Coté

There is no open source business model. It's always about selling something that's closed source, or, at least, proprietary

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 07:41:01 +0100

Open Source $$$ Ethics, How Analysts use AI, Advanced Chicken Nugget Diplomacy, with Rachel Stephens

In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

If you listen to podcast, you should subscribe to this one.

Relative to your interests

Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures - “The report found code generation is the leading use case for generative AI, with more than half of survey responses naming that as a dominant use. Support chatbots came next, at 31%, followed by enterprise search and retrieval, data extraction and transformation, and meeting summarization.” // Once enterprise people are comfortable with using public cloud AI (they are currently not, at scale) things will grow a lot. Then we’ll need a year to see if it’s actually useful (and worth, like, $20 a month per head more in the IT bill). I hope it works! I like the AI stuff.
Platform Engineering Is The New DevOps - “Once hailed as the savior of organizational dysfunction, DevOps is causing friction in teams finding that operations is work they never really wanted to do. To get back to a happier balance, DevOps teams are finding that platform engineering helps them to split out operations from application development so that each function can return to focusing on what they do best.” // Way back when, Andrew Shafer would explain that the “you write it, you run it” thing only works if you have a highly automated platform. He still goes over that of course. His point there is one of the most often forgotten parts of all the cloud stuff over past years. Worse is when you have lots of platforms or set the layer of your platform too low, usually at the IaaS layer. You need a centralized PaaS. People are difficult in change, but technology is hard as well, especially if you have the wrong technology or haven’t changed it to match, help, and embody the new way you want to work (“culture”).
New York Times & AWS dispel three mainframe migration myths - What’s most shocking is that the New York Times had a mainframe. But, I guess it’s old enough that of course they do.
The Future Of B2B Buying Will Come Slowly … And Then All At Once - “Six months later, a little more than 18 months after ChatGPT launched, we polled B2B buyers for the first time about whether they are using generative AI. The genAI adoption numbers were shocking. The overwhelming majority, 89% of buyers in Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, reported that they were using genAI in at least one area of their purchasing process.”
Best non-fiction of 2024 - List of books.
Marketing from jdilla.xyz - “If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked. Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.”
Managing managers is its own skill - “I remember when a new executive was brought in to Freddie Mac at a high level in the IT department. My colleague Mary pointed out to me that he did not bring anyone with him from his former position. She saw that as a bad sign, suggesting that he had not earned much respect from his managers at his former employer. She was proven right, and he soon was bounced out of his position at Freddie Mac.”
THE RIGHT PEOPLE - Driving subscribers: “Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?”
AWS named as a leader again in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - AWS, VMware, Azure, Oracle, and Nutanix are in the MQ leader’s quadrant for “hybrid cloud.”

Wastebook

“Individual non-contributor.”
I’m pretty sure that I had a dream last night that I could easily buy SPY in my US brokerage account. For some reason, living abroad, I can’t do that. Taxes? Small print for liability reasons? Who knows, who cares. The thing is, I could probably call the brokerage and find out what to do. I am somehow horrified of calling them - just the conversation, just calling someone. What an odd, paralyzing phobia. This applies to almost every other business/consumer relationship I have. How do I get over that? I see other people who are totally fine just calling whoever - sometimes they’re the person hoarding a plane and talking on their phone. What thought-technology are these people benefitting from that I’m not?
I did the math tonight and I realized I’ve worked in computers for 29 years.
Related: Kid, I’ve got dotfiles older than you.
Why have the Dutch not come up with kruidennoten ice cream? It’d be like the Blue Bell buñuelos of the Netherlands.
I bet this is a great panel from KubeCon. Packed with banks.
Brevity is the soul of corporate comms confusion.
“Please cease the vibing and chilling or we will swallow a battery.” ArcaneBullshit.
“Bitter,” as in “they’re a very bitter person,” isn’t used much anymore. Now’s probably a time to put it back into the daily lexicon.
“The industry keeps moving, even if I’m in all-day meetings.” Link-blogger powerhouse Seroter.
“I’m sure we’d all agree that McDonald’s do not make the finest hamburgers on the planet. On the other hand, if you want a Big Mac, then a Big Mac is what you want — and no amount of boutique sliders fashioned from Kobe beef and hand-seasoned by elves is going to hit the spot.” From fellow Big Mac fan.

Recent laptop sticker collection. A SREDay Amsterdam, 2024.

