Ranch Dressing Crisis at the Border, the Legibility of Effort, and iPad Sadness – Related to your interests, Wednesday

Also: AI lessons from SMB banks, build vs buy redux, and the return-to-office secret.

I’ve got two speaking things this week:

• Today at noon, Austin time: I’m hosting a three person panel on how the Spring Framework team has been dealing with all these AI-driven problems. It has the directors of R&D for Spring and my devrel pal Cora. Plus, Nebraska. There’ll be a recording if you want to register and watch it later.
• Thursday: I’m speaking at the Global VMUG on how Tanzu + VCF makes the perfect private cloud stack. It’s Thursday June 25, 10:40am Austin time, virtual and free. It’s Oren Penso and I: VCF + Tanzu Platform = The Private Cloud // You can of course see the reply if you can’t see it live.

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

The platform-as-a-product whitepaper I helped revise is out. First published in 2017, updated several times since, with the fingerprints of a lot of people involved in platform engineering over the years all over it.

Some of the updates: the AI bottleneck that’s about to hit Day 2, updated team-size benchmarks, and a more contemporary read on what a platform actually is.

Check it out – the PDF is free to download, no lead-gen.

More things I’ve published since time:

• How AI change your software development organization – Here’s an interview I did with the head of our division at Tanzu. Purnima goes over several ways we’ve changed how we work after using AI for awhile.
• Let’s go to Buc-ee’s – Software Defined Talk #577 – “The hosts discuss the Fable ban, SpaceX’s $60B Cursor acquisition, and why Lovable wins when AI picks your stack. ‘Europeans are at the World Cup and already drank Boston dry.’”
• Deming, DevOps History, AI Risk, and Critical Thinking, with John Willis – Software Defined Interviews #123 – “Hosts Whitney and Coté explore systems thinking with guest John Willis, examining how Deming’s principles apply to DevOps, exploring the evolution of software delivery practices, and discussing contemporary concerns around AI risk and the importance of critical thinking in technology leadership.”
• Three R’s in 2026 – also, how do you secure agent skills? – Tanzu Catsup
• The Millennial Aesthetic, 2020 – an extracted/infered color palette and design principles/vibes based on Molly Fischer’s 2020 article.

Related to your interests

• When “Sovereign” Becomes Strategic: What Organizations Actually Want from Digital Sovereignty – see also the extracted numbers.
• AI Readiness: Enterprise Infrastructure and Private Cloud (VMware survey)
• 🤖 Legibility of Effort in the Age of LLMs – AI makes effort hard to recognize, challenging creators to find new ways to show care and authenticity. Online spaces once relied on “someone cared enough to make this” as a proxy for quality. Now, plausible but shallow contributions flood open source projects and the web, eroding trust. Maintainers face challenges distinguishing genuine work from AI-generated “slop,” sometimes resorting to humorous tricks like poisoning AI agents’ context to expose low-effort code.
• Lessons from Putting AI in Front of a Platform
• AI lessons learned from 3 SMB banks – Align with how your organization makes money, start small to prove it works, make sure you have access to data.
• AI Use by the US Government
• The AI tipping point: where enterprise AI runs at scale
• Trace: Meeting transcripts that never leave your Mac
• The future of engineering at Nationwide, Comcast, TD, and HPE
• Is Platform Engineering Already Obsolete?
• Using an iPad Pro as a Laptop – Using the iPad as a general purpose device is a path to sadness.
• Governance: New Strategy, Old Hands On The Wheel
• Europe IRL – The counter-point to all those Europe is decadent economic charts people put out: “After roaming the Earth for 35 years, my conclusion is the U.S. is the best place to make money and Europe is the best place to spend it.”
• If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad?
• I posted to TikTok every day for a year and I learned nothing – “That is incredibly hard work. And most of the people who work really hard at it don’t get lucky and just peter out. And even the ones who do get lucky. They peter out too. It’s too hard.”
• Sixty percent of US consumers say “AI” in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds
• 3 Ways to Rethink Your Build-or-Buy Strategy
• The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week – The New York Times – This seems a little weird methodology-wise, but: sure.
• Kraft to develop TSA-compliant ranch dressing due to World Cup demand – “Are you kicking around the idea of flying home with your favorite dip?” the agency stated in the caption of the post on Instagram. “If you’re traveling within the U.S., make sure to keep your carry-on sauces to 3.4oz or less and place any larger containers in your checked bags.”

Wastebook

• “We are one week into our new timeline where all of humanity has always ever and only ever worked on our singular goal of making it possible for Elon to fuck in space. JEFFBEZOS! What a world.” Ben Brown

AI Summaries

I wanted to read these, but I didn’t make the time, so I asked the robot to summarize them.

• 🤖 Anthropic AI Models Pulled Offline Over Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge
• 🤖 Rethinking Build vs. Buy: Match Strategy to Asset Type and Risk
• 🤖 The Post-Christian Condition: Kitsch, Longing, and the Afterlife of Dead Christianity
• 🤖 Code Goes to Zero, Comprehension Doesn’t: Why the AI Bottleneck Moved to Review, Specs, and the Harness
• 🤖 Kubernetes Becomes the Backbone of AI and Multi-Agent Systems
• 🤖 AI Coding Agents Boost the Feeling of Productivity While Draining the Real Thing
• 🤖 Build-vs-Buy for AI Agents Inverts in One Year as “Agent Platform” Quietly Balloons Into Four Separate Product Bets
• 🤖 Analysis of 25,000 TikTok and YouTube Videos Finds Pro-AI Content Outnumbers Anti-AI 3:1, With Memes and Creative Theft Dominating Over Elite Narratives
• 🤖 How Avocados Became a Year-Round Global Commodity

Upcoming Events

Conferences I’ll be speaking at and other events I’ll be at.

• June 25 – Global VMUG 2026, speaking
• July 8 – WeAreDevelopers World Congress, Berlin, speaking.
• September 21 – Cloud Foundry Summit 2026, speaking.
• October 24 – DevOpsDays Istanbul, speaking (keynote)
• November 19 – Cloud Native Denmark, Copenhagen, speaking (keynote).

Logoff

My robot friend has been assembling a page of my speaking history, for both conference talks and webinars. It’s in a pretty good state now at talks.cote.io.

The numbers since 2007 are 149 talks, 31 webinars. There’s probably 10 or 20 webinars missing, and an equal number of talks.

If you want to join me in my sadness, you can also look at my CFP acceptance tracking page. It’s not super-actuate the further you go back since I only know about talks I gave, not rejected proposals. As you can see, 2026 has been a nose-dive!