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.

Here’s a recording of my latest “how to do platform engineering in large organizations” talk. In this version of it, I go over what matters most for private cloud platforms. Here’sthe slides for the talk if you’re into that kind of thing. This talk is based on many years of observing people run platforms, primarily Cloud Foundry based one. I don’t know if it’s the oldest, but it’s one of the longest running and used private PaaS’es (“platform”) out there.

Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your ValueIf you want developers to actually use your platform, you’ve got to give them more than APIs and automation. You need a community. In the third piece in our platform marketing series, Rita and I look at how the most successful platform teams invest in support forums, internal events, and actual human beings whose job is to make developers feel connected, heard, and empowered.

Is Swag the Secret to Platform Adoption?Turns out, T-shirts might matter more than YAML. In this post, I dig into how internal platforms benefit from strong branding - not just logos and names, but a clear identity and ethos that developers can rally behind. When your platform has a name people actually want to say out loud, and maybe a sticker they slap on their laptop, adoption gets a little easier.

Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stacklays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning: Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For? Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?” Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications.

The AI Wired Parent“Why is saying ‘please’ nice?” my five year old daughter asked. Being a dad, I got excited to explain a simple thing in detail, “well,” I started. “No, let’s ask the circle!” and by that she meant voice mode in ChatGPT. So we did: “Well, saying ‘please’ is kind of a way to show respect and appreciation when you’re asking someone for something. It just helps to make the interaction a bit more polite and friendly, which usually makes people more willing to help you out.

Perfect FoodsPerfect foods: traditional Tex-Mex refried beans; bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco; pad thai with tofu; instant ramen noodles; Dutch fries with mayonnaise; sharp cheddar cheese; salted butter (aka, European butter); peanut butter, chunky; HEB tortillas; kibbling; coffee; queso with all the stuff in it; (OK, OK: all of Tex-Mex); USDA steak, cooked rare. Great episode.Wastebook“and then [for] three minutes you wait for it to be done, gazing out the window contemplating the gentle breeze on the leaves, the distant hum of traffic, the slow steady unrelenting approach of that which comes for us all.

Giving AI an inner-voice with Model Context Protocol I separated out a “think tool” from my agentic D&D project this week. Thethink tool is stupidly simple: all it does it echo back whatever the AI sends it. The original write-up from Anthropic makes it seems a little more mystical, but it doesn’t take long to understand first, how simple it is, and, second, how great of a hack it is.