Logoff

The Software Defined Interviews podcast reboot is going real well, see above! Whitney is a natural at podcasting and she and I don’t overlap too much in, I don’t know, the conversations we want to have and takes. That makes for a whole new type of conversation than if it was just me or with my usual bunch. We have a lot of recordings this week which we’ll drip out every two weeks. You should subscribe to it and listen, of course. I don’t really “get” subscribing to YouTube as a podcast (I think you just subscribe to the channel?), but here’s the playlist of the video versions of our recordings.

As I mentioned, I’m working on an internal video. Five minutes for the annual sales kick-off going over what Tanzu is. Normally, I loath spending too much time on video content, well, any content, really. I suppose there’s hubris crossed with laziness: I think my “first takes” are good enough, and I believe in abundance over perfection.

That’s not how working on an internal video that represents your business unit works, though. I think I’m OK with the fine tuning, reworking, reshooting, and collaborative editing.

Most of it (being OK with it) I guess, is that the intention is to have it be in my gonzo style. Also, I’ve tried to think of the first few video recordings as draft to get people thinking and extract the content - what they want me to say - from the group.

Extracting that content is part of the process. It’s also, in the last few years, where I’ve found myself in marketing. I get involved in work that isn’t about translating the official marketing strategy, talking points, positioning, messaging - you know, the official point of view, “what to say” - into content. It’s about figuring all of that out, coming up with the stuff.

There’s usually so much rigor, discipline, and being on message with corporate marketing that he lack of “what to say” can seem bad, negligent even. But, I mean, that official marketing-talk has to be created somewhere.

The point being, if you work in marketing, you have to watch out for this switch. That applies to all sorts of work, actually. Sometimes you’re asked to follow he strategy, sometimes you’re asked to help come up with it.

(This is especially true when you’re working on corporate strategy. So often when I was doing that at Dell for software and cloud I waned to [and did!] ask “just tell me what you want, dear scatterbrained, changing what you ask for every meeting, executives!” but that wasn’t the job. It was to help them figure out what they wanted.)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:32:25 +0100

Platform Engineering Is The New DevOps - “Once hailed as the savior of organizational dysfunction, DevOps is causing friction in teams finding that operations is work they never really wanted to do. To get back to a happier balance, DevOps teams are finding that platform engineering helps them to split out operations from application development so that each function can return to focusing on what they do best."

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:30:54 +0100

New York Times & AWS dispel three mainframe migration myths - What’s most shocking is that the New York Times had a mainframe. But, I guess it’s old enough that of course they do.

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:27:55 +0100

The Future Of B2B Buying Will Come Slowly … And Then All At Once - “Six months later, a little more than 18 months after ChatGPT launched, we polled B2B buyers for the first time about whether they are using generative AI. The genAI adoption numbers were shocking. The overwhelming majority, 89% of buyers in Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2024, reported that they were using genAI in at least one area of their purchasing process."

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:25:18 +0100

Token stream 2024-11-22 - jdilla.xyz - “If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked. Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post."

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:22:07 +0100

Managing managers is its own skill - “I remember when a new executive was brought in to Freddie Mac at a high level in the IT department. My colleague Mary pointed out to me that he did not bring anyone with him from his former position. She saw that as a bad sign, suggesting that he had not earned much respect from his managers at his former employer. She was proven right, and he soon was bounced out of his position at Freddie Mac."

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:20:26 +0100

THE RIGHT PEOPLE - Driving subscribers: “Write a post that will resonate with the person you’re emailing. Yes, even if it’s just that one person. Email the person the link. Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?"

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:18:29 +0100

AWS named as a leader again in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - AWS, VMware, Azure, Oracle, and Nutanix are in the MQ leader’s quadrant for “hybrid cloud."

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:19:02 +0100

Business spending on AI surged 500% this year to $13.8 billion, says Menlo Ventures - “The report found code generation is the leading use case for generative AI, with more than half of survey responses naming that as a dominant use. Support chatbots came next, at 31%, followed by enterprise search and retrieval, data extraction and transformation, and meeting summarization.” // Once enterprise people are comfortable with using public cloud AI (they are currently not, at scale) things will grow a lot. Then we’ll need a year to see if it’s actually useful (and worth, like, $20 a month per head more in the IT bill). I hope it works! I like the AI stuff.

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:57:49 +0100

Gartner forecast dampens cloud repatriation outlook - Pretty thorough round-up of recent analyst stuff, and even the GIECO angle.

