November 18, 2022

Twitter's past self, kubernetes & dev tools markxetsizing, & not the usual nsense

Big one this week. My thoughts on Twitter; what to do with your past-self; CFP’ing; some music recommendations; as always, lots of links - some tasty ones on kubernetes market-sizing (a lot smaller than you’d think).

Suggested epigraph: “I woke up this morning Didn’t recognize the man in the mirror Then I laughed and I said, ‘Oh silly me, that’s just me.’“

Suggested theme song:

(We apologize for forgetting to add a suggested theme song to last week’s edition.)

My Thoughts on Twitter

I don’t know, I try not to think about it beyond rubber-necking entertainment. I agree with most everyone else’s take. Let me summarize: (1) what an asshole! (2) if you fire the people who keep it running, it will stop running, to which I’d add my reverse Halo Effect principle, (3) it’s only stupid until it works.

And, implied (4) who knows if it’ll “work”…how does anything work, Charlie? Move past it.

If you’re interested in my takes, I’ve done them here:

• This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast
• A little bit on this week’s Tanzu Talk podcast
• Some waste book notes: where will our IT community go? and maybe it’ll fix our urgency problem.
• Not me, but I agree: After Twitter - Brian’s often nostalgic and thankful enology of Twitter. So many memories, so many career and business helps. The history of DevOps would be different, at least the mechanics of how it happened. Where will we learn and find new things? Blogs? Newsletters? I dunno. It will be slower and longer form. Of course, Pairs well with: “Society needs to be de-Twitterised and experience a Twitter-winter.” Of course, this assume Twitter implosion. Which, ironically, is a very quick-cycle, very Twitter-mind thing to assume after a fortnight of weirdness. It took blogs/RSS, what, 3 to 5 years to “die”? Maybe even much more.

DON’T FORGET ME, PLZZZZ!!1!

If you’re part of the burn it down/it will burn down crew and still interested in following me, there are three options (and, yeah, you should totally follow me - I live for the validation of your attention and the vanity metrics - I am not cool enough to be otherwise):

• This newsletter - you’re already here or reading it on the web. Subscribe, MOFOs!
• My blog - it’s sort of like the daily version of my newsletter with longer-form content from time to time.
• In Mastodon. My handle is @cote@hachyderm.io and you can find my profile page here.

Ask me to come speak at your conference

A huge part of my job is speaking at conferences, and has been for 17 years. Since COVID days and having a third baby I’ve let myself…uh…do some “self care” about traveling so much. But, HERE WE ARE!

I dusted off my CFP’ing habits and abstracts and submitted to a butt-load of conferences.

If you know about conferences or are selecting talks, here’s my asks:

1. Tell me about conferences you think I should apply to - anywhere on the globe.
2. Ask me to come speak at your conference. Here’s the two talks I want to give at the moment, but…
3. I’m always up for coming up with something new for keynotes, sessions, panels, whatever. Generally, if someone asks me to come to a conference, I put that at the priority list.

I’m also always open to speaking at internal organization things. This usually done as part of a sales process, but, you know: whatever.

My content

Some mentioned above, but I’ll repeat for completeness and habit:

• Highlights from #VMwareExplore; Backstage/DX/platform engineering checkin; new IaaS+PaaS MQ; learning from Twitter - There was a lot going on at VMware Explore Europe last week, so we focus in on the Tanzu related stuff. Then: we do our usual check-in on platform engineering; a brief magic quadrant tour; see if there’s any lessons to learn from Twitter the company; and close out discussing VMware’s recent open source supply chain survey.
• The Vibe at Cloud Foundry Day - What’s going on in the Cloud Foundry community? In this episode, Ben and Coté are joined by Nick Kuhn (a return guest!) to talk about the recent Cloud Foundry Day at KubeCon. They discuss Cloud Foundry on kubernetes, build packs, Detroit pizza, and singing the hits of the day back in the late 80s.
• Software Defined Talk #387 - A weekly podcast covering all the news and events in Enterprise Software and Cloud Computing. We discuss topics including: Kubernetes, DevOps, Serverless, Security and Coding. Plus, plenty of off topic banter and nonsense to keep you entertained. Don’t worry if you miss the latest industry conference, we will recap all the latest news from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
• I finished my 14 hurdles to digital transformation series. I figured 13 was unlucky, so I skipped it. I have an alternate version to the 14th hurdle that I’ll publish some day too, then it will be, like, 14. The last one is: you’re going to need to change the organization, for reals:

Waste Book

• I think I’ve come to peace with using the phrase “developer experience” and “developer portal.” I still feel like a dork when I have to say “DX.” Next-up: my living rent-free therapist is now going to work with me on “inner-loop” and “outer-loop.”
• “Work harder” in this case means “think up better ideas of how to save this business and help with my interest payments.”
• Omelettes are just lo-carb breakfast tacos.
• This Is How We Do The Thing - “I have an ale in the fridge already. It’s got to be a better call than joining the millions of people apparently spending their days trying to get a Mastodon account. I can’t even be bothered to open my RSS reader most days.”
• More times than not, if there’s a picture embedded in a calendar invite, it’s a meeting I delete.
• “I’ve been drink on’ all day/I’m tired.”
• I am ready for #supertrain
• A wobbly dog’s dinner.
• The granola mezzene.
• This Twitter account is…maybe?…can’t tell if I’m supposed to dislike it or not/weird…but this work advice is good.
• The Challenger Enterprise Architecture Pattern.
• “We’re taking pictures like we’re a couple. Like we like each other. Like we’re husband and wife, and we span time together. We span time together as a couple. Because we’re a loving couple, spanning time. These photos are us, in love, spanning time.” - I saw this movie when it came out 24 years ago, in the theater, a little art house on the UT campus (the Dobie), I think. It was amazing. So weird, so normal. I frequently think about this scene and these words (though not an exact quote): “we’re spanning time.” Indeed.
• Only drink what the bartender would drink.
• Comparatively, there’s very little urgency in meatspace.
• “I’d worry about it a little bit, but that’s all.”
• As I get older, I think the thing is, it’s not that I like to get things done, it’s thet I prefer people not be upset at me.
• I had to get glasses, finally, recently. My Lasik expired and my eyes are too old. I din’t get exactly right glasses (maybe I will in the future), but I’m really hoping I can do a half-ass The Bartender in Deadpool look:
• I guess I’d also need the hair longer, and the shaved down beard. But, like, in my head this is what I look like when I wear glasses. Get the fuck off my brain-yard with your “actually, bruh: reality” bullshit.

Diggin’ Through the Stacks

I really like the Stetch and Bobbito show in Apple Music. Three reasons. First, the music is always what I want to hear. Second, their banter is plesent to listen to, and I miss radio DJ banter a lot in our thrilling days of streaming. Third, in my head, there’s this world-building of the life of a DJ, digging in records, interviewing people, playing music, building up that corpus of work on the radio…and then along comes Apple and is like, “hey, I’d like to pay you to make some podcasts.” Sure, things always seem super-great on the outside, but that has to be nice!

And then check this out! Archives! (Here’s a direct link to archive.org.)

Side-note: as with so many - too many! - Apple software products, the Apple Music radio stations are in this uncanny value of UI. If they just added favoriting radio stations, starting to play where you left off, and easier listing of tracks currently playing, it’d be perfect.

The Three Selves: what am I supposed to do with/about my past self?

• From Justin Warren’s Nov 14th newsletter: “You pretty much never have perfect information. You only have what you consider to be enough information to make a decision, and sometimes not even that. What matters, I think, is how you explain your decision to other people. And ‘other people’ includes future you. This is quite liberating, because it frees future you from the decisions made by past you. If it’s clear that past you made decisions based on certain information, and you then find out new information, you can make a new decision! You don’t have to be welded to old decisions made with less, perhaps bad, information.”
• Meanwhile: “The distinction between satisficing and maximizing not only differs in the decision-making process, but also in the post-decision evaluation. Maximizers tend to use a more exhaustive approach to their decision-making process: they seek and evaluate more options than satisficers do to achieve greater satisfaction. However, whereas satisficers tend to be relatively pleased with their decisions, maximizers tend to be less happy with their decision outcomes. This is thought to be due to limited cognitive resources people have when their options are vast, forcing maximizers to not make an optimal choice. Because maximization is unrealistic and usually impossible in everyday life, maximizers often feel regretful in their post-choice evaluation.”
• First: what is the behavioral (economic?) theory behind systems that have no goals? Can you be “rational” if there is no goal? A simple example is retirement planning. Please note that the rules of this game clearly state: “you cannot win this game by cleverly suggesting that there is always a goal, even if you don’t know it. And, having no goal is a goal. Don’t be cute.”
• Second: maximizers are the analysis paralysis fun-bunch. The grueling process of researching and discussing done over and over, 10’s if not 100’s of times in late night meetings with tedious spreadsheet and slide reworking make people’s lives suck. The irony is that in seeking to be “rational,” the maximized left an important part out of the equation: effort spent to figure out The Best answer.
• Third: at some point, you know too much (all of the options and the benefits/risks of each), and this is depressing like a kid being taken to a candy store and being told they can only pick one piece of candy.
• Theme song for the following bullet points
• It makes me think about myself: I don’t optimize for my future self. No exercise, not learning Dutch a little each day, unhealthy eating. Obviously, you have to put habits in place so it doesn’t seem like work. But, I almost have a dissociative relationship with myself in the future: I don’t feel like it’s me. Or something. Am I, like, a really lazy hedonist? …maybe?
• And what does it mean to invest in (“dwell on”) your past self? You can: (1) understand it, (2) think better about it, (3) think worse about it, (4) forget it, (5) hide it (from others, and yourself as a variant of (4)?. How much time should you spend investing/hacking your past self?
• You should keep learnings and experience from your past self, but pretty much, ignore and forget about it otherwise. (I guess you could remember the “history” of your past self so you don’t repeat the bad parts - but this is not really what I’m talking about).
• There’s nostalgia, but that has a high risk of turning into wistful paralysis, so maybe it’s not worth keeping all those old photo albums around, so to speak.
• Your past self is living rent free in your head.

Relevant to your interests

• Don’t buy the cloud repatriation claptrap - Also, it’s probably like when I try to switch note-taking apps every 6 to 12 months - a whole lot of work and then I’m like, “well, I still have all the same problems, and now I have to learn this new UI.”
• IDC’s developer tools market-sizing: “$5.1 billion in 2021 to $6.8 billion in 2026, reflecting a CAGR of 5.9%” - Published June, 2022. With a 2022 TAM estimate of $5.2bn. They estimate that public cloud tools (like, in-browser IDEs) are 8.2% of the 2021 market, growing to 18.6% in 2026
• 22% of organizations say kubernetes has “[f]ull adoption across 100% of IT organization” - Seems like a lot!
• Doing just fine, untransformed, Brenon Daly, 451 - ‘As life starts to return to normal and tech is no longer the up-and-to-the-right industry it once was, two points about the “digital transformation” trend are becoming clear. First, much of IT spending of the past two years was simply born of necessity. Second, most of the wrapping up of those purchases as part of some grand strategy was done by the folks selling the technology, rather than the folks using it. How do we know? It turns out, a fair number of companies say they are doing just fine untransformed. [1] A recent 451 Research survey of about 500 small and medium-size businesses found that respondents with “digital transformation” strategies in the works at their companies were far more likely to cut their overall IT spending than other companies. [2] Nearly four of 10 would-be “digital transformers” in the survey told us they expected to spend less on tech for the balance of 2022, compared with just one of every four respondents more broadly.’
• Worldwide Container Infrastructure Software Forecast, 2021–2025 - “The worldwide container infrastructure software (CIS) market grew to $980.1 million in 2020 from $740.6 million the year before, representing 32.3% year-over-year growth.” They forecast it hitting ~$2.9bn in 2023. Their model includes private and public cloud kubernetes, with about a 80/20 split in 2022, with the 20% being public cloud.
• CHARLES SAATCHI - God damn I love that aesthetic.
• Novel use of LinkedIn - “On the growth side, I would add the max amount of people LinkedIn would allow me to add a week until the app would not let me. I’d make sure that each person I added worked in the space industry. Once I did that, I’d send them a message asking them to sign up for the newsletter. I don’t know the amount that signed-up, but I would not be surprised that at least 10% of our audience — but potentially as high as 25% — have signed up because of the message I sent them on LinkedIn. The best way to jumpstart a newsletter is to personally ask people to sign up.”
• Good think on devrel strategic planning, from Laura Santamaria - “Strategy is a definition of risk valuation and reward opportunities across multiple focus areas. If you’re defining strategy simply by naming a bunch of tactics, you’re missing out on the creativity boost a good strategy framework can provide for a devrel team.”
• New in Planview Tasktop Viz: Time-to-Market Insights - When it comes to serious enterprise metrics, I feel like TaskTop has been doing it for 10+ years.
• Case Study: How SeatGeek Adopted HashiCorp’s Nomad - Will have to read one day.
• Does Kubernetes really give you multicloud portability? McKinsey Digital - Can you predict the answer? “Given our findings, we feel that organizations that are defaulting to Kubernetes solely to have future portability are limiting the value that the cloud can provide them, especially given the vast array of broader technology drivers at play. ” It’s intuitively obvious, but everyone thinks they’re the ones who will finally crack it. Like, for the past 25 years, which as long as I can remember software development. Part of what’s great about this piece is that they considered getting the log operational the success/end criteria: I mean, they certainly aren’t wrong!
• 5 ways to cut waste in cloud spending: McKinsey - Probably useful.
• Report: The Evolution of DevOps - This would be a useful roll up of stats and reports if your executives asked you “what is DevOps and what are we doing about it?” You could sprinkle in some Gartner/IDC/Forrester for what the normals are up to.
• “Live rent-free in my head” - This definition is not very good, but the concept is wonderful. I’ve been working on identifying when I’m creating multi-person arguments in my head and saying “stop arguing with yourself.” It works better than I’d expected.
• Evernote’s fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker - “Note-taking app Evernote…announced the end of its 14-year run as an independent company today with its sale to Italian mobile app company Bending Spoons.” I loved Evernote! Someone asks about alternatives: I never really found one. The markdown crew never got graphics and handwriting down well for me (I keep waiting for the Bear experiments with their Panda alpha to finish - I stopped waiting). I really liked GoodNotes for awhile, but it lacked structure way too much. I use Apple Notes now whose only real flaws are: (1) you can’t link between notes without stupid hacks, &, (2) it doesn’t support markdown & flat files. Yes, I’ve tried everything. They work for some others, not me so far.
• Improve Developer Engagement With Online Portals, Forrester - Pretty good devrel advice here for your developer-hungry website, onboarding developers to your platform, and conference thinking.
• Zoom now integrates Mail and Calendar into its One interface - I welcome all attempts to make calendaring better, especially if it’s cross-organization.
• 7 Ways to Improve the Developer Experience and Accelerate Software Delivery on Kubernetes - I hear this is a good PDF.
• Things could be better - Study finds that people think optimistically be default. Also shows that academic papers can be written in natural, fun the read language. “Well you could have a bunch of stray dogs come in here and barf everywhere and then we could set your chaise lounge on fire, that would be different.” And: “When you ask people to imagine how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better.”