Coté

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?

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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.

“SOAP for AI tools cool cool."

Two quick things up top: in a little over a week we’re going to talk about what what us Tanzu folks been doing with enterprise AI, register to check it out online. Next month, at Cloud Foundry Day you can come to an in-person workshop for even more. I’ll be there, hopefully talking about the goblins and AI, as well as MC’ing.

Mole enchiladas at El Cerrito, Menlo Park, California.

Wastebook

  • “They’re not chasing perfection–they’re chasing momentum.” Om.

  • “[H]e led the team whose research convinced the UK government to legally recognize lobsters and octopuses as sentient beings.” To consider.

  • “I’m happy for u tho. or sorry that happened.” Universal reply algorithm for human interaction, April 1st.

  • “That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.” 'naner logic.

  • “SOAP for AI tools cool cool,” James Governor on MCP, I think.

  • “Does Mr Trump really think Americans would be better off if only they sewed their own running shoes?” The Economist in a maximum vitriol column.

  • “Cashless society could be why fewer kids are eating coins.” Unintended benefits…

  • “[K]eep vibe coding pure.” Escalated quickly.

Relative to your interests

  • Schooled by Trump, Americans are learning to dislike their allies - ‘last year 17% of Republicans viewed the EU as “unfriendly” or as an “enemy”; that has now grown to 29%.’

  • Public sector still hanging on to private cloud • The Register - ”While 80 percent of decision-makers in government bodies report using a hybrid cloud arrangement, 36 percent said their organization still operates an internal private cloud as their primary platform.” // You have to image that, now, this number will sustain and go higher for EU countries, anyone outside the US.

  • How the US Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence - ”U.S. adults as a whole – whose concerns over AI have grown since 2021 – are more inclined than experts to say they’re more concerned than excited (51% vs. 15% among experts).” OpenAI Embraces MCP: The Protocol Era of AI Has Arrived [www.layered.dev/openai-em...](https://www.layered.dev/openai-embraces-mcp-the-protocol-era-of-ai-has-arrived) Enterprise AI gateways.

  • Has VMware Finally Caught Up With Kubernetes? - ‘“Previously, there were multiple disparate APIs spread across different areas for VMs, containers and networking services,” Carr said. “The advantage of the new approach is the integration of Kubernetes and VMs APIs with a single operating model. This enables streamlined processes for both workloads.”’

  • Securing Spring AI MCP servers with OAuth2 - Add authentication to MCP agents. This has been the major piece missing for enterprise use.

  • We have to talk about AI “art” - No easy answers to this: “Artists are seeing their craft threatened by the careless complicity of those who use machines as some kind of art vending machine. It’s disturbing and scary, and when you consider that this is tied to people’s livelihoods, it can be painful to see.”

  • Flood The Zone - The “bullshit singularity: infinite bullshit at zero-cost” // Understanding the utility of Frankfurtian “bullshit” is an under appreciated thought technology. If you can spot it, you can analyze it and figure out if you should filter it out or not: use it weight claims and world-views (often negatively). You can also use it to evaluate your own actions, if you find that you are bullshitting, to check facts and see if you’re acting based on truth and logic, or just vibes. This especially true in marketing, but also life decision. // Also, the AI’s need to be careful about eating too much of their own bullshit as the results mutate into even worse bullshit.

  • How to Prepare for a Meeting Where Emotions Will Run High - Probably good advice for life too.

  • Rebuilding the Social Security Administration’s Codebase - “Still, it’s interesting to think about how this should be done. I wonder if they could run the new system in a sandbox for a year, feeding it all the same inputs, and see whether it generates the same outputs.” // This feels like the kind of advantage government modernization projects have over commercial. There is not as much urgency. If the lifetime of a government agency and software is in centuries (we hope!), you can take a year to just run tests. Plus, you have an existing system to both compare to and keep the plane flying while you change the engines.

Shoreditch, London.

Conferences

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

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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I hope to record one or two more playing D&D with MCP stuff next week. See y’all next time.

