Coté Memo - Issue #4
Hello again. It's been raining cats and dogs here in Austin, worse over there in Houston. We lived in years of draught, so downpours are always miraculous. I think the lake is even full now, after God knows how long of being way under.
Conferences
The Spring conference season is on. You know if someone says "conference season" they go to (too many?) conferences for work. I've had to miss out on DevOpsDays London where I would have been speaking this week, but will be at all sorts of other conferences over the next few months:
OpenStack Summit, Austin (April 25th to April 29th) - I have a panel on developer relations and marketing on April 28th, plans to catch up with all the folks in town (internet-friends, vendors, analysts, the rare "user"), and it'd always fun to see what's on the expo floor. Also, if you have any thing related to developer marketing and relations you'd like to see us discuss, reply back: there should be a recording of the panel, so never mind you'll be there or not.
DevOpsDays Austin (May 2nd and 3rd) - this being the local DevOpsDays, it's one of my favorite events of the year. I'm speaking on the second day, May 3rd. Check out the rest of the schedule.
DevOpsDays Seattle (May 12th and 13th) - I'll be giving an ignite talk on surviving and thriving BigCo's, the first time I've given this (tiny) talk. Also, you can get 15% off when you register with the code SOFTWARETALK.
OSCON, Austin (May 18th to 19th) - I'll just be hanging around here, helping out at the Pivotal Booth. And, I have a discount you can use: get 30% when you register with the code REFERCOTE.
CF Summit, Santa Clara (May 23rd to 25th) - come hear all about the cloud native world of Cloud Foundry, across all the distros and such. You can get 20% off when you register with the code CF16COTE.
There's some more coming up after that: a GE Predix conference, our own SpringOne Platform conference, and more DevOpsDays.
Coté Content
Software Defined Talk Podcast 060: “I’ll tell you this, if it’s support and services, they’re totally fucked.” If you're in the container orchestration space, do you need to open source your platform? We use Mesosphere's recent open sourcing of it all to discuss that topic, plus marketing in the container world and an ongoing arm-chair stratagizing of what's going on the infrastructure software market right now with respect to containers.
Books
I've been reading "the Southern Reach trilogy," flying through the first two books - Annihilation and Authority. I really like them: they're like modern HP Lovecraft books mixed with a kind 70s "big, slightly dumb but spooky bureaucracies running spooky stuff" vibe (kind of like a non-funny version of the organization in Cabin in the Woods, you know?). I started the third book, Acceptance, earlier this week.
I don't come across fiction books I like a lot very often, but these are definitely some of them. The last one even seems to be resolving a lot of loose ends, but not too many of them.
Links!
'Jaws'-Themed Sperry Footwear Will Hit Beaches This Summer — mentalfloss.com
I'm trying to get clearance to buy these. Kim and I have an agreement: I will not wear boat shoes until I'm 60, but, when I'm 60, I can wear boat shoes all the time. Perhaps I can get an except for the slip-ons here.
It’s Hard to Name Web Aesthetic Movements — trackchanges.postlight.com
"Brutalist Web Sites" - nice phrase.
Employees Are People Too: The Balanced Team
"As speaker Jeff Patton explained, modern corporate structure came out of a time when communication was expensive. When changing the moving parts of an organization takes a massive amount of communication and coordination, companies naturally default to top-heavy up-front planning done by those who have the highest vantage point for the decision. Now that technology has made communication essentially free, the old ways no longer hold — inverting the decision making process by empowering those on the ground level frees organizations to more fluidly adapt to changing market and customer forces. Balanced teams don’t just make for happier employees, they also make for more innovative, adaptable organizations."
Who Doesn’t Like Lock-In? "So it appears that developers often ignore and create lock-in, and operations staff suffer most of the consequences."
