Coté

Dark leisure, eating sausage and vodka before a morning run

Relative to your interests

Looks like it’s all AI except one link. Can you find it?

The robot read it

I don’t read all the links I come across. Like the below, sometimes I have the AI read it. You’ve been warned.

At SAP Sapphire, executives polished their AI pitch with Joule, a copilot now destined to appear in everything from HR workflows to humanoid robots, while declaring the death of complexity through “suite-as-a-service.” CIOs, meanwhile, were urged to craft enterprise-wide SAP roadmaps that include cost-risk forecasting, hyperscaler alignment, and internal AI investments—despite no clear ROI, mounting transformation fatigue, and the uncomfortable feeling that they’ve been here before.

Nadia Asparouhova explained that the most powerful cultural ideas are “anti-memes”—things that work precisely because no one understands them, a claim ironically promoted via glossy press coverage. And Ed Zitron warned that modern companies are being run by “business idiots” who climb the ranks by appearing competent while doing nothing of consequence, suggesting that the true anti-meme may be merit itself.

I used to be so into mind maps, circa 2006.

Wastebook

  • “the skills as defined in the first sentence are small fingers – which is not a skill.” iPhone-talk.

  • “Are ‘friends’ electric? You won’t need to hold them in your hand. You’ll just carry a little coffin with a ghost in it that talks to you.” Warren Ellis.

  • “I respect your privacy and time.” Angela Winter.

  • Eating sausage and drinking vodka with Russian general, then early morning jogging. You Won, Now What?

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10).

Low barriers to entry software marketing, July 2006.

Logoff

That’s it for now.

Now's a great time to rediscover PaaS

Norway, leaving OSL.

My recap of Cloud Foundry Day is up on the Tanzu blog: check it out!

I gave an opening talk at Cloud Foundry Day last week. I ended up shortening it a lot and, of course, I didn’t exactly give the talk I’d written down. Here’s the script I wrote for myself. It goes over the opportunity the Cloud Foundry community has right now. I gave a talk later in the day that more systematically made the case below.

Well, thanks for coming. To put in the effort and expense, and the time: y'all in the room here are definitely die-hard, lifers in the Cloud Foundry community. And it's thanks to you (and those who couldn't make it but wanted to), that have been in the community so long, that we're here and have given the users of our platform such a great experience all these years. So, thanks for that. You should be pleased with yourself, proud - all that.

It can be hard to stick in this community - some people and organizations have given up, bedazzled by perceived substitutes for a great developer platform. Some of us in the community have been bedazzled here and there. But the result of that bedazzlement - and, you know, I'm talking about Kubernetes, obviously - is often befuddlement. You're not supposed to say negative things about competition at things like this, or, really, even acknowledge that they exist! It's necessary, maybe even cathartic for some, though, to acknowledge the elephant we've been living with for a long time.

Here's what I think: Kubernetes is finally boring, and we can get back to Cloud Foundry being exciting. As I'll talk about later today in my longer talk, I think we need to get back to thinking about Cloud Foundry as a developer platform, not an operations platform. If we re-position our thinking around that, we'll bring our beloved platform to more and more people. If we really focus on that mind-shift as a community, supporting and amplifying each other, we might even need to book a bigger space next year.

And that's what I want to pitch this community on. We should be supporting each other more. Boosting each other's efforts, and being loud about the success of people who use Cloud Foundry - the pleasure they take in it.

Photo by Danielle Burrow.

I think too many people have forgotten how good it is, what a real developer platform looks like and feels like to use.

We've all heard the stories. There's a corporate initiative to replace Cloud Foundry. The developers love Cloud Foundry and aren't sure why there's a need to change, but it's out of their hands. A year goes by: you get a PoC, and then you move to more apps…how do we move our apps and data to this new thing? How do we get developers to learn how to package up their apps and make their apps manageable on the new platform? Turns out we need to build a platform now (guess they actually meant it when they Tweeted that Kubernetes isn't a platform, it's a platform for building platforms), better get some platform engineering too…so we need to transform the ops people, yet again. And what's this "product management" business we need to do? Also, we now need to maintain that platform - right after we launch it, the developers start asking for new features. Have you heard about AI? Oh, and have you seen the new budget requests?

And so on. 

Some organizations succeed here, and that's great for them. Gold-star stickers all around. Other ones, we end up hearing about years later and they haven't done much. What's bizarre is that everything was working just fine. The developers were happy, they were shipping, the platform ran just fine, and the business was improving.