How to code agentic AI tools in Java with goblins

The goblins get into agentic AI.

The above video is exciting for me: it’s me relearning programming, playing D&D with the robot, and coming up with a new type of way I can help out at work. In this introductory video I go over the basics of making a tool (an “MCP Server”) for Claude.

This tool is a very simple oracle that will answer yes/no questions. Oracles are a core part of solo role playing and introduce unknown twists and turns, help you come up with adventures on the fly, and so forth. I’m not sure an AI like Claude needs an oracle, it might be good enough at picking random results that lead to different adventure paths. Or maybe it’s not! AI’s work by typing out the next word (yeah, nerds: token) that logically comes next, so maybe it is very much not good at random results!

Anyhow, this oracle is super basic, but it shows how to make these tools with Spring AI. Java is used by millions of developers, especially enterprise developers, and Spring is used by many (“most all”?) of them. Spring AI makes creating these agentic tools really easy. As you’ll see in the video, setting up Claude is more difficult than making the actual tool!

I’m going to put out more videos, making more complex (and useful) tools. I’ll also explore running this on your own machine - I’m about to try on a 10 hours flight so I hope I can figure it out.

You can see the basic tools I’m making for this video series in my EasyChatDM project and my “real” tools in the ChatDM project.

Relative to your interests

  • DATEV Accelerates Tax and Finance Software Innovations with VMware Tanzu Platform - “We recently patched application platforms that host 18,000 containers four times in one week. That wouldn’t have been possible without all the automation we have with Tanzu Platform.” // DATEV eG modernized its application development and deployment pipeline using VMware Tanzu solutions, enabling rapid development and deployment of tax, finance, and business administration applications.

  • Three Methods for Channeling Shadow IT’s Energy - “For CIOs, the question shouldn’t be about whether to eliminate shadow IT but how to harness its potential while mitigating its dangers.” // Or fine them with “what I like to call DARC (dangerous, awfully conceived, redundant, or costly) solutions, they should face financial consequences.”

  • On Da Vinci and Boredom - “More than anything, observe a brilliant person for whom both the prospect and opportunity of boredom led him to follow his curiousity into whatever intellectual avenues it wanted to pursue, and then turning his imagination into product manifest in text and on canvas.”

  • Running MCP-Based Agents (Clients & Servers) on AWS - Running MCP Servers on AWS, with Spring AI.

  • Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books - “GPT-4o [likely] recognizes, and so has prior knowledge of, many non-public O’Reilly books published prior to its training cutoff date,” wrote the co-authors.” // I mean, we know that the AI people are doing regulatory arbitrage, breaking the law to get competitive advantage.

  • Picking Apart An Ebullient GenAI Spending Forecast - “Lovelock says that companies will be looking for third party software providers to add AI features rather than try to do all of this GenAI creation and integration themselves, which reflects the attitude that most IBM i shops have had thus far. Straw polling we have seen shows that companies are waiting for either IBM or application software makers to give them the tools to have AI functions in their applications.” // And, a lot of the big-ass estimate is AI PCs, so you can probably throw that out.

  • JFrog Survey Surfaces Limited DevSecOps Gains - All that DevSecOps marketing from a couple years ago didn’t stick. // “A global survey of 1,402 application developers, cybersecurity and IT operations professionals finds 71% work for organizations that, despite any potential vulnerabilities, still allow developers to download packages directly from the internet.”

  • The Strategy Behind MCP - Good theory on the business strategy for MCP: it keeps LLMs at the center of value. // “Anthropic is not positioned as a consumer brand. Everything in their actions and intent thus far has been positioned towards enterprises or power users.” // “you need the tools to disintermediate themselves. That, at its core, is the goal of MCP and in my opinion a core strategy for Anthropic.”

Wastebook

  • “No one hate-listens to a podcast.” Here.

  • “Face with bags under eyes.” New emoji for recent parents.

  • “Featurecide: the slow killing of a product’s soul in pursuit of every trend that moves the needle on engagement metrics, no matter how disconnected it is from the original mission.” Here.

