Three good videos

Platform Engineering 2025: What “great”’ looks like now.

Most platform engineering talks are very frustrating for me. The same stuff over and over since about 2015. The platform engineering space is rife with people who’ve made the monumental mistake of thinking Kubernetes is a platform and then finding out they have so much more to build on-top of that thin layer. Meanwhile, based on that false assumption, the industry just jettisoned all the PaaS technology we had. It’s a “journey” of self-harm and rebuilding. But, uh…I’m not bitter! Anyhow, this is a great panel going over mostly how to put platform engineering in place. We sometimes call this “culture,” but here it’s much more practical than that. I’d call it “stuff management should do and how they can think differently to succeed.” Skip the first question, and the rest is good stuff.

Phil and Dan talk about how AI is disrupting the IT industry analyst business.

The industry analyst business is always dying. There were boutique firms using blogs, then social media. Independent people like Horace and Ben Thompson. Video, podcasts, and more. I imagine that before all that people were freaking out about FAX machines. Nonetheless, the industry analyst business has all the trappings of big D Disruption: a business that is so locked into its current business model and revenue that it can’t hope to change. Here’s a good discussion of the current industry analyst killer: Artificial Intelligence.

Realistic Utopias by Bruce Sterling with slides.

There’s never a good way to describe a Bruce Sterling talk. I’d say it’s something like: what is a personal utopia? It goes a bit off the rails at the end, as usual, but then you get an odd moment of Sterling being a Hallmark-level romantic. It’s good stuff, as always.

Bonus: what’s the difference between US and UK work culture? This is a question I ask UK tech people a lot, and one of my (new) favorite shows did a whole episode on it. (Yes, I emailed the question to Russell).

Wastebook

• “Trump, like a perverted Santa Claus, keeps only two lists: naughty and nice.” ★

• “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” Bezos.

Relevant to your interests

• From Knowledge to Action - For AI, now, the app is what matters most.

• GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it. - “We have been fed a steady diet of bullshit for the last several years.” // He’s not a fan.

• Google is a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant for SCPS

• 2022: Why we’ve decided to decommission GOV.UK PaaS (Platform as a Service) - “It has enjoyed uptime of 99.95%, and suffered only one major incident in its 7 years. All this while tenants deployed services more than 122 times a day, made up of 3,200 applications.” // It worked well, but people didn’t want to use it. Instead: Kubernetes. It’d be cool to hear how the next three years went.

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.

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I've been surprised at the degree of GPT5 hate. It is underwhelming to be sure. It's just a typical "better performance" release. I didn't realize so many people thought it'd be the second coming of Christ. We talk about this all the time on the podcast, but clearly people are way too exuberant. Well, the chattering class who publish stuff. I've long discounted and ignored all the "hype" and, I guess, forgotten about all the big claims, hopes, and dreams.

There’s a funny moment in the industry analyst discussion above. After talking about how a well stocked AI could replace an analyst, Phil says he hates reading content written by AI. Indeed! Dan rightly says that you have to tune it, add in the data, get some custom weights… That is, you have to put in a lot of effort to make AI good.

I know I’m sounding snide and patting my own back.

Since about a year ago, paying attention to the industry/business stuff of generative AI has been a distraction. It’s better to pay attention to what people are learning about using AI, the use cases they come up with. That’s what needs to be proven out in the next few years. I think it’ll be fine. I suspect there’s so little structured, purposeful use of AI in businesses that we have no idea what it’s good for, how to use to make the business better, and how to balance cost and profit.

In contrast, it seems like programming is well figured out. We sort of know what works and what doesn’t work: we know the value in programming. We don’t know the long-term consequences because it hasn’t been long enough. The consequence is probably that we’ll build up tech debt faster than ever and be crushed under it in two the three years. Try to avoid that, as always.

I don’t have enough first hand experience with it, but I’m guessing we’ve figured out how to use AI for better education productivity. The teachers are freaking the fuck out, of course.

There's a kind of "bad press is good press" angle, too. Each time there's a doom-piece on AI replacing millions of human workers (or rotting kid’s brains), that piece is reinforcing the notion that AI is super-fantastic and powerful. Even though those stories are negative, they have a positive uplift on the story of AI.

Also, it's been less than a week. Something as difficult to evaluate as generative AI probably needs a month or more to really build up enough of a frond to get a stew going.

Making AI Reviews More Useful

Reading all the ChatGPT 5 coverage confirms my feeling that no one knows how to review these models yet. It’s either those incomprehensible charts (and also, who cares how good they are at math? More: who understand what those tests even mean?) or people just saying “I really like it.”

It’s a classic IT/business alignment problem. Until you define the “business outcome” you want and how you can improve it, you’re vibe-ROI’ing.

Maybe some tests:

• Have it give you sartorial advice. Dress like it tells you to and see if you get treated better.

• Can it (tell you how to) fix your plumbing problems cheaper than hiring a plumber?

• Ask it what art you would like and see if you do like it. Will it help you discover new art?

• Have it give you a walking tour in your own city. Does it match what you would show people?

