for 2020
- Pack to the Future: Cloud-Native Buildpacks on k8s
- Sam Newman Rip It Up And Start Again?
- Sync Developers With Business Needs
- Scaling Enterprise Agility amidst Cross Border Merger
- GitHub - justinamiller/SoftwareArchitect: Path to a Software Architect
- The Essential Guide to CI/CD, Pivotal
- A CISO’s Guide To Leading Change
- Looks interesting: The Long Road to Cloud Native Computing
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Relevant to your interests
- The Moldy Peaches - that song from Juno came up on Kim’s playlist last night and I remembers how much I liked this album. “Let’s go to the beach. Let’s talk about movies. Let’s get a bite to eat.” What was I doing in 2001? Boy, that’s three of four life-times away. I barely remember, but I think I was there. And who can forget: “THESE BURGERS ARE CRAZY.”
- Pivot podcast episode - Scott suggests throwing in the towel when it comes to composting with Amazon: sell your retail business and buy Amazon stock. Is that a valid strategy? I suppose Berkshire Hathaway does that, other holding companies.
- Maybe it’s not such a good idea to “be a tech company” - many unicorn IPOs drop value of the company.
- “At some point I wondered if that comfort was an obstruction to getting to new places.” - it’s always good to let yourself be sloppy with notebooks.
- Kubernetes takes over - on Docker and Mesosphere.
- Simulate your business in a digital twin - ‘A computerized system that produces reliable reference or a digital twin, and is able to introduce variety of changes and compare the results to the reference, while also depicts the potential impact of uncertainty and lack of accurate data, deserves to be called a decision-support-system (DSS). Such a system will reduce significantly the risk in taking top-level decisions and will also reduce procrastination that is usually found whenever ‘hard decisions’ are evaluated. This would help significantly to put the company ahead of the competition.’
- That latte paid for your black coffee - ‘You can eat out and get an excellent meal at a fair price – if you don’t order any beverage except tap water. Restaurants earn their highest profit margin on drinks and often supply good food as a bait to bring in customers who will drink while they eat. Sodas usually sell at a markup of about 15%, wine goes up “two and a half to three times” the wholesale price, and beer often sells at a price increase of 500%. Some consumers don’t mind paying such high premiums. Others do mind but do it anyway. Such buyers subsidize good meals for the “nondrinking gourmand.” The idea of “cross-subsidies” is apparent in movie theaters where the food is bad and pricey. You pay a high markup for the popcorn and snack food because the theater isn’t making much profit on the movie. If you don’t eat at the theater, the movie itself offers good economic value. You can also experience this kind of benefit at Starbucks, but only if you order black coffee. Fans who pay inflated prices for fancy, foamy coffee, sugar and milk mixtures subsidize the plain cup of coffee.’
- Better IT/business alignment metrics for insurance - ‘Increase revenue. Gross written premiums (GWP) and gross earned premiums are insurers’ primary revenue drivers. To increase these, insurers must either sell more policies to new or existing customers or increase the policy value per customer. Digital technologies can help insurers design and develop tailored products; optimize marketing and sales to attract new customers and create opportunities to cross-sell or upsell existing customers; provide better service to foster customer loyalty; empower agents with digital tools to boost effectiveness and productivity; and improve engagement to retain customers.’
- The Sims - ‘Before we knew it, it was 3am.’
- A vision for tractors - ‘Perhaps one of the best sustainability visions I have seen was done by John Deere back in 2015. They outlined a larger challenge to not just build tractors but to feed the world. This gave a clear social anchor to the work that development teams were doing. The simple shift from being a farm equipment manufacturer to being part of the greater good enabled them to design innovations that helped to yield more nutrition per acre of land. Furthermore, this reframing helped to motivate stakeholders and improve the overall company brand value.’
- And, but… When tractors are software - ‘A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized” repair shops can work on newer tractors.’
- Changing how you do things is important if you want to change your outcomes - ‘To study the effects of socialization at work, we partnered with a large commercial bank in Asia. We used their administrative records to track the assignments between the employees and managers, as well as the evolution of the employee’s pay grade, effort, and performance. We also conducted a series of surveys to measure other aspects of the employees’ lives, such as whether they take breaks with their managers, or whether they know the manager’s favorite sports team.’
- Male managers bias promotions based on hanging out - ‘Our evidence suggests that, unlike the male managers, female managers treated male and female employees similarly.’
- Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems - ‘Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems’
- Argue for change by appealing to things people understand, not bigger picture goods - ‘ focusing solely on solutions that they don’t see as a threat because they carry positive benefits and/or are good for their bottom line’
- Overview of Netherlands government IT - ‘Rijsenbrij wants the government to develop a Dutch cloud to give the government a safe and reliable way to interact with citizens and businesses. “And then it would be perfectly possible to give those citizens and businesses access to that cloud as well,” he said. Janssen added: “You want a secure and reliable infrastructure for the government on which you can exchange data and run various applications. With such an infrastructure, you don’t have to think about the basics over and over again, but you can focus directly on the real problems in society, such as debt relief. “Then you don’t have to think about how to identify citizens or how to communicate safely with them, because that is guaranteed in the infrastructure. As a possible second step, you can then make this infrastructure available to citizens and businesses.”’