Private cloud is just fine, and here to stay, so build a great platform for yourself

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:36:21 +0100

I did a second interview with the GM of my division at work, Tanzu. The first one was about Prunima’s career in IT management and, now, cloud. This second one is all about private cloud. Here’s a video except:

Here’s a summary from our AI friend:

When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Purnima Padmanabhan, Tanzu GM, highlights that customers often require both private and public clouds, depending on their application needs. She outlines several reasons why people choose to maintain, even prefer private cloud:

Data Gravity - Applications running in private clouds often handle large volumes of data. Transferring this data to and fro other environments is challenging, and costly, especially when integrating advanced analytics or AI/ML capabilities. Keeping the data within the private cloud minimizes complexity and enhances performance.
Ecosystem Gravity - Applications frequently interact with other systems such as ERP, supply chain, ordering systems, and other applications and services. Hosting all these interconnected applications within the same private environment improves performance and reduces latency. It ensures seamless integration, as applications do not operate in isolation.
Control Over Governance, Privacy, and Regulation - Private cloud infrastructures offer greater control over data management, helping organizations comply with governance policies, privacy standards, and regulatory requirements. Customers feel more secure managing sensitive data within their own infrastructure, where they can enforce strict controls.
Effectiveness and Familiarity of Private Cloud - Many organizations find that their applications run efficiently on existing private infrastructures. Instead of migrating to public clouds, they can enhance their private environments by implementing platforms that make it easier for developers to build and update applications. This approach provides the needed flexibility without the complexities of a public cloud migration, often leading to better outcomes.

There’s more in my full interview with her in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed.

Now that’s the way to stage-dress a panel.

Relative to your interests

Customer-centric applications: Heroku simplifies deployments - "Heroku’s owned by Salesforce,” she noted. “Heroku’s philosophy is like, ‘Hey, you know what? The undifferentiated heavy lifting for a lot of people is building your platform. You should spend the time building your business, building your app.’ The integrations that we provide, we unlock a ton of capabilities for all the creators bringing business analysts like sales ops, marketing ops people together with developers to build the best workflows and automations”” // Here’s to the dream of hiding Kubernetes from app developers working this time! Not only working, but having the industry actually stick to it instead of tearing it down to the IaaS studs once some cool new IaaS layer comes along in ₅ years.
Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.’
Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF.”
Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.
Elon Musk hints at plan to sink DOGE’s teeth into legacy tech - List of old IT in the US government. // Escaping the legacy trap is hard.
Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%.”
Google Cloud growth - “Google Cloud now accounts for 12% of Alphabet’s overall revenue. That’s nearly double the amount from 4 years ago.”
The Influence of Bell Labs
What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - "Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”
IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!

“Orwellian Videocams, almost a quaint form of surveillance to get upset about,” photo by Bruce Serling (presumably).

Wastebook

Ignorant urgency.
Some simple premature optimization.
“Give developers and engineers the terrifying responsibility of being in charge of their own spending. Let them enjoy both the upsides and downsides of being adults.” Justin.
“AI as an accountability sink.” Fresh in from Iceland.
“Calling in rich.” Brandon.
“DevOps Activist.”
People don’t like it when you raise prices. Often, they’ll like it less if you disappear.

From The World of Interiors.

Logoff

I’ve been working on a video for our annual sales kickoff (SKO). Doing SKO work is always weird. People have so many theories about how to communicate with sales people. Also, as with a lot of internal comms, you can end up with so many fingers on the film that end-up with a Homer Car.

Brandon’s number one theory is that you need to tell them how to make money. I believe this is the most important thing. You could do just the and be done.

There’s a common belief that you have to be brief and high-level, keep in mind simple.

Another one is that you need to speak to the benefit and outcomes of the product you’re highlighting - which is another way of going over he problems solved.

My theory is that you also need to tell sales people who to find in an organization, what their problems are, and how your product can solve their problem. If you do person-to-person sales (not just through the web, PLG, demand gen - whatever), you also need to give them some conversations to have.

We’ll see!

Outro: It’s Tuesday, all day today. I recommend this 39 minute 45 second track. And if you don’t have time for that, here’s what you want.

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:03:58 +0100

What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - “Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:03:00 +0100

Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF."

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:02:02 +0100

Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:27:24 +0100

Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.'

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:23:31 +0100

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 07:24:01 +0100

IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 08:40:31 +0100

Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%."

How to write better conclusions

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 08:26:20 +0100

Use the last paragraph for something fun

Watching the video is more fun, but here’s he transcript you can’t be bothered:

The way you learn to write a conclusion to an essay or a paper or whatever kind of text you're writing in school: just totally forget that.

What you want to do when you write a conclusion is not summarize what you've done, return to your argument, and say how you've proven it out or whatever. You do that before the conclusion.

What you want to do in a conclusion is introduce a new idea, a new insight. I think of this as a treat that you're adding at the end. You don't have to discuss it that much. You don't have to prove it out. You're just throwing something out there that kind of intuitively connects and makes sense, or that you're just gonna say and possit.

