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Cloud Cloud Dot Dev is about things, topics and aha-moments I encounter on a daily basis that I think may be interesting for saving and that also may be interesting for others to learn about or discover.

6 April 2025

• “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking through the wrong end of the microscope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” — Dr. Seuss

3 April 2025

• “I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight.
  
  I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song?
  
  Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song

2 April 2025

• “The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.” — Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others, Volume Il: American Essays 1931-1935, On Orthodoxies (1933)

27 March 2025

• Cloud migrations aren’t just about speed or sticking with what’s familiar. They’re about doing the foundational work even when it’s painful.

25 March 2025

• Why getting the right people on the bus is key to any transformation effort!

20 March 2025

• A story about my biggest role model in tech: my mom!

18 March 2025

• “Competition is the law of jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilisation.” - Peter Kropotkin

17 March 2025

• What St. Patrick can teach modern day Europe.

16 March 2025

• “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” - Alvin Toffler

13 March 2025

• Why are only 40% of applications delivered using CI/CD?

12 March 2025

• “Mundus sine caesaribus” - The World Without Ceasars.

11 March 2025

• Dr. Seuss went to war with wit and cartoons, not guns.

10 March 2025

• When the world feels upside down, focus on what you can control.

6 March 2025

• “A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.” - Jimmy Cartner

5 March 2025

• What future will we choose for Europe?

4 March 2025

• How Hitler dismantled German democracy in 53 days.

3 March 2025

• Leadership is not defined by the easy days, but how you handle the hard days.

1 March 2025

• ”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.” - Cicero

28 February 2025

• Ukraine’s cause is ours.

24 February 2025

• “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato
  
  
• Over the past year or so, I’ve been on a mission to share my passion for an active lifestyle with my kids, beyond their regular training routines.

23 February 2025

• “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

22 February 2025

• “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it’s unsafe to be intelligent.” - Isaac Asimov
  
  
• In 1987, Donald Trump spent nearly $100,000 to place a full-page advertisement criticizing U.S. foreign policy in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Already then undermining Pax Americana, following a visit to Moscow. A zebra doesn’t change its stripes.

21 February 2025

• “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” - George Orwell, 1984

20 February 2025

• “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.” - Charles de Gaulle
  
  
• “You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.” - Charles de Gaulle
  
  
• Drawing some parallels between the Tito and Stalin split of 1948 and Russia’s aggression on Ukraine.

19 February 2025

• “I don’t know” is probably one of the most powerful phrases in leadership.

15 February 2025

• Calls for European digital sovereignty are getting louder!

13 February 2025

• In the modern world identity is no longer tied to a single place, culture or role.

12 February 2025

• Charter for a Competitive, Diverse, Dynamic, and Democratic European Union (in the style of the Agile Manifesto)

11 February 2025

• Started reading Gregor Hohpe’s “Cloud Strategy”.

6 February 2025

• “First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.” - Bertrand Russell, on how fascism starts

4 February 2025

• At the heart of a company’s adaptability, portability, resiliency, and ultimate success is a simple truth: its ability to understand, maintain, and evolve its codebase.

3 February 2025

• Highly relevant analogy from Milton Friedman on free trade.

1 February 2025

• “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” - Aldous Huxley
  
  
• What skills should infrastructure engineers learn in 2025?

28 January 2025

• “Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.” - Winston Churchill on leadership
  
  
• “Respice post te! Hominem te memento!” - “Look behind you. Remember you are a man.” - Tertullian, Apologeticus 33
  
  
• Why isn’t cloud carbon data standardised?
  
  
• Book review of Jim Collins’ “How The Mighty Fall”.

27 January 2025

• Spectacular view on my run commute home.
  
  
• Examples of state censorship in DeepSeek’s R1 LLM.

24 January 2025

• “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984.

23 January 2025

• The teachings of Hannah Arendt resonate more than ever.

22 January 2025

• “Whatever happens, stay alive. Don’t die before you’re dead. Don’t lose yourself, don’t lose hope, don’t loose direction.
  
  Stay alive, with yourself, with every cell of your body, with every fiber of your skin.
  
  Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design.
  
  Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope.
  
  Stay alive with joy.
  
  There is only one thing you should not waste in life, and that’s life itself.”
  - Virginia Woolf

21 January 2025

• “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…” - Carl Sagan
  
  
• “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” - George Orwell, 1984

20 January 2025

• Book review of Gergely Orosz’s “The Software Engineer’s Guidebook”.

9 January 2025

• “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.” - Erasmus

8 January 2025

• How do you objectively assess the operational maturity of an infrastructure team?

7 January 2025

• “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” - George Box
  
  
• First day commuting to work after a 2 week vacation. Amazing, snowy views.

3 January 2025

• “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” - Seneca

1 January 2025

• New Year’s greeting to colleagues, old and current, and friends, new and familiar.
  
  
• “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” - Peter F. Drucker.
  
  
• Packard’s Law - “No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.” - David Packard
  
  
• “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away… people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.” - Winston S. Churchill

31 December 2024

• Looking at my Strava year in sport.
  
  
• The essence of profound insight is simplicity.
  
  
• “Revolution means turning the wheel.” - Igor Stravinsky

  29 December 2024

• TOC (Theory of Constraints) has a single core concept: every process has one constraint, and the entire process throughput will only improve when the constraint is improved. Moreover, this core concept gives rise to a significant corollary: spending time optimizing non-constraints won’t yield substantial benefits; only improving the constraint can further the goal of achieving more profit. More here.
  
  
• “The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action.” - W. Edwards Deming
  
  
• “Planning requires prediction. Prediction requires a theory.” – Ron Moen

28 December 2024

• “The colder the winter, the more open the cherry blossoms. The same is true for people. Without suffering and troubles, it is difficult to have great development and will not grasp true happiness.” - Kazuo Inamori
  
  
• “A clear and pure mind can feel positive energy, while a selfish heart sees complexity and chaos.” - Kazuo Inamori

27 December 2024

• “If you improve performance of something that is not a constraint, you improve nothing.” - Eliyahu M. Goldratt

23 December 2024

• May this time of reflection, tranquility and hope bring you joy, renewed energy, and inspiration for the journey into the new year.
  
  
• People are not your most important asset, the right people are.

20 December 2024

• Summary of books read so far this year - key themes and surprising outliers.

19 December 2024

• Book review of “Flow Engineering”.

18 December 2024

• Identity is the new perimeter.

17 December 2024

• Why on-premise infrastructure engineering skills are not directly transferable to Cloud.

12 December 2024

• SEB Christmas Party Song.

11 December 2024

• What I do with cold calls.

10 December 2024

• Key cues you have a bad project manager on your hands.

8 December 2024

• Some thoughts on why hiring experts and telling them what to do and think, may not be the best idea.

5 December 2024

• Review of Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline”.

2 December 2024

• After 19 years, student loan free!

1 December 2024

• Complexity as the shortcut to job security.

29 November 2024

• Relationships are the foundation of success.

28 November 2024

• Key factors that break microsegmentation from a Google Cloud perspective.

27 November 2024

• Viewing public cloud through a monolithic lense.

26 November 2024

• Black Friday meme.

25 November 2024

• “Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
  
• Just a few reasons with figures why Cloud is here to stay.

21 November 2024

• “A company is a machine for making decisions.” - Peter Drucker
  
  
• “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All the rest are costs.” - Peter Drucker
  
  
• “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” – Peter Drucker
  
  
• “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” - W. Edwards Deming
  
  
• “Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.” - Henry Ford
  
  
• Snow is back in town.

20 November 2024

• The Pygmalion Effect or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, suggests that when individuals receive sustained support, encouragement, and belief in their potential from others, they are more likely to achieve success and exceed expectations.
  
