Coté

Would you like to hug a cow?

Cows, IoT, and ML

On this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with my friend Saad. We mostly talked about the irresistible topic of monitoring cows, which he did at his previous startup:

In this episode, Whitney and Coté speak with Saad Ansari, a product manager at Databricks, about his fascinating journey from working at Microsoft to co-founding a startup focused on creating sensors for monitoring cow behavior. They go over the challenges and rewards of transitioning from large corporations to startups and back, the differences in company scales, and the various lessons learned along the way. Saad shares some stories about developing technology for dairy farming, tackling supply chain issues, and the importance of passion in one’s work. The conversation also touches on the unique cultural aspects of dairy farming around the world, managing imposter syndrome, and the value of hands-on experience.

Check out the video, above, or the traditional podcast episode. I hope you already subscribe to it or will subscribe if you don’t already.

Relative to your interests

Punctuation marks chart
Found September 25th, 2025.

Wastebook

  • “Solo Toxic Neon Lord.” DriveThruRPG.com

  • “He often categorizes knowledge by geography and culture (as per his rule, every person is interesting if you know something about their,” ChatGTP on Tyler.

  • ‘the code’s use of a “taste-driven development (TDD) paradigm.”’ Microsoft touts ‘Vibe Working’ in Office apps

  • “You only live once. And then you end up dead.” Ben.

  • “Kargo will tell Argo…”

  • ‘When we say, “I love my job,” we really mean, “My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way.”’ Thank you for being annoying

image
Found by bruces.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

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Ibis London Shoreditch, 1st floor elevator area.

Usually, I recommend sticking with one brand for hotel and flights when you’re a business travel. However, now that I have lifetime platinum status with Marriott, I’m more free to stay at other hotels. What to choose? Well, based on the recent shit-selection from Marriott hotels in London, I’m staying at Accor hotels for the next few trips. In Europe, there are always many Accor hotels available. I was at an Ibis last night and I’d judge it as a Moxy+, not exactly a Court Yard. The breakfast was fine, nice plump English breakfast sausages. Tragically, Accor doesn’t seem to have a status match, so I’ll be scrambling up the ladder.

//

If you’re into slides, here are the slides I presented at Civo Navigate London yesterday. Hanna Foxwell gave a great talk in the morning. Hopefully it was recorded, but who knows with these things.

This is what I remember every portrait of an author or academic being like on the backs of all those used books I used to read from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. See more.

Running your AI in your own private cloud

Tips on running AI on your private cloud

Some brief comments on using Tanzu Platform to run your private GenAI stuff. If you’re interested in more than that short clip, check out my co-worker Nick’s talk on this topic. You can check out the Tanzu Platform more at TryTanzu.ai.

Relative to your interests

  • Two strategies to succeed when AI seems to be eroding jobs around you - 🤖 Technical writers are shifting from writers to content directors, steering and editing AI output. To thrive: build deep subject matter expertise and tool expertise–with editorial judgment and workflow skills as supporting habits. // How many managers does the world need, though?

  • The yaml document from hell - They advocate for using JSON (with comments) over YAML: “Generating json as a better yaml. Often the choice of format is not ours to make, and an application only accepts yaml. Not all is lost though, because yaml is a superset of json, so any tool that can produce json can be used to generate a yaml document.”

  • What is “good taste” in software engineering? - Programmer aesthetics: “your engineering taste is composed of the set of engineering values you find most important.” // And: “most bad taste comes from inflexibility. I will always distrust engineers who justify decisions by saying ‘it’s best practice.’ No engineering decision is ‘best practice’ in all contexts! You have to make the right decision for the specific problem you’re facing.”

  • Book Review: “Doughnut Economics” - “Doughnut Economics is based around an important insight: Diagrams are powerful marketing tools.” // And, from the book reviewed: “Visual frames, it gradually dawned on me, matter just as much as verbal ones…[N]ow is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times”

Flywheel Fancies - who Econ-diagramed it better?

Wastebook

  • “One of the things we must always keep in mind is that press releases are written to persuade.” // We should call them “persuasion releases.” Bogus.

  • Yes: ”Amara’s law and states: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” But: “The law has been used in explaining nanotechnology.” Roy Amara/wikipedia.

  • “online friendships are forever,” Internet-grass.

  • “A great deal of effort can be put into deciding to do nothing.”

  • “Complaining of SaaS pricing always smells a bit hackernews ‘I could build that entire business in a weekend and run it on a raspberry pi that I used to control my cat’s smart litterbox with.’” JasonJ.

  • “Daddy?” “Yeah?” “You need to learn how to not fart.” // Children are implicitly asked to give their opinion with no take-backs from parents.

  • Raise your hand if Passkeys work flawlessly for you as much as usernames and password. Yup. Moving on…

Conferences

Coming up next week…

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

I’m onto a new theory for my own enjoyment of solo roleplaying D&D. I think the rail-roady ones are easiest and most fun. They work well with the Mythic Game Master Emulator and ChatGPT. I’ll have to experiment more. The mechanics of it and what works or doesn’t is good input for understanding what exactly to do with generative AI. Hopefully I’ll have enough to surface in my talk at AI for the Rest of Us, next month.

Everybody talks about digital transformation, but nobody does anything about it.

Recording of my AI platform engineering talk

This is a new talk of mine going over how platform engineers can support AI. Well, it’s more about how we don’t exactly know, but we can speculate based on a handful of early use cases. Here’s the slides if you’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s the 🤖 on my key points:

  1. Platform engineering for AI is mostly running another middleware service - same infrastructure tasks as always, plus model registries and figuring out who handles AI safety evaluations.

  2. Put a gateway/proxy in the middle immediately - the eternal computing lesson we relearn every five years: never let developers talk directly to services or you’re stuck sending angry emails.

  3. Three new types of customers for platform teams - developers who want AI coding help, “normals” using internal ChatGPT for business tasks, and the mythical “AI embedded in applications” unicorn nobody can actually find.

  4. Platform-as-a-product thinking applies here too - make something developers actually want to use, get lawyers and security on your approval board to avoid the old “center of killing dreams” problem.

