ETH Denver, DevOps Forum and Some Other Things
Welcome to the 30th entry of my public journal, where I share *some of the things* I've been thinking about, learning about, and exploring across work, tech, wellness, and life.
Dear Friends,
Since my last update almost 3 weeks ago, I attended ETH Denver, decompressed in Boulder, and spent 2 days in Portland for the Enterprise DevOps forum. Life is good and we’re starting to see the earliest signs of Spring here in New York as the days get a little bit longer every day.
ETH Denver
It was great being in Denver and getting to meet many internet friends IRL for the first time, as well as meeting founders and employees from startups, DAOs and companies like Privy, Pinata, Dynamic, Bankless Card, Unlonely, and Coinbase, to name a few.
The main reason I attended this year was to continue to establish GM Farcaster as the first and only Farcaster-native media brand covering the Farcaster ecosystem, and to connect with our community of early supporters. My highlights were the 2 hours we had in the podcast studio on the main ETH Denver floor on Friday and the 3 hour karaoke brunch we hosted for our audience and friends on Saturday.
Videos
Live from ETH Denver with Matthew from Events, Dawufi from Airstack, Brian from Unlonely and Toady Hawk from the Noun Square (Watch 43 minutes)
Live from ETH Denver with Justin from Pinata (Watch 17 minutes)
Live from ETH Denver with Jesse Pollak from Base (Watch 16 minutes)
GM in the PM, the ETH Denver recap with friends Erica, Ted, Grace (Watch 30 minutes)
Surprise Announcement
We also used the occasion to drop an announcement that both Prof and I will be pivoting away from our current jobs to lean into GM Farcaster. I can think of many potential avenues for monetization and revenue generation, but we’re starting with 2 simple paths - one for individuals and one for brands. The individual sponsorship options are available through hypersub subscriptions - Cup o’ Mole and Cup o’ Wowow. In less than 1 week we have 90 people who have already minted the hybersub, with more than 30 people committing to over 6 months. We also announced our first official brand sponsorship with Pinata. Pinata will be sponsoring all Monday’s episodes for the next 3+ months.
Pics
ETH Denver pics from top to bottom, left to right:
Row 1: Prof and I at the “media” registration booth (Joe Petrich once called us out as “journos” and we’ve been leaning into the joke), in the podcast studio with Brian and Dawufi, Prof and I in the studio with our nounish and foxy accessories
Row 2: Playing a card game in the tabletop games area in the basement at ETH Denver (a quiet and peaceful escape, organized by iSpeakNerd), meeting Ox Bid - founder of Bolide app and friend of GM Farcaster at the Dyanmic x Coinbase party, hanging with Privy and Pinata at the Farcaster party
Row 3: More Farcaster party pics, with Prof and Ted, with Justin and Chicago, and with the hottest /gmfarcaster models at the party
Enterprise DevOps Forum
After Denver I headed to Portland, Oregon to attend the Enterprise DevOps Forum hosted by IT Revolution. This annual event brings together senior technology leaders from various industries to work together on addressing some of the biggest challenges facing organizations today. One of the main outcomes of the forum is the Enterprise DevOps Journal, which compiles guidance papers based on participants' real-world experiences. The journals are published under the creative commons license, making them free to the community.
Attendees this year came from large corporations like eBay, Apple, John Deere, Discover, ADP, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, government agencies such as the Department of Defense and the NSA, and boutique consulting firms like mine (Tenger Ways).
What makes the Forum special is what the attendees have in common: tackling technology challenges within large, complex organizations, often with legacy systems. A common passion within this community is a desire to reduce workplace suffering, aiming for technical excellence and high performance without the toil and bureaucracy, something I’ve been calling bringing joy to the workplace.
AI took center stage this year, with a focus on responsible adoption to maximize benefits while minimizing risks. Discussions also covered strategies for maintaining momentum in multi-year digital transformations and new ideas for approaching cloud vendor selection. Much of the discussion this year referenced the three layers of work from Gene Kim & Steven Spear's book, "Wiring the Winning Organization." This framework separates the technical work (layer 1) from the tools and instrumentation (layer 2) and the social circuitry (layer 3) and allows technology leaders to address performance at different layers of their organization.
The paper I’ll be working on is about how to think about vendor lock in when choosing a cloud provider. Our team will be working virtually over the next 2 months and the paper will be published in the fall.
Nature: The Ultimate Stress Reliever
I love travel but back-to-back trips with too much activity packed in can stress me out. When this happens I look to nature for balance. While I was busy at ETH Denver and the DevOps Forum, I was lucky to find time to get out into nature.
Top to bottom, left to right - the first two photos are from a hike in Boulder, CO. The altitude got to me a little bit but I loved how calming a big sky feels. The next two photos are coastal redwoods in the Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, Or. And the last two are back at Rockefeller State Park near my home where I go to decompress.
Some of The Other Things
As always, some of the other things I’ve been reading or learning about:
Base’s 2024 mission, strategy and roadmap. Base is Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 and their mission is “to build a global onchain economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom”. Global innovation, creativity and freedom pretty much sums up the vision that drew me to crypto in the first place. I’ve been impressed with Base and the Base developer community. We chose to build /gmfarcaster on base and I’m excited to keep watching the ecosystem grow.
Former Cornerstone colleague and product leader Henry Vasquez wrote a blog about release management for Enterprise SaaS. “Ultimately, there is no free lunch in choosing a Product Release process. There are simply trade-offs.” Lots of great insights in the article. I like his suggestion to segment customers to reduce complexity so you can move faster.
Kaloh wrote an interesting market analysis about Farcaster native NFTs, featuring the Farcaster OG, Purple, Protocol Updates, Castaways, FarCats, Outcasts, and Faristocats.
Semantle - A word game that is somewhat like wordle, but it’s based on vocabulary, intent and meaning instead of spelling. And it’s orders of magnitude harder. Definitely fun to play but good luck.
“Think back to your favorite childhood play memory. Where were you? What were you doing? Was there an adult supervising you?” Kids need risks. This was an excellent essay with a good reminder of the unintended damage of micro managing our kids. Let ‘em play.
A Note to My Subscribers
I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.
I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out my consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.
Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.
Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️
me and my wife and friends have spent MANY HOURS OF OUR LIVES playing semantle