  

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People outlines seven principles for personal and professional effectiveness. These habits are timeless and help individuals achieve their goals while fostering relationships and personal growth. Here are the habits:

• Be Proactive - Take responsibility for your actions and focus on what you can control rather than what you cannot.
  
• Begin with the End in Mind - Define your personal mission, values, and long-term vision. Clarify your goals to align daily actions with your ultimate objectives.
  
• Put First Things First - Prioritize your time and energy around what matters most, focusing on important tasks rather than urgent distractions.
  
• Think Win-Win - Seek mutually beneficial solutions in relationships. Foster a mindset of abundance rather than competition.
  
• Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood - Practice empathetic listening to truly understand others before expressing your own perspective.
  
• Synergize - Leverage the strengths of diverse groups to create better outcomes than individuals could achieve alone.
  
• Sharpen the Saw - Regularly renew yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to maintain balance and effectiveness.
  
  These habits emphasize personal responsibility, goal orientation, relationship building, and continuous self-improvement.

19 November 2024

• The not very well hidden cost of team dependencies in software engineering.

18 November 2024

• “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” – Stephen Covey
  
  
• “Have you ever been too busy driving to stop for gas?” - Stephen Covey

16 November 2024

• An AI generated tune on DORA.

14 November 2024

• “Seek first to understand, than to be understood.” - Stephen Covey
  
  
• “Data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction.” - W. Edwards Deming

13 November 2024

• What Agile role divisions (briefly) are to me.

6 November 2024

• 4th FSI / Fintech event at Google. Some take-aways.
  
  
• Make Europe great again.

5 November 2024

• “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill
  
  
• “… it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it. And you also find there’s tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do. And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It’s that process that is the magic.” - Steve Jobs
  
  
• “Lead with context, not control.” - Reed Hastings
  
  
• Diwali celebrations at work.
  
  
• Job ad for our Tech Trainee out!

4 November 2024

• On Simian Army and resilience in financial services.

3 November 2024

• Reflections on life’s fragility and importance of being in the moment.

26 October 2024

• Adding a third, cost dimension to Forrest Brazeal’s cleverness/wisdom curve.

23 October 2024

• Two measurements of a modern infrastructure and application stack: percentage of infrastructure in production set up using IaC and percentage of applications deployed to production using CI/CD.
  
  
• What is the price premium you’re willing to spend on additional features in a system or a tool, that are only sparingly, if ever, used?

22 October 2024

• What agile is about, at it’s core.

21 October 2024

• 18th anniversary on LinkedIn!

16 October 2024

• Why DevOps still matters, a lot!

15 October 2024

• The origin story of my path to Cloud.

14 October 2024

• A short recruitment video for our open Azure Cloud Engineer roles.

10 October 2024

• Giving a presentation at Tech Day about mastering NPAP.

9 October 2024

• Attending Google Innovator’s Hive for the first time!
  
  
• Macron’s insightful remarks reg European competitiveness (or lack thereof).

7 October 2024

• Great discussion with Richard Seroter on basically all things cloud.

6 October 2024

• US banks invest 3 times more in tech than European ones. But does it matter and what actually does matter!?
  
  
• When your legs get tired, run with your heart.

5 October 2024

• Some thoughts on enpowering leadership and three key tenets of how I see leadership.

4 October 2024

• Book review of Seth Godin’s “This is Marketing”.

3 October 2024

• Unboxing of reMarkable Paper Pro. Review to follow.

28 September 2024

• Chat Control would be devastating for our democracy, individual rights and freedoms, if it would be made into law!

25 September 2024

• Key learnings from cloud transformation in financial services.

20 September 2024

• Image from yesterday’s post-PI planning fika.

17 September 2024

• A true classic, the CIA field guide to reduce productivity in the workplace.

16 September 2024

• Are you doing your developers a disservice by adding #middleware “magic” in front of their applications, temporarily saving the day but long term creating a pile of tech debt, hard to get out of?

15 September

• Why you can’t lift and shift on premise ways of working.

7 September 2024

• “You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors, who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else will do as good of a job as them.” - Steve Jobs in a 1985 interview
  
  
• Book review of Adam Grant’s “Give and Take”.

5 September 2024

• “Is there such a thing as too little tech dept?… It goes by the name of “premature optimisation” and can slow down teams and companies at critical times.” - Gergely Orosz

3 September 2024

• “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” - Adam Smith

2 September 2024

• A walk down the memory lane to my first encounter with Salesforce back in 2008, and how SFDC changed how enterprises consume software.

27 August 2024

• “A bird sitting in a tree is not afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not in the branch, but in her own wings.”

22 August 2024

• Some images from my morning commute run to work.

20 August 2024

• “Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already was what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

14 August 2024

• “Birds born in a cage, think flying is a disease.” - Alejandro Jodorowsky
  
  

12 August 2024

• Why general IT concepts can not be sole possession of a select few.

7 August 2024

• Some reflections why not doing anything work related during the summer vacation can be a great thing.

1 August 2024

• Maintaining some traditions is important. Here a post on my and my kids’ yearly kayaking tradition.

28 July 2024

• “Rough waters are truer tests of leadership. In calm water, every ship has a good captain.” - Swedish proverb
  
  
• “In the infinite game, the only real competitor is yourself.” - Simon Sinek
  
  
• “Our products and services are some of the things we use to advance our cause. They are not themselves the cause.” - Simon Sinek
  
  
• A just cause embraces five standards:
• For something: affirmative and optimistic.
• Inclusive: open to all those who would like to contribute
• Service-oriented: for the primary benefit of others
• Resilient: able to endure political, technological and cultural change
• Idealistic: big, bold and ultimately unachievable

25 July 2024

• Some more gems from “The Software Engineer’s Guidebook.
  “If you work at a company with a dedicated infrastructure team, it can be tempting to skip the learning process and turn to the infra team, when you suspect an infrastructure issue. However, this approach will ultimately slow you down. Besides, learning how infrastructure works under the hood is not only interesting in itself; this depth of understanding is table stakes for well-rounded senior engineers.”

19 July 2024

• “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the customer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
  
  
• “There is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” - Milton Friedman
  
  
• “Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives. And ultimately, that company will provide subpar returns to the investors who depend on it to finance their retirement, home purchases, or higher education.” - Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, 2018 letter to CEOs

18 July 2024

• Book review of Simon Sinek’s “The Infinite Game.”

15 July 2024

• Summer vacations are for playing with an RC helicopter and landing it safely on the porch.

10 July 2024

• Yokoten is a Japanese word that translates to “best practice sharing.” In the world of process improvement, Yokoten is a tool that helps to unify and standardize work processes across an organization. It’s essential for creating a standardized and efficient process, which is key to minimizing errors and maximizing productivity. Think of Yokoten as the foundation for creating a process that everyone in the organization can understand and follow. Without a standardized process, employees are often left to figure things out on their own, leading to inconsistency and confusion. To solve this problem, Yokoten provides a framework for everyone to follow so that everyone is on the same page. Read more.
• Yamazumi in Japanese means “to stack up.” A Yamazumi chart is a graph that shows the cycle time of each task in a process step displayed as a stacked bar graph. It’s a tool to visualize machine and operator cycle time to assess performance. It’s also a good indicator of variation among workstations that do the same thing. Variations, or mura in Japanese, result in muda or waste. Read more.

9 July 2024

• Book review of “The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership” by Jeffrey Liker and Gary Convis.
  
  
• Recruiting for a Technical Service Manager. Also learnt how to block someone on LinkedIn.

8 July 2024

• “Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers.” ― Socrates

5 July 2024

• The term jishuken is used to describe the intentional, workplace-focused activity called gemba kaizen. The origin of jishuken comes from “kanban houshiki bukachou jishu kenkyuukai”. This translates as “kanban system department & section manager autonomous study groups”. This was shortened to “jishuken” which is “self study”. Jishuken is a “management-driven kaizen activity where management members identify areas in need of continuous improvement and spread information through the organization to stimulate kaizen activity.” In other words, while kaizen typically involves all employees on the shop floor, jishuken requires managers to conduct hands-on kaizen activity on the factory floor. This helps managers take ownership of kaizen and create a culture of observing problem areas in their natural state.
  