I think the broader "market" has wised up to this cycle. Or, at least, experienced it. 

That's our first opportunity, and why I think it's important for us to work together more. People want a platform and they're discovering that they don't have one anymore.

Cloud Foundry is a platform and it works, right now, and it's been working for a long time. 

The next two opportunities are associated with private cloud. 

In my mind, "private cloud" more means "not the hyperscalers" than just "on-premises." You can run it on-premises or managed by a service provider, whatever. It means you have more control of your stack. IDC has this delightful phrase - "dedicated environment" - that captures it well.

The thing with private cloud is that it's always been there. If you get all wrapped up in revenue numbers of public cloud, you'll miss that about 50% of applications run on private cloud. And that's been steady for several years now. We all see that, especially with the organizations that use Cloud Foundry.

If you do private cloud, Cloud Foundry is a perfect fit for your developers.

What's different right now are two big things: AI and a growing desire for sovereign cloud.

Let's look at the first. 

AI: sure, all the things good and bad. I use it all day, every day, and I'm not even a programmer. While there's a bunch of elusive AI ROI in enterprise chatter going on now, the positive side of that is that it shows how much demand there is for AI. People are saying they haven't figured out AI ROI, but the board is allocating more budget nonetheless.

And I think that's just for off-the-shelf apps. I'm not sure we've even seen material uptake in developers adding AI to their existing enterprise apps. That's just now possible (maybe you were at our AI workshop yesterday to see how). My part of the Cloud Foundry community has been talking with a lot of Cloud Foundry users that have spent the past year figuring out their AI strategy and are starting to ship apps with AI…on Cloud Foundry.

AI creates opportunity because it makes people aware of the reality, benefits, and need of and for private cloud. It makes them want private cloud. 

Sure, it's about "control and security." That's like saying food is about taste and satisfaction. It's table-stakes. The better focus is to show how having control over your whole app stack and data stack gives you more flexibility, more options, and lets you innovate more and faster.

As organizations start putting more and more AI functionality in their apps, they're going to start thinking about private cloud more. They'll want to integrate with all the existing services they have, use the data they have, and so forth. We've seen this before, many times. As with microservices and mobile before that, new - pardon the phrase - "paradigms" up the stack drive people to reconsider and think of, and even re-platform to new parts further down the stack. When the UI changes, the infrastructure changes. People are looking for new platform options for their AI applications. We are a platform that just works and has AI services wrapped up in it: Cloud Foundry.

So, that's the second opportunity.

The third opportunity is the growing desire for "sovereign cloud." Now, here in the States, we don't really think about "sovereign cloud." We are the cloud here. I think of "sovereign cloud," then, as "not an American controlled cloud." To get out of my American-centric head - and, you know, I'm a Texan, so that takes a lot of time to even get out of those borders - would American companies want to run in German clouds? French clouds? Dutch clouds? You can come up with more obviously no-go countries on your own.

I live in Amsterdam (here's a good joke: how do you know someone's an expat? Just like vegans, they'll tell you) so this sovereign cloud thing is in my face all the time. People across the Atlantic from here really want full control of their cloud, under their own jurisdictions, in their own, you know, cultures. Apply this to all of the world. I'm sure the Canadians are into the idea too.

Cloud Foundry is inherently ready on day one for sovereign cloud if you want to run your own "cloud" to run your applications. I can't think of anything better. It's open source, it's got over a decade of being production-tested, it's not tied to one company (and there's a lot of Germans involved, so it's not just mono-national), and, again, developers love it! Rolling upgrades, zero downtime, developer self-service - all those things are just normal for Cloud Foundry.

And, listen. Guess what? American organizations want control over their stacks as much as everyone else. People are even talking about cloud repatriation. Crazy, right? Who would have thought that was something people would actually be doing a few years back?

That's the third opportunity: what if more and more people ended up wanting private cloud?

So that's what I want to open with. I want y'all here, the community, to see what I see as huge potential in the next few years for Cloud Foundry. 

Again, all of you in the room are part of the core community that's built this platform, kept it going, and done so much for the developers, ops people, and organizations that use Cloud Foundry. Let's work together as a community and make it happen.

Now, here's some housekeeping before we get to the rest of the day…

Middle-school wisdom.

