Inspired by the short stories of the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, Mary Maka illustrates woodland creatures with fantastical characteristics as part of her Endless Forest series. The Portugal-based artist has always been interested in mythology and nature, and after reading Tutuola’s works, she decided to render spirited animals that could plausibly emerge from the pages of his books.

Often hybrid in form, the beasts are based on unique fears. “Hunters gave names to the phenomena and creatures that were most frightening,” Maka says. “By giving them a name and endowing them with human qualities, the fear became less intense. Spirits that had names could now be allies and help in hunting and gathering.” This sentiment grounds her work as she translates each fear into vibrant colors, grainy textures, and playfully exaggerated features, which she hopes ameliorates panic and worry.

The digitally illustrated series began as an animation that is currently in progress. Keep an eye out for that, along with an upcoming poster release, on Behance and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Endless Forest: Mary Maka Digitally Illustrates Otherworldly Woodland Creatures to Tame Fears appeared first on Colossal.

DevOps / Platform Engineering / Software Development”>Michael Coté”>

2023-06-06 06:05:41

The Art of Platform Marketing: You’ve Gotta Sell It

sponsor-vmware,sponsored-post-contributed,

One of the most important parts of a platform engineering strategy is one often overlooked. Take lessons from sales to boost adoption

Jun 6th, 2023 6:05am by

Michael Coté

“How do we get developers to actually use our platform?”

This is a question I’m often asked. A good first step is to make sure you take a product management approach and build an app platform that developers actually want to use, making sure that the golden path to production is not only useful but, well, fun. However, there is a second step that is often overlooked and misunderstood by platform teams: good, old-fashioned marketing. Once you have your platform set up, you have to build up what is essentially a full marketing plan to drive interest in and use of that platform. This includes not only brand, messaging and positioning and campaigns for outreach, but also platform advocacy.

What Platform Marketing Does

Platform marketing is used to drive awareness, trust and interest, but it also gives you an opportunity to get product management feedback about your platform. That last part is one of the underappreciated parts of advocacy (or “developer relations” as it’s sometimes called). When you’re developing in a product mindset, as most platform teams do, you’ll appreciate as much feedback as you can get from your customers — your developers. When infrastructure teams tell me they’ve built a platform or a Kubernetes cloud for developers but that developers aren’t using it, it’s usually because they need to do much more platform marketing.

Marketing doesn’t come easy to infrastructure people. It’s an off-putting word, perhaps only rivaled by “enterprise sales rep.” As ever with eye-roll-inducing phrases, what people actually dislike is bad, boring and useless marketing. At large organizations, most of the successful platform teams I talk with pay close attention to marketing, to good marketing. The likes of Mercedes-Benz, JPMorgan Chase, Duke Energy, The Home Depot, BT, the U.S. Air Force and Army and many others start their platform marketing plans from day one. And, in fact, marketing is a key part of scaling and sustaining how these organizations improve the way they make software.

I’ll be covering platform marketing as one of the “7 lessons from 7 years of running platforms” in my upcoming talk at PlatformCon, being held June 8 and 9. In the meantime, here’s a preview of one of those seven lessons: marketing and advocacy.

Brand

“Do you have a T-shirt yet?” my colleague DaShaun Carter likes to ask platform teams. This can seem like a flippant question, but it gets to an important part of platform marketing: establishing a brand. You need a name for your platform and the philosophy of software it supports. For example, the U.S. Air Force uses the brand Kessel Run, and JPMorgan Chase has the Gaia brand.

A brand performs two functions.

First, it creates an identity and a definition of what exactly your platform is. People tend to identify with the tools they use. They’re Java developers, Rust developers, Linux administrators, they follow XP or they’re site reliability engineers (SREs) instead of “DevOps engineers,” and so forth. That identity creates affinity and attraction to the brand — in this case, your platform. In doing so, it creates a certain joy in using the platforms and a passion for the platform.

Second, a brand helps define what your unique methodology and philosophy is. No matter if you’re doing agile, following DevOps principles, practicing SRE or sorting out what “platform engineering” means this quarter, you’ll need to adapt those methodologies to your organization’s unique needs. The sages of these methodologies aren’t so fond of cafeteria DevOps, where you just pick and choose the practices you want to use. However, in many large organizations, to get better, you need to make compromises and adapt stringent methodology principles.