  
• “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” - Ralph Nader
  
  
• “The only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals.” - Ralph Nader
  
  
• “A society with more justice needs less charity.” - Ralph Nader

4 July 2024

• Did a fun video recording on Cloud, educations and Pluralsight, with Pluralsight.
  
  
• Some thoughts on micro-segmentation.

1 July 2024

• ”No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.” - Theodore Roosevelt

26 June 2024

• “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” - Dr. Seuss
  
  
• “Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best.” - St. Jerome
  
  
• “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” - Zig Ziglar

24 June 2024

• Some thoughts on why viewing cloud as yet another data centre may be a starting point for many, but also why it can’t stay very long like that.

21 June 2024

• “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” - Japanese proverb
  
  
• Monozukuri, or alternatively spelled monodzukuri, literally means ‘production’ or ‘making of things’ in Japanese and is the Japanese term for ‘manufacturing’. The broader meaning encompasses a synthesis of technological prowess, know-how, and spirit of Japan’s manufacturing practices. The spirit includes a sincere attitude towards production with pride, skill, and dedication and the pursuit of innovation and perfection.

19 June 2024

• “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” - Thomas Jefferson
  
  
• “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” - Confucius
  
  
• “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Confucius
  
  
• “We at Toyota made a mistake. We should have never called it the Toyota Production System, we should have called it the Thinking Production System. Because the real point is to make people think and people are the value of the system.” - Toyota employee

17 June 2024

• Shu-Ha-Ri is a way of thinking about how you learn a technique. The name comes from Japanese martial arts. The idea is that a person passes through three stages of gaining knowledge:
• Shu: In this beginning stage students follow the teachings of one master precisely. They concentrate on how to do the task, without worrying too much about the underlying theory. If there are multiple variations on how to do the task, they concentrate on just the one way their master teaches them.
• Ha: At this point students begin to branch out. With the basic practices working they now start to learn the underlying principles and theory behind the technique. They also start learning from other masters and integrate that learning into his practice.
• Ri: Now the students aren’t learning from other people, but from their own practice. They create their own approaches and adapt what they’ve learned to their own particular circumstances.

16 June 2024

• “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.” - Peter Drucker
  
  
• Hansei is a Japanese cultural practice that focuses on self-reflection or introspection. It is a methodical approach to examining past actions, particularly mistakes, to understand why things have gone wrong and how it can be improved or prevented. Hansei is deeply ingrained in Japanese culture that it’s even taught to kids as early as kindergarten. This practice establishes a sense of responsibility and accountability in the lives of the Japanese early in their formative years and essentially becomes a way of life.
  
  Being deeply rooted in the Japanese way of life, hansei became a practice for Japanese companies as well. The idea of introspection is applied in the context of an organization. This can be done after projects are completed, during year-end reviews, or as part of employee self-assessments. Hansei must be conducted regularly after each event no matter the outcome experienced.
  
  
• The 8 Steps of the Toyota Business Process:
• Clarify the problem
• Breakdown the problem
• Set a target
• Analyze the root cause
• Develop countermeasures
• See countermeasures through
• Evaluate both results and process
• Standardize successful processes
  
  
• “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

13 June 2024

• “Senior management is simply a flag bearer when a business decision is made. It is of no use unless others follow the flag.” — Eiji Toyoda
  
  
• “Having no problems, is the biggest problem of all.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “Ask ‘why’ five times about every matter.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’, they go there to ‘think’.” - Taiichi Ohno

11 June 2024

• Third year straight running Blodomloppet. Great event and chance to hang out with colleagues.

9 June 2024

• Book review of Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis. An interesting perspective on current state of the world and growing power and influence of Big Tech.

5 June 2024

• A few words on striking a sound balance between control and freedom that stands the test of circumstances is all but easy but well worth a try.

4 June 2024

• 1st time attending the AWS Summit Stockholm, which was a blast.

3 June 2024

• “In essentials unity, in action freedom, and in all things trust.” - An early Christian axiom
  
  
• “A Man Without a Smiling Face Must Not Open a Shop.” - Chinese proverb

1 June 2024

• Book Review of Peter F. Drucker’s “The Five Most Important Questions”.

30 May 2024

• Why Clickety Click is truly a bad idea!

28 May 2024

• “So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.” - JFK
  
  
• “Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made — therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable — and we believe they can do it again.” - JFK
  
  
• “We now say that it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company.” - Reed Hastings
  
  
• Recreating the classic “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” with the team dressed in different shades of green.
  
  
• Book review of Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg.

23 May 2024

• Last day serving on the board of Brf Mimer after more than 7 years.
  
  
• Posted some of my favourite Macklemore quotes.

21 May 2024

• Posted the slide set, notes and talking points from my and Victor Bodell’s talk last year on the topic of cloud computing and sustainability.

16 May 2024

• First visit to our trading floor. For the first time in 3+ years, I had a strong insight that I really am working at a bank.
  
  
• “Don’t look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don’t think with you head, think with your hands”. -Taiichi Ohno

15 May 2024

• How the good, fast and cheap Venn diagram also applies to Cloud migrations.

14 May 2024

• “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” - George Bernard Shaw

11 May 2024

• “Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.” - Oscar Wilde

10 May 2024

• “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.“
  - John F. Kennedy [Commencement Address at American University, June 10 1963]

9 May 2014

• DORA survey is out - the most important survey of the year!

8 May 2024

• A post on Value Stream Mapping and the value of it.
  
  
• “Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
  Man never Is, but always To be blest.
  The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
  Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
  - Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

7 May 2024

• Some tips on how to deal with the naysayers.

6 May 2024

• Monday comic classics with Dilbert.

4 May 2024

• “The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.” - Bertrand Russell

3 May 2024

• Book review of Melissa Perri’s “Escaping the Build Trap”.

29 April 2024

• “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” - Alan Kay

28 April 2024

• “Premature optimisation is the root of all evil.” - Donald Knuth
  
  
• “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” - Niklaus Wirth

26 April 2024

• Book review on LinkedIn of Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness”.
  
  
• “The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.” - Hans Rosling
  
  
• “Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.” - Hans Rosling
  
  
• “There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.” - Hans Rosling
  
  
• “Looking for causes, not villains.” - Hans Rosling
  Understanding systemic problems requires moving beyond simply assigning blame to individuals.

23 April 2024

• Put a recruitment ad out for the role of “SaaS Integrator Engineer”.

22 April 2024

• “The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.” - Tibetan proverb

21 April 2024

• “My own definition of DevOps:
  Everything you do to overcome friction between silos.
  All the rest is plain engineering.” - Patrick Debois, 2021
  
  
• “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.” - Evan Bottcher, 2018
  
  
• “It’s not autonomy doing what you want, it’s agency to operate with safety - within the encoded values that are jointly shared.” - Byron Miller

19 April 2024

• Reflecting upon the cons of “us vs them” management style.

18 April 2024

• “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” - Thomas Jefferson

15 April 2024

• Hiring an AWS Cloud Engineer to our Cloud Tribe.
  
  
• Reflecting upon more than 10 years of consistent running.

13 April 2024

• Summarising the benefits of the public cloud.

11 April 2024

• Podcast tip of the week: Spiffe/SPIRE on Cloud Security Podcast.

10 April 2024

• Life Finds The Way or how to set a product vision that discourages shadow IT and encourages golden path thinking.

8 April 2024

• “I never lose. I either win or learn.” - Nelson Mandela
  
  
• Back from vacation. Celebrating with some comics.

30 March 2024

• A LinkedIn review of the book “Empireworld” by Sathnam Sanghera.

