Hey everyone!

Tech YouTube is exploding… Some call it magic, others AI. Now, the Rabbit R1 brings both to your pocket, and it drives techfluencers insane. The intelligent bunny should change your future behavior in interacting with smart devices. What could possibly go wrong when you combine a camera, a screen, and an AI in a fancy 80s-vibe orange box?

I think the people are not ready for it. The fear of missing out and the addictive need for moving pictures will keep people on their phones. Looking into the future, and yes, maybe Star Trek kicks in too much; without augmented implementations (AR), such a device might not catch the people. The first reviews also don’t leave room for hope, calling it slow, with a poor connection, very generic answers, and often just wrong. I found it astonishing that with all that GenAI is going on, you can deliver such poor products. What do you think? Will the rabbit in the pocket be a game-changer?

In signs of sustainability - Green Platform Engineering (!?)

In the last months, I had the chance to talk more often about how cloud-native platforms, internal developer platforms, et al., are the foundation for a more sustainable IT. The complexity of architecting a system with an environmentally sustainable principle in mind is much more challenging than for static conditions like costs. Also, I see here much traction and correlation; it’s more a coincidence than a lever. In the live discussion with the Platformers Community and The Good Guy I highlighted the element of complexity and abstraction. Platforms will lower that issue, and looking into the future, I believe we will have systems that completely ignore the underlying infrastructure and schedule workload based on our requirements, for example, the CO2e footprint.

At the Platform Engineers Meetup I gave a short summary on that topic.

I’m curious: does this topic play any role in your organization?

Talking about becoming greener, for the last two days, I participated in the Eco-Compute in Munich. Which was a fantastic event, with very different talks and chances to network and exchange ideas. You should keep an eye on it for next year! It’s definitely worth your time and support.

My learning of the week/month

What does it mean to have “a career”? My learning for the last month is that a career doesn’t mean growing within a company or hunting for the next higher title. A career means mastering your profession. And you can do this over and over again. For some reason, we humans are so stupid to believe that anyone cares if we are the super vice president of Yadda. It is good to have ambitions, something that drives us. And we should be compensated for our experience and talents. I had the luck of meeting some fantastic individuals at KubeCon, and even before in some open source projects, who have proven this multiple times. A career is what you make from it, not what others believe it is.

The treasure hunt

• 📕 Kill It with Fire by Marianne Bellotti is a fantastic read on modernizing legacy systems and code. It is also a great source of inspiration for non-software engineers.

• 💻️ CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability - in the context of Sustainability and Cloud Native, more than two years ago, I proposed the idea of starting a working group to open up this field and provide guidance. Have a look!

• 🦜 https://internaldeveloperplatform.org/ - While researching for a project I stumbled on this open community/page about IDPs. They provide a good starting point to better understand what IDP do and bring you.

See you later!

Max

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