Is it Winter already?
Salesforce
Three things are certain in life - death, taxes, and another Salesforce release is right around the corner. In this case it’s Winter 22, and the release notes are out in beta. Like Siegfried Sassoon, I don’t dread the dark winter, I just hope that functions actually goes GA this year.
Continuing in the vein of things that keep happening, Salesforce announced better than expected Q2 results, delivering 23% year on year growth.
The Success from Anywhere: Your Digital HQ event took place, celebrating the joining of Slack and Salesforce. It started 15 minutes late so I guess they won’t be adding Anytime to that list of superlatives. On the subject of Slack, Cloud Wars think the purchase is the deal of the decade.
Marc Benioff said he was surprised at how few people want to return to the office. Or at least I think he said that - it was difficult to be 100% sure as he referred to ‘any CEO’ like he’s not one. It will be interesting to see how the CEOs react to this - will they accept that things have changed or try to force everyone back to their old/preferred way of working back in the office. Personally I think that approach is doomed to failure, but time will tell.
An interesting read on the executive talent pool that Marc Benioff is assembling - ignore the clickbait headline as nobody things that Benioff is going to step down, maybe ever. As any Premier League manager will tell you though - it’s one thing to assemble a team of galacticos, quite another to keep them together. Keeping the superstars happy when the top job isn’t available requires no little effort, and you can be sure that the offers to take up the CEO job elsewhere will be coming in at a reasonable clip.
Other
A great article in Wired about the challenges of machine unlearning - undoing the effect of a biased dataset or respecting someone’s right to be forgotten, but without starting from scratch. Maybe when the Terminator eventually appears we can get it to forget about John Connor.
Apple gave a little bit in their ongoing battle with app developers, who will now be allowed to email their customers to tell them there are other ways to pay. Apple also announced a $100 million Small Developer Assistance Fund to be split among developers who have made less than $1 million a year across all their apps. This somewhat pales into insignificance when you read about Tim Cook making $750 million from his recent share award, but you have to remember that the share price has increased 1,200% since he’s been in charge.
Me
I couldn’t resist the lure of gently mocking Salesforce+, so produced my list of top programs for August.
A while ago it struck me that programming is now a public occupation, whereas it used to be intensely private. This turned into more of a trip down memory lane that I originally intended, but things long-repressed kept coming back to me.
My continuous integration jobs started failing and while I knew a certificate was to blame, I didn’t know where or what it was.