  5. Experiment rapidly when you don’t know what you’re doing - which is right now for everyone, so build fast feedback cycles rather than one perfect thing that takes forever and turns out wrong.

Check it out, and tell me if you have any things you’ve learned, heard, done’d, etc. on the topic.

Are you enjoying the widgets?

This week’s Software Defined Talk:

This week, we cover Oracle’s OpenAI deal, the RubyGems drama, and Atlassian buying DX. Plus, does anyone still use widgets?

Like and subscribe, hey guys!

Also, don’t forget to check out the sister-show, Software Defined Interviews with Whitney Lee and me. For example, in the last episode we talked with Hannah Foxwell about, I don’t know, everyday AI stuff. New interviews come out every two weeks, usually on Wednesdays at 7:30am Amsterdam time. Subscribe to auto-pilot your mid-week enjoyment.

Relative to your interests

Lots of “measure the ROI of AI is very difficult” vibes below.

Class slides: “Cradle of Modernity,” Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, September 14, 2025, University of Pennsylvania

Wastebook

GDPVAL paper from OpenAI, 2025.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Saturday night dinner. The perfect dish to smuggle in some broccoli and mushrooms. Sadly, the children found the mushrooms.

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I’m continuing revivifying of my blog. It has most of the links and things you find here, but a few different things. In particular, I’ve given myself the freedom to picture dump there. It can be annoying to see duplication in a newsletter and a blog, but if you don’t care, here’s the RSS to subscribe to it.

Meanwhile, I finally got better audio gear after…15 years? I have a Rodecaster Duo and a Rode PodMic. You can hear the results in this week’s SDT opening. Since then, I think I’ve tuned it even better, so we’ll see. Overall, I really like it. There are other fun benefits like being able to pipe audio into Zoom calls and stuff. With a select few, playing the sad trombone at just the right part in corporate complaining is key to long-term enterprise friendships.

For the audio-heads out there, if you have excellent taste in music, like I do, you’ll really like this remastered classic. I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and this version has a new soundscape to it.

Workers controlling the means of ROI

The Golden Era of PaaS is Still Here

I’m playing around with trying to, I don’t know, re-introduce the notion of PaaS to the platform discussion. I don’t think what’s going on now is as good as it could be. I mean, yeah, I’m biased. But, you know, also biased to awesome.

As you may recall from last episode, I cleaned my desk. You can see that in action here. My audio there was crap, but I wanted to get onto my weekend. Subsequently, I got a bunch of new audio gear.

You get the AI you deserve

Looking at the recent skepticism and elusive ROI for enterprise AI (see some links below!), here’s three theoretic takes from me over on my weblog. Plus, one of Andrew’s best PowerPoint-jokes.

Relevant to your interests

From Robert Brook.

Wastebook

  • “audio-first creators” Descript release notes.

  • “Our parenting hack of the year so far is having cut vegetables ready at the table when our kids get home from school. The percentage of vegetables consumed is up like 10x” Good tokens 2025–09–26.

  • “The Concorde was fast, but not that fast. It could go from New York to Paris in just over 3 hours. The starry-eyed futurists of the song could be forgiven for expecting things to get even better. But even when oil prices were cheap, it was just too expensive to run, so we gave up on that dream, and now are lucky to travel that distance in 7 hours.” // Boooo! Commentary on “I.G.Y.”

  • “Very often, you need great audiences to have great art.” Tyler.

  • And at, don’t sweat the small stuff: “people judge things at the margin, right? In a friendship, or marriage, or if you have co-founders. At the margin, am I getting what I want? And, getting out of that mindset is very difficult.”

  • “Juice Jacking” is a problem.

  • “How many $18 glasses of natural wine can you drink while friends relay the latest upsetting news they gleaned from X, Instagram, and TikTok…” the new lost generation

Image may contain Furniture Bed Bedroom Indoors Room and Bench
Museum ‘t Fiskershúske.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

This probably isn’t the first time there’s been an Tim & Eric reference in corporate content, but it’s the first time I’ve slipped one in.

AI Center of Excellence Gatekeepers Guild

Getting over the AI policy board bottleneck

Also, people have suggested that have just two roles on the AI Center of Excellence Gatekeepers Guild is a good idea. Those two roles being security and legal. The theory is that the security people are used to this kind of thing and have processes in place. Also, that they are narrowly focused on a handful of things. You need the lawyers for all the whacky IP stuff. Hopefully they focus most on licenses. I think what you probably want to avoid in the AI policy board is focusing on endless hypotheticals about what can go wrong and ways of preventing them. But, who knows at this point?

Relative to your interests

  • Unlocking content potential: a report on organising structures and capability - not sure about tue conclusions, but good for the archives.

  • The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet - “French cover design can be unsympathetic to cover illustration, crowding the paintings with poor type choices and purposeless graphics.” // Great looking paperback covers. // That basic framing would be good for video thumbnails…?

  • Manton predicts the AI oligopoly - “I’m increasingly thinking that we’ll have OpenAI and Google for the mainstream, Anthropic carving out an enterprise niche, Meta doing the ads thing, open source models… and the rest of the industry is going to fade away.”

  • The new Lost Generation - What people without kids are up to. “Must be nice,” etc.

  • How Target is rethinking search for generative AI - 🤖 To stay ahead, Target is training its AI agents to understand product context deeply and surface assortments that reflect how people shop in the real world. Bhosale gave an example of a “summer party” query that should generate not just tableware, but grills, décor, sunscreen, and more—a holistic, curated experience.

  • 🤖 Shaping the Future of VMware Cloud Foundation: Broadcom’s Focused Strategy for VMware Cloud Service Providers - Broadcom outlines its plan to consolidate VMware Cloud partners, emphasizing quality, customer value, and strategic growth for its VCF 9.0 ecosystem.

  • AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity - “We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” And: “Each incidence of workslop carries real costs for companies. Employees reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with each instance of workslop.” Related: “It turns out having an always-available ‘marriage therapist’ with a sycophantic instinct to always take your side is catastrophic for relationships.” // Some additional shitting all over AI if you’re into that.

