How I got 8,700 views for my talk about developer productivity.
The answer will shock you: beats me, how does this whacky World Wide Web work? Plus, links and strange and fun finds from the whacky and normal World Wide Web.
The recording of one of my talks has 8,400 views. That’s a lot more than other talk recordings. How does YouTube work, I sure don’t know!
Confusing it more is that the same talk given at a different conference has 85 views. At least I wore a different shirt each time.
Oh, and while I’m promoting myself, here’s my lighting talk (5 minutes) from DevOpsDays Antwerp pondering if DevOps is successful.
Internship
My nephew, Caleb Marques, is looking for an internship in IT and would love to join a great team. He's studied all the thrilling IT stuff at Texas A&M: Unix sysadmin'ing, cybersecurity, networking, python, Business, and all that kind of stuff. He graduates in August 2025 and needs an internship to finish up his business and cybersecurity degrees. He'll move where ever, so location is not a problem. Tell me if you're interested, or know someone who's got an IT, especially security internship. He's fun too! :)
Relative to your interests
Developer Relations Foundation Aims to Clarify Role - Hopefully it’s good for enterprises too, big organizations that need internal-facing devrel.
California Becomes the First State to Ban Sell-By Dates on Food Labels - I think we all knew these were bullshit. // “Sell-by dates are a slightly ironic, and unnecessary, cause of food waste, because they’re not intended to ever be used by consumers. Instead, these dates are meant to indicate to store employees when stock needs to be rotated, and are not accurate representations of freshness or consumability.”
Viktor Farcic: There is no such thing as a DevOps engineer - Platforms bundle services developers use to make it easier and faster for them. // Viktor’s platform engineering definition: “In practice, certain experts are codifying their experience into services. Hence, if you’re a database administrator, you’re an expert. Instead of waiting for somebody to ask you to create a database for them or to configure it, you can codify that knowledge, transform it into a service and plug it into that platform so that everybody else can do it themselves instead of asking you to do things for them. Click a button, fill in some fields, and create some YAML; whatever the system is, should be the mechanism for others to create and manage that database without you. And you should focus on managing those services instead of managing requests from people to do something.”
Continuous Authorization to Operate (cATO) needs a DevSecOps platform - This is written in US Federal government speak, but the same benefits apply to commercial enterprises. If you use a centralized PaaS for your apps instead of customized infrastructure per each app, you can certify the layers below the application as compliant to use. Then when you put new all code on it, you only need to certify a thin layer of new code. The more traditional alternative (a customized infrastructure stack per app) means you have to certify the whole stack for each new app version. That takes a lot more time than the wafer thin layer of app.
Departure Mono - This font from Tobias Fried, Departure Mono, is amazing. Well, amazing if you remember dot-matrix printers and the screens in the Aliens movie. What’s even more amazing is the website: be sure to scroll and keep scrolling.
Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten - “parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents' earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families”
Cave Oak - Wow! This is fun.
Writing Examples - Good for itself, and probably good for instructing The AI.
Desperately seeking AI ROI as IT budgets tighten - ”As we show above in red, at least 44% of the respondents indicate that gen AI is funded by stealing from other budgets. We’ve seen that number hover around 40% to 42% in previous surveys, and it pops up to at least 55% in the Global 2000.” // Also, one tactics for general IT cost savings is vendor consolidation.
Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming - People have been using generative AI to help with coding for a couple years now. Is it making 10x developers? This guy tries to make the excitement more realistic by pulling together research on the topic.
How to Choose the Architecture for Your GenAI Application - I should read this!
Wastebook
“Today I am the man in seat 61 on the Eurostar from Paris to London.” Here.
“It’s clear they’re not used to halflings wandering into their midst, offering strange pockets of extradimensional comfort.” ChatGPT in D&D mode.
“Not sure when I started eating like a country hermit.” Here.
“salt libertarians” Here.
Conferences
Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.
If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.
VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.
Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.
Logoff
I’ve been at CF Day in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was great seeing the CF people. There were some great talks, especially on the topic of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes co-existing in a useful way. They’ll be up on their YouTube channel sometime soon. Also, there was a live recording of Cloud Foundry Weekly, available now.
No travel until Explore, which I guess is actually soon-ish. Hopefully that means I’ll get some content out.
Here’s some good advice on how to eat Dutch food:
(I actually like stamppot a lot, and, now that I think of it, I’m not really sold on hot pot yet. But, you know: ha hah. Good one.)