Original content

Here’s two of my podcasts to share with you:

Capitalism is working, Software Defined Talk #534: “This week, we discuss the US backing Intel, SaaS staying power, and AI’s impact on deep work. Plus, Matt Ray’s moving tips and more kolache talk in the after show.” Also available, unedited, in video form.

The business value of developer relations, devrel history, plus more stuff, with Mary Thengvall: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté chat with Mary Thengvall, exploring the development and significance of Developer Relations (devrel) over the years. They discuss the transition from tech "evangelism" to the modern devrel roles, the challenges and successes in community building, the importance of internal support for devrel teams, and the impact of AI on content creation. Mary also shares insights from her book, The Business Value of Developer Relations, and her experience with the devrel Collective community.” Also available in video form.

Relative to your interests

• Observability and Visibility at Scale - you always need it.

• AWS CEO says AI replacing junior staff is ‘dumbest idea’ - ‘Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”’ // That’s unexpected from Amazon whose uber-CEO has said AI will replace people. There must be some nuance in a six-pager over there.

• Meta Says Threads Has Over 400 Million Monthly Active Users - “What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be.”

• The Business of ChatGPT - Revenue and such numbers circa. August, 2025.

• ai-development-patterns, PaulDuvall - ”A comprehensive collection of patterns based on my experience for building software with AI assistance, organized by implementation maturity and development lifecycle phases. These patterns are subject to change as the field evolves.”

• One Way Parents Can Fight the Phone-Based Childhood - GPT5: “Phones are not the root cause; they’re the symptom of a constrained, over-supervised childhood. The solution isn’t banning devices but giving kids freedom back: unsupervised play, local friends, independence. If parents want kids off screens, they must open the door–literally–and rebuild the conditions that once made childhood social, adventurous, and real.”

• Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty - Great picture too.

• Kubernetes Isn’t Enough for a Production-Ready Platform - Yeah. You should buy your platform instead of build it.

Wastebook

• “Reading productivity advice is really fun for me. It’s a great way to procrastinate.” Zhengdong

• “Having a successful textbook is like being married to a very wealthy person you don’t like much anymore.” Friend of Hal Varian.

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

This week, I’ve been doing a lot of research for the AI and platform engineering talks I have this fall. It’s fun to learn. Also, the Deep Research stuff in ChatGPT is really great for this kind of thing. Some of the outputs would even be good enough just to post as white papers. I mean, as far as I can tell…since I am using them to learn the topic.

As a marketer, looking at the sources it uses is interesting. For the tech topics I look at, it’s usually startups that are blogging their stuff. Here’s the sources-by-logo for a report on chain-of-though for enterprise audits:

There’s big companies there, medium ones, and also smaller ones. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t cite individual authors for things. I don’t know, like substack, blogs, etc.

Back to marketing think: as people have been saying this year, the new SEO is getting your chunks of text out there for the AIs to consume so that you show up in people’s AI chats.

Does it work? It just did! (On me at least.)