Things Americans living in Amsterdam ask me to bring back from the US
Webinar! (hole on, this is just an ad, there's a lot more, don't delete this email yet - but read the below - it'll be cool, I promise. Totally chill!)
Rick and I have a webinar coming up. Usually, I detest, er...hey!...dislike working on things with other people (yeah, you know, all the things), but this has been a delight! It's actually the case that, as other people say: "he's made me thinking of things in new ways"!
Here's a teaser of slides:
Join us this Thursday, then the week after next for part two.
And, if you're going to be at SpringOne Platform in Austin next week, we'll be presenting a very short version of this talk on Tuesday morning.
It's still not too late to REGISTER! Get $200 off with the code S1P200_Cote.
Things Americans living in Amsterdam ask me to bring back from the US
- Benadryl.
- Hamburger Helper (actually, a Dutch person requested this to "see what it was like").
- Twinkies (Ibid.)
- Frosted Flakes.
- Ford Mustang.
- Graham Crackers.
- "Buc-ee's Stuff".
- HEB tortillas.
- HEB Buddy Bucks.
- Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
- Crystal Hot Sauce.
- Big bag of cheap, gas station beef jerky.
- Corn husks for making tamales.
- Anything from CostCo.
Original programming
It's the last Pivotal Conversations before the BIG SHOW. We talk about that, some DevOps stuff, and what to do with apples our kids won't eat - plus my dog's peanut butter sandwich strategy:
Pure sonic feels
When I was young, the words of songs were what mattered to me most. Slowly, as I've aged, it's just the sound. The lyrics are, of course, fun, but the sound and mood is what takes over. I listen to the same Yacht Rock and (mostly old), low-key hip-hop playlists over and over because they're soothing, and I get songs stuck in my head because of their sound.
Like this Jackson Brown Song, "These Days":
In my teens, I would have wanted to identify with the story in the song - someone being an asshat, having their lady (I mean, it's a man in the 70s, so, you know, we can ignore our contemporary pronoun accuracy-by-inclusion thing, right?) leave them, and then being like "fuck!" - than anything else. But, I haven't been in that situation, so the story is distant.
But, man, that song sounds so nice! Maybe it's the central Texan in me that likes that fusion of country and 70s smooth. Who knows - it could also just be a good song.
Related: YOU'RE WELCOME!
How to compete with Amazon in retail
From "Where stores can still compete - and win," Brian Gregg, Kelsey Robinson, Jess Huang, and Sajal Kohli, McKinsey, November 2017.
Noop Noop files
(Context:
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This edition:
- "I’ve met people in the past who’ve told me technology is important, and then I follow that up with a second question, and there’s nothing there" - God damn...
- "Those [interview question suggestions] seem mostly wrong to me, and perhaps better targeted at the median USA Today reader who has to make small talk at a company picnic." GOD DAMN!
...this guy gets it!
IT Portfolio Tech Debt
The Dubai Airport went from 130 to 60 applications.
This is an example of a kind of portfolio tech debt. Instead of forcing people to match their needs to applications you already have, or slog out customizing the app to their needs, you've let them bring new problems, er, enterprise applications, into the portfolio. I suspect it's not always a feature mismatch: it might also be to route around annoying procurement and governance.
This increases your portfolio tech debt over time. That results in more toil for you staff, sucking your attention away from innovation and denting overall productivity (you spend more time on bullshit than on satisfying corporate goals), e.g.:
“The fragmentation of those applications was quite high,” he says. “The identity and access management for each of those applications was segregated and siloed. And our teams would spend an inordinate amount of time creating profile data in applications for people to log into them.”
A Forrester survey (referenced in a report on agile finance models) shows that "only 23% of software budgets goes to new custom-developed solutions, while about 57% goes to licenses for commercial software or maintaining existing solutions." That is, there's a baseline of 57% spent on "old IT," kinda sorta.
Where's that other 20%? O, hai!:
These EMEA people seem to take saving the earth seriously
Also from the Dubai airport dude:
“We’re tracking our energy consumption in some places in real time. So we’re deploying smart metering technologies – we’re talking about a few thousand smart meters across an airport campus to measure all these different tenants and partners in their areas to manage energy consumption better. It’s a really interesting project, because it’s engineering and technology added together. And it’s really exciting to see what results we can get from a cost-saving and environmental perspective.”
I have nothing but anecdotally experience here, but Europeans seem to take environmentalism seriously. This is not just as individuals, but in businesses! Like just being more energy efficient is a business goal. Perhaps this is because of regulations - the law - maybe there's cash incentives from the government, but, whatever: I have no such feels from US companies.
One regulation example comes from Dutch(?) law. A startup person told me that Dutch law requires that if you sell a build it has to meet new energy efficiency standards. This creates an interesting incentive, from of all people, banks.
For example, if a bank lends you €5m to buy a building, you go bankrupt and can't pay the loan back, the bank now owns the building and would like to sell it to recoup the loan.
But the building has to be up to environmental spec to sell! So now the bank has a risk it's carrying: what if it can't sell the building, and it costs tons of money to outfit, in addition to the delay of doing so. That messes up some spreadsheet cell that was driving otherwise good numbers for that quarter, or whatever.
So, turns out, banks are interested (compelled, really) in going all Captain Planet.
hashbrownsWHATATIMETOBEALIVE
What is "tech debt," exactly?
Speaking of, there's a new book on tech debt out. Their definition:
Technical debt is a term that conceptualizes the tradeoff between the short-term benefits of rapid delivery and the long-term value of developing a software system that is easy to evolve, modify, repair, and sustain.
Also:
In our conversations with development teams we came to appreciate that while many development teams assume they get into technical debt because they follow or do not follow a particular software development process, or because they picked a particular technology, or because their customers or managers mislead them, they do not realize that all systems will eventually have technical debt.
"Mislead" them?! Like deceitfully, or just cause the customers and managers were wrong-thinking? I like the first: they're a conniving actor who's trying to get innocent developers to misbehave. But, I'm sure it's just the second (sad for drama, tho).
Filters
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48816298976The original Instagram (2009, MOFOs!), Hipstamatic, has a new version of their app out...I mean at least since I checked last.
It's a fun app with it's skeuomorphic film and lenses thing. If you're into that kind of thing, may I also suggest HUJI, which is even more hipsterstrippeddown.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/48826584896/Relative to your interests
Figure out the right icon to click on for sharing. It'll just be “$50 to $100 billion” over the next 20 years to replace cargo shipping. Password picking is a problem everywhere. “This data suggests that the IPO market in 2019 has been characterized by very aggressive price increases on the first day of trading, which deflate over time.” This place in my old neighborhood is awesome; try the sandwiches too!