Good Management Is a Fad, Use Women's Razors, and AI Saves Three Hours a Week
Also: Corn, Goats, and ChatGPT's Million Customers // Fun and strange finds from the World Wide Web.
3 factors is all you need
In this Tanzu Talk interview, Coté talks Brian Friedman about his extensive experience working with Pivotal, Tanzu, and Broadcom. They discuss the intricacies of modernizing enterprise applications, the relevance of .NET in the current tech landscape, and the role of platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. They also explore using AI, the challenges of application transformation, and the importance of leveraging the right tools and methodologies to drive successful tech modernization initiatives.
Original content
No one cares about Chickens, Software Defined Talk #545: “This week, we discuss cloud earnings, Siri teaming up with Gemini, and AI bottlenecks. Plus, is cloning your dog weird?”
Private Cloud AI Platform Engineering, at SREDay Amsterdam, slides.
Using ChatGPT image generation to make isomorphic D&D maps, sample above.
Questions asked and not asked of Andrew Clay Shafer. We interviewed Andrew for Software Defined Talk last night. It will be our next week. Here are some questions I had prepared. I didn’t get to all of them of course.
Relevant to your interests
Organizations are measuring DevEx metrics more, JetBrains survey.
“Good engineering management” is a fad - “The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.” // Corporate culture can just be a tool to match the needs of the moment. Also, a good reminder about the arc of an individual’s career strategy: “You also have to operate within the constraints of your life today and your possible lives tomorrow. Early in my career, I had few responsibilities to others, and had the opportunity to work extremely hard at places like Uber. Today, with more family responsibilities, I am unwilling to make the tradeoffs to consistently work that way, which has real implications on how I think about which roles to prioritize over time.”
The New Rules of B2B Buyer Engagement - ”Buyers are relying on AI-driven tools and insights to shape decisions, with 77% of B2B buyers depending more on AI tools than traditional search engines.”
iOS 26.1 Features: Everything New in iOS 26.1 - If you’re into release notes, this is a good one. Also, they’ve been steadily making microphone control more like the desktop.
Analyst Insight Series: Security and Collaboration—Core Tenets of Successful Platform Engineering - Remember when DevSecOps was all the rage? Enterprises are till trying to figure out DevSecOps.
Predictions 2026: Software Development Goes From Jamming To A Full Orchestra - “adoption rates varied across the SDLC. Coding and testing were the top use cases for leveraging AI (48% and 47%, respectively). Lagging behind were priorities such as finding development insights, at 33% of respondents.”
1 million business customers: the fastest-growing business platform in history - A big deal: “more than 800 million weekly users already familiar with ChatGPT, adoption and ROI within businesses is realized more rapidly–pilots are shorter and rollouts face less friction. We’re seeing this with the growth of ChatGPT for Work–”we now have more than 7 million total ChatGPT for Work seats (up 40% in just 2 months).” ChatGPT Enterprise seats specifically have grown 9x year-over-year.”
Google Gemini’s Deep Research can look into your emails, drive, and chats - This would be great. I implicitly trust Google because my stuff is there. While I love using ChatGPT and Gemini, I have less trust in their security (they just don’t have the track record yet) and even less on their morals and law-following (they obviously blatantly violated copyright for their models). // If things keep up in this trajectory, Gemini might be a real content, feature-wise for ChatGPT Anthropic is really good at app innovation though and will be hard to beat.
Antonio Bravo: “AI is driving a structural transformation within the banking business” - “The use of OpenAI tools is becoming widespread among employees who, with more than 4,000 active GPTs and an average use of 4.1 days per week, claim that it saves them nearly three hours a week. This impact translates into time-savings of up to 80% for certain specific tasks, such as report writing or risk analysis.”
IKEA Debuts 21 HomeKit-Compatible Smart Bulbs, Sensors, and Controls - If this stuff actually “just works” with Apple stuff, that would be cool. Side-note: was that Matter stuff just a crock of shit? Seems like it.
Shifting Security Left with AI — Is It Truly AI-Assisted Security, or an Infinite Loop? - The “infinite loop” problem in AI security is real, and there are ways to break it.
Leaving the Cloud Isn’t for Everyone - Modeling staying in public cloud versus moving out of it.
The Emotional Impact of ChatGPT - ‘Some 36% of active users consider generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) “a good friend”’
An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now - Good guide on picking a chat bot.
Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail? - “Suppose that 95% of enterprise AI transformations fail. How does that compare to the failure rate of normal enterprise IT projects?”
Why engineers can’t be rational about programming languages - As many of us say, technology is fashion and passion. Programmers identify with the language they use just people do with brands (beer, shoes, cars, political parties).
How Gillette Used Gender to Make Face Shaving Needlessly Worse for Men - Use women’s razors for a better, more comfortable shave.
Why Is Geographic Mobility Declining? - Americans move less than they used to/stay where the grew-up: “Some of the explanations for the decline in mobility involve long-term trends — such as population aging or increased earnings opportunities for women — that make moving costlier. Others appeal to changes in the geographic distribution of earnings, urban amenities and housing prices, all of which make moving less rewarding.”
Wastebook
I am considering putting corn on my shit. I like corn just fine. I’m from Texas after all. But over here in Europe they put corn on damn-near everything, even pizza. A poke bowl has corn too. Corn has gone too far.
“We’ve all got to die of something, he thought. Even if it’s just from staying alive too long.” Mini-story: Retirement
“A poor villager tells the Rebbe his one-room home feels suffocating with his wife and kids. The Rebbe says: Bring your goat inside. A week later the man returns, frantic – now it’s chaos, noise, and stench. The Rebbe smiles: Take the goat back out. The man says, thank you Rebbe, my home suddenly feels spacious and peaceful!” Could be worse.
“Leonardo DiCaprio experiments with ageing badly, to good effect.” Warren
“trust fund brunchlords”Here
“Multi-Layer Configuration Sandwich of Gemini CLI” Daniel Strebel
“White Collar Elitism” America’s ‘Simon Sinek’ Problem
Logoff
This was a fun week. I think. I’ve started working more closely with one of my co-workers, going back and forth on talking about what we’re working on and offering suggestions. Normally, this kind of think would make me cringe, but I think it's doing the opposite now.
//
I’m in a lull with my D&D solo roleplaying. Sometimes it just gets difficult to come up with adventures, or let them unfold. Plus, at the end of day, I don't have creativity energy. You’d think about almost 3 years of it and with the support of ChatGPT and Claude it’d be easy. But it is not.