Category: newsletter
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The long slog to enterprise AI ROI. Or, digital transformation is back, baby!
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,…
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Practical platform engineering, the industry analyst business dies again, personal utopia – three good videos
Three good videos Platform 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…
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AI Reviews Aren’t Very Good
Making AI Reviews More Useful From 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…
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Luck, belly fat, & a typical existentialist
Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, July, 2025. Relative to your interests How 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…
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“It will probably be bad. But in the end, it doesn’t matter.”
Original Content Internal 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…
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Platform engineering for private cloud
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’s the slides for the talk if you’re into that kind of thing. This talk is based on many years of observing people run platforms,…
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Internal Developer Platform marketing: the people, the community management
Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value If 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…
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Using t-shirts to drive internal developer platform use
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…
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Internal Developer Platform Marketing, part 01
Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value If 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…
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Why saying “please” is nice and pineapple skin, AI edition
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…
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“We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.”
Perfect Foods Perfect 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…
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A think tool
Giving AI an inner-voice with Model Context Protocol I separated out a “think tool” from my agentic D&D project this week. The think 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…
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Can you add AI to existing application – it’s unsatisfying…so far
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,…
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Three offensive robots
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…
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Post-ZiRP Enterprise Self-care
Checking in on the infinite workday This 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…
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Incremental AI is better than civilization changing AI
Incremental AI For 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…
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The introverted traveler: Cologne
A reliably good place for a meal Art 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…
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Resume-driven Development
Good wastebook list this episode, but first… Even the Germans suffer from RDD Some 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…
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Re: Still a lot of private cloud, numbers of cloud repatriation (higher than I thought)
The Clouds You know, I’ve never really looked at the Flexera State of Cloud surveys. I think they’re accepted as legit, and they have many years of data to make those multi-year charts I like. Here’s a quick one my favorite question, “where are the apps?”: Sources: Flexera State of Cloud Report, 2018, 2019, 2020,…
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The next bottleneck for enterprise AI: data
Lots of links below, plus some sovereign cloud thinking from EU people in the Logoff. Access to data shouldn’t be holding you can from enterprise AI radicalness To make enterprise AI useful, you need your data: Gartner Inc. predicts that organizations will develop 80% of Generative AI (GenAI) business applications on their existing data management…
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