Using your own name helps you take ownership of the methodology you’re putting together and change it as you learn what works. It’s a good time saver too. As one executive told me on a long elevator ride a few years back, don’t ever use the word “agile” when you’re doing agile. The first thing that’ll happen is that someone will start complaining that you’re not doing real agile, that you’re doing it wrong. And then you get stuck in the narcissism of a small-differences black hole instead of just getting on with the work.

The Book

You’re certainly going to need a manual, training, documentation and the usual three-ring binder material. But you’ll also want to write up the thinking that’s behind the brand. You need to codify and distribute your intentions, goals and principles. This is something more tactical, more usable than vision and strategy.

The exact content of The Book will vary, so it’s good to look at examples for inspiration. While it’s just a narrow slice of what would be in The Book, the UK Digital Service has a great list of design principles. You can see how we think about software at VMware Tanzu Labs in things like our FAQ and books like “Radically Collaborative Patterns for Software Makers.”

As you scale your platform to hundreds, then thousands of developers, this ongoing documentation of your thinking will be critical. It’s more than just tech documentation, it’s documenting the culture that your platform is built to support. This book will also help the platform team remember the point of the platform and their work as well. For example, to get the organization focused on building well-designed software, using lean-design techniques, deploying weekly, etc.

Platform Advocacy

Finally, the successful platform teams I talk with have very active platform advocacy. This means having at least one person working full time to just talk with, work with and listen to the people who use your platforms, usually developers. The role of “developer advocate” is pretty well understood by us vendors and cloud providers. Developer advocates love talking to people, and we also love talking about our craft. This means you can find out how it’s done easily by just asking us.

You’ll probably start with just one platform advocate who visits with developer teams throughout your organization listening to what these teams do, teaching them how to use the platform and associated methodologies and listening to their feedback. The advocate acts as a spreader of your platform, a booster and an explainer. Also, often overlooked, the advocate takes feedback from developers and others back to the platform team. They advocate for both the platform team and for the platform users.

As your platform and overall software transformation scale, you’ll add more advocates. Like JPMorgan Chase, you might even have a whole team of platform advocates. The Cloud Foundry platform team at Mercedes-Benz provides training, systematic feedback collection, quarterly community updates and numerous other community management functions that you’d expect an advocate to help with.

One of the common, maybe required, practices the advocacy team follows is holding quarterly internal conferences. These are actual, in-person conferences, often rotating through different regions and office locations with an online component. At these conferences, your platform team and executive sponsors talk a little bit about the platform, but you mostly get your customers — developer teams — to present and talk about the projects they’ve worked on. This serves two functions: training and, that’s right, marketing.

The marketing you’re taking advantage of at internal conferences is the most coveted of all marketing treasures: word of mouth. Having developers tell other developers that your platform is good, great even, will be the best way to get developers to use your platform, and use it well.

Start Platform Marketing on Day One

In addition to those important aspects of platform marketing, you’ll also need to do some marketing fundamentals, like producing content and documentation and working with product management to understand your customers and go to where they are, so to speak.

I haven’t seen many platform teams (or any, perhaps) that have scaled and sustained their developer platform without platform marketing. You’ve got to start thinking about marketing from day one, assigning at least one full-time advocate to start that work of creating a brand name and documenting your ongoing platform philosophy and principles. As with developer advocacy, you don’t need to spend time reinventing the wheel: Tech marketing is a well-understood set of practices. The trick is to actually do it.

If you want to hear the other six lessons of scaling and sustaining platforms in large organizations, check out my full talk at PlatformCon, ”7 lessons from 7 years of running platforms.”

Group
Created with Sketch.

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books “Changing Mindsets,” “Monolithic Transformation” and “The Business Bottleneck” cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451…

Read more from Michael Coté

TNS owner Insight Partners is an investor in: Pragma.

SHARE THIS STORY

THE NEW STACK UPDATE
A newsletter digest of the week’s most important stories & analyses.

Margaret “Meg” Moore can’t walk, stand or tend to activities of daily living on her own and she relies on an assistive device for communication.

Yet, the 26-year-old from Middlebury has already accomplished more than many people will in a lifetime – and she keeps adding to the list.

“My positive attitude can definitely be attributed to my parents,” Moore wrote in an email. “My mother and my late father approached my life with a disability with a very positive outlook right from the beginning.”

Her latest mission brings positive artwork and poems to hospital walls, in a project she’s named: “Positivity for Patients: Project Yes You Can.”

She came up with the idea after a brief hospital stay in 2021 for aspiration pneumonia, followed by months of outpatient rehabilitation at Gaylord Specialty Health Care, where the first installation of positive artwork is on display.