  • I Blame the AI - “Accountability sinks are systems designed so that when things go wrong, no individual human can be held responsible for fixing them. He argues that ‘decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen.’” So, therefore: “Redesigning roles and AI systems with human overrides will be essential to ensuring accountability. At least for now, every key decision still needs a person behind it & maybe that’s enough to rebook quickly enough to get home for dinner.”

  • The intelligence is in the user - The robot is only as good as what you bring to it. Related:

  • The Man Calling Bullshit on the AI Boom - “To what end? What happened there? Because we get all these stories about ‘Oh, they fed all the data into the LLM,’ and then what?”'// Plus, a list of previous big tech things that have been utter bullshit.

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Lots of time to catch-up on things this week. You know, the “important, but not urgent” quadrant.

The Larry King. Lean in when you want to say, “hey, but, for real…”

For example, I setup my desk so that I can do the Larry King video style. You know, leaning on the desk. Dan often does this, so does Noah, and Whitney. People tell me this is better. And, as a viewer, I do like that look more.

So many links, so many finds

PaaS Talk

We’re trying to amp up more technical explanations and demos of why Tanzu Platform/Cloud Foundry are great. Here is a little front-runner for a demo I’m going to extract from this same talk.

Relative to your interests

I didn’t take the time to organize these by topic. Apologies and kisses.

  • UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI - ‘The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”. The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated.’

  • Java 25: Oracle Makes Java Easier To Learn, Ready for AI Development

  • Atlassian acquires developer productivity startup DX for $1B - A little bit on DX’s product.

  • I think “agent” may finally have a widely enough agreed upon definition to be useful jargon now - “[AI ‘agents’ are] Tools in a loop to achieve a goal… wiring up tools to an LLM in order to achieve goals using those tools in a bounded loop.” // Also, he’s not a fan of the “autonomous” vision, which feels right. // “This category of agent remains science fiction. If your agent strategy is to replace your human staff with some fuzzily defined AI system (most likely a system prompt and a collection of tools under the hood) you’re going to end up sorely disappointed.” // “If someone surveys Fortune 500s about their ‘agent strategy’ there’s a good chance that’s what is being implied. Good luck getting a clear, distinct answer from them to the question ‘what is an agent?’ though!” // Sadly, this implies that McConaughey will still find dinner reservations tricky. // Other opinions differ.

  • Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B - That’s a good match, and a quick exit.

  • 🤖 Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption: “Enterprise deployment via Anthropic’s API exposes a different facet: businesses adopt AI programmatically to automate. 77% of API usage is automation-dominant, particularly in coding, debugging, office administration, and recruitment. Surprisingly, firms are not especially price-sensitive; higher-cost tasks see higher adoption if they deliver economic value. Yet complex, high-impact deployments are constrained by context—firms need to restructure data flows and centralize knowledge to fully unlock AI potential. Without this, sophisticated tasks remain underutilized, delaying broader productivity diffusion.”

  • Anthropic lets Claude remember previous interactions to streamline work - Including, and using, past chats in your current chat. Always a great, helpful feature.

  • Slowing Down - How to avoid burnout as you get more successful at life.

  • Gartner predicts 40% of enterprise apps will feature AI agents by 2026 - “Enterprise applications are entering a new phase of automation, with Gartner forecasting that 40 percent of them will include task-specific AI agents by 2026 – up from less than 5 percent today.” And: “By 2035, the firm predicts, agentic AI will account for nearly $450 billion in enterprise software revenue, or 30 percent of the market.” // Some predictions about broad uses as well. The uses are mostly (all?) the idea of having an assistant in your tasks, yes, a “copilot.”

  • School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study - Update on the young people and those damn video games. // “There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.” // See Tyler Cowen’s disclaimer. // I mean, it could be one of those “phones don’t ruin kids lives, kids using phones to ruin their lives ruins their lives” situations.

  • Even fantasy money can buy lots of power – ask Larry Ellison - “But serious questions remain over whether OpenAI has got the money. Its revenue is reportedly just $10 billion annually while it is not expected to make a profit until at least 2029. It is likely to get around $30 billion from another VC round and SoftBank, an early backer, might cough up more cash. Still, it seems a long way from the $300 billion it needs to pay Oracle, if Big Red’s forcasts are ever to become reality.” // Also Larry wants to rebuild Oxford, England.

  • Introducing the MCP Registry - ”The preview emphasizes federated discovery rather than a single walled list. The team describes the official service as a “primary source of truth” that public marketplaces and private enterprise sub-registries can mirror and extend, all against a shared OpenAPI. There’s a moderation process (including deny-listing) and, for now, a clear caveat about breaking changes and no durability guarantees during the preview period. The code and API surface are open, with the reference implementation and schema published on GitHub and a hosted API for client integration.” How To Build Agentic AI That Ships - The New Stack - “Ninety-five percent of AI initiatives should be expected to fail as long as we ignore these pitfalls: Models are generic. Enterprises are unique. Ideal use cases aren’t flashy. Coordination across teams is hard.” // Lots of other good executive think too, especially being blind to how complex the overall system is w/r/t dependencies. // Also notable is that, technology aside, these are all the concerns of “digital transformation.”

  • macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica review - Check out the extended overview of the new Spotlight features/changes if you’re into launchers.

  • Most Work is Translation - This is a great metaphor: ”To me, LLMs have the potential to be the Babel fish of work, the little creature from Hitchhiker’s Guide that instantly translates whatever goes into your ear. Except here, it’s not speech alone. It’s papers into briefs, meetings into memos, data into charts, ideas into roadmaps etc.” // So much of knowledge work figuring out what the fuck people are saying and what you should do. And, on the other end, figuring out how tell people that. Using GenAI to de-BS business talk, and hopefully generate more actionable (hah!) talk would be great.

  • 🤖 What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers. – OpenAI’s first usage study reveals ChatGPT’s massive growth, demographic shifts, and main use cases. // More concise list of uses here. // And, the actual study.

