No Subject
No Subject
There’s little to report this episode. Things go on and on, over and over with just enough variation to keep me awake.
Movie at 11.
(I still struggle to take time at the end of the day, or any part of the day, to collect together all the wunderkammer- and commonplace book-ready scraps from the day into an organized pool. I still don’t clean up my room, as it were, each night.)
Original programming
Podcasts
- Software Defined Talk #246 - Istio-washing, 20 domain names, .docx - We discuss: the trademark moves of Google; open source skullduggery; why Slack has the upper-hand on Teams…or not?; and Coté’s growing love of .docx files.
- Misaligned Incentives # 003 - Improvement requires fear, or, digital transformation by crisis and fear - People in large organizations avoid improving for improving’s sake. They’re very rarely proactive in transforming. Instead, it seems that management in most large organizations only act, and change, when they fear competition and failure. “Everyone” knows this is a bad strategy, and yet “everyone” does it. Perhaps we should embrace that behavior, or at least be empathetic, and figure out how to work with it.
- Tanzu Talk - It’s all about containers now - Container usage is finally getting big time in the enterprise. Gartner is estimated a 34% growth rate, going up to $1bn by 2024. With new co-host, Rita, we look at what “containers” and “cloud native” has become as a market. Our conversation starters this episode are about checking in on how much executives are actually transforming and discussing trade-offs in decision making. Also: olive oil.
Books
After reading Short Life in a Strange World, I found the authors’ first collection of essays, published online, not in book form: Anatomy of Norbiton. They have the same etherial tone to them and contemplate contemporary banality mixed in with old art, mostly Renaissance.
Relevant to your interests
See my blog for (more) links as I find them, and other stuff.
- SUSE buys Rancher - ‘The Register imagines that the companies’ respective PR teams probably didn’t ever draft the following: “With Red Hat now backed by IBM and its OpenShift K8s stack doing rather nicely, and VMware using all its muscle and Dell connections to push its Tanzu K8s offering, both SUSE and Rancher risked being left behind. This transaction keeps them both in the game and hopefully capable of catching the containerisation and K8s waves.” An off-the-record comment from an industry analyst to The Register suggested the deal is a good one for Rancher, which otherwise faced the possibility of being hoovered up by a minor K8s player like Cisco or NetApp that would have bought it to bolster thin efforts that would have little chance of long-term success. As a SUSE deal puts Rancher amidst a recognisably useful combination of technologies, the latter’s K8s tech has a better chance of thriving.’
- Adoption COVID tracking apps in Germany, India, and Korea: rocky - ‘Americans’ trust in government is near an all-time low. Concerns about the government and tech companies accessing citizens’ data have been heightened in recent years with a string of revelations, from Edward Snowden to Cambridge Analytica, and citizens are worried about privacy breaches and misuse of data. There is also no cohesive nationwide plan to deploy such apps. The White House, federal agencies and state governments have failed to champion them, which means that adoption rates are likely to be low and people won’t see enough value in using them to risk their privacy. Apps may appear in pockets – companies, college campuses, local communities – creating a fragmented, unreliable system of digital contact tracing.’
- Kubernetes, the missing parts - ‘It can be the case that IT miscalculates how complex it is to run highly available and secure applications on top of Kubernetes. K8s demands a particular level of expertise to maintain it in production with your software running on top. Things like service health checks, infrastructure monitoring, application instrumentation, deployment strategies, networking, VM security, container security and many others, all need requisite planning. Don’t attempt the DIY route unless you have the requisite level of in-house expertise. K8s is not a single executable, running on a single server — it is a conglomerate of different applications and network layers, closely integrated to produce the final solution,’
- Management needs to let go when putting agile in place - ‘“Our natural tendency to step in and solve the problems for our people robs the organization of learning and adapting, which makes them very fragile to change and worse overly dependent on leadership.”
- A 6 Month Cultural Transformation with Scrum
- Being successful at complete failure - ‘The Star Trek months were, psychically speaking, a necessary idleness, an uncoiling, not unlike sitting motionless in the woods, waiting for woodland life to reassert itself, one squirrel at a time.’
- Not flawed in any special way, just regular - ‘For some reason, this is incredibly vitalising. Here is a woman whose deep flaws don’t result from trauma, or her mother, or her children; she is not reacting against poverty, male betrayal or erasure, or unfulfilled artistic potential. She is at once structured by, and an agent of, social violence. The pleasures of Alma’s maladaptations are not that she is heroic, or courageous, or even particularly rebellious. (Hjorth writes that ‘Alma had never, she realised that now … met any angry women, women who rebelled. Frustrated and mentally crippled yes, but not rebellious.’) The pleasures of this character boil down to the fact that her flaws are the ordinary derangements of many people who live in unjust, casually brutal societies.’