28 March 2024

• “Bad behaviours can give temporary good results, but only ideal behaviours can give sustainable ideal results.” - Shigeo Shingo
  
  
• “Those who are not dissatisfied will never make any progress.” - Shigeo Shingo
  
  
• “Too busy for improvement? Frequently, I am rebuffed by people who say they are too busy and have not time for such activities. I make it a point to respond by telling people, look, you’ll stop being busy either when you die or when the company goes bankrupt.” - Shigeo Shingo
  
  
• “Without standards, there can be no kaizen (continuous improvement).” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” - Shigeo Shingo
  
  
• A LinkedIn post on why standardisation is the foundation of improvement.
  
  
• “Simple, standardized processes are the foundation of rapid and flexible Lean systems.” - James P. Womack
  
  
• Celebrating 1 year since I started posting here!

26 March 2024

• Reflecting upon some observations by Gergely Orosz about tenure at work and how it brings perspective that leaders need.

25 March 2024

• “Banking is just bits and bytes.” - John Reed, Citi CEO/Chair, 1984-1998
  
  
• “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.” - Walter Wriston, Citi CEO/Chair, 1967-1984

22 March 2024

• Job role update: addition of team leadership to my current CPO role.

20 March 2024

• “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” or colloquially “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” - Helmuth von Moltke

18 March 2024

• MVP: You decide what’s minimum. Customer decides what’s viable.
  
  
• “Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.” - Ben Horowitz

17 March 2024

• Heard earlier this week from teenagers: “The target group for our product is 30-50 year olds so we had to learn Facebook, and that was tough.”

15 March 2024

• “It’s easy to make things hard, but hard to make them easy.” - Jos de Blok

14 March

• Celebrating the Pi day!

13 March 2024

• Serving on the finals jury for UF, Ung Företagsamhet Stockholmsregionen.

11 March 2024

• Do you serve the process or does the process serve you?

7 March 2024

• Got thinking how well innovation and regulation play together in the light of Claude not being available in the EU.

6 March 2024

• Some comics from www.agiledrillsergeant.com.

4 March 2024

• Goofing around with ChatGPT to figure out the best AI jokes on Claude, Bard and ChatGPT.

2 March 2024

• “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato

28 February 2024

• “The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” - Bertrand Russell
  
  
• “If you don’t stick to your values when they are being tested, they are not values: they are hobbies.” - Jon Stewart

26 February 2024

• Some Monday comics on the elephant in the room.

24 February 2024

• “Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths. In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources, including competition, dramatic macroeconomic change, market change, supply chain change and so forth.” - Ben Horowitz

22 February 2024

• What was your first home computer? A thread on LinkedIn that generated a lot of engagement.

21 February 2024

• “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.” - Jeff Bezos
  
  
• Book review of Eliyahu Goldratt’s “Critical Chain” that extends TOC to project management.

17 February 2024

• Going above 1,200 Cloud trained colleagues in 1 1/2 years. LinkedIn post

14 February 2024

• Why you’re more likely to be getting “single pain of glass” than a “single pane of glass” when buying 3rd party middleware to manage multiple clouds.

13 February 2024

• Promotion driven development is one of the reasons why so much custom tooling gets built in Tech.

12 February 2024

• Comparison between a Cloud transformation journey and “The Alice in the Wonderland.”
  
  
• Produce, Organise, Publish framework.
  
  
• “In most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job.” - Ray Dalio

7 February 2024

• In the category #thingsidoatwork, I had a new experience today participating as one of the jury members in one of the run-up stages to national finals for Ung Företagsamhet.

6 February 2024

• A few reasons why having a review process for Cloud services is important.

5 February 2024

• Some good cloud comics from Geek & Poke.

2 February 2024

• “It takes two years to learn to speak, and sixty to learn to keep quiet.” - Ernest Hemingway
  
  
• Some comics on dashboards.
  
  
• “A picture is worth a thousand words. A well designed chart is worth a million.” - Stephen Few

1 February 2024

• Podcast tip of the week. The Economist conversation with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella from Davos on the future of AI, human work and regulations of this space. Masterly commented by the Babbage studio crew.
  
  
• Looking forward to the next week’s UF pitch day (SE).
  
  
• “Please believe in THE POWER OF ONE. One person can make an enormous difference in the world. One person — actually, one idea — can start a war, or end one, or subvert an entire power structure. One discovery can cure a disease or spawn new technology to benefit or annihilate the human race. You as ONE individual can change millions of lives. Think big. Do not limit your vision and do not ever compromise your dreams or ideals.” - Iris Chang

31 January 2024

• How DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) and DORA (DevOps Research Assessment) relate to each other - LinkedIn post.

29 January 2024

• Some Cloud Tweaks comics on a Monday.

28 January 2024

• Feedback is a gift, because it’s always easier to simply not give it.

27 January 2024

• “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” - Albert Einstein
  
  
• “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” - George Bernard Shaw
  
  
• It’s interesting how sometimes certain technical topics and even single words or concepts, beget powerful gatekeepers who rather than invite a mutual exchange of perspectives, experiences and knowledge, seek to establish one single, one “officially” sanctioned, one sided, no-questions-asked point of view.
  Being a fan of Socratic thinking, I can find this one-sidedness surprising, as it hardly leads to overall progress or betterment.
  
  
• “Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.” - George Bernard Shaw

25 January 2024

• “Wer will dass die Welt so bleibt, will nicht dass sie bleibt.” - Erich Fried (“If you want the world to remain as it is, then you don’t want the world to remain at all.”)

24 January 2024

• Some thoughts on standardisation vs customisation.

20 January 2024

• “Give light and people will find the way.” - Ella J. Baker

19 January 2024

• Some thoughts on what defines good leadership.
  
  
• Run commute through Hagaparken, some images.
  
  
• “Stand guard at the gate of your mind.” - Marcus Aurelius
  
  
• “We question all of our beliefs except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” - Orson Scott Card

16 January 2024

• “Aristotle described the formula. He did that two and a half thousand years ago. Not only did it work then, it still works today. So actually anyone who says there is no formula is wrong, there is. Aristotle did it in a way that makes it incredibly easy to remember. There’s three words – pity, fear and catharsis. He said you need to make the audience feel pity for a character. You do that usually by making the character go through some undeserved misfortune. What that does – it enables the audience to emotionally connect with the character. And once the writer has got that emotional connection between the audience and the character, the writer begins to have some control over the audience. You then put the character into a worse and worse and worse situation. And because of the emotional connection, the identification, the audience feels fear. When you release the character from the jeopardy or whatever the situation they’re in, the audience experiences a catharsis. Pity, fear, catharsis.” - Julian Friedmann, TEDx Talk

15 January 2024

• Some Monday comics on iCloud.

12 January 2024

• Book review of “Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach” by Mark Richards and Neal Ford.

9 January 2024

• LinkedIn post regarding three architect types as described by Ford and Richards.

8 January 2024

• Post regarding Dr. Seuss and the rhyme-as-reason effect.
  
  
• Some Monday comics on the topic of “Robots are taking our jobs”.

31 December 2023

• Looking back on the year gone by with some stats and New Year resolutions.

29 December 2023

• In the book “Fundamentals of Software Architecture” Mark Richards and Neal Ford lay out 8 core expectations on (software) architects. These should be core requirements for any architect.
  
  
• “There are no wrong answers in architecture, only expensive ones.” - Mark Richards

28 December 2023

• “Programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing. Architects need to understand both.” - Rich Hickey
  
  
• “What is software architecture? Software Architecture is the stuff you can’t Google.” - Mark Richards
  
  
• “No matter what the problem is, it’s always a people problem.” - Gerald Weinberg

27 December 2023

• “Winning Minds” by Simon Lancaster book review.

