Most organizations treat infrastructure as a series of projects to be “completed,” but successful platform engineering requires a permanent product mindset. In this episode, we explore why platform teams need dedicated product management to balance competing priorities—like security, cost, and developer experience—and why the “why” scales much better than the “what” in large enterprises. We also dive into the often-overlooked role of designers in creating platform tools that developers actually want to use.
Developers crave AI tools for various tasks beyond coding, but that’s only about 20% of their work. But, ops people freak out about security and control challenges, like cost, regulatory compliance, and usage tracking.
Bad advice from Wall Street on enterprise AI.
Automating everything but changing how people work - Relative to your interests, Friday
Enterprise AI apps (or lack thereof), ROI surveys, CFO budget pivots, agile’s stubborn relevance, platform engineering vs. private cloud, Heroku’s freeze, IRS tech cuts, and Europe hedging on AI tools
Peter Klúcik's The Hobbit illustrations. Related to your interests Where are the enterprise AI apps? Part n + 1 - AI capacity demand is high, but it’s still “early innings” for enterprise AI use.
You Can Feel It Coming - Software Defined Talk
This week, we discuss personal AI hype cycles, bottoms-up adoption, and “The Modern Stack” simplifying cloud. Plus, thoughts on new cars and the dogs that ride in them.
See the traditional podcast listing for links and more.
Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse - Software Defined Interviews
See the traditional podcast version for more and Heidi links.
Why it's great to be a Spring developer now, and how to make it even better - State of Spring, 2026
This is a talk I give at the start of Spring workshops we do. Here is the recording. The point is to show people that being a Java and Spring developers is fantastic right now. Here’s the description:
Spring developers are in a strange position in 2026: everything is changing: AI, platform engineering, enterprise architecture. And yet Spring keeps getting stronger.
In this talk, Coté walks through why this is actually a great moment to be a Spring developer, especially in large organizations.
Best review of The Sound and The Fury, in Mad Men, s2e11: “Sex is good. This book is just OK.”
Management is always eager to "reduce costs."
The real story lies “in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in the release. “This marks a structural pivot from labor expansion to optimization driven by automation and AI that deliver productivity gains without proportional increases in headcount.
Say you love business logic without saying "business logic."
Model Eats the Software: Why the Marginal Cost of Enterprise Software Approaches Zero
More on agentic AI changing the software business from Jason Hoffman:
Andreessen specifically predicted that Salesforce would disrupt Oracle. Fourteen years later, Oracle is roughly 2.5x the size of Salesforce. Salesforce sells application logic – workflows, configurations, business rules. Oracle sells infrastructure – databases, middleware, cloud compute. The application layer was always the vulnerable part. The infrastructure layer was always the durable part.