Wastebook

  • “Just Tech Bros Selling Old Rope.” Here.

  • “I’m one of the great Googlers on the East Coast.” Government worker.

  • “Telescopic philanthropy.” Here.

  • I thought all the tech people left Twitter in moral outrage, but there’s a lot of them still there, Tweeting away.

  • After writing a bunch of MCP tools for playing D&D, one my theories: the natural langue docs you give the robot are equally important as the code. The code often just does simple things. But explaining to the robot the what, how, and why is important for your tool to get used. Since developers are terrible at docs, this will be a problem.

Relative to your interests

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10).

Logoff

These were not-very-good to straight-up-gross, no other way to put it:

But, I mean, that’s sort of what they’re telling you right on the package.

Minimum Viable All the Things

Max Ernst, 1934.

Relative to your interests

  • MCP Authorization in practice with Spring AI and OAuth2 - Filling in the missing piece of MCP: security.

  • The Battle For Grounding Your AI Agents Has Begun - Data gravity considerations for AI.

  • We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. - It’s still hard to know how much energy AI uses…until the big AI companies start telling us.

  • Minimum Viable Humans. - “it’s only possible with algorithmic management taking over functions previously handled by human managers: performance monitoring, task allocation, basic feedback and guidance, coordination and information flow. On the positive side, this should translate into a sunset for the endless run of pointless meetings. Good riddance.”

  • After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain - “I’m leveraging them to learn Go, to upskill myself. And then I apply this new knowledge when I code.” And: “But I’m not asking it to write new things from scratch, to come up with ideas or to write a whole new plan. I’m writing the plan. I’m the senior dev. The LLM is the assistant.”

  • morning computer sociomediapath - As ever, the way to improve productivity is stop interrupting people, be they writers, programmers, or any “make something” type.

  • Generation Z leading shift toward GOP, survey shows - ”voters aged 18 to 21 now favor Republicans by 11.7 points, challenging the common perception of Gen Z as ‘uniformly progressive.’" And: more updates on The Kids.

  • Reports of Deno’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - ”Most developers weren’t deploying simple stateless functions. They were building full-stack apps: apps that talk to a database, that almost always is located in a single region.” // People love the CRUD app. // Also, a tales from PaaS-land.

  • Proof (again!) of why enterprises need to focus on AI strategic value over cost-cutting - “Forrester believes that a maximum of 1% of core business processes will be orchestrated by generative AI this year. A core issue is trust, since these systems tend to hallucinate, and it’s hard to troubleshoot bias.”

  • The new economics of enterprise technology in an AI world - This is a strange collage of IT project success and failure. I think it’s saying that if your IT projects don’t show legible business improvement. They’re considered a failure. // Also, you have to look at an IT project as a big system, not just one point in time like the developers shipping an app. // “This pattern is clear in AI initiatives, where only 1 percent of company executives describe their gen AI rollouts as “mature”10 and only 10 to 20 percent of isolated AI experiments in the past two years scaled to create value. Our analysis of the impact of FinOps programs reveals that this misalignment of incentives leads to poor spend decisions on enterprise technology and results in a 20 to 30 percent loss of value.” // And commentary on IT projects in general, namely, it’s hard to get perceived ROI on them and stick to original (incorrect) ongoing budget estimates. On the other hand, would the company survive without them? Analogously, what is the ROI on electricity? // Also: “Some 10 to 20 percent of productivity resulting from work-from-home investments benefits employees rather than the enterprise (such as improved working conditions and freed-up time for personal activities).” Employees are better off, but who cares if it doesn’t make the shareholder more money?

Max Ernst, 1934.

Wastebook

  • “Catastrophic forgetting.”

  • “Parking lot with a taco hole.” RotL #580.

Max Ernst, 1934.

Logoff

I’m done with another talk, this time at NDC Oslo. I’ll be at SREDay Cologne week after next, then not too much for a while.

Patience, plumbing, and the pricing of everything

Relative to your interests

  • When was peak message in a bottle? - Only 80s kids will get this: “grandfather clocks; suits of armour; quicksand; spontaneous human combustion.” Also: big foot and UFOs.

  • Is it Euro-poor, or Ameri-poor? - Checks out on both sides.

  • Pricing: A List of Tactics - Some mind-tricks to play with pricing.