26 December 2023

• “We shall not cease from exploration
  And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time.”
  - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
  
  
• “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” - Benjamin Israeli
  
  
• “I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.” - Tony Blair, 1983 Maiden Speech in the House of Commons
  
  

22 December 2023

• A Season’s Greetings post including an AI Santa in my own image.

17 December 2023

• “It’s harder to be kind, than clever.” - Jeff Bezos, at his commencement address to Princeton’s class of 2010
  
  
• “Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” - Native American proverb
  
  
• Asyndeton (from the Greek: ἀσύνδετον, “unconnected”) is a literary scheme in which one or several conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses. Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more memorable.
  
  
• Tricolon (from the Greek τρία (tria), meaning “three” and κῶλον (kôlon), meaning “member” or “clause”. In plain English: A series of three words, phrases or sentences that are parallel in structure, length and/or rhythm. Tricolons are one of the most powerful rhetorical devices. There is something almost magical about the number three. Use one for power. Two for comparison, contrast. Three for completeness, wholeness, roundness.
  
  
• “You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.” - The Wizard From The Wizard of Oz
  
  
• “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” - Benjamin Franklin

14 December 2023

• “Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” – Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize Laureate, Economics
  
  

11 December 2023

• Did some speaking at SEB’s Social Media Ambassador Academy. Put together a few slides with the help of Copilot using my own text and a simple prompt.
  
  
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc is Latin for ‘after this, therefore because of this’. It is an informal fallacy that states: “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.” It is often shortened simply to post hoc.
  
  
• Ethos - using characters, credibility and ethics to persuade.
  Pathos - using emotions and passion to persuade.
  Logos - using logical reasoning and evidence to persuade.

7 December 2023

• Another SEB meet-up for the books. This time on the topic of Cloud Security.

6 December 2023

• Cloud Transformation is not about waiting for cloud native Godot. It’s about keeping the eye on the cloud native prize while learning from one’s lift and shift mistakes.
  
  
• “Today you’re You. That’s truer than true. There is no one alive who’s Youer than You.” - Dr. Seuss
  
  
• “If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it.” - Dr. Seuss
  
  
• “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” - Mark Twain
  
  
• The Story of Three Bricklayers
  
  After the great fire of 1666 that leveled London, the world’s most famous architect, Christopher Wren, was commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. One day in 1671, Christopher Wren observed three bricklayers on a scaffold, one crouched, one half-standing and one standing tall, working very hard and fast. To the first bricklayer, Christopher Wren asked the question, “What are you doing?” to which the bricklayer replied, “I’m a bricklayer. I’m working hard laying bricks to feed my family.” The second bricklayer, responded, “I’m a builder. I’m building a wall.” But the third brick layer, the most productive of the three and the future leader of the group, when asked the question, “What are you doing?” replied with a gleam in his eye, “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m building a great cathedral to The Almighty.”
  
  
• “Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.” - Seth Godin

29 November 2023

• 1-2-1 framework as practiced by Bill Campbell.
  
  
• Some snowy pictures from my running commute to work.

27 November 2023

• Book review of “Trillion Dollar Coach”, aka Bill Campbell, the legendary confidant of Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Erik Schmidt and other Silicon Valley giants.

26 November 2023

• “If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.” - Coach Bill Campbell

24 November 2023

• Why getting Cloud Foundation is essential for Cloud transformation success, plus how we use the Maturity Model to align our foundation building efforts.

23 November 2023

• Final regulatory approvals of Broadcom’s VMWare acquisition call for good data center comics.

20 November 2023

• Looking back at past weekend’s light festival in Uppsala, a yearly tradition for me and my wife.

17 November 2023

• The inspiring 1944 CIA Field Manual for wartime obstruction unfortunately reminisces the way of operating in many modern companies.

16 November 2023

• Half month into this year’s Movember Challenge. Still not best friends with my moustache.

15 November 2023

• “Are we allowed to be on-prem?” Today’s finest food for thought at Google Cloud FSI & Fintech Community Event in Stockholm. Will traditional on prem environments where incumbent banks still have their core systems, be able to keep up with increasing regulatory pressure in the financial services industry?
  
  
• “We are not a bank: we are a technology company in which the customer is at the center of the strategy. We develop our own technology, challenge the complexity of the industry, and make data-driven decisions.” - David Vélez, CEO of Nubank
  
  
• The Amazon Prime series “The Consultant” is as a cautionary tale, highlighting the dangers of unchecked ambition and the potential for manipulation in the workplace.

13 November 2023

• Some good software and computing comics from geek and poke.

11 November 2023

• Have been thinking of a Cloud Transformation model for a while now. First draft published.
  
  
• “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” - George Orwell, 1940

10 November 2023

• Some good “Written by AI” comics.

9 November 2023

• “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” – Tom Landry
  
  
• When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. - Goodhart’s Law

8 November 2023

• There is nothing more important than an empowered engineer. Product Teams are the heart of the company. They are the ones that build new features and new products.
  
  
• “The greatest management job of all time was building the pyramids, and we’re just trying to live up to that standard ever since.” - Peter Drucker

7 November 2023

• The history is full of soon to be made bad decisions that fortunately didn’t materialise. One such decision was whether to run or not run the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial. The now iconic Super Bowl ad used George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’ to set the stage for the Apple Macintosh launch. However ingenious the ad seems now, it was in fact met with scepticism by many within Apple just before the launch, including the Apple Board.

6 November 2023

• Back at work after one week vacation in the sun. Lots of catching up but reenergised at the core, as the week was spent running, doing other sports, swimming, slow reading, strolling around, enjoying views, food and conversations.
  
  
• LinkedIn post on World Cultural Values map.

25 October 2023

• “Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. a shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” - Lord Varys, Game of Thrones

24 October 2023

• “You have a meeting to make a decision, not to decide on the question.” - Bill Gates

23 October 2023

• Middleware and what to do about it. Plus some comics.

22 October 2023

• The big 1000! We’ve reached 1000 projects in GCP. An achievement worth celebrating!

19 October 2023

• “What I can not create, I do not understand.” - Richard Feynman
  
  
• “Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.” - Lao Tzu
  
  
• “Great acts are made of small deeds.” - Lao Tzu
  
  
• “A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it isn’t open.” - Franz Kafka

18 October 2023

• What is a legacy software system and what to do about it? A LinkedIn post with some Dilbert comics on the topic and some further insights on how to achieve modernisation by amongst others Martin Fowler.

13 October 2023

• Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”
  

  A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  

• “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” - Plato
  
  
• “Never regret being a good person, to the wrong people. Your behaviour tells everything about you and their behaviour says enough about them.” - Bruce Lee

10 October 2023

• “We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions.” - William Shatner
  
  
• Reflections on droids in Star Wars and singularity in a LinkedIn post.

9 October 2023

• “My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best.” - Winston S. Churchill

8 October 2023

• On a recent request by European telecom CEOs to European Commission for “fair sharing” big tech revenue.

7 October 2023

• Isaiah 57:19: “Peace, peace to the distant and the close.”

5 October 2023

• On change management with some valuable lessons in this LinkedIn post.

4 October 2023

• “Leadership is an achievement of trust.” - Peter Drucker

3 October 2023

• “The task of leadership is to make an alignment of strengths, making a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.” - Peter Drucker

2 October 2023

• “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” - Barack Obama

29 September 2023

• Got confirmation of my Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect!

28 September 2023

• An old but great interview on how Netflix reinvented HR with Patty McCord, chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012.
  
  
• Speaking of Netflix, I heard a great story today about how Reed Hastings intentionally removed members of his management team working with DVD rentals, from his weekly management team meeting. Although DVD rentals were what ultimately the company was making money on, these managers were not contributing to the long term goal of becoming a streaming company. How many leaders would take such a drastic decision of removing both loyal and business critical team members from a meeting in the light of them not being involved in company’s longer term aspirations and strategy? The strategy worked. Netflix became THE streaming company and didn’t go bust, like Blockbuster.
  
