As always, if you use Spring, you get the latest and greatest…so long as you’ve architected your socialtechnocal system so you can upgrade.
🔗 Beyond JSON: Converting Spring AI Tool Response Formats to TOON, XML, CSV, YAML, …
SKATE392.BMF
What is platform engineering? What is a platform? How do you show platform ROI?
Tony was on the the team that lead platform engineering at Home Depot for many years. Here’s what he thinks platform engineering:
This is a livestream Tony and I have started. Tuesdays at 10am US eastern time/4pm Amsterdam time.
Playing D&D is the perfect test case for this. Can Claude “remember” the lengthy sessions from last month? // Managing that memory has been a huge part of the toolchain for playing D&D with Claude. It often gets the gender of characters wrong, as a simple example. Recently, just have access to previous chat sessions has been great and helpful. If you keep your sessions in one project, it’s good at looking at the past chat sessions. We’ll see if this claim of memory over longer sessions pans out. It probably will: Anthropic is a trustworthy company when it comes to product.
🔗 Anthropic releases Opus 4.5 with new Chrome and Excel integrations
Office hours, DaShaun's secret to juicing up your enterprise devrel
DaShaun became a great devrel by developing a new way to work with our community. I’ve seen it pay off in all ways, big time. Here is his key differentiation for devrel.
The business if devrel:
There’s more to developer advocacy than just conferences and content. The real thing that companies [that hire devrel] want, is they want to see it move the needle. They want to see us driving adoption, or driving sales, or driving perceptions, or sentiment.
tl;dr: “Nobody likes a smartarse”
People are not rebelling against economic elites,” writes Heath. Instead, this is “a rebellion against [cognitive] executive function”. In this view, populism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut, rather than those who rely on some too-clever-by-half argument.
There is a lot that rings true about this suggestion. Consider the following intuitive, common sense ideas: if we let immigrants come here and work, they’ll take our jobs; we should levy taxes on imports to help protect our economy from foreign competition; crime can only be controlled by getting tough on criminals.
Kubernetes, AI, and platform engineering, build, build, build
AI is here. It’s hungry. It’s expensive. And Kubernetes is the only thing big enough to feed it. … Kubernetes is no longer the platform for apps. It’s becoming the substrate for AI-driven systems.
And then you add platform engineering to build a platform around it for self-service access to AI, so long as you satisfy: “Security wants policy and audit trails. Leadership wants predictable costs and explainability.”
“If the people building the tech are terrified of it, maybe we should listen to their fears rather than their sales pitch.” Ten Blue Links, “Pop goes the bubble” edition
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
A few months ago, I bought my new glasses, prescription, at the Ray Ban store. They checked my eyes for free, and the glasses weren’t in some kind of “buy one get two free” deal. When it came to settling accounts, they didn’t ask if I wanted the scratch protection on the glasses.
I’m pretty sure that means the scratch guard is bullshit. And it makes me only want to buy from Ray Ban directly for the rest of my life.