  • The coyote trap. - “Call it whatever you will, I don’t care, but we’re on a new path and companies are doing more than ever to extract every ounce of value out of everyone in the payroll system. I talked to a long time friend and former colleague who went from team leader to division leader overnight. No title change. No additional compensation. Just do more.”

  • For many, patience is the killer LLM feature

  • Anthropic closes $2.5 billion credit facility - “Annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, the company confirmed, more than doubling from a $1 billion rate in the prior period. Revenue chief Kate Jensen said in a recent interview with CNBC that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually with Anthropic jumped eightfold from a year ago.”

  • Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding? - Get yourself a PaaS. // “the idea of a dedicated team removing frictions by building tools and resuable abstractions is an idea that’s here to stay.”

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, May 19th, 2025.

Read by the Robot

These are articles I asked the AI to summarize, and here’s its summary for you.

Middle-aged adults who drank 500ml of water before meals lost more weight, felt less hungry, and aged more slowly—suggesting that longevity may hinge less on willpower than on plumbing. Kyla Scanlon argued that friction—not efficiency—is the most valuable commodity, a bold claim in a world where even chewing gum now comes via subscription. Adam Mastroianni proposed rebuilding psychology around the structure of a board game, implying the current paradigm mostly resembles Candy Land with grad students.

Meanwhile, over in tomatoes, an 80,000-year journey from wild Andean fruit to CRISPR-modified supermarket staple suggests some things, at least, do improve with breeding. And at Target, a much younger experiment appears to be working: the 10-items-or-fewer express self-checkout cut transaction times and bumped satisfaction scores—while surprisingly increasing the use of human cashiers. Perhaps people just like their robots with limits.

Wastebook

Converting the world to D&D settings

Here’s a fun thing to do with ChatGPT, have it make pictures for your D&D settings. When I’m walking around, I see scenes that feel like they’d be fun in some printed adventure. You can ChatGPT to create those for you!

For example, here’s an original picture, taken in a park here in the Netherlands that I frequent:

I’ve developed a prompt to create the kind of rough, line-drawn style that I like for D&D visuals, resulting in:

In a near-by park, there’s a tree that’s grown up around the cement curb that used to enclose it, pretty standard urban stuff:

You take that, and tell ChatGPT this: “Use this one, but make it look larger like an ancient ruin that has a large tree growing through and has cracked open the wall like you see in the original. Can you make the ruins look other and not so symmetrical, the hundreds of years have worn them down and suited them here and there.”

As with a lot of my D&D and AI, uh, “work,” the point isn’t to be perfect or great, it’s to boost the fun I have. It’s a type of “fun productivity.” Generating those images takes no time at all.

Here’s the prompt I started using. It was, of course, written by ChatGPT with a little bit of prompting from me:

Generate in the style of gritty, 1980s fantasy illustration, drawing heavily from the black-and-white aesthetic of The Savage Sword of Conan, the dense linework of Albrecht Dürer, and the chaotic, cluttered compositions of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Art should be primarily black and white, using heavy ink, crosshatching, and etching-like detail to convey form, shadow, and texture. Selective muted color is allowed only if it enhances atmosphere or storytelling.

Figures should be realistic, expressive, and grounded—a mix of young and old, scarred and beautiful, weary and noble. Avoid heroic idealization: these are lived-in characters shaped by hardship and dirt, not fashion models or video game avatars. Body types, faces, and posture should reflect diversity in age, experience, and culture. Characters may be adorned in patchwork armor, practical gear, or ceremonial garb, but always rendered with tactile detail and believable wear.

Scenes should feel chaotic, cluttered, and richly lived-in, with elements of medieval squalor, fantastical decay, and mysterious ritual. Environments—forests, ruins, inns, alleyways, courts—should have depth and texture, with weathered stone, tangled roots, hand-carved iconography, and organic asymmetry. Always favor texture over polish, mood over symmetry, and story over spectacle.

This is not a clean or sanitized world. Show mud, scars, broken teeth, rusted iron, sagging pouches, old tattoos, cheap jewelry, burned-out torches, mossy ruins, ragged cloaks, and crowded shelves. Facial expressions matter: stern glares, crooked smirks, haunted eyes, and world-weary stares should tell the viewer more than dialogue ever could.

The overall tone should be grimy, grounded, mysterious, and sometimes grimly humorous—not glossy or cinematic. Avoid all anime or cartoon styling, smooth gradients, heroic posing, or digital cleanliness. Do not idealize figures or reduce them to archetypes. Favor realism and imperfection.