  

  25 September 2023

• Was awarded the “Social Media Ambassador of the month” at SEB. Immensely fun!
  
  
• https://uptime.is is a great page for fast checking up on SLA/SLO levels and what they translate to in seconds, minutes, hours of downtime/uptime.

24 September 2023

• “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” / “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.” - Axel von Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, 1612-1654, the father of the modern central administrative structure of the State

22 September 2023

• A story of my own transformation from stress, fast food and smoking to more healthy and longer term sustainable habits.

21 September 2023

• Summary of my impressions from Google Cloud Summit Nordics on LinkedIn.

20 September 2023

• “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
  
  
• What is failure demand and what to do about it?

18 September 2023

• Hoshin Kanri (Japanese: 方針管理, “policy management”) is a 7-step process used in strategic planning in which strategic goals are communicated throughout the company and then put into action. The Hoshin Kanri strategic planning system originated from post-war Japan, but has since spread to the U.S. and around the world. Translated from Japanese, Hoshin Kanri aptly means “compass management”. The individual words “hoshin” and “kanri” mean direction and administration, respectively. Wikipedia
  
  
• “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.” - Steve Jobs
  
  
• “A relentless barrage of ‘why’s’ is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often.” - Shigeo Shingo
  
  

12 September 2023

• “To deal with an uncertain future and still move forward, people should have strong opinions, which are weakly held.” Coined at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future, by Paul Saffo. Weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. It is just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions.
  
  
• “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” - The Retrospective Prime Directive
  
  
• “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” - Leo Tolstoy
  
  
• “It’s only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement.” - Shigeo Shingo

11 September 2023

• Quotes on Democracy.

10 September 2023

• Quotations about Democracy and related matters.
  
  
• “Salus populi suprema lex esto (the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law].” - Cicero
  
  
• “If something external is causing you distress, it’s not the thing itself that’s troubling you but your judgment about it, and it’s within your power to erase that right now. And if it’s something internal to yourself, is anyone stopping you from looking at it in a more positive way? Likewise, if you’re distressed because you’re failing to do something that strikes you as sound, why not do it rather than indulge in distress?” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47

9 September 2023

• Eight time running Stockholm half marathon. While not breaking personal records any longer, I’m still very much enjoying this yearly tradition.

7 September 2023

• Held a 20 min presentation on SRE at SEB’s DevCon conference.

3 September 2023

• “Costs do not exist to be calculated, they exist to be reduced.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” - Carl Yung

31 August 2023

• “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” - Peter Drucker
  
  
• Failure Demand is demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer. Customers come back, making further demands, unnecessarily consuming the organisation’s resources because the service they receive is ineffective.
  
  
• Everything you wanted to know about Aperol Spritz but didn’t have anyone to ask.

28 August 2023

• No business model or competitive advantage is indefinitely sustainable.
  
  
• Features delivered are not a measure of success; business outcomes are.
  
  
• “It’s not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” - W. Edwards Deming
  
  
• “The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.” - Peter Drucker
  
  
• “Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.” - Victor Hugo
  
  
• “Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.” - W. Edwards Deming

26 August 2023

• “The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.” - Stephen R. Covey

25 August 2023

• Words to live by. “Our prime purpose in life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” - Dalia Lama

24 August 2023

• “You are a fool if you do just as I say. You are a greater fool if you don’t do as I say. You should think for yourself and come up with better ideas than mine.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “People who can’t understand numbers are useless. The gemba where numbers are not visible is also bad. However, people who only look at the numbers are the worst of all.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• “Whether top management, middle management, or the workers who actually do the work, we are all human, so we’re like walking misconceptions, believing that the way we do things now is the best way.” - Taiichi Ohno
  
  
• Underneath one Kaizen idea, is another one.
  
  
• “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” - Helmuth von Moltke
  
  
• Per aspera ad astra. / Through hardships to the stars.

22 August 2023

• “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy not even mine, not even mine. No, I think we should accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell
  
  
• Romney Wheeler interviews British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell at Russell’s home in Surrey, England. The interview was broadcast on his 80th birthday, which was May 18, 1952.

17 August 2023

• “The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title. The rationale behind the law is that the other employees in the company with lower titles will naturally benchmark themselves against the crappiest person at the next level. For example, if Jasper is the worst vice president in the company, then all of the directors will benchmark themselves against Jasper and demand promotions as soon as they reach his low level of competency.”- Ben Horowitz
  
  
• The Peter Principle, coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, contends that, in a hierarchy, people are sooner or later promoted to positions which they are no longer skilled to handle. This is their “level of incompetence.” This is where they stay. In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove points out that this is largely unavoidable because there is no way to know a priori at what point the person will be incapable of handling further promotions.
  
  
• “MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones. Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs. At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future.” - Ben Horowitz
  
  
• “We take care of the people, the products and the profits…in that order.” - Jim Barksdale
  
  
• Ben Horowitz recalls a situation as a PM at Netscape when there were no silver bullets, only Lead Bullets.

13 August 2023

• “All decisions are objective until the first line of code is written. After that, all decisions are emotional.” - Ben Horowitz in Hard Thing about Hard Things
  
  
• “If you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble.” - Ben Horowitz
  
  
• “It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  
  
• Came across the amazing story/book by Dr. Seuss from 1990, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”. Reading and rereading it, and it’s quickly becoming a new favourite. Read for yourself here.

23 July 2023

• Apple is so perturbed by a United Kingdom surveillance bill that it’s threatening to flat-out remove iMessage and FaceTime in the U.K. instead of complying with the proposed legislation. On Mashable.

14 July 2023

• “Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” - Joseph Addison
  
  
• Takumi (匠) is a Japanese word meaning “artisan”. The saying goes that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, but 60,000 hours to become a takumi.
  
  
• Ganbaru (頑張る, lit. ‘stand firm’), also romanized as gambaru, is a ubiquitous Japanese word which roughly means to slog on tenaciously through tough times. Gambaru focuses attention on the importance of finishing a task and never stopping until a goal is achieved. The continuing effort to overcome obstacles (even if not successful) is an important concept in Japan.
  
  
• “If we try to get rid of one wave with another, we end up with an infinite sea.” - Zen saying
  
  
• Hara hachi bun me (腹八分目) (also spelled hara hachi bu, and sometimes misspelled hari hachi bu) is a Confucian teaching that instructs people to eat until they are 80 percent full.

11 July 2023

• “Be Water, My Friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” - Bruce Lee
  
  
• Story of “Big Tech” rejections, before they were the “Big Tech”. Tweet

10 July 2023

• Major breakthrough for personal data privacy, tech innovation and transatlantic cooperation as EU and US agree on a data privacy adequacy framework.
  
  
• Wabi-sabi is the view or thought of finding beauty in every aspect of imperfection in nature. It is about the aesthetic of things in existence, that are “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.
  
  
• Ichi-go ichi-e (Japanese: 一期一会, pronounced [it͡ɕi. ɡo it͡ɕi. e], lit. “one time, one meeting”) is a Japanese four-character idiom (yojijukugo) that describes a cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment.
  
  
• “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” - Will Durant
  
  
• “Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions.” - Aristotle
  
  
• “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it, that matters.” - Epictetus
  
  
• “Nana korobi, ya oki” - Japanese proverb which means “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”
  
  
• “We don’t create the meaning of our life, as Sartre claimed - we discover it.” - Hector Garcia

6 July 2023

• A few simple rules of thumb as to who does what on an agile team, my take.

5 July 2023

• “A culture is strong when people work with each other, for each other.
  A culture is weak when people work against each other, for themselves.” - Simon Sinek
  
  
• A comparison between financial services and online gaming industries along a few dimensions.

4 July 2023

• Odd thing learnt today: In workaholic Japan, “job leaving agents” aka taishoku daiko help people escape the awkwardness of quitting.

