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.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Enterprise AI middleware & services with Tanzu Platform 10.2 There’s a big release for the platform as a service we make at Tanzu, Tanzu Platform 10.2. In new release, we've focused a lot on adding in AI middleware and services to the Tanzu Platform. That's both in the form of AI model brokering and hosting for any type of application (like python in the AI world), and, of course, a lot of attention to Java via Spring.

Checking in on the infinite workdayThis week’s Software Defined Talk episode: This week, we cover Apple’s WWDC updates—from containerization to Foundation Models—and the Linux Foundation’s new FAIR Package Manager. Plus, we crown the best SDT Uber rider. Take a listen, make sure to subscribe. Also available in YouTube if you like that kind of thing. Relative to your interestsUse Cases for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.

Incremental AIFor every AI skeptic and alarmist, there are ten AI dreamers convinced AI will change civilization. In the business world, this fuels high valuations and premature optimization through layoffs or sweeping business changes. Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy, listed out all sorts of AI things Amazon is doing. To me, the list suggests AI is great at incremental improvements to existing business processes. For instance, improving campaign planning and copywriting helps Amazon and sellers.

A reliably good place for a mealArt museum restaurants and cafes can be a great place to hangout for the introverted flâneur. They often have good food, good service, and are in the center of town. Being attached to a museum, they usually feel the need to be mindful of aesthetics, both atmospheric and food quality wise. Better: there are often very few people in them, especially compared to popular and tourist places.

Good wastebook list this episode, but first… Even the Germans suffer from RDDSome people actually did a study on resume-driven development. I thought it might be a joke at first, but, no: it appears to be serious. I’m working on refreshing a paper on the pitfalls of building your own application platform (“DIY platforms”),1 so the topic came up and the paper fit in nicely, see below. Many of the pitfalls we've discussed so far touch on strategic choices and project management challenges.