What is a platform and how do you do platform engineering at scale? Find out in this interview on tales from Home Depot and beyond.
Posts in "tech"
There’s probably around 50 million developers world-wide, and 20.5m professional developers. That’s what I’d start saying after seeing a chart from IDC’s September 2025 developer study update. They forecast it to be ~59 million in 2029. If you want to be very precise, a breakdown of the survey puts “professional developers” at around 20.8m in 2025. But even that includes “DevOps professionals” and “platform engineers.” So, to me, that’s something more like 20.5m or even 20m developers.
Compare that to GitHub’s claim that there are at least 180 million developers, just GitHub account holders.
Also, see more numbers in previous round up, from July, 2023
Managing the eels
A combined Google family bundle costing $120 to $200 a month could replace existing subscriptions and services like Apple One, though it may require changes to photo storage and streaming preferences.
The platform that needs a platform
Despite its status as a critical tool for cloud-native applications, Kubernetes remains complex and challenging to manage, with experts advising caution before adoption.
“If you already have zero enterprise apps in Python, that remains the right number and Gen AI should not change that at all.” Rod Johnson, October, 2025.
Reducing the 7 R's of modernization down to 3 - new take on tech debt, from Charles Betz
Where once there were 7, now there are three:
Forrester data provides clear guidance on where organizations should focus. Knowledge and process debt, selected by 37% of respondents, demands immediate attention through process improvement, reengineering, and organizational change management. Unsupported vendor software and redundant IT systems, each selected by 30–32% of respondents, require proactive migration planning before crisis points emerge. System inflexibility, identified by 35%, calls for architectural investments that preserve future options.
Only three kinds of AI products actually work - “For my money, the current multi-billion-dollar question is can AI agents be useful for tasks other than coding?” // Good thinking about productizing AI: what seems to work and not work.
AI, banks, mainframes, and on-premises
Above related to spending on EU sovereign cloud for AI, the lack of AI app explosion in the enterprise (see the product management/design take), and pondering why banks don’t run 100% of their IT in the public cloud.
The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides
The iterative design process for the Mac calculator app highlights the challenges of executive feedback and suggests that executives should use AI to better articulate their visions.
We should be calling it all “AIaaS,” but I don’t think anyone could pronounce that without going PG-13 in every EBC and MQ.