3 July 2023

• Review of Ozan Varol’s book “Think Like a Rocket Scientist”.
  One of many good quotes from the book: “Your passion should be your compass, not your destination.”

2 July 2023

• Found some old pysical business cards in the drawers, the oldest one from 2005. Does anyone still use business cards nowadays? LinkedIn post

28 June 2023

• 16 plus years since inception of DevOps. Some LinkedIn reflections on the progress brought by the movement.
  
  
• “Things are never as bad or as good as they seem.” - Tony Hsieh

26 June 2023

• “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” - Jeff Bezos on why it’s always Day 1 at Amazon in his letter to shareholders

25 June 2023

• Jan Bosch has a good post on how to maximise one’s life through three tactics: prioritization (only do what you feel is important), acceleration (don’t delay things but do them now) and desensitization (stop worrying about what others might think or what you might lose).

23 June 2023

• After decades of stop-start progress, ML is now a reality due to the recent convergence of three factors: advanced algorithms, access to huge volumes of digital training data, and cheap, abundant computing power – available, of course, through the cloud.
  
  
• When applied systemically, cloud computing can usher in a new IT model centered on standardization, interoperability, and openness. This shift can have powerful business implications, such as reducing operating costs, increasing efficiency, and even making customers and employees happier.
  
  
• “For customers to realize AI’s full potential, cloud-based ML tools must be accessible enough for non-experts to use without any IT assistance.” - Urs Hölzle.

22 June 2023

• “We have three innate psychological needs - competence, autonomy and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive and happy.” - Daniel Pink
  
  
• “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” - Mark Twain
  
  
• “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” - Zig Ziglar
  
  
• “Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” - Geoffrey Moore
  
  

21 June 2023

• Some LinkedIn reflections on disallowing access to production for anything but deployment pipelines and pets vs kettle.
  
  
• “You have to disrupt yourself or others will do it for you.” - Steve Forbes
  
  
• “Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.” - Tom Peters
  
  
• “Failure is success if we learn from it.” - Malcolm Forbes
  
  
• “The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.” - T. H. White
  
  

17 June 2023

• Compilation of places, people and things I have dear in pechakucha format, ie 20 slides with 20s commentary each. Part 1 of 2.

15 June 2023

• Reading through a 2006 article with Werner Vogels where he amongst other things brings up the reasons behind “You build it. You run it”.
  
  
• “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.” - Richard Feynman
  In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.
  
  
• “I’d rather be right than consistent.” - John Harlan

13 June 2023

• 2nd year running Blodomloppet with SEB’s sports association.
  
  
• Kent Beck has a good post on where the insights come from.
  
  
• “What’s easy, often isn’t important. What’s important, often isn’t easy.” - Unknown

12 June 2023

• How I deal with pending LinkedIn requests - a short post.
  
  
• “Costs don’t exist to be calculated, costs exist to be reduced.” - Taiichi Ohno

11 June 2023

• “One run can change your day. Many runs can change your life.” - Unknown

9 June 2023

• New-word-learnt: Shoshin (Japanese: 初心) is a concept from Zen Buddhism meaning beginner’s mind. It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying, even at an advanced level, just as a beginner would.
  
  
• AI doomers are a ‘cult’ — here’s the real threat according to Marc Andreessen.
  
  
• “Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.” - Jeff Bezos
  
  
• “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” - Steve Jobs

8 June 2023

• “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E.F. Schumacher
  
  
• I stumbled upon a good 3-post series from Spotify Engineering on how they manage software and infrastructure at scale.

7 June 2023

• Quote-of-the-day: “In Nvidia’s context, [AI] is going to create some winners and losers… more losers than winners.” - Rajiv Jain
  
  
• “We love to make great products that really enrich people’s lives. We love to integrate hardware, software and services seamlessly. We love to make technology more personal and allow our users to do things that they could never have imagined. We have been working incredibly hard for a long time on an entirely new product and we believe this product will redefine what people expect from its category. I am so excited and I am so proud to share it with you this morning. It is the next chapter in Apple’s story.” - Tim Cook at the launch of Apple Watch

6 June 2023

• Sweden’s 500th birthday as free and independent nation is definitely cause for great celebration. To mark the occasion, here are five time tested Swedish proverbs.

5 June 2023

• Apple’s latest reveals can be somewhat stressful for some: Everything Apple tried to kill at WWDC 2023.

4 June 2023

• “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” - Joe Biden

2 June 2023

• “Do we own the process or does the process own us?” - Jeff Bezos in 2016 letter to the shareholders

1 June 2023

• “If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. But if you argue for your possibilities, you get to create them!” - Kelly Lee Phipps
  
  
• “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

31 May 2023

• “Between a good story and a bunch of data, the story has always prevailed.” - Ozan Varol
  
  
• “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.” - John McCarthy, who coined the term AI in 1956

30 May 2023

• Explaining why “Lift and Shift Landing Zone” is a good and truthful concept for many cloud migrations, although only to be seen a first step, not the end goal. See here.
  
  
• “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” - Bertrand Russell

29 May 2023

• I was asked a while back to share the full list of my reads/listens. I found the request flattering but didn’t think too much about it until I heard the same thing from another person, and then another. One is a dot, two is a line, three is a trend. Said and done, I’ve now extracted the list of books I’ve listened to from Audible since I started my monthly subscription in 2018. Think a few books from competing services are missing and I’ll look to add those too shortly. As well of course hard copies of books, which I’ll also add. To top it off, at some point, I will add more data about the books, including linking to my reviews on LinkedIn. Without any further ado, here is the list.

27 May 2023

• At the end of the day, company in any type of business is now, a software company. Even if previously your core product didn’t have a software component, now it’s unlikely that your core product doesn’t come with a software element attached. Failing to do your best with that software component, is equal to failing at your core product.

26 May 2023

• A quick book review on “The Journey to Enterprise Agility” by Daryl Kulak and Hong Li. The book is a good starting point, in case you’re wondering how to develop effective interfaces between enterprise methodology and Agile practices.

24 May 2023

• Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock’n’Roll, has died at 83.
  “People think my life has been tough, but I think it’s been a wonderful journey. The older you get, the more you realise it’s not what happened, it’s how you deal with it.”

19 May 2023

• An internal document from Google circulating reg Open Source and OpenAI. “…in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question. Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. In this respect, at least, we can make the first move.”

15 May 2023

• Short post on my commute to work, running through the forest in the Haga park.

13 May 2023

• Post on how to be true with one’s current standings and set achievable stretch goals, when applied to running, but also applicable to life as a whole.

11 May 2023

• Some interesting readings (so far) this week:
• The new era of resiliency in the cloud - a good McKinsey post on resiliency.
• Real Data on Cloud Costs from vantage.sh - Vantage uses anonymized data to snapshot industry spending patterns.

10 May 2023

• A LinkedIn post on Via Negativa and how by doing less and removing things we can do more and better.
  
  
• Google I/O with a number of AI announcements and inclusions to Google services.

8 May 2023

• “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.” - Richard Beckhard
  
  
• The Backhard-Harris Change Model DxVxF>R.

5 May 2023

• Unlike bridges or buildings, software architectures are not meant to be frozen in time. Software architecture should frequently be revisited for small or big improvements, as well as fundamental changes. Walter Vogel looks at this from his perspective in an enlightened post.
  
  
• “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking

4 May 2023

• Some reflections on benefits of micro segmentation in Cloud environments and how difficult it can be in case you don’t do it right off the bat. LinkedIn post
  
  
• Great post by Kent Beck to always bet on the growth rate, on the subject of ChatGPT right now still lagging behind in (some) coding skills. Beck reminds that in technology growth matters far more than absolute values and that limits to growth are valuable to overcome and so receive due attention and funding.

2 May 2023

• Podcast tip of the week: Engineering Enablement podcast. Plus a throwback to a DevOps conference in 2017 with Nicole Forsgren and how much still remains valid today.