  • “We’ll do four hours of shit-talking nonsense.” Noah.

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I composed and sent this in my phone. You can tell the Substack product managers were like “sure, let’s make it work on iPhones, but don’t spend a lot of time on it.” Which is fine, really. I imagine there aren’t many people who want to sit down to a breakfast of typing a newsletter on their phone.

“Pageants of minor chaos”

Just wastebook and links this episode.

Wastebook

  • “So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: ‘Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.’ Kurt Vonnegut.” Found by that guy Russell.

  • When you’re talking on a podcast, it’s like you’re talking with your friends. When you publish in social media or blogs (probably YouTube), it’s like you’re talking to strangers.

  • “[I]t’s hard to explain to the French that Americans are much more afraid of each other than they are of Russia. Conflict in the United States is usually an internal convulsion, a civil matter.” boom boom paris.

  • “sitting in the buzzfeed offices just clickin' on this off tweetdeck.” Good times.

  • “The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion & affinity was five years ago. The second best time is today!” Robin Sloan.

  • And: “pageants of minor chaos.”

  • “I think that [parent’s] resilience. Or, their resilience at work is an incredibly important quality to transfer [to their children] and this might be one way to do that. Ooo! Looks like I had a thought!” On bringing your kids to work, having them see you work, etc. - John Dickerson on the Political Gabfest bonus episode, March 13th, 2025z

  • A lot of lunch and learn sessions, weekly meetings, and other collaborative activities focus on building and maintaining a network of knowledge rather than just learning the specific topic covered in the meeting. These activities involve sharing information and establishing connections with others to enhance your understanding and access to a wider range of knowledge.

  • “toyetic.” Here.

  • ”During that unplanned and somewhat chaotic scene, Jensen walked up the set and asked, “Did somebody order Denny’s?” He then started serving Nvidia Breakfast Bytes to everyone at the table while talking about his time at the diner.” Alumni.

  • “All the Micheladas You Must Sip in Austin.” One of the most 2000s Austin headlines ever, from 2025.

  • “Late night chemist.” Shoreditch side street.

  • And now I find myself in the absurd position of having to put together a talk about playing D&D with AI at the last minute, sitting in a hotel room in Kensington. This is not the first time this type of thing has happened.

  • “I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.” Tyler.

  • “So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed.” Buck-wild.

  • An infinite hold my beer regress.

  • “Design Fiction." bruces.

  • Related: ‘I enjoy probing the domestic “limits of everyday weirdness.”’

  • “1950s and 1960s Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street.” Chris Ware.

  • "decision-makers can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Career advice in 2025.

  • ”a concept as antiquated as intent.” NYTimes.

  • “a felicitous remove.” Spicy.

  • “Significant improvement but still issues.” Oxide and Friends.

Image showing Seth Milchick's office.
“Praise Kier for Severance season 2! Let’s discuss.”

Relevant to your interests

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Here’s the video of an interview I did a couple weeks ago with ITQ - always fun folks. I gave two talks this week - on the same day! One at SREDay London (on private cloud platform engineering), another at Monki Gras. The second was the first go at a talk about learning agentic AI by playing D&D. Next time I give it, I want to have at least a recording of coding some tools. We’ll see!

“Significant improvement but still issues.”

Not much today.

Found at the ITQ offices.

Wastebook

Relative to your interests

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I’ve been re-learning Spring with Dan Vega’s Spring Boot crash course. It’s great, and encouraging. So much has changed since 2005, but the thrill of learning and doing little iterations is fun. After this, there’s his Spring AI course. I hope to get skilled enough to make some D&D AI tools/MCP servers, whatever.

Once I can get over the (to this older Java coder) rails-like feel of Java and Spring (where there’s so much going on in the background hat it gets confusing to know what to do - it’s so simple, I have no idea where to start), it’s pretty quick and interesting.

Also, since the effects and outcomes of Spring (along with Tanzu Platform/Cloud Foundry) are what I talk about at work all the time, it’ll be good to have more first hand experience than the “reporting” I do on it.