• Ask it to critique your work’s strategy and suggest small and large changes to make to improve profits, share price, etc. Do they make sense?

• What is the best episode/season of a TV show to start with to see if you like it?

• What’s a recipe for a Greek-inspired cucumber salad? Given the following ingredients, what should I make?

• Look at my email and my calendar and give me a list of valuable things I can do in five minutes each. What are things I’m missing, what are things I can complexly ignore. Make me GMail (etc.) filters accordingly.

• Explain to me when I should spend Euros, pounds, or dollars. Make me a spreadsheet to tell me when.

• Based on recent earnings calls, what is Apple’s strategy and when is an ideal time to buy and sell their stock?

• What is the ideal garbage and recycling plan/strategy for New York vs. Amsterdam vs. Waco? How does it compare to what they currently do?

• Write me an 800 word short story that I’d like.

• What are some astounding things I could ask you to do?

And so forth.

Maybe we could get inspiration from car reviews. I think those are based on aesthetics, performance (I’m guessing speed and things like ability to turn), smooth ride, (I’d hope!) durability and cost of maintenance over time, all compared to price. How do you evaluate kitchen gadgets or the price/performance of Velux windows?

The other part of the evaluation needs to consider the app’s capabilities. The model is just part of the overall experience. The actual app and integrations/tools in ChatGPT and Claude make a huge difference in the quality of the experience. For example, ChatGPT’s long term memory features are incredibly important. How good is it at using your Google Drive, etc.

A simple one that most fail utterly at is something like “tell me who I emailed with the most in 2003 and what we talked about.” I just added my GMail to ChatGPT today and asked that and it said, “I don’t have access to your GMail” even though I’d just added the integration.1 Last I did this with with Gemini, while in Gmail, was sad.

You could probably also re-use whatever test cases we had for Alexa and Siri before we all realized they were just good for turning on music and telling the time.

You can of course have it write things for you. I feel like programming is mostly a finished task. We sort of know that it can write the first few passes of code. We can intuit that the limitations of AI programming are: (1) long term maintenance will be a nightmare, probably no better than it currently is, (2) a lot of programming is not actually writing code, but product management, design, etc. The AI is fine at programming, but all the other stuff is equally important.

For writing, maybe give it the daily White House press releases and videos, along with other agencies. Have it write a daily briefing and compare it to what the NYT writes about that day. Then compare it to what The Economist publishes that week. You could do it for tech news.

Upload all of your journal entries for 10+ years and say “what is wrong with me, and what should I do to improve?” After a week, are you better, happier, did you change anything?

A lot of these tasks have to with data and content: getting access to a lot of it and having the AI work with it. Again, something that has little to do with the model itself, and more to do with the app.

You could also take this text and have the AI write a better version incorporating other content and coming up with some original thoughts.

Less Goofy. More Enterprise.

I give my take on Google Cloud’s progress and prospects in this week’s Software Defined Talk: “This week, we discuss cloud earnings, what’s driving valuations, and why AWS says it’s still early innings for cloud. Plus, Coté does a deep dive on Shipley Donuts.” Listen to the audio, or check out the un-edited video.

Also, in my self-proclaimed role as Apple’s (fractional) VP of Cables, I suggest a complimentary product:

The more ports, the more cables they’ll sell, right?

Wastebook

• “We all used to meet at weekends and draw each other. We went to the cinema and discovered the films of Jean Renoir, Rene Clair and Marcel Carne. We jived and jitterbugged to Humphrey Lyttleton’s jazz band every Monday evening. We also got sucked into the drinking scene in Soho. It was all over in 2 or 3 years, but in my memory it seems to have been longer.” Some UK weirdos, long ago.

• “Slopject.” From bruces.

• They say developers don't like being marketed to. Yes, and, no one likes being marketed too, right? Successful marketing is rarely thought of as “marketing.” As with any marketing, from tooth-paste to piping valves, in developer marketing, if a developer doesn’t like your marketing, it just means you need to come up with different marketing.

• This is a good meta episode because the guest is so slippery at answering questions and does not “play in the space.” She refuses to follow the norms of questions, which, in this podcast is largely about coming up with new thoughts based on what you know, not just talking about what you already know and have proven. In doing so, Tyler has to coax her and explain how to play in the space, revealing the mechanics of the format and tactics getting people to have interesting conversations. The actual topic is interesting too. And, to be clear, I don’t think the guest is being “bad,” I like her style and responses as well.

Relative to your interests

• At-Scale Management and Multi-Foundation Views with Tanzu Hub - If you’re running a platform - or platforms - inside a large organization, Tanzu’s got something for you.

• Your AI workloads still need a service mesh - You always need a load-balancer/proxy/gateway, more generally, “middleware.”

• Why AI Isn’t The Silver Bullet For Customer Service — Yet - A typical digital transformation problem: you change just one tool, but not everything else, especially how people work and the (now) old systems you integrate with.

• Columbus, Ohio’s Revival: a Model for the Rust Belt - Update from IRL. Now, back to cyberspace.

