Tips on running AI on your private cloud

Some brief comments on using Tanzu Platform to run your private GenAI stuff. If you’re interested in more than that short clip, check out my co-worker Nick’s talk on this topic. You can check out the Tanzu Platform more at TryTanzu.ai.

Relative to your interests

• Two strategies to succeed when AI seems to be eroding jobs around you - 🤖 Technical writers are shifting from writers to content directors, steering and editing AI output. To thrive: build deep subject matter expertise and tool expertise–with editorial judgment and workflow skills as supporting habits. // How many managers does the world need, though?

• The yaml document from hell - They advocate for using JSON (with comments) over YAML: “Generating json as a better yaml. Often the choice of format is not ours to make, and an application only accepts yaml. Not all is lost though, because yaml is a superset of json, so any tool that can produce json can be used to generate a yaml document.”

• What is “good taste” in software engineering? - Programmer aesthetics: “your engineering taste is composed of the set of engineering values you find most important.” // And: “most bad taste comes from inflexibility. I will always distrust engineers who justify decisions by saying ‘it’s best practice.’ No engineering decision is ‘best practice’ in all contexts! You have to make the right decision for the specific problem you’re facing.”

• Book Review: “Doughnut Economics” - “Doughnut Economics is based around an important insight: Diagrams are powerful marketing tools.” // And, from the book reviewed: “Visual frames, it gradually dawned on me, matter just as much as verbal ones…[N]ow is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times”

Wastebook

• “One of the things we must always keep in mind is that press releases are written to persuade.” // We should call them “persuasion releases.” Bogus.

• Yes: ”Amara’s law and states: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” But: “The law has been used in explaining nanotechnology.” Roy Amara/wikipedia.

• “online friendships are forever,” Internet-grass.

• “A great deal of effort can be put into deciding to do nothing.”

• “Complaining of SaaS pricing always smells a bit hackernews ‘I could build that entire business in a weekend and run it on a raspberry pi that I used to control my cat’s smart litterbox with.’” JasonJ.

• “Daddy?” “Yeah?” “You need to learn how to not fart.” // Children are implicitly asked to give their opinion with no take-backs from parents.

• Raise your hand if Passkeys work flawlessly for you as much as usernames and password. Yup. Moving on…

Conferences

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

I’m onto a new theory for my own enjoyment of solo roleplaying D&D. I think the rail-roady ones are easiest and most fun. They work well with the Mythic Game Master Emulator and ChatGPT. I’ll have to experiment more. The mechanics of it and what works or doesn’t is good input for understanding what exactly to do with generative AI. Hopefully I’ll have enough to surface in my talk at AI for the Rest of Us, next month.