Think: a dwarf passed out under a tree with a broken flask; a swamp hag grinning beneath hanging moss; a mercenary queen in patched armor confronting a weasel-faced noble; a ragged adventurer polishing her blade beside the corpse of a demon. Everything should suggest a story already in progress.

I haven’t tried this too much with Midjourney. You can get Midjourney to generate images in that style I like, but it takes a lot of work. As ever, Midjourney’s flaw is that it slides back into cinematic, perfect image generation. Also, I haven’t figured out getting Midjourney to consistently generate the same character and general image over and over. ChatGPT does it extremely well.

Logoff

This is a great talk from Paula on the history, and repeated history, of platform as a product. You know, basically, platform engineering. She was one of the early pioneers of it and has been involved ever since.

"the great murderer of boredom"

My Content

Two Software Defined episodes this week:

"I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza," startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff - After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and balancing commercial and community interests, moving to Europe, and more!

This is a “hit by pitch” - This week, we discuss Zenoss finally getting acquired, Databricks buying Neon, and the debut of WizOS. Plus, updates on OpenAI, Google, Apple—and hot takes on Marmite, Vegemite, and Emacs. (Just Matt and Brandon, I was away.)

Keep your Spring Apps Up-to-date

Webinar alert! If you manage Spring apps in your organization, keeping them up-to-date probably seems like an impossibility. There’s help! Check out this overview from the Spring folks on the topic:

Keeping applications secure and up to date is more challenging than ever. Upgrades introduce transitive dependencies that can break compatibility; some projects require migrations due to end-of-life decisions, and security vulnerabilities demand urgent attention. While security teams integrate vulnerability scanners to detect risks, developers often struggle with lengthy and unpredictable remediation efforts, leading to delays, uncertainty, and disruption to business priorities. Join us for this exclusive webinar to learn how Spring Application Advisor (SAA) can simplify the Spring app upgrade process, so you can maintain security and stability without derailing your roadmap.

Register for it and check it out on May 22nd. Or, just catch the replay.

ChatGPT conversation from an actual photograph.

Wastebook

  • “a usefully belligerent attitude” Tim Bray.

  • “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” And, I said, I realized that this is what I had been doing. Worrying about tomorrow. Anticipating the worst possible outcome. “Exactly,” he said. “Since earliest childhood. Worrying is all mixed up in your mind with loving. You don’t think you can love without worrying.” - Notes to John, Joan Didion

  • And: “I said I wasn’t sure where we left off. Dr. MacKinnon said why not begin where you are now. I said I wasn’t sure where I was now, life seemed rather scattered.”

  • “The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom.” Craig Mod.

  • “Unstatus.” Westenberg.

  • “There’s a really big body, and it’s not quite buried.”

  • Doing a tiny amount is better than nothing, which is sort of what habit building is.

  • “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful. And theirs is weak.” Beef-talk.

  • “defaults instead of opinions.” Matt Gemmell.

  • “Another thing to keep in mind is that therapy often isn’t a repair process; it’s a perspective-changing process instead.” Matt G.

  • “Mailchimp has grown and mutated to serve a set of needs and cus­tomers that I truly don’t understand. Not that it shouldn’t! Well — I mean, I wish it wouldn’t. But it did” // A helpful marketing/product strategy thing to keep in mind: sometimes your customer base changes, and that can be totally fine.

The Ford Branco has several Greatest of All Times modes available. But which is the greatest?

Relevant to your interests

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10). PlatformCon, June 23rd to 27th, speaking, online.

VMware corporate art at the former “VBC” (or, EBC as other companies would call it).
At Cloud Foundry Day 2025, Palo Alto.

Logoff

I’m back from Cloud Foundry Day in Palo Alto. Nice trip with lots of time to see people.

GenX - working as designed

More on the Tanzu AI Stack

As you may recall, along with several colleagues, I worked on the Tanzu annual update which came out last month. I’m sure you’ve watched the entire video, right? How else would you get to see my AAA skills at talking with my hands at the end? I mean, I even cut my hair for the thing, so you know I put some effort into it.

Here’s some follow-up writing and coverage if you’d like to, as they say, go deeper.

From Tanzu people:

Press coverage:

Lightboard videos going over how we think about AI enterprise architectures:

More casual discussion in Cloud Foundry Weekly Podcast:

Be sure to click on all of those, reading them would be cool too.