  • Dan Moren’s iOS 26 Review - “It’s one of the very best, most thoughtful, most useful changes in iOS 26.” // I didn’t notice this, and it is nice of you so a lot of things with text and other content on your phone (like link blogging).

  • Treat your to-read pile like a river - ”To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).” // Be comfortable with a to didn’t read list.

  • 32 notes on AI & writing - “AI is better than most humans at producing prose. In a couple years, it will be better than most ‘professional writers’ as well. Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information as clearly as possible.” // We should be using AI for corporate communication without shame. There is little value in internal, corporate communication to be “genuine.” The very important except is when you lay people off. // That said: I should test this theory by having Gemini rewrite my inner-comms for a week.

  • The Ditherinator - Convert your photos to shitty old versions that will print well on dot matrix printers. Love it.

  • Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships - “If you want the software to get updated—to have bugs fixed and security vulnerabilities patched—you want something very different. What you want is an ongoing supply of software, not a copy of a specific software artifact.” // A good overview of updating OSS software versus a one-time download and continuous use. Paying for support is one way to get the actual “supply chain” benefits enterprises and auditors crave. // The next question is: is it the job or the people running the project to do this supply chain stuff?

  • Marriott checks out AI agents amid technology transformation

  • Occupying TikTok with love - “And TikTok is full of advice about how to break out of this ‘200 views jail’ - have a niche, have a hook, look at trends - but maybe instead we could just think ‘how beautiful, TikTok are going to share my thing with 200 random people scattered around the earth’. It’s not a jail, it’s a window. (Or it’s a jail with a window)”

  • Do Not Shred Your Fingers In An Actual Blender - “Yes, sometimes LLMs can simulate humans. Yes, sometimes those simulations can be useful. But be wary of a simulation if you can’t verify its accuracy/efficacy. When you cannot yet distinguish fact from fiction, relying on a fiction pump seems unwise.”

  • Pentagon research official wants to have AI on every desktop in 6 to 9 months - “‘We want to have an AI capability on every desktop — 3 million desktops — in six or nine months,’ Michael said during a Politico event on Tuesday. ‘We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company … for intelligence and for warfighting.’”

  • Java 25: Oracle’s Big-Tent Release—and a Clearer Roadmap for What’s Next - “Java’s momentum (by the numbers and the vibe) Oracle cited a 2025 VDC study claiming 73 billion active JVMs and reiterated Java’s position as the ‘#1 enterprise language.’”

  • Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B - That’s a good match, and a quick exit.

  • The Post-AI Org Chart - The people need to stop saying the quiet part out-loud about job loss. The focus should be on doing more with what you have, not doing the same with less people. But, hey, investors, amiright?! // “This configuration reduces headcount (1:7:49 -> 1:7:14) by 53%.”

Found by Julian Simpson.

Wastebook

  • “A man who had over the course of a week absorbed, as by osmosis, the Spirit of the Internet. And that is a foul, foul thing.” a slightly embarrassed announcement

  • When you meet a new person in your field, one easy small talk question to ask them is: “if you were [insert your company name here], what would you do?” It gets you some free consulting, lets someone talk about themselves and things they know, and, you know, just gives you something to talk about that fills the silence.

  • “Data, Bratwurst and Beer. The perfect combination!” Here.

  • “advanced Unicode manipulation” Glitch.

  • “I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I doing with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.” // This person’s linkblog style is next-level.

  • Does anyone really want air hand-dryers around? I mean, they’re loud and they don’t work. You might as well have a sign that says “dry your hands off on your clothes.”

  • “My phone -and I realise this is mildly absurd - is a constant slight disappointment to me. But I’m from the generation that thought we’d have the world on our wrist.” W.E.

  • “you should be very suspicious that the smart phone banners take absolutely no interest in measuring their possible benefits.” From the comments

  • “the boring Macedonian dentist” Sly Tyler.

  • “I code therefore I Claude” Weekend Reading.

  • “Is Observability just the GenZ version of ‘export to CSV’? Many people are asking.” Brian.

  • Waiting for the Eurostar in that little space - both at Centraal and St Pancras - crammed in with your fellow humans isn’t Brueghel. It’s Bosch.

  • When you meet a new person in your field, one easy small talk question to ask them is: “if you were [insert your company name here], what would you do?” It gets you some free consulting, lets someone talk about themselves and things they know, and, you know, just gives you something to talk about that fills the silence.

  • “linguistic pyrotechnics” // Chatty-G tries to explain to me why I don’t like contemporary hip-hop: “In other words: 2001 is like taking a fat blunt and then hitting the studio with laser precision. Post Malone is like nodding off on codeine in the back of an Uber.”

  • “A person dies, but capital is forever.” // And, when the worker becomes the self-manager. Capitalism and the Death Drive

  • There is wide agreement that AMS<->LCY is the perfect flight.

From M. Cathcart, 1978.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

Here are two new web site things:

  1. I created a new blog for dumping pictures. That is, not just “nice” ones, but pictures I think are fun, curiosities, etc.: “Here you will find a stream of photos and other visual from me unless noted otherwise. I have another blog, but in the spirit of “pictures as a wastebook,” this one is for dumping all of the pictures and other media. Most of these photos are ones taken or made by me, but sometimes there’s something from beyond me that’s just too good not to share.” // I am always hesitant to split content, but ever since I stopped paying for and using Flickr, I haven’t had a place like that. So I think it will be fine.

  2. I’ve come up with a great way to summarize articles with ChatGPT. This is thanks to the new Use Model shortcut in Apple Shortcuts. It makes doing it super easy and doesn’t fill up your ChatGPT session with one off chats. I added saving the summaries to Obsidian, like a good little information hoarder. I also experimented with posting some of the summaries to my blog (see here). I aspire for my blog to be as much of my “off board brain” as possible (only public stuff), so this seems natural for me. I enjoy scrolling through the river of other people’s stuff. But maybe it’s a bad idea, unethical even! I’m not sure about either. What do you think?

Getting a slice of the Kubernete$ management pie

Kubernetes mows down the competition.

How big the Kubernetes market?

