Thoughts, stories and ideas.
For twenty years, cloud architecture rested on a single unwritten premise: compute capacity is infinite. You benchmarked your service on a specific virtual machine shape, hardcoded it into your Terraform configs, and set up an autoscaler. Systems architecture was taught as an optimization between two variables: performance and cost. Availability and elasticity were treated as [ ]
I have not used a corporate VPN in more than ten years. At Google, access to internal applications depends on the user and the device, not on the network. This has been the case since the BeyondCorp transition. There is no client to start and no token to type. The only time I notice the [ ]
I spent two days at the CIO AI Summit in Munich this September, attending every single session. What I witnessed wasn t the typical vendor-driven optimism you d expect at a tech conference. Instead, 500 European CIOs, from largest European companies, engaged in a rare, frank conversation about why their AI initiatives aren t working. The most memorable [ ]
The conversation about artificial intelligence usually gravitates toward spectacular disasters. We worry about superintelligence seizing control or mass unemployment destabilizing society. Derek Thompson’s widely discussed essay, You Have 18 Months, introduced a quieter, more intimate anxiety. He focused not on the machines taking our jobs, but on the potential softening of the human mind. His [ ]
For the past two years, the world of software development has been defined by a single, seismic question: What is the true impact of AI? The initial data was puzzling. The 2024 DORA report famously found that higher AI adoption was linked to worse software delivery stability and throughput, an anomaly that baffled many leaders [ ]
For nearly a decade, Silicon Valley s mantra has been clear: dematerialize everything. Transform atoms into bits. Move fast and break things, but preferably break them in code where the damage is reversible. This philosophy gave us streaming services, cloud computing, and mobile apps that transformed how we communicate, work, and entertain ourselves. But 2025 marks [ ]
Last Tuesday, I watched a founder friend upload his entire company s documentation into NotebookLM. Twenty seconds later, two AI podcasters were discussing his business model with the kind of insight his board of directors hadn t managed in three meetings. This is insane, he said, replaying the segment where they debated his pricing strategy. They actually [ ]
Every teacher knows this moment: A student struggling with Newton s laws while their classmate breezes through. The traditional response? Read it again. But what if the problem isn t the student s effort, it s that the textbook speaks only one language when learners need five? Google Research just dropped something fascinating: Learn Your Way, an AI system [ ]
Last week, during a conversation with a CTO friend in Berlin, he casually mentioned his AI assistant had just negotiated a 30% discount on their cloud infrastructure bill. Not him, his AI agent. It analyzed usage patterns, benchmarked pricing across providers, drafted the negotiation email, handled three rounds of back-and-forth, and executed the contract renewal. [ ]
We’ve all seen it. Maybe it was a university colleague whose textbook looked more yellow than white, nearly every paragraph aggressively highlighted. Or perhaps it was the person in the quarterly briefing, furiously typing notes, attempting to transcribe an 80-slide deck word for word. For a long time, I assumed this was the definition of [ ]