• Gartner Says Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 22.5% in 2024

• Remembering Dominic Pannell: Dom’s Framework for Influencer Ecosystem Mapping - Managing the people who influence enterprise It buying.

• Heroku brings app development to the AI era - One day I hope people stop focusing on build containers, and start focusing on to build apps.

• In the world of podcasts, YouTube is now the elephant in the room — just like in TV - This is obviously a category error: if I can’t add it to Overcast with an RSS feed, it’s not a podcast. But, (1) old man yelling at clouds, it me! and, (2) aside from using the word “podcast,” good info. // “The elephant in the room of all of this upheaval is YouTube – the silly viral internet video giant that became a TV, music, advertising, and now podcast giant. Per an April survey by Cumulus Media and media research firm Signal Hill Insights, 39% of all weekly podcast consumers use YouTube as their primary platform, more than double the share from late 2019. The video platform estimated that more than a billion people a month are watching podcasts as of February.”

• The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence - A good take on metrics and frameworks to show the “business value” or tech projects.

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.

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In this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney, James Eastham, and I talk a lot about learning how to be “social.” This is not only being a good “communicator,” but being good in a group of people. For the three of us, this is part of our job, our professional life. And you can see how, like any other nerd, we studied how to do it. But, look at us nerds now! Also, we cover the tyranny of those stupid, childish YouTube thumbnails we all have to use.

I like how the Interviews show has turned out - it’s difficult to find a good co-host. You need someone who will put their energy and time into it, maintain the “lively” feeling, and develop both a podcast persona for themselves, as well as co-create the overall persona (“vibe”?) for the show. Also, they have to be maniacal about scheduling and showing up on time.2 I think we’ve got it worked.

Make sure you subscribe to it! And, yes, it’s in YouTube if you consider that a “podcast.” People from all channels are welcome and appreciated.

Relative to your interests

• How to Secure MCP Servers

• Modern Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 - When you want to build your own platform with Kubernetes.

• Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job - I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them. Therefore you need more managers to oversee them. The workers then stop caring about doing “good work,” because it is l, by design, no longer their responsibility. Also, it adds a lot of extra paperwork to audit them:

• How to increase your surface area for luck - “One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff – socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.”

• The case for memes as a new form of comics

• Why is Rear Window so tense? - “The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing happens.”

• Don’t hide behind AI to trim your belly fat. Start redesigning your workforce - “What we are seeing is not just automation-led efficiency, it is a structural shakeout triggered by board pressures to cut costs, eliminate underperforming middle layers, and move away from legacy talent strategies. The corporate world has also experienced high-wage fatigue, where many staff have had significant wage growth, especially since the inflationary pandemic years, and it’s simply very expensive to maintain staff on these high salaries and other benefits.” Meanwhile:

• C-suite leaders attribute revenue, software development boosts to AI - “Executives credit increased AI use over the past year for bringing an estimated 44% bump in revenue, according to the report. Nearly 3 in 5 respondents said their organization experienced business growth thanks to software innovation over the last year.”

Wastebook

• How 'bout that 0.75% tip option on the payment terminal?

• It’s not that I forget that September exists, it’s that I forget where it is in the calendar. I always think October is the month after August. Imagine my delight when I discover - multiple times a week, often - that there’s a whole extra month before I need to start working on those slides.

• “My mind now is only retaining information that is directly applicable.” RotL, #589.

• “I discovered your typical existentialist: long, straight black hair, turtle neck jumper, black trousers, black coat, cigarette, pale face with a gentle smile”

• “Break a few eggs, cook an omelette…eventually.” Elon runs Intel. Sharp Tech, July 30th, 2025.

• "I know what Bo don’t know.' Hotstepper.

• One of the first authors to really take social media seriously: “His life had a legendary arc: married four times; drank hard; feuded with rivals; was wounded in the first world war; reported on the Omaha Beach landings in the second; ran with the bulls in Spain; and survived a plane crash in Africa.” Hemingway.

• “I did the whole trip with a single backpack, which I now find unimaginable. That perhaps reflects some deterioration of my capabilities. Most of all, I need to carry around more books these days, plus a laptop and iPad and various chargers.” 1988.

• “In-Car Productivity.” Hopefully not.

• “In Anchorage it was a city of one-way streets because it was part of the American experiments.” RotL #588.

• Also: “this is what you get for having stop lights that work.”

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Nothing to report this episode.

Original Content

• Internal developer platform marketing series - just as a round-up, here’s my series on internal developer platform marketing: part one, part two, and part three. // I talk with people setting up and running platforms in large organization frequently, and this topic is the number one thing they respond to with “oh, we need to do that.” The second is product management, but that is well known at this point.

• Recent here’s what Coté’s thinking videos: private cloud is a big deal, here’s the proof; stability is a competitive advantage for your enterprise apps.

• His proper name is Sasquatch, Software Defined Talk - This week, we cover AI going rogue, Cloudflare declaring independence, and the secure container craze. Plus, Matt bravely judges 9 new emoji. // I wish I’d been there of the emoji ranking. I had to miss it, lots of travel at the moment. // Also available in video format, the unedited original recording.

