Man in yellow suit on a bike, "helpful" advice, a cassette tape, and links
First, this delightful picture:
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It’s a mid-week newsletter. Why? It feels like something helpful to do, sort of therapeutic. I’ve left a few self-promotion, things I’ve made things off the past two newsletters. Lucky you they’re below!
As a reminder, we’ve started the Tanzu Talk podcast back up, so you should subscribe to it in your podcast player, Spotify, whatever. I let it wilt on the vine for a good year or more (in favor of the videos and, you know, just staying sane by doing less work). Sadly, this means the downloads are, like, way down from their peak of 1,000 to 1,500 an episode (which is pretty good for the type of podcast it is, especially a corporate one). Anyhow, we’ll get the downloads back up - or not. That’s the first step to handling a negative thing, just add “or not” to the end of all your hopes and dreams and move on.
Notebook
- Recent marketing copy from webinar platform email, emphasis mine: “Hi Michael, With the growing potential for a global recession, businesses that are not yet digitally-focused will be forced to adapt. But, when pressure looms and budgets begin to feel tight, why will the best marketers lean-in to post-digital marketing?”
- “The job was new, the threat elusive and at first he enjoyed it. But younger men were coming in, perhaps with fresher minds. Smiley was no material for promotion and it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was—in the nicest possible way—on the shelf.” - Call for the Dead.
- Burnout journal: any (good) life consultant (therapist, financial advisor, caring friend or loved one) will start with one question: “what do you want?” The problem is, answering that question is so much work on its own, it is just more stress, labor, and, thus, anxiety. Ultimately, it is another traumatic moment that will go wrong, put you in the docket and dunce hat. What I want, is not to have to think about that question and just get on with things. “What things, though?” the therapist-voice in my head says. “See, you’re doing it again,” I reply.
- “Well I could do with a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich.” Hilda’s mother.
- When I get in a depressed funk, I suppose it’s useful to remember that at some time in the past, I was happy and cheery. It comes as a shock once I remember that. Of course, the whole issue with depression is that you don’t want to do anything, nor can think of anything to do, or can even build up the will and awareness that you could just fake doing something. You are chained to the wall looking at the wrong side of the cave. Otherwise, it’d be easy to solve and under your control (and thus your fault in the first place): “have you tried not being so sad about nothing?”…and all the other oh so helpful advice.
- Here is some especially “helpful” advice from The Secrets of Happy Families: “All you have to do is remove the barriers that are making you unhappy and you’ll be a lot happier.” Pretty amazing, amiright?
- “Trivial things light fuses in the memory.” Between the Woods and the Water.
Content from Me
- My keynote from DevOpsDays Dallas 2022: How I got comfortable, even JAZZED with the practice of re-writing everything every five to 10 years, e.g., Kubernetes replaces all that other container stuff we worked on for the past seven years. I don’t think I put the narrative-thread together too well, but I got my point across well.
- Tanzu Talk News - This week’s Tanzu Talk News podcast. First, a candy corn cameo. Then @egrigson, @benbravo73, and I discuss: VMware Explore, k8s 1.25, Heroku’s free tier EoL’ed, NGINIX talks open source, Serverless. Plus, an interview with @jenjamall all about Backstage.
- And, if you want to hear more about ideas in that talk, check out this discussion Barton George and I had afterwards.
From Namroud Gorguis
Relevant to your interests
- VMware Targets the Platform Engineer - Alex Williams writes up VMware’s deal with developers and the operations people who help them.
- Adobe’s Internal Developer Platform Journey and Lessons - Good notes on Adobe’s platform engineering/platform as a product efforts. Moving from Mesos to kubernetes, getting developers to use the platforms, seeding people to scale skills, etc.
- Deception vs authenticity: Why the metaverse will change marketing forever - Hold on - is there a rapid shift going on? “The rapidly approaching shift to immersive media will impact almost every industry, but few will be transformed as dramatically as marketing.” I’ve committed to the following take on the metaverse: it’s bullshit.
- My online chess addiction was ruining my life. Something had to change, Stuart Kenny - Socrates hates writing, the technology of writing. Comic books were going to destroy society, TV melts your brain, and people spend too much time on their phones. Every time the medium changes, we fear brain-melting and self-zombiefication.
- Jeff Bezos on Bet-the-Company Bets - “companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.” You always want to avoid Halo Effect generalizations (especially when it comes to Amazon), but, in general(!) continuously doing a lot of small things and changing direction based on feedback is better than doing one big thing that takes a long time to get feedback on.
- Laundry Lens app - app to figure out what all those laundry symbols mean on your clothes. We have a fancy laundry machine and dryer. I always wish there was just one button called “wash my shit right now and stop asking me questions.” I spent the first ten years of my life just using the same settings on an old, clunky analog laundry machine and it was…fine?