From Grumpy's Garage

It's been a busy and remarkably productive month. I spent the first two weeks sprinting to the finish line preparing to deliver a tutorial, Playing in the Clouds , at the Cascadia IT Conference . That went well. Then I had to attend to a few items that I had ignored for those two weeks: steering toward the next milestone of a WordPress site I am helping to build preparing to lead a troubleshooting/brainstorming workshop,  WordPress Round Table , for WordPress site owners writing profiles of Makers (creative folks making cool things in their spare time) that use Google's Makerspace in Seattle. The last two items had deadlines yesterday, and came off without a hitch. The first item is on schedule for its progress status and planning meeting next week. Oh, yeah. Then there is my day job: tech support for Google Cloud Platform . That is going pretty well, too. But today, I'm taking a break. I slept in until 6am, and it felt luxurious. I spent a full hour at the gym instea...

"Consumer". I hate that label. I am a producer. I produce value. People pay me to produce value. In general, I produce a lot more value than the value that I consume. You probably produce value, too. Whether you work for a company, a government, or are self-employed. The only reason you get a paycheck is because you produce value to your customers or your employer. If you don't produce value, if you are NOT a producer, then resign yourself to your role as a consumer. Don't go to work tomorrow. If you do, might violate the first law of consumerism, "Buy early! Buy often!" Just sit in front of the TV and eat Bon Bons, like a good consumer should.

It's getting down to the wire. Next week, Friday, March 13, I'll be leading a workshop (a "tutorial", they call it) at the Cascadia IT Conference to introduce system administrators to some elements of cloud computing. I expect that there will be several in the workshop who have experimented with virtual machines on AWS or Google Cloud Platform. My workshop will take that experimentation to the next level: making a website scalable. I call it the "Good Morning, America" scenario. It's 4:30 AM, Pacific Time. You are peacefully entering another cycle of REM sleep. You can sleep peacefully because your web servers are monitored. And the monitoring software with page you at any hour if the site goes down. Then it happens. George or Amy start chatting about the cool downloads on your company's site that are available only to registered users. But registration is free. At the commercial break, 7:37 AM, New York Time, 217,243 people try to register at your ...

I recently finished Chapter 3 in Lean Analytics . In it, the authors discuss "analytical frameworks", which I take as merely, "How do we talk about relevant metrics?" One of those frameworks is the Lean Canvas. In it, between the Unique Value Proposition and the Customer Segments, is "Unfair Advantage". Unfair. Like patents, brand equity, and other barriers to entry for competition. But "unfair"? I don't buy it. Those are competitive advantages, to be sure, but none of them are "unfair". It's like they don't believe in a competitive marketplace or something.