• “This episode is intense and funny and honest. We talk about tech, recovery, discipline, homescreen palm reading, Goodhart’s Law, and how to use data to become more human.” Whitney recaps our episode with Chris Dancy. It’s one of the funnest Software Defined Interview episodes we’ve done yet. Listen to it, or watch it.

Relative to your interests

• AI with Spring and Cloud Foundry, end-to-end - Josh does a version of his neurotic pet demo, deploying to Cloud Foundry at the end.

• The AI Replaces Services Myth - If your software saves your customers money, then you’re not getting all of the former TAM, you’re often getting much less. // Also, people want simple pricing that matches how the software helps them, or at least as simple to understand as pizza pricing.

• 2025 Sees Inflection Point for Government: A Shift to Private Cloud - “more than 70 percent of government IT leaders are considering repatriating workloads from public cloud to private cloud and nearly 50 percent say they have already begun that repatriation process.”

• Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities - wonderful interview, here. Tyler is building up a long list of medieval UK knowledge. He should do one of his blogs-to-books on that topic.

• How Elicitation in MCP Brings Human-in-the-Loop to AI Tools

• The Satya of Satya’s Layoff Memo - Reading between the lines/translating corporate-speak.

• neiltron/apple-health-mcp - Export Apple Health data to a CSV. Good for handing over to the robots.

• What LLMs Know About Their Users - “please put all text under the following headings into a code block in raw JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim.” // This type of stuff is great fun, though, probably scary to many people. // If you don’t want to handle JSON, use this instead: “please put all text under the following headings with bulleted lists: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim.” // Now, if you’re AI positive, you might review what it knows and both correct it and add to it.

• Looks like good eatin’.

• ‘Impossible hill to climb’: US clouds crush European competition on their home turf - “Details shared by Synergy Research on regional markets show that Euro cloud operators continue to grow, but none comes remotely close to competing with the big American rivals for leadership of European markets…. According to Synergy, local companies accounted for nearly a third (29 percent) of cloud infrastructure revenues in 2017, but by 2022 their share had dropped to just 15 percent and has held fairly steady ever since.”

• Inter font family - Crisp and clean.

• GoogleCloudPlatform/apigee-samples - Use Apigee as MCP middleware.

• The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care - “Another way to put this is that to retain workers, wages in stagnant-productivity sectors must rise to match those in (equally labor-skilled) high-productivity sectors. That means paying more for the same level of care, simply to keep the labor force from leaving”

Wastebook

• “From what I could tell, Australia was Canada with deserts, beaches, and idiosyncratic animals.” If he walked all the way, he’d die.

• LOGGING_LEVEL_IO_COTE_MCP_THINKTOOL. Recent work.

• “Mini golf and such were on the agenda today.” Seroter.

• Thoughts on elf sex.

• “You can’t get a whole baloney.” David, Political Gabfest, July 24th, 2025.

• “I have largely de-teched myself until September 1. On September 1, all the things get re-attached and turned on.” W.E.

• And, a go at describing learning by productive procrastination: “It’s not, as someone wrote in to comment, learning things for me. It’s finding things for me to learn later while I’m busy doing something else, complete with sources I can follow up on and suggested further reading.”

• “off-screen dramedy.” Jenn.

• “It will probably be bad. But in the end it doesn’t matter.” Noah, The Hotline Show #70.

• The taxes are high, but the livin' is good.

• “He was, as the eulogy recounted, someone who couldn’t tell an anecdote in a couple of minutes when 20 would do…. I did start thinking about my own eulogy in contrast.” Phil.

• “signs of idiosyncratic deterioration, and the resulting glitch of mechanical shortcomings” Here.

Conferences

It's about 30 days until SpringOne. If you work on enterprises apps, there's a good chance you work with Spring. At SpringOne, you can learn and catch-up on the latest in Spring, including Spring AI. Register for it and come get your brain filled up with good stuff.

And, also:

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th.

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I don’t really like using Instagram anymore. Just too crowded with stuff I don’t care about. Sadly, this means I don’t post Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam much anymore. I was thinking I should start an Instagram just for that. Good idea?

Anyhow, here’s a recent one:

This spot is particularly good for finding chairs. It has some low-price (I assume!) office space, so you get a lot of churn and chairs. Sometimes you find burned chairs, and this is one of them. Here’s a detail:

As you can see, these were not burned in place - otherwise that paper under the chairs would be toast. You come across burned things in the outer parts of Amsterdam a lot. I usually imagine it’s the usual teenage boys up to bullshit. As I recall having been lucky enough to be a teenage boy once, at that age, fire is a magical treat to be treasured, especially if you start and control it on your own. In this case, what happened?

Here’s a recording of my latest “how to do platform engineering in large organizations” talk. In this version of it, I go over what matters most for private cloud platforms.

Here’s the slides for the talk if you’re into that kind of thing.

This talk is based on many years of observing people run platforms, primarily Cloud Foundry based one. I don’t know if it’s the oldest, but it’s one of the longest running and used private PaaS’es (“platform”) out there. That is, it works and, if you talk with the developers and platform engineers who run, it’s well loved.

