Coté's Commonplace Book #41
I’m a Texan, so cold weather is always welcome. Rain and cold weather is even better. Here in Amsterdam, people apologize for the rainy weather, they seem to dread it. I suppose it you’d lived all of your 41 years in a gray and wet city, you’d be sick of it too. Just like I’m sick-numb to the heat of Hill Country. There are other tells to the Amsterdammers longing for sun: many of them have deep tans. I imagine the British are the same way. A deep tan, even that too much sun face patina means you’ve escaped the moist gloom, of only for a few weeks in August. But us over-warmed Texans, we can’t get enough of that chilly gloom. We can actually wear jackets and sweaters now, rain slickers. After two years I’m sure we’ll be sick of it. But that cicada orchestra filled heat is always there, waiting to snuggle you into a puddle.
Original programming
the delight of looking over people’s shoulder - Cashed Out #12 — www.cashedout.coffee
Robert and I talk about the joy of ephemera, in photography, text, and whatever medium we can get it from.
The 2018 State of DevOps Report, a gander - Software Defined Talk #146 — www.softwaredefinedtalk.com This year’s DevOps Report, as always, great. The new sections on culture and a peek at finance are dandy. We discuss it.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION!!1!
I posted to more excerpts from the book I'm working on. In doing so, I also wrote a table of contents page with a punchy introduction. Punch, punch.
Team composition: not all ninjas — medium.com
You don't need rockstars, and they're kind dicks anyhow.
A series of small projects, building momentum to scale — medium.com
Create momentum to help you scale up.
An ask
We need more reviews for Software Defined Talk over in iTunes. It's a sniveling thing to ask, but, really, it's a joy to see reviews. Hopefully it leads to more listeners. We have around 2,000 to 3,000 downloads an episode now, which is pretty good for the topic and format. Still, think of all the people that aren't hearing my ranting because the machine learning isn't getting us high up enough in the you should listen lists. It's a crime. So, be a dear, go write a review, only a positive one, of course. I'm not an idiot.
Another time
I can never remember the attribution, but one of my favorite quotes ends with the suggestion that the highest form of reading is sheer appreciation of style, over entertainment and "make you think" substance. Those two are fine, of course, but just enjoying the style is the poetic experience. This applies here:
Computer maths
Employees generally give few fucks
Just for the survey: A 2017 Gallup report found only 33 percent of US employees said they were engaged at work. This surprisingly low rate has serious consequences: their actively disengaged colleagues are estimated to have cost the US between $483 and $605 billion annually in lost productivity.”
Internal Product Management: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly For internal products, the “customer” is the enterprise, usually their strategy and execution, aka, “grind and stack.” Staff are, often sadly, meatware enablers in the value stream just like any technology. Optimize the VSM, make more paper.
VMworld 2018: VMware Wants to Re-Architect Your Containers for NSX - The New Stack “The developer shouldn’t have to know how to program NSX, or know what the security isolation boundaries are,” continued Fazzone. “But they should know that their organization has taken steps to unify the networking approach between the containerized applications and the traditional applications running in VMs, and take advantage of that ‘service’ offered by IT to extend the NSX-T support up into their container platform, versus just defaulting to the Layer 2 default that’s available in the open source community — so that their organization can realize that complete connectivity model in a consistent way.”
Impressions from VMworld “VMware’s ability to strategically partner to respond to shifting market forces is an impressive competency that should not be underestimated.”
ITSM’s own “DevOps renaissance” won’t come from copying DevOps “Service management” considered legacy thing.
No, Operations Isn’t Going Anywhere, But it's Going to Look Different Ops, still a thing.
Enterprise Software Priorities for the Next Decade
“For a cloud computing architecture to effectively deliver value, the bottom layer (IaaS) must deliver cheap, pay-as-you-go HW & the top layer (SaaS) must deliver ubiquitous adaptable access–but is it the middle layer [PaaS] that does most of the work.”
Reading
I've managed to find time to read books this week.
I started Sharper Objects after watching the series. I'm always interested to look at how an author pulls of such a successful story. So far, I don't have any searing insights. It's just interesting and easy to read. That's insight enough.
My highlights so far:
"I was already tired of talking, and I’d said very little."
"I wished then that I hadn’t sucked down so much vodka. My thoughts were vaporizing, I couldn’t hold on to what he was saying, couldn’t ask the right questions."
vulpine
Meanwhile, there's always the Noise in Your Head book. After a good first start, around 75% done I'm still waiting for the parlor trick to be explained so it can be believed. So far, we're still at "just tell anxiety to punch you in the face harder and then..." it will mysteriously stop punching you in the face?
For example:
We must “act as though” in our daily lives. If we didn’t, we could never accomplish anything. We couldn’t assume that the water from the faucet was clean. We couldn’t assume that gravity would continue to keep us grounded or that the earth would continue to spin. We make these assumptions without thinking about them. “Acting as though” allows us to take action. “Acting as though” permits us to drive to the beach on a day when there are no clouds and zero obligations.
Fake it until you make it. Got it.
“I’ve already decided that these worries are noise. Even though I feel insecure about that decision right now, I’m going to act as though the content is irrelevant. I’m going to step toward this challenge and see what I learn.” This will require your courage, because you are going to feel scared and step forward despite that fear.
Hmm, so to change your mind you just get brave enough to be able to change your mind, or at least act as if you've changed your mind. Yup.
To some extent, this "be courageous, and accept that you'll fail and, keep reminding yourself that you're fucked in the head" advice is serviceable:
If your goal is to take on the challenge, you cannot wait until you are certain you have enough skills, because certainty is not available to you beforehand. If you delay, waiting for your confidence to show up, then you’ll be waiting indefinitely. Therefore, it’s best to act as though you have enough skills to face the challenge. This too will be a courageous act.
The mindfulness stuff is still sort of interesting, if only as a reminder to observe yourself as if it were another self, and manage accordingly, e.g.,
This “mindfulness” is something you can adopt as well. Be alert when you’re approaching a scene where you tend to worry, and then mentally prepare yourself for how you want to respond. Because once you enter the scene, once you begin the activity, you will become more vulnerable to your worries, and it will be harder to break out of the pattern.
Have the courage to finish the book!
I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World to my son. He loves it. It fits the bill for a kid who reminds us every day that he wants to be a paleontologist
Turns out
Unknown Unknowns: The Problem of Hypocognition “Consider this: how well can you discern different shades of blue? If you speak Russian, Greek, Turkish, Korean or Japanese, your chances are much better than if you speak English. The former groups have two distinctive linguistic representations of blue. In Russian, for example, dark blue (sinii) and light blue (goluboi) are as distinct as red and pink. But in English, we know blue as a single concept. The deprivation of finer-grained color concepts poses a great perceptual disadvantage. English speakers more easily confuse blue shades, not because we have poorer vision, but because we lack the more granular distinctions in the language we speak.”
Potato Chips Market Share, Size, Growth and Analysis 2018-2023 "In the past 7 years, the market for good ol’ fried tater chips has grown at a snackable rate of 4%, pushing the global market for potato chips to."
Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman review – the travails of being an MP Sounds like a (rightly) sympathetic, interesting take on being a representative.
It's hard to figure out what to do with all this, but it sure seems wonderful.
From the notebook
And finally...
