My ContentTwo Software Defined episodes this week: "I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza," startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff - After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and balancing commercial and community interests, moving to Europe, and more! This is a “hit by pitch” - This week, we discuss Zenoss finally getting acquired, Databricks buying Neon, and the debut of WizOS.

More on the Tanzu AI StackAs 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.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam. This is more of a “smoke break chair,” but I’ll allow it.Relative to your interests28 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 "

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?

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 interestsDid we just make platform engineering much easier by shipping a cloud IDP? - Google Cloud’s take on a platform (IDP).

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 JavaHere’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.

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.

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.

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.

Not much today. Found at the ITQ offices.Wastebook"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. Relative to your interestsA Conversation Algorithm I Cribbed From Clinical PsychologistsWhat does “open ended question” even mean? Here’s some examples, and a conversational framework built around it. This also probably good for sales and marketing.