Conferences

It's about 30 days until SpringOne. If you work on enterprises apps, there's a good chance you work with Spring. At SpringOne, you can learn and catch-up on the latest in Spring, including Spring AI. Register for it and come get your brain filled up with good stuff.

And, also:

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th.

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Good times, great hair:

Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value

If you want developers to actually use your platform, you’ve got to give them more than APIs and automation. You need a community. In the third piece in our platform marketing series, Rita and I look at how the most successful platform teams invest in support forums, internal events, and actual human beings whose job is to make developers feel connected, heard, and empowered.

Support channels should be more than a ticketing system - they should feel like a Slack room full of friendly coworkers. Regular speaker series and internal conferences help developers see what’s possible, swap war stories, and stay excited about using the platform. Mercedes-Benz and others have found that when you treat community management like a core feature, it pays off in adoption and trust.

We also talk about platform advocates - full-time people who listen to developers, answer questions, and carry feedback upstream. These folks are your field reps, therapists, and salespeople rolled into one. Bottom line: community isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s part of the product. Treat it like infrastructure, and it’ll return the favor.

Check the full article for more.

Wastebook

• Diegesis.

• The levels of confidence in having figured out the mysteries of life that the 20 something males in first class have is amazing.

• “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Dorothy Parker.

• “Happens to be dead.” @bruces caption.

• “Now, thanks to the internet, you can become a psychologist without even taking the train!” Here.

• “This is a useful way to think: everything is already in motion, we just need to try to steer.” // I suspect you have to couple this with: you actually need to do less than you think to matter. On Ease.

• Dateline: Glasgow - black pudding breakfast roll.

• As a whole, the Manchester airport is buck-wild. Like if you threw DFW into the sky, and used duct-tape and zip-ties to connected where everything feel to earth. But Terminal 2, recently freshened up, is real nice-like.

• You’ve achieved Delta 369 status; divorce fees not included.

• “Were you short on deodorant this morning?” “DAAAD, stop it!” // A minor moment in the confederacy of parents.

Conferences

It's about 30 days until SpringOne. If you work on enterprises apps, there's a good chance you work with Spring. At SpringOne, you can learn and catch-up on the latest in Spring, including Spring AI. Register for it and come get your brain filled up with good stuff.

And, also:

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th.

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Suggested outro for the weekend. As one commenter said, “For those about to chill, we salute you.”

Is Swag the Secret to Platform Adoption?

Turns out, T-shirts might matter more than YAML. In this post, I dig into how internal platforms benefit from strong branding - not just logos and names, but a clear identity and ethos that developers can rally behind. When your platform has a name people actually want to say out loud, and maybe a sticker they slap on their laptop, adoption gets a little easier.

In part two of our platform marketing series, Rit and I look at how teams like JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. Air Force use branding - complete with slogans, mascots, and yes, swag - to build loyalty and turn internal platforms into movements. A good brand makes your platform memorable; an ethos makes it meaningful. Together, they give developers a reason to care - and a way to explain why they care to others.

So before you obsess over provisioning pipelines, consider whether your platform has a vibe. Is it something people identify with? Would they wear the shirt? If not, it might be time to revisit the brand.

Check out more in the article. Eventually, we’ll get a white paper (PDF) out on this that’ll have a few more tactics, tips, and mini-case studies that are not in the articles.

Cords, Cyborgs & Cold Cases: Grandpa Dancy’s Operating System for Life

In this week’s Software Defined Interviews, we talk with Chris Dancy, a friend of mine from long ago. He let me wear his Google Glass. It was amazing:

He is always interesting and recently has been applying tech to solve simple problems at the city level. There’s also a lot of “most connected man in the world” talk.

Give it a listen, or watch the video if you’re into that kind of thing.

Relative to your interests

• I love this, uh, vibe for an app release video.

• The more senior engineers get, the more results matter - “as you become more senior, you’re increasingly graded on results. Interns are graded on effort.”

• How to Measure the ROI of AI Coding Assistants - Actual suggestions for doing it, not just pondering. // Also, good follow-up to the link last episode saying that asking for metrics is good way to pop the AI bubble.

• Kubernetes Complexity Realigns Platform Engineering Strategy - Turns out computer are always difficult.

• French Data Under U.S. Firms Is Not Protected From U.S. Government Access -

• Where Technology Executives Will Be Investing In 2026 - Looks like lots of datacenter buildout.

• Code was the least interesting part of my multi-agent app, and here’s what that means to me - Less time coding means more time designing and product managing.

• Architecting the MVP in the Age of AI

• How Pair Programming Enhanced Development Speed, Focus, and Flow

• Java licensing snafus cost millions, drive developers to open source - ”One-quarter of respondents said their organization spent between $50,000 and $100,000 resolving software non-compliance issues, while licensing issues cost 17% of surveyed organizations up to $1 million.”

• Beyond London Summit 2025: Decoding Google Cloud’s Scale Narrative - Summary of stated Google cloud strategy, from Bola.