TAM-time for managing Kubernetes:

The container management market has grown more than 20% over the past year, with a market value of over $2.5 billion in 2024. The market is forecast to exceed $4.5 billion in constant currency by 2028, with a 17.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Gartner, August, 2025.

That TAM means that every vendor looking to sell Kubernetes is competing for slice of $3bn to $4bn pie. So, take the marketshare of Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Red Hat, VMware, and nine other vendors that made the MQ cut. Assume that the top three have something like 30% o 40% of the market divided among them. Then the next three have 15% to 20% divided among them. And the remaining nine divide up 10% to 14% of the market.

Doesn’t sound like a lot of revenue per vendor unless you’re way on top.

Now, you could say “but Kubernetes drives all sorts of other product/service usage.” Indeed! You could say that.

Also, what exactly is “container management”? It is this:

Container management automates the provisioning, operation and life cycle management of containerized workloads at scale. Centralized governance and security policies are used to manage container workloads and associated resources. Container management supports the requirements of modern applications (also refactoring legacy applications), including platform engineering, cloud management and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Benefits include improved agility, elasticity and access to innovation.

Also, I suppose if you sold just a Kubernetes distro but not tools to manage it, that would cash would not be included. And, then there’s paying just to run Kubernetes, whether in public cloud or in things like VMware/VCF. But, that might count as “operation.” There are also components for Kubernetes you might sell: storage, networking. There are more pies!

I confess I didn’t spend a lot of time figuring this all out.

App Share

How many apps run on Kubernetes versus other types of infrastructure (VMs, public or private cloud; bare metal; mainframes, etc.)?

Some numbers by AI workloads:

  • “By 2028, 95% of new AI deployments will use Kubernetes, up from less than 30% today.” Gartner, August, 2025.

  • Back in Dec, 2024: “by 2027, more than 75% of all AI/ML deployments will use container technology as the underlying compute environment, which is a major increase from fewer than 50% in 2024.” Gartner, December, 2024.

How about apps/workloads in general? This is a very difficult number to find.

I found this number back in August, 2023, but the link to the Gartner source is busted:

  • “By 2027, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10% in 2021.” Gartner, can’t find original.

  • About two years back, one infrastructure analyst I talked with estimated that 10% to 20% of apps ran on Kubernetes.

Here is what the robots think:

  • ChatGPT 5: “So maybe 10% to 20% of apps globally are running on Kubernetes, with the rest on VMs, bare-metal, other cloud platforms.”

  • Claude Sonnet 4: “Based on the available data, I’d estimate something like this for production enterprise applications globally:…Containers (mostly Kubernetes): 30% to 40%…Traditional VMs: 50% to 60% // Bare metal: 5% to 10%…Serverless/PaaS: 5% to 10%…The container percentage is growing rapidly (probably 15–20% annually), while VM usage is slowly declining but still dominant in large enterprises with legacy applications.”

Each did a search for surveys and came up with a model. The robots can’t find (or don’t like to find) the likes of Gartner and IDC, so they often pull from some weird sources.

Fatteh experiment on September 8th, 2025. Added purple onions to the pine-nut roasting: good result.

Original Content

Some things I’ve made since last time:

  • YOLO acquisitions, Software Defined Talk #537: “This week, we dig into Atlassian buying The Browser Company, whether Pay Per Crawl makes sense, and Oracle’s cloud jackpot. Plus, a quick lesson in Aussie slang.”

  • What Platform Engineers Need to Know about GenAI Security and Compliance, video interview: “AI is a new workload for many platform engineers, developers, security people, and, well, just about everyone. When it comes to minding security and compliance needs, what needs to get done? In this discussion, Coté talks with Chris Cropper and David Zendzian about just this. Chris draws on his experience working with the US military's Software Factory, and David draws from his long history in security. Among other things, they talk about how AI can enhance cybersecurity practices, the significance of continuous compliance, and the necessity of legal and security oversight.”

  • If you can’t be bothered to watch a lot, here is a short video from that interview.

Relative to your interests

  • When the AI policy board is slowing everything down.

  • Goldman Sachs bankers explore limits of AI: ‘The risk is over-reliance’ - Some enterprise uses of AI. In this case, it feels like it’s all just using a chat app integrated with data - if even that! “Goldman rolled out its generative AI-powered platform – GS AI Assistant – to all its roughly 46,000 employees in June, telling staff the aim was for it to help with tasks such as summarising complex documents, drafting content and performing data analysis.” And: “They offer enormous efficiency gains, such as drafting documents for an initial public offering in minutes that previously would have taken months, or quickly sketching out a multiyear investment plan. But they can lack the personal nuance that is crucial in a demanding client service business such as banking, which commands multimillion-dollar fees.” Also: “So far she says AI has helped her do her job in four key ways: getting quick answers to complex technical questions; summarising the key points within dense documents; editing and polishing her own written work; and brainstorming. Time saved can be spent with colleagues and clients.”

  • Agents show promise, but widespread usage in the enterprise remains elusive - "A PwC survey of 300 executives in May found: ‘Almost nine out of 10 executives surveyed (88%) say their companies plan to up their AI-related budgets this year due to agentic AI.” Yet, in spite of this optimism, 68% of respondents said that “half or fewer of their employees interact with agents in their everyday work.’ While 35% reported broad adoption, most companies are not using agentic AI at scale. PwC also found that 18% weren’t using agents at all—a state the report authors called completely lacking in vision.” // In 2026, I’d like to see a lot more coverage about the actual enterprise AI apps people are building and running.

  • The Last Days Of Social Media - If true, this is probably great. Obvs people engaging with each other - with strangers - on social media is too risky for society: “People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.” (Via Russel Davies.)

  • How the Sun Microsystems acquisition made Oracle the cloud company it is today

  • Spring AI 1.1.0-M1 Available Now - Looks like great additions for MCP.

  • The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security - An IT modernization tale, with both technology and culture. Lots of crazy tales and quotes, as you’d expect from a saga that involves a character named “Big Balls.” Meanwhile:

  • Why CIOs can’t afford another modernization failure in 2026 - ”Gartner estimates that up to 70% of large-scale digital transformation and modernization initiatives fail to deliver their intended outcomes. That number has hovered stubbornly high for years, but the stakes in 2026 are different.”