“I wanted to do something to help those patients,” who had long stays, Moore wrote. “And I thought that decorating the hospital corridors with art and writing that depicts themes of positivity would be a good way to brighten their days.”

Moore, a poet, called upon Black Rock Art Guild, a group she belongs to contribute positive artwork and poems.

Guild member Janet Krauss, who donated nine poems on positive topics, said Moore’s accomplishments are “remarkable.”

“I get very emotional when I think about Meg and all she does,” Krauss said. “I think it’s extraordinary this young woman thought of the project and put it into action….She’s a role model for all these patients at Gaylord ad other facilities.”

Katie Butler, a certified therapeutic recreation specialist at Gaylord, said art is powerful for patients.

“Art brings people together and allows them to interpret a variety of different emotions,” Butler said.

“Patients can enjoy reminiscing on the artwork as well as socializing with other peers while observing. Positive messages light up patients’ days, even with the simplest of words. Positive messages spread positive vibes, allowing patients to feel good and smile.”

Moore was born with cerebral palsy because of a prolapsed umbilical cord at birth that left her without oxygen for five minutes.

While that resulted in extreme physical impairments, Moore’s cognitive abilities were intact and she was educated in the mainstream.

Moore said she was taught by her parents growing up that she could, “achieve all my ambitions.”

Some of her achievements include: In summer 2022 she graduated from Fairfield University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, maintaining straight As throughout; she was the 2022 College of Arts & Sciences recipient of the Fairfield University Graduate Student Service Award; in 2020 she graduated magna cum laude from Fairfield University, earning a bachelor’s degree in English/creative writing with a minor in psychology.

Also, in 2019, she received the Fairfield University Mariann S. Regan Award for Outstanding Achievement in English and the creative non-fiction Essay Award; she delivers presentations at graduate level international & national writing conferences; she is Gold Award Girl Scout; her debut memoir, “Bold, Brave, and Breathless,” will be released October 2.

Meanwhile, she has a job too. Moore is a book editor and marketing coordinator at an independent book publisher, Woodhall Press. She’s also an ambassador for PRC-Saltillo, the manufacturer of her communication device that allows her to type using eye gazes.

Margaret has also been accepted to be on Gaylord Sports Association’s ParaTriathlon team, using a walker to run.

“She keeps very busy,” said her mom, Anne Moore.

Margaret Moore’s dad died of a rare form of stomach cancer at 44 just before her second birthday, but he faced his daughter’s situation head on and found resources to help.

“Before he died, my father was discussing my disability and said to a friend, ‘Whatever the obstacle, we will overcome it,”‘ Margaret Moore wrote.

As for mom, Margaret Moore said, “When I would see my friends playing sports, doing Girl Scouts, going ice-skating, zip-lining, you name it, my mom was always there saying, ‘Let’s figure out what we need to do to get you to do those activities right along with them.’

Anne Moore said that aside from parental influence, determination runs in the family.

“We come from a long line of strong, persevering women,” she said.

Margaret Moore said it took her years to realize that what her family taught her about positivity and overcoming obstacles has not been a common approach in the larger disability community and the general public.

“I really wanted to change that, and a lot of what I see even today in 2023 is that many people of all abilities have this belief that having a disability means that you are incapable and having a disability is seen as an undesirable quality,” she wrote. “Through sharing my story and through initiatives… I strive to teach people about the potential and the capabilities that we all have, whether we are able-bodied or disabled.”

Her soon to be released memoir is about her childhood experience growing up with cerebral palsy and losing her father, whom she remembers.

The printing costs for the first installation of the “Positivity for Patients: Project Yes You Can,” were made possible through crowdfunding, Margaret Moore said.

She and the Black Rock Art Guild, or BRAG, will continue to donate exhibits and the hope is the pieces will eventually be given to patients to take home.

BRAG treasurer Sheila Weaver said the group found Meg’s art program for hospitals, “very exciting,” and they were happy to see it’s debut at Gaylord where so many happened to have a personal connection.

“She does it with the love, the care and the spirit of giving to others,” Weaver said. “She’s an amazing poet.”

Margaret chose Gaylord for the debut exhibit because, “they have patients at all stages of recovery…and I know how important it is to stay motivated during the recovery process.”

PORT ANGELES — The 59th edition of Tidepools will be released on Thursday.

The public is invited to a launch party from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the ʔaʔk̓ʷustəƞáwt̓xʷ House of Learning, Peninsula College Longhouse on the Port Angeles campus at 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.