• AI industry’s size obsession is killing ROI, engineer argues - Doing enterprises AI isn’t free in terms of time, money, opportunity cost, and risk. You need target things that have a pay off, an ROI. I hope that this will mean doing more, not cutting costs. That is growth, not firing people. Based on:

• Why I’m Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them) - ‘Meanwhile, the winners will be teams building constrained, domain-specific tools that use AI for the hard parts while maintaining human control or strict boundaries over critical decisions. Think less “autonomous everything” and more “extremely capable assistants with clear boundaries.”’

• How I use LLMs to learn new subjects - It’s good at well know facts, things that are mainstream or so niche that there is only one answer: “you should avoid asking the model for concrete details that don’t really matter, and if the model gives you details like that you shouldn’t trust them. But when the model is speaking about facts that do matter - facts that are load-bearing for many other things the model knows about - you can be relatively confident that you’re getting correct information.” // Also, nicely put: “models are not minds; instead they are role-playing a particular kind of helpful character. They prioritize consistent role-play above almost all other concerns.”

• Do conversations end when people want them to?

Get yourself an absurd milkshake.

Wastebook

• Don’t ask things in Reddit. That’s like a kindergartener asking a second grader where babies come from.

• I don’t think I have the right kind of drugs to appreciate this music.

• “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” Interior design criticism.

• And: “if your tastes tend more toward a black polo neck or an unadorned steak (both fine things in themselves), you’ll never enjoy the Rococo.”

• “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” 1,000 fans.

• The conversation about AI slop is a lot about the content other people put in your face, not about one’s own AI use.

• “Made 58 waffles!” Here.

Logoff

I was in Manchester for the first time this week. Seems like a nice place. This signage at the airport is very big and very clear. I can’t find any references quickly enough, but I feel like sometime in the last 10 to 15 years, the UK got really into typefaces and making things clear, and, thus, usable. It’s worked!

I’m not in the market for a pipe, nor did I verify this, but according to this sign, could be that you can purchase smoking pipes in the Manchester Airport.

Also, downtown Manchester is full of kids. Well, college students. Just walking around, doing stuff. So much youth!

Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stack lays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning:

Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For?

Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?”

Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications. This might be technically right, but narrowing down to a set of smaller, specific positions is helpful at first.

Here are some examples of how to position your platform:

• Your platform is good for cloud native applications, not just any type of application.

• Your platform is a good destination for modernized applications. Many modernized applications target cloud native architectures, moving apps to containers and microservices architectures.

• Your platform is the best place to run Java applications, especially ones that use the Spring Framework.

• Your platform is a great place to develop and run AI-enabled applications.

• You could say that your platform is good for classic three-tiered web applications: something with a UI, a middleware and business logic layer, and then a database.

Another position could be that your platform is good for highly regulated apps that need to run in air-gapped environments.

You don’t need to pick just one positioning for your platform. After all, platforms are usually general and intended to be used for many different types of applications. However, coming up with multiple positions like the above allows you to speak to specific teams, making it easier for them to sort through all the options and figure out whether your platform is the right fit for them.

Do read the whole thing, and keep your eyes open for the next two (or three?) parts published sometime soon (maybe this week?).

Relative to your interests

• VMware Tanzu enhances support for generative AI and agents with Tanzu AI Solutions - “As customers move from AI experimentation to implementation, they stand to benefit from closer integrations between technology components as they redefine “Ops” frameworks within their businesses. VMware Tanzu AI Solutions are designed to do just that, with specific enhancements like AI middleware that boosts performance, fosters security and reduces time to value when it comes to operationalizing AI models and applications. Tanzu AI Solutions are polyglot for those who are unfamiliar with preferred data science languages or use other languages, and should appeal to Java developers with the launch of Spring AI. Spring AI also includes dedicated feature sets to control, observe, and evaluate models and, ultimately, agents, as organizations' AI capabilities progress. Model context protocol (MCP) is also supported in Tanzu Platform.”

• Identify, solve, verify - “My job is to identify problems that can be solved with code, then solve them, then verify that the solution works and has actually addressed the problem.”

• Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027

• On the other hand: Gartner Survey Finds 45% of Organizations With High AI Maturity Keep AI Projects Operational for at Least Three Years // Lately, analysts have been coming out with an AI survey that says things are great, and then pairing it up with another that says they are not. Which way is it? Who knows - does it matter?

• Agentic Design Patterns, book draft

• Arriving at ‘Hello World’ in enterprise AI - The (slow) nature of digital transformation hits AI like a sack of bricks in the face. The brick avoidance techniques are the same as always, a duel approach: (1) sell a “business outcome” to execs, a measurable improvement to either making money or cutting costs (2) enable developers to smuggle in AI that is then more costly to get rid of than to accept. Each takes years to build up to big revenue. For the enterprise natives, well, it’s almost comforting.

• Highly related: doing anything new in enterprise IT is difficult, especially if things are basically working fine.

