My Content

Two Software Defined episodes this week:

"I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza," startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff - After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and balancing commercial and community interests, moving to Europe, and more!

This is a “hit by pitch” - This week, we discuss Zenoss finally getting acquired, Databricks buying Neon, and the debut of WizOS. Plus, updates on OpenAI, Google, Apple—and hot takes on Marmite, Vegemite, and Emacs. (Just Matt and Brandon, I was away.)

Keep your Spring Apps Up-to-date

Webinar alert! If you manage Spring apps in your organization, keeping them up-to-date probably seems like an impossibility. There’s help! Check out this overview from the Spring folks on the topic:

Keeping applications secure and up to date is more challenging than ever. Upgrades introduce transitive dependencies that can break compatibility; some projects require migrations due to end-of-life decisions, and security vulnerabilities demand urgent attention. While security teams integrate vulnerability scanners to detect risks, developers often struggle with lengthy and unpredictable remediation efforts, leading to delays, uncertainty, and disruption to business priorities. Join us for this exclusive webinar to learn how Spring Application Advisor (SAA) can simplify the Spring app upgrade process, so you can maintain security and stability without derailing your roadmap.

Register for it and check it out on May 22nd. Or, just catch the replay.

Wastebook

• “a usefully belligerent attitude” Tim Bray.

• “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” And, I said, I realized that this is what I had been doing. Worrying about tomorrow. Anticipating the worst possible outcome. “Exactly,” he said. “Since earliest childhood. Worrying is all mixed up in your mind with loving. You don’t think you can love without worrying.” - Notes to John, Joan Didion

• And: “I said I wasn’t sure where we left off. Dr. MacKinnon said why not begin where you are now. I said I wasn’t sure where I was now, life seemed rather scattered.”

• “The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom.” Craig Mod.

• “Unstatus.” Westenberg.

• “There’s a really big body, and it’s not quite buried.”

• Doing a tiny amount is better than nothing, which is sort of what habit building is.

• “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful. And theirs is weak.” Beef-talk.

• “defaults instead of opinions.” Matt Gemmell.

• “Another thing to keep in mind is that therapy often isn’t a repair process; it’s a perspective-changing process instead.” Matt G.

• “Mailchimp has grown and mutated to serve a set of needs and cus­tomers that I truly don’t understand. Not that it shouldn’t! Well — I mean, I wish it wouldn’t. But it did” // A helpful marketing/product strategy thing to keep in mind: sometimes your customer base changes, and that can be totally fine.

Relevant to your interests

• Shadow AI Isn’t a Threat: It’s a Wake-up Call - “Shadow AI isn’t the enemy – it’s a signal. Shadow AI tells you that your teams want AI, they need AI and they’re willing to move without you if they have to. That’s not just a risk. It’s a roadmap. This is your chance to build something better: secure, governed AI enablement that works the way your teams do.”

• A2A Protocol: The Universal Language for AI Agents

• AI agents drive Boomi’s vision for scalable automation - Adding MCP support.

• Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - checks out, in both directions. I don’t ever recommend reading the comments, but after some predictably dumb ones, there’s some interesting, additional thinking in the comments.

• Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation - I can’t read Math-Greek, so don’t really know what’s going on here. But it looks helpful for playing D&D with the robot.

• Why is AI not in your productivity statistics? - I like one of the ideas here: when AI makes things better, and those things don’t obviously increase sales/profit (“growth”) or save money, it’s easy to think it has no ROI. Increasing quality of life with productivity is hard to capture in GDP, so to speak.

• news that stays news - What’s old to you is completely new to younger people, no matter how old the text is: “One of the things that’s great about being the kind of teacher I am is that you spend your life introducing new people to old things: when my students fall in love with Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil or John Donne or Pascal — things that happened this very term — it’s all new to them.” // Or: every second someone new is born who’s never watched The Flintstones.

• Revisiting the clouds - “Fast forward to today, and the PaaS market has been significantly reshaped, largely by the rise of Kubernetes and other technologies. The landscape is very different. Apparently, somewhere along the line we lost the ease of deployment that platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry were well known for … progress” // Indeed…

• Why so many IT projects go so horribly wrong - Latest in “why do IT projects fail?” research.

• Texas’ Regulatory Landscape - ”Texas is the 5th most regulated state in the US” // I wouldn’t have expected top 5!

• Mexico and China didn’t take manufacturing jobs from the Rust Belt - ”A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.”

• Blitzscaling for tyrants - more on (consumer?) tech startup culture being applied to the US federal government.

• Americans are losing the taste for plant-based milk - and Oatly is feeling the pain - “Riding an alt-milk wave, Oatly’s revenues nearly doubled every year from 2015 to 2020 — but shares of the Swedish milk maker are down some 98% from their 2021 peak, and in the latest quarter, Oatly’s growth finally went sub-zero.”

• Philips debuts 3D printable components to repair products - I don’t know much about this area, but seems cool.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10). PlatformCon, June 23rd to 27th, speaking, online.

Logoff

I’m back from Cloud Foundry Day in Palo Alto. Nice trip with lots of time to see people.