- Agility is a defense against ignorance - ‘Agility is mainly a defensive strategy against your own ignorance. It’s about dealing with the costs of previous decisions by either failing fast and thereby learning quickly, and/or by lowering the costs of adjustments and re-working them when you learn that what you had built or deployed at first is not quite right. This includes creating an environment and office culture where that is OK and expected, as long as you also learn quickly. In contrast, to maximise efficiency, a more offensive strategy would need to be used when you are confident you have enough information to act quickly in order to maximise your advantage over competitors. These defensive and offensive strategies can look similar in practice, but in reality, the rationale is quite different.’
- Concise kubernetes description - ‘Kelsey Hightower, coauthor of Kubernetes Up & Running, says: “Kubernetes does the things that the very best system administrator would do: automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring. It takes what we’ve learned in the DevOps community and makes it the default, out of the box.” For dev teams, when Kubernetes steps in to manage the dev and deployment lifecycle, from automating feature rollouts with zero downtime to performing node and container health checks (even self-heal), they can focus more on features and functions and less on tedious tasks. And because Kubernetes is largely used with Docker software packages, it allows software engineers and developers to push products to production even faster and more reliably than when using Docker alone’
- Momentum for Chef Habitat - ‘This week, Chef has launched Habitat 1.5, citing a 300% increase in adoption in 2019 over 2018, and boasting usage by enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Rakuten, Walmart, and Rizing.’
- The differences between working at home and in an office - ‘Working from the office, the environment itself sends clear signals: This is where I work. I get home — this is where I play and take care of personal stuff. Without this separation and clear indicators, it was harder to keep things apart. Now, when I reach home, it’s easier to leave work behind and focus on the other part of my life. Yes, remotees can employ certain tricks and techniques to manage “modes”, but one’s surroundings are hard to beat as natural cues.’
- Ideas for you to remember, not art - “Ideas, not art.” The point being that your sketchnotes are intended for an audience of one. The point of the sketchnote is to help you retain the information, not be put on display in a museum or shared via social media. Don’t fall into the trap of comparing your notes with others. The goal is not to make something beautiful — the goal is to capture the ideas as they come to you.
- Paying for Java - Old stuff in use “the vast majority of Java applications – certainly more than 80 percent – still have a dependency on Java 8 or earlier.” And then she lays out the stack: “‘You should be building your back end as a set of restful services,” she added, “and your front end using your favorite JavaScript framework. And the front end should be talking to the back end using APIs, because you want that back end to support your mobile clients, your voice clients, your immersive clients, your kiosks, your watches and things we haven’t thought of yet. You need to be designing your applications to be multi-experience, and 90 percent of what is in Java EE right now is focused on providing server-side generation of HTML. The applications you build today should be microservices or miniservices with deployment in your favorite platform-as-a-service-type environment or Kubernetes-type environment. And you should be using the MicroProfile, not Jakarta.’
- How to CEO - rephrased: “Differentiate yourself but avoid using price for that; and grow the top line more than focus on the costs.”
- GDPR is being used - ‘With 43 enforcement decisions made so far, Spain leads the pack as Europe’s most active regulator, followed by Romania (21) and Germany (18). The UK has imposed the highest total amount of fines — more than €315 million… France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, with just over €51 million in fines, and Germany’s DPA, at nearly €25 million.’
- The culture war is over, let’s start moving product - ‘LGBTQ consumers differ most from the rest of the consumer population in the importance they place on environmentalism and on sensuality, or experiences that please the five senses. Of the 93 statements ranked by survey respondents, LGBTQ placed environmentalism 47 rank places higher than non-LGBTQ consumers. Sensualism ranked 37 spots higher than average.’
- Be more productive by saving up your excitement for when you’re actually doing the work - ‘The longer you think about a task without doing it, the less novel it becomes to do. Writing things in your to-do list and coming back to them later helps you focus, but it comes at the cost: you’ve now converted an interesting idea into work. Since you’ve thought about it a little bit, it’s less interesting to work on. It’s like chewing on a fresh piece of gum, immediately sticking it somewhere, then trying to convince yourself to rehydrate the dry, bland, task of chewed-up gum. Oh. That thing. Do you really want to go back to that? “We’ve already gone through all the interesting aspects of that problem, and established that there’s only work left”, the mind says.
- “I might have been a bit easier on myself.”
- The four roles for a CTO - I don’t know, man. This sounds like what IT should have been doing all along.
- “The New York Times,” she told his agent, “is always the prettiest girl at the party.” - ” Every morning, team members gather over MacBooks to plan for the next day, later that week, and beyond, scouring top stories to figure out what will connect with an audio audience, batting around ideas, arguing for passion projects (Taylor Swift was the subject of a recent vigorous debate), and hashing out logistics (who can be reached in Hong Kong in the midst of the protest demonstrations there?). Human interest can sell a story, or an element of shock or surprise, or even just great tape.”
#cfgmgmtcamp 2020, Monday | Michael Coté | Flickr
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