Coté

“Laws can be opinions on inevitabilities in the world of software engineering, or wry observations on unavoidable realities.” // A round-up of all those laws and bromides tech world people use. 🔗 Hacker Laws

This one had some bonus cat action.

A vision for a kinder post-AI meltdown. Also, speculation about where AI code generation will stick and not stick. 🔗 GenAI Predictions

“According to IDC research, 72% of tech marketers say creating original, differentiated thought leadership is a top challenge. Even more cite difficulty connecting that content to real business outcomes. 37% of CMOs say creating a unified, omnichannel customer experience will have the greatest influence on their marketing strategy over the next 12 to 18 months.” And: “It’s not about doing more. It’s about making what you already do work harder to drive the engagement you need.

Cows, IoT, and MLOn this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with my friend Saad. We mostly talked about the irresistible topic of monitoring cows, which he did at his previous startup: In this episode, Whitney and Coté speak with Saad Ansari, a product manager at Databricks, about his fascinating journey from working at Microsoft to co-founding a startup focused on creating sensors for monitoring cow behavior. They go over the challenges and rewards of transitioning from large corporations to startups and back, the differences in company scales, and the various lessons learned along the way.

Your business processes are tribal knowledge passed down through email chains and hallway conversations. Before an AI can handle expense reports or customer inquiries autonomously, you need to document, standardize, and make machine-readable every workflow. That’s a multi-year project. 🔗 Your employees are already AI-augmented. Your enterprise isn’t. Here’s why that matters

”Prioritize sovereignty where it matters most. Not every workload requires sovereign infrastructure — and overengineering can be costly and inefficient. Focus on areas where sovereignty is critical: AI workloads, sensitive data, and operations in regulated industries. Use edge computing to process data locally and reduce compliance risks. Localized cloud options, including sovereign clouds and regional vendors, can help meet legal requirements without compromising agility. A surgical approach to sovereignty ensures strategic alignment and cost-effectiveness.

For those who prefer Kubernetes instead of a PaaS, there are good options that your organization likely already has. 🔗 Empowering Platform Engineers with native Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management in VMware Cloud Foundation

Smoked brisket in London from Smokoloko. It wasn’t too great, but I had some travel salt packets, so added enough salt to make it OK. They seemed to have some end-pieces which looked better, but I ordered “brisket” thinking I’d get slices.