The Illiterate Corporation

I’m the guest on this week’s When Shit Hits the Fan podcast. You can hear about two of my fan shattings. Here’s the podcast in Apple, Spotify, and Overcast.

Favor documents over slides

Slides are an oral culture, not a written culture. Imagine civilization without writing: that’s what organizations relying on slides instead of documents are like.

There are workarounds, and they tend to prove the comparison. Often, you will see a slide with a lot of words, and the presenter will apologize that there’s too much text. That’s because the slides should have been a document.

Slides are not good at text, they’re good at visuals. Slides are good for enhancing spoken communication: showing examples, visualizing data (charts), even giving a written outline of the topics covered, major conclusions, and suggested actions. McKinsey titles are great for all of that. The right slides will make your talk better, more memorable, more “actionable.”

Slides are a terrible way to share, archive, and “document” your decisions and reasoning. For example, slides are terrible at strategy. Have you ever asked for the plans, the strategy, an overview of what a product does, and been sent slides? They’re usually not good. You’re usually left with many questions, especially when it comes to why and how. That’s because these types of things should be documents.

There’s an old maxim of keynote slide design: for your audience to understand the slides, you should need to be there giving the talk. The slides should not be able to stand alone. A document can stand alone, a document can be re-read, sent to people who weren’t in the room.

You can also collaborate on a document. You can suggest changes, you can ask questions in comments, you can update it. You can track changes on a document. A document is, somewhat ironically, more of a living document than slides. In contrast, have you ever tried to track changes and collaborate with slides? It’s a mess.

I use slides all the time for presentations, both public and internal ones. For internal collaborations and work, however, I start with a document and try to “force” the people I’m working with to use the document as well. Eventually, in most of the corporate cultures I’ve worked with, I have to switch to text pretty early on. But, at least the document is there to serve as the source of truth.

Most corporations are illiterate. From what I can tell, people avoid reading in large organizations. People don’t make the time to read, it’s faster to flip through slides. It’s faster to edit slides.

Guess what else: all this generative AI stuff is really good at text. If you think it’s hard to write, and that most people won’t be able to do it, even the simplest AI can help. You can even take a recording of your presentation of slides and ask the AI to convert it to a document.

This is an opportunity for management. If it seems like people aren’t “getting it” that ideas aren’t trickling down from management, that you keep getting the same questions over and over…maybe you should switch mediums from slides to text. Try something different. Slides are a poor way to run a company, and switching to documents is an easy, no cost way to boost productivity.

Relative to your interests

Wastebook

  • “So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: ‘Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.’ Kurt Vonnegut.” Found by that guy Russell.

  • “it’s hard to explain to the French that Americans are much more afraid of each other than they are of Russia. Conflict in the United States is usually an internal convulsion, a civil matter.” boom boom paris.

  • “sitting in the buzzfeed offices just clickin on this off tweetdeck.” Good times.

  • “The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion & affinity was five years ago. The second best time is today!” Robin Sloan.

  • And: “pageants of minor chaos.”

  • “I think that [parent’s] resilience. Or, their resilience at work is an incredibly important quality to transfer [to their children] and this might be one way to do that. Ooo! Looks like I had a thought!” On bringing your kids to work, having them see you work, etc. - John Dickerson on the Political Gabfest bonus episode, March 13th, 2025z

  • A lot of lunch and learn sessions, weekly meetings, and other collaborative activities focus on building and maintaining a network of knowledge rather than just learning the specific topic covered in the meeting. These activities involve sharing information and establishing connections with others to enhance your understanding and access to a wider range of knowledge.

  • “We’ve entered the ‘tamale layaway stage’ of late Capitalism.” Chris.

  • “toyetic.” Here.

Conferences

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

SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

There's a huge, great line-up of topics and people at Cloud Foundry Day this year, May 14th in Palo Also, hosted by my work, Tanzu. Come check it out - Cloud Foundry is the most proven, mature platform as a service I know of, used for over a decade in the biggest, mission critical organizations, and beloved by developers and operators.

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