Building your own internal developer platform is a lot of work, buy it insteadHere’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 platformThe 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.

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.

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.

Original contentHere’s two of my podcasts to share with you: Capitalism is working, Software Defined Talk #534: “This week, we discuss the US backing Intel, SaaS staying power, and AI’s impact on deep work. Plus, Matt Ray’s moving tips and more kolache talk in the after show.” Also available, unedited, in video form. The business value of developer relations, devrel history, plus more stuff, with Mary Thengvall: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté chat with Mary Thengvall, exploring the development and significance of Developer Relations (devrel) over the years.

Here is some (book) writing pedantry for business book writing. Of course, the way to write anything is to “just start writing.” For some people, this works. For most, the question is, “yes, but how ‘just start writing’?” That is, how do you start with a blank screen/blank sheet of paper? For me, I start typing into the screen like I was talking to someone, complete with things like “you know,” and “like,” and especially, “I mean…” Don’t write like you would write, write like you would talk.

Lots of AI slowdown and skepticism in the past week. Likely due to the letdown of the GPT-5 release, I guess? First, though from last month, The Economist asks “Why is AI so slow to spread?” GPT5 says it says: Integration Costs and Technical Frictions Many businesses haven’t integrated their datasets effectively into the cloud, creating latency and transaction costs. Even with AI tools available, getting data into the right format and place is a barrier—making adoption slow and expensive.

Three good videosPlatform Engineering 2025: What “great”’ looks like now. Most platform engineering talks are very frustrating for me. The same stuff over and over since about 2015. The platform engineering space is rife with people who’ve made the monumental mistake of thinking Kubernetes is a platform and then finding out they have so much more to build on-top of that thin layer. Meanwhile, based on that false assumption, the industry just jettisoned all the PaaS technology we had.

Making AI Reviews More UsefulFrom Robert Brook, posted July, 2025.Reading all the ChatGPT 5 coverage confirms my feeling that no one knows how to review these models yet. It’s either those incomprehensible charts (and also, who cares how good they are at math? More: who understand what those tests even mean?) or people just saying “I really like it.” It’s a classic IT/business alignment problem. Until you define the “business outcome” you want and how you can improve it, you’re vibe-ROI’ing.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, July, 2025.Relative to your interestsHow to Secure MCP Servers Modern Applications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 - When you want to build your own platform with Kubernetes. Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job - I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them.

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