Pancakes in The Hague
Pancakes in The Hague
It's travel season for my type, the external facing vendor person. There's conferences, planned executive dinners, and the occasional sales meeting. August is vacation for everyone, especially in Europe, but America more than we'd like to admit it. We're busy-is-virtue types, USA Americans: taking time off is still seen as weakness, so we like to down play it.
Next week it's an open source foundation conference, the Cloud Foundry Summit. Then an internal sales meeting, then DevOpsDays London, and on and on. There's even pancakes at one of them.
In the meantime, I'm all but signed on the dotted line to do another booklet with O'Reilly - a sequel to my previous one. I just need to hunt down the advice for managers and executive, beef up and polish the sections telling finance and strategy people how to think about software...and then lacquer case studies and validation.
My production style is mostly that: playing around with an idea in my head, writing 3 or 4 drafts and approach's, scrapping most of them, then just writing straight though one day, finally. Then over the course of several months, layer on layer of anecdotes, links and footnotes, and beef.
I was told a few months back that most Germans (and presumably others in Europe) don't get my quick layering of jokes and cultural references, all sort of American, in my talks. This is fair, but I get that from Americans a lot. John Willis used to say that it was only in re-listening to our podcast episodes that he caught half of the jokes and references.
This is a fair critique of my, well, overall "style." But it's cultivated, it's pleasurable to me, it's what I admire in other writers and media. As they say: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Speaking of, here's what I'm reading.
- Clear: A Transparent Novel - Nicola Barker is praised for the voice in her books. There's certainly that. As I read it, I feel like it's a tale of aimless gen-x'ers struggling to bring any meaning into their lives, something to consequential that they can comment on as a social phenomena. They pick David Blaine, which I think, sums up what my generation has done with our crumbling cultural cat seat.
- War and Peace and IT - this is more philosophy for IT managers. As with most business books, it relies on making the right thing seem obvious. CIOs need a lot of therapy. I don't think there's much hope for dramatic improvement in IT, just small, incremental acts of change that'll hopefully add up over time. Exceptions abound, but like most self-help schemes, we'll do more reading and nodding than actual doing.
- Essentialism - Greg McKeown is speaking at a Pivotal event, one I've been content-directing. I know his work from shorter articles and talks, but I figure I should read the original. His reliance on case studies from high history (Rosa Parks and Gandhi!), to fiction references (I feel like there's at least a Star Wars in there), to pedestrian business types ("I asked one Bill Gates once...") matches the pull in whatever works style of self help, blog-era books. The insistence on, you know, focusing is the whole point. The Subtle Art if Not Giving a Fuck and Make Time are variations on this theme. The second is one of the better takes with some very practical tactic. My favorite is: just flake on people, don't show up to meetings that aren't important, etc.
Original programming
I was sick with one of those going around the family things so I didn't make it, but check out this week's Software Defined Talk:
Searched Guard stole some code, lots of “elites” in the State of DevOps Report and should we really cry for Docker? Plus, we talk Australia Punters invading American Football and why Yahoo! will always be a necessity to football fans.
Relative to your interests
Win some, lose some. Pricing restaurant food starts with tripling the cost of ingredients. “the casual Friday of late capitalism.”