30 April 2023

• Reflections on importance of traditions and how each tradition arises in a particular time and context. Still, the best traditions are those that remain relevant over time. Ergo, I spent the last of April once again introducing my kids and spouse to the traditions of my hometown on this particular day. More about it in this LinkedIn post

27 April 2023

• Took part in a local event at the Google Stockholm office for financial services in Google Cloud. Really interesting to hear how Google sees the AI and ML space and what unique differentiators they are bringing to the table. LinkedIn post

24 April 2023

• Blunt copying from one company to another of best practices, insights and implementations is at it’s best just blunt, but at it’s worst “inviting disaster” as per Deming. A short post on systems thinking and this topic.

23 April 2023

• “You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You can’t secure what you can’t see.”

22 April 2023

• Been a few days without content. Blame it on vacation and coming back to work after vacation. Anyways, here we go off again.
  
  
• It’s been now 2 years at SEB, as I started in April of 2021 in the midst of the pandemic. Since day 1, it’s been an eventful ride, with many highs and lows. Changing ways, practices and thinking in a nearly 170 years old institution requires patience, persistence, taking in different perspective and maintaining grit. Everyday has been a learning and growing opportunity and that’s in essence what life is about, right?
  
  
• Summarised some of my initial experiments and experiences with FinOps in this LinkedIn post plus put an advertisement out for the FinOps Roadshow in Stockholm on 12th of May.
  
  
• Read the book Investments Unlimited from IT Revolution. Summary here.
  
  
• Bard can now generate, debug and explain code.

13 April 2023

• Itamar Gilad has an insightful article why NPS (Net Promoter Score) (like any framework or methodology really) is not to be followed blindly.
  
  
• Sterling Bank’s Engine SaaS branch on why Cloud is an innovation enabler as well as a compliance must for them. Article here.

7 April 2023

• Techcrunch has an interesting piece on how generative AI is near perfect at inoffensive, blend CorpSpeak and marketing copy, in turn disrupting and replacing millions of jobs engaged in just this endeavour.
  
  

6 April 2023

• "”The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed.” - Mahatma Gandhi
  
  
• Jennifer Brady tells the story how to introduce financial services governance to DevOps. Article on Medium.
  
  
• Key takeaways from Stanford’s report on the state of AI.
  
  

5 April 2023

• Ofcom (Office of Communications - UK regulatory body for broadcasting, telecommunications and post) is highlightning anticompetitive practices by major Cloud providers: data egress costs, technical restrictions on interoperability, committed usage discounts. Article here.
  
  

4 April 2023

• New Google Flights feature guarantees the lowest price, pays you back if it’s wrong. Caveat: it only works in the US right now and with airlines using “Book on Google” feature. Still interesting move.
  
  

3 April 2023

• On the 30th March, Bloomberg announced BloombergGPT. This LLM has been trained on a wide range of financial data to support a diverse set of NLP tasks within the financial industry. It has been trained using both public and private data sets, to produce an LLM with a competitive edge in the financial services on ChatGPT and other “generic” GPTs.
  
  
• “Leaders are not the problem. Bad leaders are the problem. Challenge is to create a culture where good leadership is the norm.”

1 April 2023

• Italian DPA issues order to block ChatGPT over GDPR breach concerns.
  
  
• The Verge tracks the best and worst April Fools’ Day jokes of 2023.
  
  
• Washington Post has a honourable? tradition of debunking April Fools’ pranks.
  
  
• A little LinkedIn post in the spirit of Aprils Fools as to why I think onprem is better than Cloud.

31 March 2023

• Ars Technica is writing a piece on Google refocusing efforts from Google Assistant to Bard. Just like Alexa it seems Google Assistant, isn’t making any money for the parent company.
  
  
• “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” - John C. Maxwell

30 March 2023

• An interesting ROI measurement on Backstage was released today by Spotify. The developers that use Backstage are both more productive, content and retained longer at the company than non-users of Backstage. Check out the analysis right here.
  
  
• The leaps in AI are just massive. Here’s a driverless Cruise vehicle making its way through North Beach on St. Patrick’s day. Seems AVs will be able to take on pretty hairy situations quite soon. Link to the video.
  
  
• “I can make the trains run on time. But that trait is not conducive to being a leader. That’s a great trait for being a manager. Leadership is a vision. It’s inspiration, it’s execution, it’s instincts. It is not just letting the trains run on time.” From 20VC podcast episode with Sequoia’a Doug Leone.
  
  
• “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” - Confucius

29 March 2023

• Had great fun at a meet-up co-arranged with Continuous Delivery Stockholm. Really glad to contribute in any way I can getting the meet-up scene going after too many years of pandemic.
  
  
• Deep fakes and online bank runs are a scary combo. In a digital first world, toppling banks in an online bank run, happens at amazing speeds. And as deep fakes, with the help of AI, are becoming all the more plausible and believable, the risk of a deep fake video causing a run has become all the greater. Bloomberg Opinion article
  
  
• Stumbled upon Minimum Viable Secure Product Controls checklist while listening to episode 114 of Cloud Security podcast. It’s a quite usable minimalistic security checklist for B2B software and business process outsourcing suppliers.

28 March 2023

• Trying out Perplexity AI iPhone app. It’s like ChatGPT but with cited sources and voice searches. Perplexity is backed by some of the key people and pioneers in search, consumer products, and artificial intelligence.
  
  
• Cloud Security Podcast Episode 96 has some interesting insights and take-aways from Jeff Bollinger, Director of Incident Response and Detection Engineering at LinkedIn. The episode focuses on how to best approach observability in Cloud. One of many good take-aways is on using defined but not used subnets as honeypots.
  
  
• Goldman Sachs estimates that two-thirds of current jobs in the US and the European Union are exposed to some degree of AI automation. Administrative and legal sectors are expected to be the most impacted, with 46% of administrative jobs and 44% of legal jobs being substitutable by AI. The research shows that AI will impact roughly half of the activities people do across all sectors, and nearly all occupations will be affected by automation. Financial Times article

27 March 2023

• Sequoia Capital’s newest market map. It showcases Sequoia’s belief that that the AI revolution is the most consequential computational trend in decades. AI is rewriting what software can do and expanding the pool of who can write software. Full article here.
  
  
• “Skipping software tests to save time is like getting a head start in a race by not tying your shoes. You’re not getting ahead, you’re going to stumble.”
  
  
• Sequoia article on Generative AI predicts rise of “killer” apps just like smartphones 15 years ago unleashed new types of applications through new capabilities like GPS, cameras and on-the-go connectivity. The article speculates how different fundamental models will evolve over the coming years and what sort of associated applications will become possible.
  

26 March 2023

• Weekend time with the family and we watched the movie Lorax from 2012, based upon a book by Dr. Seuss. A good movie for the whole family with a great quote for future saving.
  
  
• “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind, don’t matter, and those who matter, don’t mind.” - Dr. Seuss
  
  
• Recent years, months and weeks have seen a remarkable progress in the field of generative AI and large language models. This study made by OpenAI, Open Research and University of Pennsylvania investigates potential impact of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models on the US labour market.
  
  
• The Guardian answers why the machine learning “breakthrough” moment happened to happen right now. A number of necessary but unconnected developments suddenly came together to create entirely new possibilities: “the availability of truly massive cloud-computing power; unimaginable quantities of data provided by the internet for training LLMs; significant improvements in algorithms boosted by neural networks; and oodles of money, provided by insanely profitable tech giants.”
  
  
• Reflecting on the US lawmakers grilling TikTok’s CEO about it’s ties to China. While I very well understand the US lawmakers’s concerns about TikTok being (ab)used as a potential weapon against the free world, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the Chinese National Security Law from 2017 and the American Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act or CLOUD Act from 2018. Politico article on TikTok