  • How our Edge Kubernetes Platform has Evolved - Update on the Chick-fil-a Kubernetes, edge stuff.

  • AirPods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users With EU Apple Accounts - “won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU.”

  • Gabe Rivera’s 20-year-old headline site, Techmeme, has never been hotter. - “Today the only full time employees besides him are Horvitz and two full time editors. The rest of the staff – a book keeper and the remaining 23 editors – are part time working remotely in enough different time zones to supply Techmeme and Mediagazer with near 24×7 coverage.”

  • Cracker Barrel halts remodels after logo backlash, lackluster test - If your deal is nostalgia for another time (imagined on real), your customers are likely conservative regarding modernizing. They want things to stay the same, the job to be done, brand wise, is a nostalgia experience. Hopefully the food has good price/performance too.

Fatteh experiment on September 14th, 2025.

Wastebook

  • “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than running my dad’s Hooters.” Matthew Prince.

  • “Chicken-fried gravy steak.”

  • “Music for Claude Coding.” Long pauses.

  • “I was drinking coffee because I was tired, and I was tired because I was drinking coffee. Can not drinking nearly two liters of coffee every day improve your sleep quality? Big if true.” Less Coffee, Better Sleep.

  • This is the kind of thing the Internet was made for, with that “one person can do a thing” vibe. Plus, this is the kind of music I go nuts for.

  • "The last thing I bought and loved was a sauna. It came on a truck from Sweden. It looks like a little troll barrel and I have it in my garden by one of the two lakes. It’s admittedly a faff, because you have to build a fire, then come back in the house and wait for it to heat up. But there’s nothing else to do where I live, in Northamptonshire. And it’s nice when people stay, because it means there is an activity to break up the wine drinking.” // And: “enforced gift giving around Christmas and birthdays is a bourgeois horror.” Edie Campbell’s supermodel secret[s]

Fatteh experiment on September 15th, 2025. Used Turkish yoghurt, mistake: stick to Greek. Avocado with fleur de sel was nice.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

After interviewing Manton Reece for Software Defined Interviews,1 last week, I started looking back into using micro.blog more.2 That’s where I host my blog and home page on the World Wide Web. I’ve been posting links (the ones you find here!) in there, old-school blogger style. I’ve now got it setup to put wastebook entries in there, and have been posting some other things. Check it out if you really want the dual-firehose (it’s got RSS too, of course).

I migrated my Mastodon account to just use micro.blog’s thing. It’s sort of a weird Mastodon implementation: you don’t get the standard Mastodon UI. You know, I get a lot of “engagement” in Maston, but I don’t really feel like I’ve figured out how to be a consumer in that community. Also, I added back in Threads cross-posting: people started liking stuff a lot in that place!

Anyhow. I’m still posting most all my stuff, including links, in all the places. The newsletter, here, then, is like a digest of all that.

//

I’ve been figuring out how to make fatteh, three of the attempts pictured above. As with many dishes, it seems there is no one, true way to make it. I’m trying to make one that I like. I started roasting the pine-nuts in ghee, and that is too much. I switched to using the air fryer to make the pita chips (related), and that’s nice. In the last attempts I think I cracked it (for my tastes, at least): roasted the pine-nuts in chili infused olive oil. I have not made it with ground lamb (nor beef). That seems like it’d be awesome, what with all the lamb-y grease.

//

Thank you for reading my newsletter. It appears either in your email, my blog, or your RSS feeds.

1

To be published Oct 15th. Subscribe to get it then, plus two other shows in between now and then. Also, the whole back-catalog.

2

My pal Robert Brook summarizes why to use micro.blog over others well: “I trust Manton’s choices.” Something like that, at least. Manton is always trying out new things in new ways. A good tinkerer.

Why you should buy your internal developer platform

Building your own internal developer platform is a lot of work, buy it instead

Here’s a transcript:

One of the reasons internal developer platforms are so valuable is because they do so much, and that’s something that you run into if you’re trying to build your own platform instead of buy it.

The goal of a platform

The goal of a platform is to remove as much toil wait time, just nonsense work that a developer has to do just to get their applications into production, just to actually run them and configure them.

You want your developers building their apps, not building production or configuring their apps. That’s how you make the business better by changing the applications around, and that’s exactly what a platform is targeting

With your ideal platform, a developer can write their application and then just deploy it without even having to worry about building containers or how it’s packaged, how it’s deployed.

Building your own platform

Now a lot of people think they can get away with building their own platform.

Usually people who set themselves up for this journey don’t realize how much a platform does.

If you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s

platform reference architecture, you can get a notion of everything that a platform does. Also imagine each of these little components have to be integrated together and also work with the existing systems that you have in your organization.

Now you look at all this stuff, you’ve got middleware, security management, you’ve even got things like the build tool chain, what a lot of people will call the “golden path” or a pipeline in there.

You now own the entire platform

So let’s say you’ve built all of this, this platform.

That’s just the beginning. You now have to update it. You’ve gotta monitor what works and doesn’t work. You’ve gotta a product manage it. Not only update bugs that you have, definitely apply security patches.

Think about that across all of the different boxes that you have. Also make it compliant, pass whatever audits that you have.

But you need to add actual new functionality that your developers need.

Right now we’re in the middle of a great example of that, adding AI functionality.

What does it even mean to add AI to a platform?

(We’ve got some good ideas at Tanzu.)

But you owning the platform, having built it, you need to add that in, understand it, add that functionality in, and totally own that process.

Chances are high. You haven’t thought about how much work it is to build your own platform. Like a lot of teams I’ve talked with, you probably have a smaller scope, like thinking that it’s just putting Kubernetes out there, maybe with some pipeline integration and doing a baseline container image that your developers use.

But it’s a lot of work as you can see, and when you think about it, it’s nothing that’s gonna differentiate your business, make your business run better.

