We hear about the days when Charles was drilling for oil. Also, waffles: "I suffered years of floppy-waffles." We also discuss the deal with kombucha, to no effect, really.

And, as always, Charles' emacs configuration tip of the week.

Links:

• The Wheel of Time series
• Show Topics
• Planet Money buys oil
• There Will be Blood
• Big Oil profit margins — Something like 6-7%
• Avocado Oil
• Whale oil — "nearly 236,000 whales were killed in the 19th century"

When you travel, people have a lot of thoughts about Texas.

Links:

• Skype Call Recorder
• Topic list
• That podcast we used to do
• “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” — It was Davy Crockett.
• "Don't mess with Texas" — “The campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways roughly 72% between 1986 and 1990.”
• O'Tacos — Panini "tacos" in Paris.
• Cooper's now in Austin
• The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper
• Original My Little Pony theme song
• South American pan pipe sounds
• Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio are top 10 US cities, by population — Austin is #11.
• Who invented the breakfast taco?
• Header image of blue bonnets from rubengarciajrphotography

Charles & Coté reboot their old podcast about regular things. Also, a rant on photo management in Apple-land and how terrible enterprise IT news it. Plus, upcoming topics.

Links:

• Screenhero
• Oracle's financials, past three years — They're pretty much "flat."
• The Software Paradox — Among other things, Stephen O'Grady analyzes Oracle's finances and what it says about their software portfolio and what companies are now buying, i.e., SaaS.
• Kubernetes tool saves eBay from its OpenStack woes
• Kara Swisher on the Ezra Klein show
• 451 Research

Having worked in cloud since before cloud, JJ and I talk about what companies are using various cloud things for. We also discuss the conceptual history of cloud, and what exactly he does as a "business development" person at Chef.

You might also know him from his "being an introvert at conferences" talk.

Check him out in Twitter @jjasghar

Special Guest: JJ Asghar.

What's up with all those cash numbers in quarterly reports, and what's the deal with "analyst expectations"? In this brief episode I talk with RedMonk's Rachel Stephens to get some quick tips on what to do with all that stuff.

Find her in Twitter (@rstephensme) and on her RedMonk blog. See also this fine mound of cheese.

Special Guest: Rachel Stephens.

We discuss all the human and process changes needed to do good things with computers.

Special Guest: Bridget Kromhout.

Links:

• Video recording of this episode — The livestreamed recording we did.

Josh Long and I discuss “reactive programming."

Special Guest: Josh Long.

Links:

• Video recording of this episode — The livestreamed video of Josh and I's talk.

Sometimes you have to live with bad code. No one will let you change it. There’s many good and bad reasons, so make sure you’re consciously making the decision instead of accidentally doing it. I discuss some reasons people would keep bad code, how management should think through it, and then some options for coping as needed.

It was Joel, back in 2000, who said not to re-write code.

I recorded this with a Mevo, hence the kind of echo'y noise. See the video over in Facebook where I LIVESTREAMED IT!

Somewhere around just 20% of people do pair programming. It seems to be an incredibly effective technique, according to people who follow it. I go over some of those reasons and micro case studies of organizations having success with pair programming. It seems like the right thing to do.

Links:

• My Pairing column from October at The Register — The comments section is especially good for common sentiment about pair programming.
• Charles Lowell — We used to do a podcast.
• Gartner survey on pair programming adoption — I got the number wrong: it's actually around 20%, not just 10%.
• Mark Ardito goes over HCSC’s astonishing success with pair programming — They thought it'd take 12-15 weeks to get their MVP done, but it actually took 5.5 to 6 weeks we finish.
• Selecting people for pair programming and their enthusiastic response — More from Mark Ardito on HCSC's adoption of pair programming.
• Phil Horowitz talks about how exhausting pairing is at first — At Perforce: "This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation."

The idea of “failing fast” is popular in DevOps and agile think. That sounds like the exact opposite of what managers at large organizations would like to do. How do you get them to feel all warm and fuzzy about it? Here’s the top three tactics I’ve seen work.

Links:

• Failing fast for the uptight — One of my explanations of "failing fast": it actually means learning; here, a recording of a March 2015 talk.
• Getting Started — picking your first cloud native projects, or, Every Digital Transformation Starts with One Project — My tips on picking a series of small projects to build up internal momentum to do larger ones.
• Digital transformation: the what, the why and the how — The sad donut: "Less than 25% of organizations that participated in a recent 451 Research survey (451 Research VoCUL, April 2016) said they had a well-defined formal digital transformation strategy."