• Musings on The AI Con - Latest from the AI-skeptics: “ask more questions of those pushing AI into everything. What, specifically, is the goal? What is supposed to be automated by the new tool? What are its inputs and outputs supposed to be? What does success look like, exactly? What would count as failure to achieve the goal?”

• Trump’s pressure on Apple to make All-American phones ignores the last tech giant that tried and failed - If no one wants the product, it doesn’t matter where it’s made. // “In the end, Motorola’s failed U.S. adventure had little to do with where the Moto X was assembled, by all accounts. The phone simply didn’t sell well enough to justify a U.S. assembly line.”

• After 8 years of playing D&D nonstop, I’ve finally tried its biggest alternative - someone bought the recent Bundle of Holding, it seems.

Wastebook

• “‘Memes' are low impact / high transmissibility. Think cat videos or brief flash-in-the-pan cultural moments that get forgotten quickly. ” Hi-memes, low-memes.

• “Self-help-y semoitics.” Another good one.

• “University lore claims the Geneva Bonnet was made from a pair of 16th-century trousers that belonged to Protestant Reformation leader John Knox.” Sure, why not?

• “people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?” Productivity for the rest of us.

• Related: “you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London.

I was accepted to speak at AI for the Rest of Us. I missed the first one, so I’m excited to get the chance to not only attend, but speak at this one. The English put on interesting, quirky conferences like this from time to time - it feels unique to them, but I’ve never spent the time to back that notion up. Anyhow, check out the talks, and you should come to it.

Also:

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

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My son does not like watching his videos around me. If we walk in the room, he’ll pause them, look-up, and smile at us. That’s a smile that say, “please, oh please, leave me alone so I can watch my YouTube.” This is a good moment to be a dad and say, “oh, it must be really good if you don’t want me to watch it! What is it!” and then sit down with him.

I soon leave. I’m not that dad-terrible.

Still, I walked in on this guy the other day. It was refreshing - not the usual Minecraft/Roblox yellers: boys playing video games, yelping and yelling about everything little thing.

But who is this? It’s not, as Google tried to guess, Mickey Rourke, William H. Macy, or even The Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart.

I tried to get a discussion going about that shaved part of his mustache. No dice.

Whoever it is, this feels like a potential upgrade to (“expansion of”?) his YouTube taste.

The AI Wired Parent

“Why is saying ‘please’ nice?” my five year old daughter asked. Being a dad, I got excited to explain a simple thing in detail, “well,” I started. “No, let’s ask the circle!” and by that she meant voice mode in ChatGPT.

So we did: “Well, saying ‘please’ is kind of a way to show respect and appreciation when you’re asking someone for something. It just helps to make the interaction a bit more polite and friendly, which usually makes people more willing to help you out.”

Of course, I immediately wanted to ask the logical follow up question, “yes, but why does it show respect and appreciation” which is the crux of the question, and then another: and why is that ‘nice’? This the important thing: saying the effect of something - saying “please” - doesn’t tell you the why and how of something. (In marketing, I’d call this outcomes based marketing, which you’re encouraged to do when marketing text to “executives.”)

But there were more important things in the five year old’s mind, and she moved on to the next question for The Circle: “Like, why do people need to cut off the skin of a pineapple in order to eat it? Why?”

It would be fascinating to observe her hang out with The Circle for a week. How many questions would she ask? Would it make her more knowledge or smarter? Would it harm our relationship, or have no effect? What would she ask?

She asked how dinosaurs died the other night, and when asked again recited back the asteroid (meteor, I guess…whatever) causing plant death causing dinosaur death theory. No Circle involved! So, she didn’t need to ask The Circle. Would her knowledge retention be the same from The Circle versus The Mother?

As with most AI things, I think it would be highly additive, not replace-itive.

(See some cloth monkey-mother versus wire-monkey mother thinking on the possible emotional landscape here - seems fine?)

Relevant to your interests

Looks like a lot of AI stuff. I mean, it’s so interesting, fun, and fascinating, and it works, so why not?

• VMware Tanzu CIO Checklist for Safer and More Scalable AI Application Delivery - If you’re doing some enterprise AI strategamagizing, here is a good list of things to ponder and pester your direct reports about.

• Key Lessons from Shipping AI Products Beyond the Hype

• How Snowflake’s DevProd team operates

• Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals - “the projects we’ve worked on, we’ve spent 60–80% of our development time on error analysis and evaluation. Expect most of your effort to go toward understanding failures (i.e. looking at data) rather than building automated checks.”

• How should businesses kick off their AI initiatives? Time for the AI advice column - your doctors are in

• A consumption basket approach to measuring AI progress - “In contrast, actual human users typically deploy AIs to help them with relatively easy problems. They use AIs for (standard) legal advice, to help with the homework, to plot travel plans, to help modify a recipe, as a therapist or advisor, and so on. You could say that is the actual consumption basket for LLM use, circa 2025.” // Also, interesting aside that maybe AI is as good as it’ll get (in a good way).

• Air France-KLM to increase intelligence of bots that have saved 200,000 hours - Four or five AI uses cases - maybe even agentic! - from the airline I fly.