Year Zero

In fact, it’s gonna be a huge distraction and something that’s probably gonna take you at least a year to get out there. It’s gonna hold you back from improving the way your organization runs.

Just like any kind of undifferentiated thing, it’s basic strategy to not do it yourself and instead offload it to someone else.

More in the paper

If you’re considering building your own platform, obviously I don’t recommend it and I think it’s a bad idea.

Now, if you wanna see some other reasons why I think that, you can check out a free paper that we have going over six other reasons and ways of thinking about the build versus buy choice, I think the answer’s pretty clear. You can get that paper for free if you go to cote.io/diy …and, really, buy the platform.

tytus-7
Watercolors of Tytus Brzozowski.

Relative to your interests

Always lots of AI stuff, this week more tempering expectations, and the usual how to stuff.

  • Breaking the AI illusion: From adoption to growth - Garbage in, garbage out: “37% of midmarket CMOs believe AI-enabled marketing technologies have potential to help their organizations over the next 12–18 months, according to the Midmarket survey. This includes incorporating tools and workflows to boost content creation and automate campaigns, critical elements of modern marketing success. Still, only 31% of the same CMOs are prioritizing the modernization of their MarTech stacks. This is a crucial metric. Without updated systems and integrated data pipelines, even the most sophisticated AI tools remain disconnected from broader workflows, limiting their value.”

  • All IT work to involve AI by 2030, says Gartner - ‘AI’s hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren’t breaking even on AI investments." And: "Plummer said Gartner doesn’t foresee an “AI jobs bloodbath” in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI.’ // Still figuring out the ROI.

  • The Three Faces Of Generative AI - “People today use large language models for three central purposes: 1) Getting things done 2) Developing thoughts, and 3) Love and companionship.”

  • What if the AI stockmarket blows up? - ‘By our reckoning, the total revenue from the tech accruing to the West’s leading AI firms is currently $50bn a year. Although such revenues are growing fast, they are still less than 2% of the $2.9trn investment in new data centres globally that Morgan Stanley, another bank, forecasts between 2025 and 2028—a figure which excludes energy costs. Meanwhile, the extent to which revenues will translate into profits is murky. A recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that 95% of organisations are getting “zero return” from investments in generative AI.’

  • How I Use Claude - “Claude is really good at helping here, mostly because thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else. Claude lets me sample fresh perspectives and possible actions I had not thought of.”

  • An ode to “via” - ‘the old ways’ - there are so many of these little things from the 2000’s web/bloggosphere.

  • Oxide Friday FAQs - These are clever/amazing “brand marketing” assets. You take advantage of a unique and famous asset you have (Bryan) and get some thought leadership and brand definition out there. Also, they have the product right there the whole time.

  • Blade Runner makes its live-action return next year - 2026 in Amazon.

Being a VC - Software Defined Interviews

Generated by Adobe Express.

In last week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with Rachel Chalmers. I’ve know Rachel a long time. I’d followed her as an analyst and talked her here and there at conferences. Then in a chance meeting in a hotel lobby in San Francisco, she accidentally recruited me to take over her job at 451 Research when she was going off into VC-land. In the interview we talked about lot of VC stuff, and, of course, a few other topics like horses.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

tytus-5
Watercolors of Tytus Brzozowski.

Logoff

Next week I’m back to business travel, in London for two of the conferences above. I’m scheduled to take the train for that trip and the next two. This means it’ll be more work to get my status with KLM. Is that bad? Is it good? Traveling by train is so much nicer and, I presume, earth friendly. It’s not always cheaper, which is odd, but I guess the way of the pricing. But, it so much more pleasant.

Highlights from VMware Explore

Summer. For most of my life I lived in Texas, where the heat of summer melts your face off. Summer was fun because I wasn’t in school, not because it was sunny. Now that I live in a part of the world where summer is mild, I really like summer. I see what all the fuss was about! So, too bad it’s mostly over now.

On this week’s Software Defined Talk episode we discuss the effectiveness of reorgs, Meta’s new AI team, and the Google antitrust ruling. Plus, some strong thoughts on cold brew and bathtubs. Listen in, and you can also watch the unedited video recording if you’re into that kind of thing.

Wastebook

  • “Buy once, cry once.”

  • “My sister loves all orphans.” RotL, #592.

  • “If you’re good at sleep, you like sleep.” Ibid.

  • The reviews of this airport are amazing. As one “just fine” review puts it: “You have to have a good sense of humor and low expectations at this airport.” I’ve been a frequent business traveler for 20 years, and I like, and try to live, that idea: have a good sense of humor. If you have that when you’re traveling, you’ll have a good time. If not, you’re just asking to be upset. The people who left bad reviews of that hilarious airport are obviously not a golfer.

  • “they are funny, shrewd and clear-eyed about aging, taking in the good (lunchtime drinking, caring less about others’ opinions) and the bad (everything else).” The Economist World in Brief, August 28th, 2025.

  • “A demon buried in a glowing glass container.” Warren Ellis.

  • An old Italian man at the beach standing, talking with his older friends - men and women - just lets out a huge, sonorous fart. Chao!

  • “At least nobody gave him any solid gold statues this time, as far as I know.” With venom dripping. And:

  • “Bill Gates was also there for some reason.”

I like these old junction boxes (?) in towns, especially Europe where they tend to be very old and have interesting font choices and logos from older national power companies. It's hard to capture whatever the essence is that like in a photo. From Robert Brook.

Relative to your interests

  • The Tanzu portfolio no longer includes Kubernetes. Hear an overview from the Tanzu GM, Purnima Padmanabhan. // Over the past, I don’t know, 4 or 5 years, the company and now business unit that I work in was the home of Kubernetes in VMware. This made “Tanzu” synonymous with Kubernetes. Now, the VMware Kubernetes products have been moved to the VMware group, out of Tanzu. And, that bundle of Kubernetes stuff is now called VMware Kubernetes Service, VKS. This brings the Tanzu business unit’s focus back to just platform for developers: the Cloud Foundry based PaaS, databases and data services, and now AI middleware. Also, check out Forrester’s portfolio overview.