This event is free and open to the public. To reserve a free ticket, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/639008771437.

Guests can help celebrate the winners of the Tidepools magazine contest and take a first peak at this year’s magazine. The Tidepools launch party will include a brief reading and pop-up exhibit featuring work in the current issue.

Tidepools Magazine has been published annually at Peninsula College since 1964 and features original art, photography, poetry, prose and music created by residents of the North Olympic Peninsula in Clallam and Jefferson counties.

Tidepools is created in collaboration by Peninsula College students who edit, design, lay out and publish the magazine while learning about publishing, marketing, community relations and gaining an appreciation of literature and the arts.

The magazine is made possible with support from the Associated Student Council, the Peninsula Daily News and The Buccaneer.

Look for Tidepools magazine in local shops across the Olympic Peninsula.

Youth Art (0-9) — 1. “Marigold and the Angel Dog” by Tzivia Reeder, Port Hadlock-Irondale; 2. “Coast Guard Dude” by Liliana Wengrin, Port Angeles; 3. “Under the Sea” by Calder Frank-Barton, Port Angeles.

Youth Art (10-13) — 1. “Rockstar” by Jude Stigler, Port Angeles; 2. “Spooky Season” by Sophie McDaniel, Port Angeles; 3. “Kit’s Corner” by Elyse Kim, Sequim.

Youth Art (14-17) — 1. “Sodapop” by Mikey Monet, Port Angeles.

Youth Writing (10-13) — 1. “Snowstorm” by Cora Powless, Port Angeles; 2. “Fire” by Alice Johnson, Port Angeles; 3. “All Hail the King” by Anouk Atwater, Port Angeles.

PC Student Art & Digital Art — 1. “Kayaking Away from the Farmer’s Market” by Karlie Viada, Carlsborg; 2. “AI Nature Girl” by Catherine Barrows, Chimacum; 3. “I Am Growing” by Nathalie Lalonde, Port Angeles; Honorable mentions: “Bailadora” by Lydia Morris, Port Angeles; “Strawberry Blonde” Viada.

PC Student Photography — 1. “Basement Birthday” by Eliza Pettigrew, Port Angeles; 2. “Seattle Reflections” by Nathan Barber, Port Angeles; 3. “Among the Fae” by Sam Chonko, Port Hadlock; Honorable mentions: “Eclectic Fantasy” by Courtney Smith, Port Angeles; “The World Above Us” by Mya Raunig, Vancouver.

PC Student Writing — 1. “Rain Like This” by Alena Grafstrom, Beaver; 2. “The Sunny Side of the Mountain” by Mary Hofer, Port Angeles; 3. “Heavy Pockets” by Alena Grafstrom, Beaver; Honorable mentions: “Night for Art” by Olivia Tejeda, Port Angeles; “Chrysalis” by Jessica Oversby, Forks.

Adult Art & Digital Art — 1. “Flicker” by George Seifert, Port Townsend; 2. “The Dragon and the Frog” by Cammry Lapka, Port Angeles; 3. “Amy’s Garden” by Terry Anderson, Sequim; Honorable mentions: “Solo Dance” by Marilou Laisnez, Sequim; “We are Family” by Malik Atwater, Port Angeles.

Adult Poetry — 1. “I Know Heaven by Trudy Roush,” Port Townsend; 2. “The Sixth Estate by Stirling Hall,” Sequim; 3. “For My Beloved Wife, Shelly, On Her Birthday” by Dennis Kelly, Port Ludlow.

Adult Prose — 1. “Sentinel of Sellman’s Creek” by Chris Kleinfelter, Port Angeles; 2. “Silent Symphony” by Nick Burnette, Port Angeles; 3. “The Current That Runs Through Us” by Katherine See Kennedy, Port Angeles.

Adult Photography — 1. “Dew-Covered Sage Plant at Woodcock Master Gardener Demonstration Garden” by Mark Klinke, Carlsborg; 2. “Family at Fountain” by Amy McIntyre, Port Angeles; 3. “Fresh Snow on the Sub-Alpine Fir Trees at Hurricane Ridge” by Amos Almy, Port Angeles; Honorable mentions: “Misty Morning with Guinea Fowl” by Pam Bauer, Port Townsend; “Sunset Giving Way to Milky Way at Second Beach” by Klinke.

Music — 1. “Winter Queen” by Ginny Holladay, Sequim; 2. “Déjà vu” by Dakotah Cole, Forks.