For example, let's say you just wrote some text arguing that the croissant is the superior pastry. What you might do is spell that out, reach the conclusion, summarize why it's done, state that therefore the croissant is the best.

But in your conclusion paragraph, you can say, Oh, and one last thing, if you're really in a hard spot and you don't have tacos available, you can also slice up a croissant, smash it on a griddle and make a makeshift quesadilla out of it.

This creates a memorable thing at the end, something that's fun, instead of just being kind of like an obligatory summing up of stuff. It makes your essay more memorable and also more enjoyable to write.

So next time you're writing some chunk of text, do your conclusion in the middle of the essay, kind of summarizing things, and add an interesting note, a little dessert item, a snack at the end.

Stay in the sandbox - Software Defined Talk #493

This week’s episode: “we cover OpenCost’s big incubation milestone, CNCF's graduation rules, and a flurry of tech acquisitions. Plus, some thoughts on teaching kids about passwords.”

You can listen to it, or watch the unedited video version if you prefer.

Relative to your interests

Moving off an AS/400 will take a couple years, discussion in reddit.
Twelve Factor project has been open-sourced by Salesforce - “Heroku is replatforming on Kubernetes.”
DevOps, LLMs, and the Software Development Singularity
3 Hour Layover in Schiphol - My tips on what to do during a 3 hour layover at Schiphol.
Cooking eggs with an espresso machine - This looks like the creamy texture of hotel eggs, except with fresh eggs instead of powder. Also, finally a use for that wand thing on my coffee machine.
US presidential election impact: Region by region, from S&P Global - As it says for regions in the world.
Want ad in Twitter - This the most concise, accurate job ad for a VP of Marketing in tech.
Sovereign cloud provides CIOs with solutions to data management challenges
Spring Boot and Temporal - “46% of enterprise workloads use Spring…. That is 46% of the workloads. That means that nearly half the time when you are using your banking, insurance, medical records, telco and utilities apps, Spring is in play. Streaming? Yeah, Netflix is all in on Spring. ECommerce? Amazon heavily uses Spring” (based on JetBrains 2023 and Stackoverflow 2024 surveys).
VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

I haven’t actually had that croissant taco, I just made it up as I was walking. Maybe I’ll try this weekend and report back.

Hyping on Twitter Mostly Garbage Now

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 11:57:58 +0100

Comparing two years of Twitter engagement to a month of Bluesky engagement

Like everyone else, I consider giving up on Twitter daily, especially with the US election bullshit. I don’t really read much on there anymore (I’ve tried all the tricks, even subscribing some months ago), but I still post things hoping to get the eyeballs. Since Twitter shut down is APIs (or made them expensive, or whatever), it’s harder to automate posting. I use the free tier of buffer, which is fine, but I’d rather just use Croissant.

Is that even worth it to even post to Twitter anymore?

Here’s the overall views and engagement on my Twitter account for the past year:

And, then top Tweets in the last ~3months (the max I could select):

That top video got 359 views, the next one 271. These are horrible numbers. A few years back when I went short-form video crazy, I’d get thousands of views of most videos in Twitter (LinkedIn is was and remains really good too).

The main thing I care about now-a-days is my newsletter. Does Twitter drive views and subscriptions for my newsletter?

Here’s the past year:

Over all time (December 12st 2022 to November 15th, 2024), Twitter drove 3,786 views and 53 newsletter subscriptions. That means most of my traffic from Twitter was in the past, and no much has happened relative to that in the pas year.

In comparison, LinkedIn has driven 3,179 over the past two years and 76 subscriptions in the same period.

In the past two years, Bluesky is at 18 views and 12 subscriptions. Let’s look at the post-Hightower Shift Bluesky period though. Between October 19th, 2024 and November 15th, 2024 (today) Bluesky generated 10 views and 9 subscriptions. In comparison, for that same period, Twitter drove 79 views and 0 subscriptions.

Views are nice, but subscriptions are the number one goal.

I have something like 11,000 followers in Twitter (I started in 2006 and have had several high profile jobs since then). I’m nearing 900 in Bluesky post-Hightower Shift. If I’m doing the math right, I have a “do followers click on my links?” percentage of 0.7% in Twitter and 9% in Bluesky.

Anyhow. I haven’t made a spreadsheet, but when I look at these numbers it makes me think that when I comes to shameless self-promotion, Twitter is now garbage and not worth the time to even automate cross-posting.

So, yeah: ENGAGE WITH MY BRAND, MOFOS! Oh, and subscribe to what you’re reading right now, my newsletter!

