Posts in "newsletter"

Opinionated Platforms, Private Models, & Essential Dev Tooling

Related to your interestsWhy Your DIY Kubernetes Stack Won’t Survive the Era of Agentic AI - 🤖 DIY Kubernetes stacks built for stateless web apps can’t handle the GPU scheduling, model versioning, inference routing, and multi-tenancy requirements of agentic AI workloads. QCon London 2026: Morgan Stanley Rethinks Its API Program for the MCP Era - “She then demonstrated deployment gates: build-time validation that catches incomplete architectures before anything reaches production. Missing image versions and missing security controls on relationships: the CALM CLI flags all of it using structural validation with Spectral rulesets.

Fully Synergized Paradigms - Related to your interests, Monday sweep

The LinksWorkers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs - “The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and ‘visionary,’ but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

Related to your interests, Tuesday

CFOs boost tech budgets and squeeze headcount, AI art may not be copyrightable, and agents expose your structural chaos. Also, slide fails, secret soap operas, and surviving BigCo absurdity.

DIY Stacks, Agent Memory, and the Great Migration - Related to your interests, Monday

Links! Wastebook! Background changes afoot! Potsdamer Platz bei Nacht, Paul Paeschke, ca. 1929.Related to your interestsWhy your DIY Kubernetes stack won’t survive the era of agentic AI How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.

AI Is Normal Now - The Enterprise Is Not

Original ContentEnterprise AI needs new apps, enterprise AI doesn’t need new platforms - I’ve been circling a theme this week after reading “AI as a Normal Technology” (Spring, 2025). This is some stream of conscious on it. Enterprises are gonna enterprise-y, especially with AI. Also available in LinkedIn, if you prefer that kind of thing. A series of OODA loops, Software Defined Talk #559 - This week, we discuss the future of SaaS, OpenAI vs.

AI Reality Bites, Wall Street Panics, and Everyone Becomes an Architect

Original ContentA few things since last time: Kubernetes use rising, large organizations slowest to adapt, not many people train their own AI model or deploy new AI models frequently - my highlights from the most recent CNCF state of stuff survey. Enterprise ROI is elusive - maybe ROI is just headcount chopping, not revenue growth and “transformation” - Executives continue to say they don’t know how to measure ROI for AI, and/or that it’s low.

Enterprise ROI continues to be elusive

NICHOLAS LITTLE, from this IEEE article.Original ContentHere’s a summary of a new post on my weblog: Three years into the generative AI boom, enterprise ROI remains stubbornly hard to find. Survey after survey shows a familiar pattern: widespread experimentation, lots of “in production” claims, and very little impact on revenue, costs, or P&L. The usual explanation is “culture,” but that’s a dead end for IT - culture change belongs to executives, and most employees don’t believe leadership has a real plan anyway.

Amazon Should Buy Anthropic, AI Doctors, Metaverse RIP

Original ContentAmazon should buy Anthropic. I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering. If you can’t be bothered, here’s an excerpt on optimizing Helm charts. After the Dream, Software Defined Talk #555 - This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices.

Recursive Loops, Enterprise Nanny-states, Garbage Chairs, and Improv

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Duivendrecht edition.Original ContentFrom Platform Engineering to Stand-Up Comedian, with Lian Li, Software Defined Talk #117: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects.

Software Defined Talk listener survey

Pardon the not-an-actual-newsletter episode of the newsletter, but… Do you listen to my podcast, Software Defined Talk? If you do, I’d appreciate you taking the time to fill out our listener survey. We do occasional ads and paid interviews, and this helps us do more and charge more. It means we can pay for the podcast and some tasty beef ribs at the end of the year. Also, I’m always curious to know more about listeners.