Posts in "links"

Most developers have adopted devops, survey says - I’ll have to look at this more, but: “29% of developers used continuous integration to automatically build and test.” This means that 71% of respondents are not automating their builds and tests. // “Grady Booch first proposed the term CI in his 1991 method, although he did not advocate integrating several times a day. Extreme programming (XP) adopted the concept of CI [circa 1989] and did advocate integrating more than once per day – perhaps as many as tens of times per day.” // 35+ years later, here we are at 71%. WTF? Something is weird here, or just 🤦.

Do software companies actually have good margins? - ’In other words, software development costs are COGS. Not literally; not according to the accountants. But in practice, if you can only sell SaaS software—and retain customers—by promising a steady stream of new releases, how are the expenses associated with developing those releases functionally any different than the money you spend on servers and support agents?’

Notes on how to use LLMs in your product. - “Even the most expensive LLMs are not that expensive for B2B usage. Even the cheapest LLM is not that cheap for Consumer usage – because pricing is driven by usage volume, this is a technology that’s very easy to justify for B2B businesses with smaller, paying usage. Conversely, it’s very challenging to figure out how you’re going to pay for significant LLM usage in a Consumer business without the risk of significantly shrinking your margin”

‘This shit’s so expensive’: a note on generative models and software margins - “The fundamental problem with generative models is that they are 10x too expensive to work with the industry’s default business models and structure. Either these companies who are going all-in on ‘AI”‘need to fundamentally change everything about how they work – laying off a bunch of people won’t make ML compute 10x cheaper so they’d need to change the org to survive on razor-thin margins – or they need to discover some undefined magical way of lowering compute costs 10x. So far they’re opting for magic."

Forrester: IT departments are blowing their cloud budgets | Computer Weekly - “Nearly three in four (72%) of the IT decision-makers polled reported that their company exceeded its set cloud budget in the most recent fiscal year. Among the areas experiencing an acceleration of cloud deployments are: applications/workloads in IT operations (54%); hybrid work (50%); software development platforms and tools (45%); and digital experiences (44%).” // vendor-sponsored // has ranking of causes.