AI is here. It’s hungry. It’s expensive. And Kubernetes is the only thing big enough to feed it. … Kubernetes is no longer the platform for apps. It’s becoming the substrate for AI-driven systems.
And then you add platform engineering to build a platform around it for self-service access to AI, so long as you satisfy: “Security wants policy and audit trails. Leadership wants predictable costs and explainability.”
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There’s probably around 50 million developers world-wide, and 20.5m professional developers. That’s what I’d start saying after seeing a chart from IDC’s September 2025 developer study update. They forecast it to be ~59 million in 2029. If you want to be very precise, a breakdown of the survey puts “professional developers” at around 20.8m in 2025. But even that includes “DevOps professionals” and “platform engineers.” So, to me, that’s something more like 20.5m or even 20m developers.
Compare that to GitHub’s claim that there are at least 180 million developers, just GitHub account holders.
Also, see more numbers in previous round up, from July, 2023
AI uses in finance, survey
Three use cases stood out as they have been adopted by more than a third of respondents that had implemented AI in their function. Knowledge management - helping organizations organize, retrieve, and leverage information for better decision-making – is the most common AI use case (49%) in finance organizations, followed by accounts payable process automation (37%), and error and anomaly detection (34%)
🔗 Gartner Survey Shows Finance AI Adoption Remains Steady in 2025
How to think about infrastructure software as strategic instead of just tools. Plus, evaluating if your should migrate from massive stack to another.
🔗 Why Migrating from VMware Isn’t as Simple as Changing Hypervisors
The Europeans are not digging the American public cloud of late.
“Europe is facing regulatory pressure, competition between countries, geopolitical tensions, and national security concerns-all focused on making sure Europe can develop and manage AI systems on its own, without depending on foreign platforms or providers,” said Lovelock.
Leading to:
IT spending in Europe is projected to total $1.4 trillion in 2026, an increase of 11.1% from 2025, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc, a business and technology insights company. IT spending in Europe is on pace to reach $1.3 trillion by the end of 2025.
To use some framing from VC land, America broke the deal with cloud jurisdiction.
I’d wager that there’s still and will be a lot of European workloads running in American controlled clouds, but the idea that it can be long-term trusted is cracked. Not great.
🔗 Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in Europe to Grow 11% in 2026
And, related: regardless of where your data is geographically, if your cloud is owned by an American company, there’s a good chsbce it will operate under American laws and norms:
Data residency is a necessary but insufficient step. Hyperscalers can offer residency, but they cannot offer true sovereignty to their European customers because they cannot exempt themselves from extra-territorial application of certain laws. Unless the claims are substantiated by underlying evidence, they should be treated with a healthy level of doubt, more likely as marketing, than a genuine guarantee.
Real digital sovereignty is not a feature you can buy from a hyperscaler; it is a state that can only be achieved by partnering with an entity that is unambiguously and exclusively subject to your own jurisdiction and one that is offering the customer true capabilities of control and autonomous decision making for its data and data flows.
We conflate the quality of our decisions with the quality of their outcomes so automatically that we rarely notice we’re doing it. A good decision that leads to a bad outcome gets reclassified in our memory as a bad decision. A terrible decision that happens to work out becomes evidence of our brilliant judgment. We are constantly running our own internal kangaroo court, retroactively convicting or acquitting our past selves based solely on how things turned out.
Reducing the 7 R's of modernization down to 3 - new take on tech debt, from Charles Betz
Where once there were 7, now there are three:
Forrester data provides clear guidance on where organizations should focus. Knowledge and process debt, selected by 37% of respondents, demands immediate attention through process improvement, reengineering, and organizational change management. Unsupported vendor software and redundant IT systems, each selected by 30–32% of respondents, require proactive migration planning before crisis points emerge. System inflexibility, identified by 35%, calls for architectural investments that preserve future options.
Only three kinds of AI products actually work - “For my money, the current multi-billion-dollar question is can AI agents be useful for tasks other than coding?” // Good thinking about productizing AI: what seems to work and not work.
I’m no epidemiologist, but all of this seems like the biggest positive health impact since vaccines. In the America, all my life The System and The Culture have been telling us we’re overweight and that is causes problems. No doubt, a lot of healthcare spend is in response to that.
Well. This seems like a legit “quick fix.”
If generic semaglutide were made available to everyone with obesity and diabetes globally, it could save 2.1m-3.1m lives a year, according to one model. Moreover, glp-1 medications are known to reduce cardiovascular events, improve sleep apnoea, protect the kidneys and liver, and even show promise for reducing addictive behaviours. Early data have even hinted at reduced risks of cancer and Alzheimer’s. More results on these unexpected side-benefits of GLP-1 use will be published in the coming months. However you slice it, 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for these remarkable drugs.
It feels like these drugs, popular as they are, are likely “under-rated” in that they would address huge, systemic problems in US health. Hopefully it will and they’ll become “boring” like vaccines and high blood pressure medicine.
He goes hard and detailed in the Masto recco.