  • New VMware private AI infrastructure rethinks Tanzu, again - “If you want to use Kubernetes as Kubernetes, then VCF, which includes VKS, is what you use.”

  • Private AI powers Broadcom’s vision for VCF 9.0 - “We shared we have more than 80 customers now,” for AI stuff, I believe he’s saying. // And: “The key thing with VCF that I think kind of gets missed sometimes in the conversations is everybody is claiming they can do sovereign cloud, but the details matter here,” Wolf said. “The difference with VCF is we run a fully air-gapped environment. The organization owns the control plane. That is absolute control that you have. No matter what happens in the world, you have ownership of the software stack and your intellectual property.”

  • VMware Explore US 2025 Breakout Session URLs - William Lam makes a simple, nicely usable list of all Explore sessions and links to slides. Every conference should have a page like this.

  • The Great Migration: Why Workloads Are Coming Home to Private Cloud - “55% of enterprises are already running GenAI in a private cloud – especially when it comes to use cases like inference, fine-tuning and RAG.”

  • With AI Boom, Dell’s Datacenter Biz Is Finally Bigger Than Its PC Biz - “Thanks to the GenAI boom, Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which sells servers, storage, switching, and services into the datacenter, is finally – and very likely permanently – larger than its PC business for the first time in its history. (We are not counting the time a decade and a half ago when Dell ate Perot Systems and was also eating software companies to try to create a clone of IBM, much as HPE did at the same time.)” // Weird parenthetical?

  • VCF And Private AI Take Center Stage At VMware Explore 2025 - “We believe that while the company has quietly designed and delivered the leading private cloud platform, it should be more vocal and direct in the market. While competitors claim to be the more affordable option, these claims are often based on upfront discounts that don’t fully account for cost over the long term. And while these competitors talk about vendor lock-in, they are in reality simply suggesting that customers move from one proprietary cloud stack to another.”

  • Is Your IT Organization A Ponzi Scheme? - “The only way out is to stop borrowing against the future and start paying down the past. Escaping requires sustained platform investment — enough to reach equilibrium where debt stops growing. This means: Refactoring to improve code structure and reduce the cost of future changes. Refreshing technologies before they become emergencies. Rationalizing redundant systems to reduce complexity and risk.”

  • Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well - The cycle of tech loosing its democratic morals in favor of tech innovation, and, of course, making money.

  • China Has a Different Vision for AI. It Might Be Smarter. - AI applications outside of the consumer sector: “In February, the city announced the release of an agricultural AI model, using technology from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which gives local farmers guidance on crop selection, planting and pest control, according to a local government report. The city’s meteorological service is using DeepSeek to improve the accuracy of weather reports. DeepSeek is also helping local police analyze case reports and decide how to respond to emergencies.”

  • Five Vide Coding Lessons for the Enterprise - If you start with a garbage system, you end up with garbage apps. // ‘In an enterprise, the “context window” isn’t just a technical term; it’s the accumulated technical debt, undocumented tribal knowledge, and complex dependencies that hold your systems together. A new developer or a new AI tool can’t simply be dropped in and expected to understand this history. The leader’s job is to provide that context, not expect the tool to figure it out.’

  • The End Of Business Apps As We Know Them Is Here - Kate Leggett (Forrester) has a go at defining the enterprise AI stack, bringing in the “fabric” notion.

  • Seeing like a software company - When management meddling slows down the business because they need/want to measure and make decide. Also, good sub-plot on “the meeting for the meeting,” prep meetings and using the “back-channel” to get things done.

From Robert Brook.

Conferences

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

I was on Cloud Foundry Weekly yesterday. I’ve been researching the role of platform engineers with respect to AI. There’s all sorts of things! Nick of the show put together a presentation of what he’s seen talking with our customers and also running AI services on his own. It was great, check it out if you’re interested in this topic.

The airwaves are always there

You should check this out:

You can try out our AI platform with a 90 day trial. It’ll host models in private cloud, act as a proxy to public models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, whatever), and has tight integration with Java apps. Python works fine too, of course: you can host LangChain in it to get management over all the AI goop. It’s all in the current version of the Tanzu Platform.

Wastebook

  • “Create chaos to preach order,” used by Dickerson on Political Gabfest, August 21st, 2025.

  • Overheard on the street: One dude: “The airwaves are everywhere…when you think about it.” Other dude, after a pause: “Even when you don’t.” Ponderous, man.

  • “it’s funny, refreshing even, how the rollercoaster of emotions this week was mostly driven by me creating things, not by a c-level executive’s decisions. my mistakes empowering me to level up and try again to make something people love, versus making me feel like i’m in trouble over something i don’t really even find joy in…this week had its challenges but it was necessary to remind me i’m on a very good path.” jenn schiffer

  • “shaped by the logic of viral web series like Skibidi Toilet”

  • And: “the issue with AI isn’t really about what it’s good for - it’s what are humans good for?”

  • He’s like the British Cory Doctrow, only much more chill.

  • “What is the point of that? Well, if we started asking for a point, the entire tech industry would collapse, wouldn’t it? Pretty much every bit of software (looking at you, ‘AI’) created in the last decade is the digital equivalent of a leaf blower; an expensive, noisy, anti-social, environmentally disastrous answer to a problem no one had.” Cartoon Gravity 37 // Really finding the tech-doubters this episode.

  • “As for that midlife crisis, I think it already happened last year internally. I picked up a few quotes from Carl Jung on the second part of life as the Awakening: the sudden realization past all that career and success gunning that suddenly you are standing in the future you once imagined, feeling that things you once thought would make you happy won’t matter as much. According to Jung, a midlife crisis isn’t a crisis, it’s an initiation” A rare Jung reference.

  • Tyler Cowen never (very rarely?) posts photos. Does he not take them? Does he not care? Does he not want to share them? What would they be like?

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.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

No links at the moment. Lots of conferences coming up in September, then more. See above. Maybe I’ll see you! We have some good Software Defined Interview episodes coming out over the next month too, and more were recoding. Catch-up with the back catalog and subscribe.

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