The Dutch don’t strike me as a gnome-loving culture, so when I see a gnome, I gnotice.

Relative to your interests

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

Tanzu AI workshop, Palo Alto, CA, May 13th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10).

Is this the first Hugh Grant action figure? Probably should have bought it, but where would I put it?

Logoff

Whitney and I are recording our interview with Taegan Goddard next week. I’m a huge fan of his work - both blog and podcast - and an even bigger fan of his “production function.”

I grew up in the era of and as a blogger. I wouldn’t say I’m a blogger anymore, but he sure is a blogger in a the best ways. Talking US politics with him isn’t really on the agenda - by the time the episode came out, it’d be stale. Plus, what is there to say? Read his blog instead. But, there’s plenty of ever-green topics, not to mention the afore mentioned production function.

Got any questions I should ask?

Suggested outro to glide into the weekend.

iPad Goat Ears

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam. This is more of a “smoke break chair,” but I’ll allow it.

Relative to your interests

  • 28 slightly rude notes on writing - “All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness.” // “Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” // Lower down, that first part to delete is called "the windup." I call it "throat clearing." Either way, try to cut it and Mento-memo your way to the conclusion in the first sentence. This is, apparently, American-style, according to The Culture Map. Indeed!

  • A behind the scenes glimpse of the launch of GPT-4 - Fun anecdotes about OpenAI figuring out that ChatGPT was a big deal, and then marketing around it. // “Another little detail about the launch video is that we didn’t use titles for any of the OpenAI employees. Even to this day OpenAI is an incredibly flat organization. I watched a DeepMind video where every talking head had a title and it seemed like a caste system. While I don’t know if that’s really how it is there, I wanted to show that at OpenAI titles didn’t matter all that much. The one exception to titles were the people from Microsoft that appeared. I was given very specific instructions from them about titles. Microsoft even flew one of their execs down on a private jet so he could be in the video.” // Considering the goodwill and share value that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI likely brought, well worth it.

  • The Titan Who Couldn’t Let Go - Founder mode case study: “There’s a pattern here, and it’s bigger than Hughes. Obsession works–in short bursts, in narrow contexts, with clear feedback loops. But scale it up, let it harden into infrastructure, and it starts to rot the system from the inside. Hughes structurally disallowed any process he couldn’t control. That works in a cockpit. It fails in a boardroom.”

  • Getting things “done” in large tech companies - If the executives don’t know you did something cool, you didn’t do something cool. Legible.

  • VMware’s Kubernetes Evolution - a fuller history would be interesting to read.

  • Oxide’s Compensation Model: How is it Going? - You know, I bet it has the effect of encouraging people to focus on the product as the product instead of the product as their comp. // Of course, the next step is to publish and then equalize the cap-table, but, hey, we can’t go full socialist.

  • Why Bro Culture Still Holds Teams Back at Work

  • William Gibson - September 1997 interview.

  • Three Essential ROI Goals for Agentic AI Applications

  • It’s time we stopped asking for vases. - “Most people cram their AI prompts with so many rules that they predetermine the answer.”

  • Nine Emerging Developer Patterns for the AI Era

  • Has DOGE missed its opportunity? - This is general advice for digital transformation, too. // And, on the actual focus,I mean: who could have predicted this outcome…

  • PepsiCo taps AWS to accelerate digital transformation, AI adoption | CIO Dive - ”Enterprises across industries are facing ballooning cloud bills as AI adoption drives up costs. Nearly 3 in 4 IT pros blamed the AI boom for ‘unmanageable’ cloud bills last year.” // When it comes to “we’re paying too much” things like this, I often wonder: do you mean something more like “unexpected” or even “we’re buying a lot because its useful.”

  • mobygratis - Free Moby music to empower your creative projects - Free to use as long as you don’t promote right wing politics or eating meat, dairy, etc.

r/KLM - Amsterdam find!
If you know, you know.

Wastebook

  • “Let's not build that panopticon!” AI not as earth-deadly as previously thought?

  • “The first upload to my homepage (melonking.net) in 2016 was a story about a goat who trades his ears for an iPad, but recovers them again when he realises that the iPad can be broken in two, and remade into cyborg ears that fuse the best of what he had lost and what he had gained.” Finally, a practical use for iPads.

  • “It is a bit like modern Americans staking out Mount Vernon and destroying the risen corpse of George Washington.” M.T. Black.

