IncrativeOps

Maybe changing less, more slowly is a good idea. Also, links like a set of tactics to do more “active listening.”

Apr 2, 2023

Suggested episode soundtrack:

IncrativeOps: Better Living by Changing Less - Talk Idea

Here’s a talk I’m thinking of doing for a DevOpsDays keynote this fall.

Now more than ever it's critical that you change how your work. Macroeconomic headwinds are creating an existential crisis for enterprises that must migrate from old ways of working to cloud native cultures. Software is eating the world.

You've certainly heard all of this for past ten years, probably at least once in the past ten minutes DevOps has always been about dramatic changes to improve IT. You don't only need to use a different set of tools, you need to change your entire IT culture!

It's all exhausting, really. Worse, this imperative to change never goes away. Will we ever actually be done and "be like Google"?

Instead of carrying the flag of "change or die," this talk proposes an alternate, more practical, sustainable, and comforting approach to improving: IncrativeOps.

("Incrative" is not a typo.)

Midjourney: a cartoon character that's a glass of red wine hunched over typing on a laptop with wine spilling over, laughing and drinking a cup of coffee, messy office, golden light, music notes coming out of a transister radio, interesting angle

More Productive Developers Improve More Things

At first glance, the readout of this survey is kind of flat. There’s nothing too bonkers in it, and most of the charts fall feel like they have Narcissism of Small Differences in Charts syndrome. But, there’s three things of interest:

43% of people have established a platform engineering/developer platform thing/program. So, there’s a lot of people working on “platform.”
51% are planning to "Invest in new technologies to help employees with their day-to-day job functions" in the next two years. Despite the gloom of tech company budget cuts, in the overall IT world, there’s plans to “invest.” That could mean money, or just tools and attention, but it’s still a good sign. The survey was done between Nov, 2022 and Feb 2023, so it’s current enough.
Improving developer experience (increasing productivity, and, sort of, “happiness” with new tools and practices) improves everything:
At first this chart looks boring, nothing stands out. But, the point is more that “everything” is on there and is looking good. In contrast, you could have charts that show that better developer experience increases developer productivty, but that customer satisfaction doesn’t go up. That’d mean there wasn’t a connection between the two. But, here, you can see that respondents think there’s a connection. So, read: DX works!

There’s further discussion in this week’s Tanzu Talk podcast.

My Content

Undivided Attention, Software Defined Talk - sadly, once again I couldn’t make it, but: This week we discuss Docker’s Reversal, Amazon return to office, Apple’s headset, the state of the Metaverse and the rise of LLMs. Plus, Matt shares his sleep study experience and an after-show about Hawaii.
The 3 Types of Kubernetes, and, Better Developer Productivity Improves Everything - We should start distinguishing between on-premises kubernetes and public cloud kubernetes. Also, it looks like improving developer productivity improves everything. That's what Ben and I conclude after look over a recent analyst report ranking kubernetes distros/services and a survey on developer experience efforts in organizations.

Relative to your interest

Summaries from ChatGPT begin with the robot. This time, I asked the robot to pick the most interesting quote from the article. However, I didn’t go check if it was actually a quote, so I removed the quotes.

Why did you pull out an umbrella? - A set of tactics to do more “active listening.”

🤖 FinOps Can Be a Big Waste of Money: FinOps is not a silver bullet for managing cloud spend. It is an approach to help organizations manage cloud costs more effectively, but it requires careful planning and execution to be effective.
🤖 Filtered: A Reflection on Our Digital Lives: Filtering isn't about closing ourselves off from the world or ignoring important information. It's about being intentional with our attention and making sure that we're spending our time and energy on the things that matter most to us.
🤖 The Age of Average: Breaking free from the Age of Average requires a willingness to take risks and embrace failure. It also requires a commitment to innovation and creativity, even if it means challenging the status quo and going against societal norms.
🤖 Internationalization at University of Amsterdam Needs to Stop, Says Student Union: While the internationalization of universities can bring many benefits, it is important to ensure that these efforts are not at the expense of the quality of education for domestic students.
🤖 Why did you pull out an umbrella? - Blogging allows writers to engage with their readers in a more personal and direct way than social media platforms, and that it can be a way to build a community around shared interests and ideas.

Logoff

Planning. It’s something I could do more of. I say this because I’ve been particularly spacey of late. Missing some calls, late to reply to emails, and on the otherwise committing to some work that’s not really, uh, “strategic” for me. I’m not sure how to build up the habit of better planning and prioritization. Maybe with each ask I need to write a one or two line analysis of why I should do it and if I should. And then at the start of each week a plan of two things I want to do and what I must do. Each day a bit of the same. I bet I could use ChatGPT as a sot of schedule/backlog reviewer and mentor.

I can’t track down where I read this, but I recall seeing that the new version of Bear had just been submitted for App Store approval. I’ve been waiting for this new version after using the alpha/beta for awhile. If it’s like Panda, it has two things that I want: it will work with plain text files in a regular directory structure (iCloud, for me) instead of some custom database, and, you can do Apple Pencil sketches that are editable (I think the current ones were one shots). I’ve been using Apple Notes for awhile which are actually much better than you’d think for a “notebook” app, but, I don’t know, using markdown with plain text files would be nicer. And, Bear is a much nicer app as far as how I think.

Unrelated, from one of my co-workers: "Our lives are amazing"