Wastebook

• “You are 100% alive right now.” As summarized here.

• “bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.” Does this guy like anything? (He likes Disneyland, we know that much.)

• “a fleet of 18-wheelers, loaded with musical instruments and television equipment, rumbling down the highway below” Jimmy Swaggart Is Dead.

• “cottagecore”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Logoff

Every few years I come across this picture that Josh Photoshopped in the late 90s with his mad-skillz:

Perfect Foods

Perfect foods: traditional Tex-Mex refried beans; bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco; pad thai with tofu; instant ramen noodles; Dutch fries with mayonnaise; sharp cheddar cheese; salted butter (aka, European butter); peanut butter, chunky; HEB tortillas; kibbling; coffee; queso with all the stuff in it; (OK, OK: all of Tex-Mex); USDA steak, cooked rare.

Wastebook

• “and then [for] three minutes you wait for it to be done, gazing out the window contemplating the gentle breeze on the leaves, the distant hum of traffic, the slow steady unrelenting approach of that which comes for us all.” A calm moment.

• “‘Big Balls’ Is Back.” Didn’t want to spend more time with family?

• “We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.” The olds.

• Also: “we should limit ourselves to 15 minutes of bleakness about how there is no future and everything’s awful.”

• And: “AI can’t go through the bin on a home visit in the bathroom, which was essential back in the day.” That is: stop fretting about AI and focus on the human competitive advantage.

• “There is also a CupNoodles Museum located in Yokohama, which features four stories of exhibitions and attractions.” There are two!

• “The irony of a resource-extraction conglomerate funding a movie about the sins of American oil imperialism was hardly lost on Friedkin, who planted a Gulf and Western corporate photo in a crucial scene, causing one executive to have, in Green’s words, ‘a shit hemorrhage.’” Funding from odd sources.

• “The ‘brain in a jar’ lifestyle is a privacy nightmare.”

• “For instance, stop saying “Everything sucks.” Unless you’ve personally verified the entire known universe and confirmed it is irredeemable, just say ‘I am mildly inconvenienced by the long line at Chipotle.’” Inner voices.

• “Originality, which is rewarded by the Michelin system, too often is a negative in Italian food.” Tyler on Italy-eating.

• “This is the song that made even Johnny Cash weep.”

• We asked an expat returning home if they were excited about ice. And they said, “I’ve not encounter them yet.” And there was a long, confused pause. And then we said, “no, like ‘ice.’ Not ‘ICE.’”

• Shout out to my homie playing online chess while we wait for Lucinda Williams to come on stage. Speaking of:

• “[S]he gave Austin songs that feel like ghost stories scribbled on bar napkins.” ChatGPT gets poetic about Lucinda Williams.

• People who want to do things want less regulations, people who want to stop things being done to them want more regulations.

Relative to your interests

• Manton “AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.”

• AI agents wrong 70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study - “Gartner still expects that by 2028 about 15 percent of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents, up from 0 percent last year. Also, the firm sees 33 percent of enterprise software applications including agentic AI by that time.”

• AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases, Wikipedia - List of words and writing styles commonly found in AI output. I’m really interested in how AI-language leaks (is leaking?) into human language. Also, these would be words and styles you’d tell the AI to NOT do, if you cared.

• How to Fix Your Context - Lots to digest in here.

• Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises

• American - “I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth–as you please–that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.”

• KubeCon Is Starting To Sound a Lot Like VMCon

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, September 18th and 19th. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Logoff

I’ve been messing around with the AI video generation. As you know, I play solo D&D a lot. Here’s two fun things to do with that tool. The key with both is that you can give it a picture to start with.

First, you can extend maps. This is easily possible to do by “panning” in Midjourney, but the video is a fun way:

And:

Now, what I want to do with these is extract out the frames and stitch together larger images. In the AI video tools you can extend your videos by 7 or so seconds, so I could keep doing that to get more and more. Then you have an image you can upload the VTT tools (where you love little “tokens” of your players and masters around as you do combat).

If you have a wide enough view - more at a satellite image level - you can also do some idle world-building by having it pan around. A video like this feels like something you could use for a hex crawl.

That said, I think my old way of extending D&D battle maps it faster and easier. A second thing is that you could have the AI not pan and just have it animate a few things (a fire, birds, etc.). Then you can have it loop the video, and then export a gif and have a slightly animated battle map.

Speaking of looping…

And then, of course, you can make videos out of character and NPC pictures (or “tokens” as they’re commonly called), like this one that I made out a token in the JC Connors adventure The Beast of Black Keep:

Now, there’s two things you can do here. One, is you can go through frame-by-frame to find the image you want. Instead of doing a lot of image generation to find that, you can describe what you want the character in the video to do, and then pick one image of them doing it. You could, for example, do that with this little dragon, picking just the right image out of the many in the video.

The second fun thing to do is convert the video to an animated gif (as I did with the above), then when you load these tokens into a tools you use to play D&D (called “virtual table-top,” or, VTT), you get animated profile pictures instead. Which is, you know…fun!

So far, Sora is the best for this because it has looping built in.