  • “white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man” Only lacking a geographic label.

  • “WE DIDN’T GENTRIFY SPITALFIELDS SO YOU COULD MICROWAVE YOUR DINNER.” Warren Ellis.

  • “In the wild Mantichora resemble the worst house cats, lazy, mercurial, and cruel, they torment their prey, sometimes even forgetting about it and letting it crawl away broken to die.” Not very friendly.

  • “Try to match the user’s vibe” System instructions.

  • “my pain wasn’t because I was weak or broken. It felt terrible because it was terrible.” ChatTherapist.

  • “I would rather have thinner relationships with ‘the perfect people for me’ than regular bear hugs and beer guzzlings with ‘people who are in the 87th percentile for me.’” Thinking percentiles.

  • Only experts fear what can replace them.

  • “The Politics of Symmetry” Taylor.

  • “Zavagor stole an amulet off of a drunk panda-man and got a cryptic message from his demonic patron: ‘The gargoyle needs iron. The circle is wooden.’” Not helpful.

  • “What happens when the bodies of children get older but stay the same?” Artful Dodgers.

  • “Vernacular institutions”: They are more useful than they are legible.

Charts

I like 100% area/bar charts. If you have enough periods of previous data, they’re great for showing a growing trends. Here’s a recent one:

And, here’s the chart that me like these 100% area charts, from 2012. It’s showing percent of units shipped per year per PC type (so, market share by unit, not revenue1):

The genius of this chart, though, is re-thinking what data belongs in the chart. At the time, thinking of “smart phones” as competitors to PCs was not normal. But, once you do think of them as the same - as we do now when it comes to this kind of strategic thinking - you see something incredibly dramatic. That chart tells a lot of interesting stories.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

Tanzu AI workshop, Palo Alto, CA, May 13th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking (10% off with the code CLG10).

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Busy week next week. Travel to Palo Alto for two talks (see above), a podcast recording, and then all the usual.

1

That distinction is also an important one to me. When it comes to making money, market share by revenue is great, sure. You’re saying how much money you’re making versus your competitors. But, that doesn’t tell you how widely used something is. When you’re tracking trends, knowing units is much more important. You want to know how much something is happening, not just how much money people are making off it.

Half-ass Vibe Coding

I was on Cloud Foundry Weekly yesterday. We discussed “vibe coding.” More precisely, what I think of as “half ass vibe coding.” I get the AIs to write code for me, but then ask it questions, maybe even mess around with it myself.

I think that might just be “coding with an AI assistant,” but as Nicky put it, it’s also pretty close to pair programming. I know that ChatGPT sure has a lot more personality than a lot of people I’ve programmed with - know what I mean?! UP TOP 🖐️

Also, check out this week’s Software Defined Talk:

This week, we discuss Google being found to be a monopoly, OpenAI’s “offer” to buy Chrome, and some hot takes on JSON. Plus, is it better to wait on hold or ask for a callback?

Listen all the way to the end for my thoughts of Field Notebooks and XML.

Wastebook

  • “Wally’s Rent-to-Own, 1145 North Hilltop. Where, as the sign says, ‘A bargain is a bargain, no matter what the cost.’” Notes to Diane.

  • No one does grimy better than Terry Gilliam.

  • Also: “I have learned from experience, that a modicum of snuff can be most efficacious.”

Enterprise AI

There's not much room for competitive advantage if you just use the same AI models as everyone else, let alone all the enterprise integrations you need.

If you’re interested in that, check out the overview of the Tanzu AI stack. It’s got the app layer, AI model hosting and access, data, and the operations you need for day zero, to day two, to day n+2.

Relative to your interests

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My daughter at King’s Day, 2024.

It’s King’s Day tomorrow in The Netherlands, a big, fun event. People party a lot in the warm sun and kids sell a lot of used stuff. It’s like being at multi-family garage sale with endless beer. Which is to say, it’s pretty awesome.

The whole arc of OpenStack

This was a fun discussion:

Also, subscribe to the podcast!

During the interview I realized that there’s a lot of my professional-life friends that I’ve know for 20+ years across all sorts of companies, wave after of wave of tech trends, etc., including Melissa. I’m lucky to be in that situation.

Relative to your interests

Figure from Troxell and Davis
On concrete.

Wastebook

  • “mogging.” List that in your marketing tactics.

