Coté Memo #080: Come on, register for this God damn webinar

Oct 29, 2015

This week is a lull in travel. I’m closing out the year by going to lots of DevOpsDays (Charlotte, where I’m speaking, and Silicon Valley next week), a few internal summits, and my first Gartner show, where I’m speaking in a sponsored slot.

Tech & Work World

Shameless Self Promotion

“You should put that on The Slide” – Software Defined Talk #47 - us three are pretty busy now so our schedule is irregular, but here’s the latest.

Journey Time

I finished up my “cloud native journey” series recently. The real title should be something more like “how not to fuck up your cloud strategy.” Obviously, it explains the type of thinking and environment that Pivotal Cloud Foundry is built for, but I spend most of the time discussing “culture” change in an organization, regardless of what technology you use.

Check out the series, and if you’d prefer the hear me present it, we have a three part webinar series, the first one is out next week, Nov 5th with the next two coming out in December, on the 1st and then the 15th.

There’s also a preview of the first webinar in the form of my slides if you want to poke at it.

Back to Evernote

Clearly, I’m the kind of person who switches between things a lot. After a long time using the old plain text files in Dropbox approach, I went back to using Evernote. I missed the “all in one thing” nature of Evernote and the ability to put images in there. This is sort of possible with markdown and plain text files, but not as easy.

After re-wiring all Drafts to save things to Evernote and a few weeks of usage, I think it’s pretty good. The iOS apps are responsive enough, and I also like having 7 years of my stuff in there. The related notes it shows in searches are interesting. The geo-location’ing that Evernote is also interesting. I enjoy looking through my digital past with as much data as possible to refresh my memory.

Now that I’m not getting briefed all the time (and instead spend most of time creating content rather than in meetings) I don’t actually take that many notes.

Quick Hits

Target Rebuilds its Engineering Culture, Moves to DevOps - DevOps makes the Wall Street Journal with Target as the center-piece. Good stuff.
Eric Schmidt explains how Alphabet will emulate Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett - Quartz - conglomerates are the new thing, man.
Retailers would have to spend $4 billion to match Walmart’s pay hike - not knowing much about this industry, my read is that Wall Street punished Walmart for (a.) giving it’s employees a raise, and, (b.) spending money to innovate. Wall Street sounds like a regular fun bunch. More: Walmart projects 2017 revenue decline after billions invested in e-commerce | ZDNet
HP Cloud GM On Helion’s Public Cloud Exit, AWS, EMC-VMware’s New Cloud Venture And Unlocking The Power Of Partners - Yeah. Unless you got in awhile back, getting into the “public IaaS” market is pretty much impossible now. “Managed cloud,” “enterprise cloud,” and all that, sure: but generic cloud will be rare.
Too Complicated for Mobile Workers - Self-serving, but an illustrative stat: “The startup said it surveyed more than 1,200 enterprise application end users and 300 IT executives. Almost half (45 percent) of survey respondents said current enterprise applications fell short due to complexity and ”clunky“ interfaces.”
Docker adoption on the rise, but still in use by very few companies - “Datadog sampled data on 7,000 companies and found that 8.3 percent have adopted Docker. It’s a small percentage, but it’s a significant gain over the 1.8 percent that had adopted the technology a year ago.”
Microservices Made Easier with Cloud Foundry’s Lattice and Diego - Good overview of some of the container orchestration stuff running around in Pivotal land.
Outsourcing is on life support, with many providers failing to invest in As-a-Service - People want to keep using outsources, but outsources aren’t changing their business models to adapt.
Microsoft tried to buy this hot 2-year-old startup but got turned down - “Apparently, the deal fell apart when Mesosphere wanted more than the $150 million that Microsoft was willing to offer but couldn’t find another bidder willing to pay its desired price of $200 million, according to the report.”
Apple enterprise business not to be underestimated - Cook - ’“The enterprise business is not to be underestimated,” he said. “I’d doubt many people knew that we had a $25bn enterprise business that we quietly built in not too many years. Our penetration is low, but we have significant actions going on to really deepen that.’ - up 40% y/y. I assume this is company’s buying laptops and iPhones, sucking up RIM’s old business and encroaching on PCs. I like the allusion of ”low penetration“ as if to say, ”model it higher!"
Making Manageable Microservices on AWS - looks like some good tips.

Fun & IRL

At first, I thought this was a costume of a motion capture suit. “Light Up Stick Man” makes a lot more sense.