Subscribe now

Sidenote: I’ve been watching the view counts on YouTube for my fellow infrastructure software, cloud, etc. B2B people. They’re generally horrible! After speaking with a few of them who suddenly shifted to good results, I found out the trick: buy ads, buy traffic. This works incredibly well in LinkedIn too.1

Now, if you’re doing sponsored YouTube video in this space (like a lot of people!) who get paid by vendors and others to post interviews with company people and customers on YouTube, it’s clear that you should take some of that payment to buy views. This means less profit for you, sure, but once you start getting 1,000+ views on your videos about, you know, service meshe, obscure networking protocols, RBAC for Kubernees, or whatever other boring-ass enterprise shit you’re hoping will compete with how to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine…

…wait, where was I? …oh, right…

If you’re getting sponsorship for videos, pay for traffic, and once you get 1,000, 2,000, especially over 3,000 views, you’ll stand out so much from your competitors, and likely your client’s own YouTube video views that you can do more videos, raise prices, etc. There’s probably a spreadsheet you can make. This applies to the tech companies doing this and creatives hustling themselves (if they have the cash).

Logoff

I have an episode for later today as well, hopefully.

My company bought LinkedIn ads (whatever those are!) for some of my videos in the past couple months. Two of those videos got 54,301 views (with 213,135 impressions [people who saw he post but did not click play on the video) and 67,923 (with 212,104 impressions). This was to promote our EMEA conference, and judging by he engagement and people who tried to connect with me, hey did a great job reaching ME (especially Turkey) and other EMEA regions. I usually get around a 1,000 organic views on my videos, and more around 10,000 on the really good ones. LinkedIn is clearly an amazing place for B2B eyeballs.

Making money with open source, a discussion

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 14:23:30 +0100

Making Money with Open Source - Software Defined Interviews

We talked about a lot more than making money with open source in this interview with RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens, but the part was pretty good:

In this episode, Whitney Lee and Coté dive into the insights of Rachel Stephens from RedMonk about the world of being an industry analyst. They discuss experiences from working as an analyst, the balance between qualitative and quantitative analysis, the challenges and misconceptions surrounding open-source business models, and the impact of AI on the analyst profession and beyond. They also discuss the 2024 DORA report, and a few other topics.

You can listen on the episode show notes page, watch the original video (above), or, best, subscribe to the podcast to check it out. Doing these podcasts with Whitney has been great, we’ve go four of five more lined up, so there’s plenty more coming.

Wastebook

Wilford Brimley oatmeal marketing: whatever happened to just buying computers?
The problem is often lack of focus. What the executive has to do is give permission to cut all the other stuff out, and do the structural work for that: shutting down projects, closing divisions, even getting rid of people. In tech, this often means limiting chasing shinny objects, shutting down “moonshots.” Anti-innovation as it may be, these executives only focus on things that make money and immediately, intuitively benefit the customer. You have a strategy to run the business better, maybe even make more money. You don’t have a strategy to come up with a new product, create a new market. Which is fine: you’ll probably fail at that, like most everyone else. Your goal is to survive and thrive, not risk it all for glory and selling your shares at the IPO.
“The Drooling Diplomat,” Dungeon Magazine, #63.
“Reading is a form of necromancy.” Here.
Even “Bitcoin Jesus” can’t escape the IRS.
“I really don’t want cynicism to become my compass.” Noah.
“Bull power for money stream.” Both at GoTech World.
“We are all smart with browsers made by others.” Talk title at GoTech World.
If you give people the chance to edit, they often will. If you just publish it, they will often say it’s good. -“Musk-a-Lago.” Recent reports.

The sandwiches on KLM flights are actually pretty good. That firs paragraph is a pretty good summary of Dutch pragmatism and values.

Relative to your interests

Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.
Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware.”
Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.
Da Art of (Business) Storytellin’ - “Storytelling is not only important for advertising but for internal team alignment. We hear stories about Airbnb’s movie-quality storyboards around its office or Amazon’s Press Release Method. The key takeaway is that the company must align marketing and product. Slogans and one-liners must be brainstormed at the same time patents are being drawn. If the product team builds first, then asks marketing to find the story, it’s a recipe for disaster. It will lead to the customer expecting X but actually receiving Y.”
“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” // And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.”

AI guidelines at my kid’s school.

Conferences

Logoff

The T key on my laptop is sticking. How does one fix that kind of thing? (Notice how many T’s were in the sentence? I sure did!)

Not much to say, really. Weird afternoon. On such occasions, this is one of the many comfort clips that makes me smile.

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:43:16 +0100

- Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware."

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:42:53 +0100

“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life."

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:42:03 +0100

- Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 07:42:35 +0100

- Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.