There’s a new study out that means it’s time to update all those slides that say AI projects are failing: [A] new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School complicates the narrative. The study found that 74% of businesses that measure the ROI from their generative AI efforts are already seeing a positive return, and more expect to see a positive ROI within the next two or three years.

180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub. Their definition is “[a]nyone with a GitHub account.” Let’s not overthink it, just yet, and instead go with what they’re saying. If 2025 had a theme, it would be growth. Every second, more than one new developer on average joined GitHub–over 36 million in the past year. It’s our fastest absolute growth rate yet and 180 million-plus developers now work and build on GitHub.

Claude Code is being utilized beyond coding, particularly for analyzing and reformatting plain text notes, suggesting that AI may emerge as standalone applications rather than being integrated into existing software.

The new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, I like to summarize a lot of pages. Sometimes, ChatGPT can’t get the text for those pages, or I don’t trust the text it retrieves. There’s a shortcut that will retrieve the cleaned up text of a page (as markdown). So, you can get that markdown, and with the new Use Model shortcut, you can summarize it and then send the markdown summary to Drafts.

There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1: Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long it takes to get the good stuff/the point. I know the context, I want the fix.

The text contrasts short-term publishing with long-term orchestrating in work environments, highlighting the different roles of individual contributors and managers.

The people in my tech community who talk about community find Twitter so vile that there’s little discussion of the good parts. It was a great place for discovering, building, and “doing” community. And it still is, though mixed in with all the other stuff1. This history of DevOps, cloud stuff, and everything that followed - open source, even! - would be different if Twitter weren’t around. We’d be in…listservs? Blogs?

Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the early adopters, you have to show how you make it better and are evolving the project without hiding it.

Some commentary on a recent survey commissioned from my work, VMware. Unsurprisingly, open source is used by almost everyone. When it comes to what I care about software development, open source is indispensable. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a developer who only uses closed source software, if not whole systems like kubernetes or Cloud Foundry for running their applications. It’d almost be impossible. And, indeed, in our State of the Software Supply Chain survey this year, 2022, 90% of respondents said they were using open source in production.

Here’s what I’ve learned in doing 30 (maybe more like 40?) executive events in person and online over the past four or so years. Over my career, I’ve done these on and off, but it’s become a core part of my job since moving to EMEA to support Pivotal and now VMware Tanzu with executives. At these events, I learn a lot about “digital transformation,” you know, how people at large organizations are changing how they build software.