  • “insouciantly” Word-watch.

  • “Real Housewives of Uranus, here we come!” Punchy! Also:

  • “aperçu”

  • “Being sampled ≠ being obsolete. In hip hop’s logic, the breakbeat is eternal. James Brown’s drummer never vanishes; he becomes the pulse for a thousand new tracks. Accept the same fate.” ChatGPT o3

  • “broodsacs.” I didn’t want to read the rest, but: good word.

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I’ve got two things I need to get to news lettering. First, we finally did our big “what’s up with Tanzu” annual event (all online, in video, along with lots of follow-up articles and such). The points are (1) we’re a private PaaS, and, (2) we have the services you need from developer to operator to start adding AI to your apps right now, today. And you don’t even need to be a customer (but, I would of course prefer you were!): you can use Spring AI for all your Java needs for free, as always.

We all did a lot of work on it. I love it when a build comes together :)

Your author at the Portland airport, July, 2019.

Second, I’m almost done editing the third video in my “learn MCP by playing D&D” video series. After that, I think I’ll get into MCP Prompts, which I think I finally understand. I haven’t finished listening to it, but this interview with two of the MCP people is helpful for understanding the intentions, “semantics” of the Model Context Profile: its hopes and dreams. Just like actually using generative AI tools daily lets you de-hype all the mythos around AI, actually coding up agentic apps (here, with MCP), grounds all the fancy talk about it and makes it more real and practical.

Writing good docs is important for agentic AI and Model Context Protocol, and developers are terrible at writing good docs

One quick things up-top: this week (tomorrow!), get an overview and demos of the private AI stack and development frameworks we’ve been working on at Tanzu. Register to check it out online, either live or the recording after the event.

Spy on the DM with Model Context Protocol Servers in Java

Here’s my latest walk-through is writing Model Context Protocol Server tools…to play D&D. Here, I build some slightly more complicated Oracles and show how to do logging. I attempt to get into the mind of the AI by asking it tell me why it’s calling an MCP tool. Claude surprisingly tight-lipped!

While making this I realized that writing good docs is more important than ever when you’re doing this kind of agentic AI programming. Instead of just writing a specification that the AI uses to call your tool (the “MCP Client”), you need to explain the tool to it: how to use it, why you’d use it, even your intentions for it. What’s the point of this tool, what are examples of using it?

That is so much different than how most developers thing of documentation. In fact, most developers don’t think about documentation at all. Most don’t write it, and when you read the docs, a lot is just not good.

So, when you’re writing these little AI tools, start thinking differently about how you document the tools. It’s obvious to say, but easy to forget: you need to explain them as you would to a human, not a computer.

Check out the first video which goes over the basics of Model Context Protocol and builds a simple oracle. You can get the code for all of this in my EasyChatDM repo.

Recent Garage Chairs of Amsterdam, impressive haul in Duivendrecht.

Relative to your interests

Recent Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, San Jose, California edition.

Wastebook

  • “GAFAM refers to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.” The new FANG. ”During his tenure, he delivered ‘normcore,’ ‘cringecore,’ and ultimately, the end of the ‘-core’ suffix altogether as fashion moves in the direction of something more “boom boom.”” All the great cores.

  • “He’s got his own Bobcat for no reason!” “He’s living the dream!” RotL #574.

  • “How long does it take to eat a tunafish sandwich in a bathroom stall?” Mythic Quest, s1e6. “Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel.” Post-twitter.

  • ”Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.” vibe-check.

  • ‘Columnists learn over time that it is unwise to write about one’s weirder foibles because instead of making you more accessible through charming self-deprecation, it can instead make you less accessible because you might seem a hapless feeb or a worrisome creep – such as if you wrote "Hey, you know how sometimes, when you haven’t changed your underpants in a week and a half …. "?’ - Remember to Wipe Carefully

  • “As a film maker, you try to solve your money problems with creative new techniques that that look good, but that are also cheap. There’s the battle, but that’s the joy of what we were doing…” Ralph Bakshi on Wizards.

Recent Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Shoreditch, London edition.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

Racing Toward AI App Delivery with Tanzu, April 16th, online, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking.

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Next month, at Cloud Foundry Day you can come to an in-person workshop for even more. I’ll be there, going over lessons learned from programming agentic goblins, as well as MC’ing. I also have a talk at Cloud Foundry Day proposing a new marketing plan for Cloud Foundry.

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol