Original Content
From Platform Engineering to Stand-Up Comedian, with Lian Li, Software Defined Talk #117: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects. They also cover her unique improv workshops for engineers at conferences and the popular KubeCon karaoke parties she organizes.”
The Alpha and The Omega, Software Defined Talk #554: “This week, we discuss AI’s impact on Stack Overflow, Docker’s Hardened Images, and Nvidia buying Groq. Plus, thoughts on playing your own game and having fun.”
Industry analyst value after AI - how could Gartner use AI - pondering.
Relevant to your interests
AI security concerns and opportunities for 2026 - Tanzu security maestro David Zendzian rattles it off.
Amazon gives managers a new way to spot employees who aren’t spending enough time in the office - Enterprise Nanny-state.
What does the platform engineer do when the amount of “developers” in your organization goes 10x?
Open APIs Are Over - Closing an API reveals where the business strategy, i.e., how the organization makes money.
How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done: 6 Secrets To Motivation - Set numeric and behavior goals and track them.
Get Rid of Your Boss. Share a Story Instead. - Stories and culture win over hierarchy and policy.
You Aren’t Going to Be Replaced by AI, You’re Getting New Toys - We have always been trying to get rid of the programmers.
Dread Thingonomicon - This is a fun book if you’re into role playing games like D&D.
What will the DEI landscape of the tech sector look like in 2026?
Amazon pharmacy to begin offering home delivery for Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill - Sherwood News - ”Amazon said it will offer delivery for the pill through insurance and cash-pay options. Novo’s cash-pay price for the pill is $149 a month — less than half of what its injectables cost through the same channel.”
“In July America will celebrate its 250th birthday. The coming year will feature parades, fireworks and, curiously, an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout at the White House.” The Economist World in Brief for Dec 31st, 2025.
Is Your AI Assistant Creating a Recursive Security Loop? - AI-assisted coding is starting to eat its own tail: the same LLMs that write code are increasingly asked to review it, explain security decisions, and even override their own warnings. That creates recursive trust loops where “explain your reasoning” becomes an attack surface, and models can literally talk themselves out of being secure. The fix isn’t better prompts, it’s old-school architecture - separation of concerns, non-AI enforcement, and treating LLMs as assistants, not authorities.
Dell’s CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I’ve had in maybe 5 years - “We’re very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device - in fact everything that we’re announcing has an NPU in it - but what we’ve learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they’re not buying based on AI,” Terwilliger says bluntly. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”
AI isn’t “just predicting the next word” anymore - The models get better, and equally (more?) importantly the apps that use the models get better.
Welcome to Gas Town - “Gas Town is a new take on the IDE for 2026. Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances. Stuff gets lost, it’s hard to track who’s doing what, etc. Gas Town helps with all that yak shaving, and lets you focus on what your Claude Codes are working on.”
The economics of technical speaking - “You can often reverse-engineer an event’s compensation model by whether the keynote speakers are employees or independents.”
Morgan Stanley: Most Gen Zers and millennials in the US listen to about three hours of AI music a week - “50–60% of listeners 18- 44 reporting 2.5–3 hours per week of AI music listening.”
Wastebook
“Labor is valuable only insofar as it occupies a constraint the firm hasn’t yet automated.”
“Your brain hates unbounded risk. When there’s no plan, it escalates into dread.”
Enassholeification.
Consumer tech focuses on the process, enterprise tech on the outcome.
“In July America will celebrate its 250th birthday. The coming year will feature parades, fireworks and, curiously, an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout at the White House.” The Economist World in Brief for Dec 31st, 2025.
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See y’all next time. // As always, if you’d like to see these things sooner, check out my weblog. There’s also a few things I don’t put here.