Open Tabs No 2

Follow @HaufeDev Follow @hlgr360

This week in Open Tabs is my weekly column to share links and commentary based on the list of my open (browser) tabs.

I finished reading last week’s Open Tab and I would like to highlight Simon Wardley’s Introduction to Wardley maps as my absolute favourite. I have been deeply immersed within Lean and Business Modeling for the last couple of years, but I can see how Value Chain Mapping using Wardley maps adds yet another perspective.

So the coveted first spot of my open browser tabs is yet another of his articles about Other Tools I Use With Mapping, which opens up some other interesting usecases on how to apply mapping to product, business and technology strategy. You might also be interested in checking out Atlas, an open-source Wardley mapping tool (and yes, it run’s in docker too).

Regarding lean, you might have find yourselve at the receiving end of one of my frequent rants about how a lot of folks in business love to use the term Minimal Viable Product without bothering to understand what it means. Hint - it is NOT a Minimal Marketable Product. In that regard you might find the article on Minimal Viable Problem for product design interesting.

And since we are on the topic of ‘listening to your customer’ check out the article on Using On-Site Customer Feedback Surveys To Get Inside Your Customer’s Mind At The Point of Purchase.

And to top this list off one of my most favourite business strategy bloggers just published a new article on The Evolution of Transportation-as-a-Service.

But enough of the business stuff, lets move on to my favorite field of API strategy. There were a couple of interesting links I stumbled upon last week:

One of the key lessons I learned is that simply building an API is not going to be enough. You will need to evangelize its use (and that is true both for internal and external APIs). You will find a pretty good role description of an developer advocate in What does a developer evangelist/advocate do?.

Continuing with “big picture” topics, head over to O’Reilly and read up on The critical role of system thinking in software development.

Let’s hop over to Devops and check out those links in my open tabs:

A fair number of open tabs point to projects I would like to explore:

On the topic of Docker I keep having to read up on the new load balancing features built-in in Docker 12.0: Improved Options for Service Load Balancing in Docker 1.12.0. Did you know, that Docker comes with an embedded DNS server which can be used to map aliases to container IP addresses (since 1.10). And since version 1.11 it also supports round robin DNS based load balancing. Well, version 1.12 might have some other goodies for you.

For the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) the circle closes back to Simon Wardley and his talk on being In Search of Spime Script, a talk inspired by an (out of print) book Shaping Things. Once again, I would highly recommend picking up Makers from Cory Doctorow, which is the underground manifesto on how ‘Makers’ might have a similar impact on our economic system as the steam engine had on feudal society. (Fun fact - Edward Snowden was reading Cory’s book ‘Homeland’ during the interview filmed for Citizen Four)

On a personal note: Like so many of my peers, I struggle to carve out enough uninterruted time to work vs attending meetings. I found the article on Manager Schedule vs Make Schedule very enlighting.

This should cover it for this week. Plenty to read and catch up on. See you again next week.