Happy #caturday from Luna!
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Steve Fenton ➜
@stevefenton@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06🧷 Software Punk
🐙 Swabbie / Octonaut at #OctopusDeploy
✂️ Yak Stylist
🔬 DORA Community Guide
🏴 Unintelligible To The State
🏆 8-Time MVP
🔁 #ContinuousDelivery and #DevOps
👟 #Agile #Lean and #PlatformEngineering
🛡 Deputy Head Boy (BPCS)
🧠 Opinions Are My Own
489 Followers
495 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 26, 2022
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The bigger your to-be-read pile is, the less chance there is for the book to be snatched by a political ban or an AI ingest-and-pulp deathbot.
Hoarding unread books is resistance.
Future historians will thank us.
"Imagine if AI got good at this, then..."
Lemme stop you there as whatever was in the second half of that sentence... they're doing it even if AI doesn't get any better. They've already decided and no outcome will convince them otherwise.
I'm speaking at Cloud Native & Open Source Global Summit 2026.
The best thing is, the summit is online so you can join wherever you are. I'll be greasing your path into the first break with a talk on addictively fast feedback loops!
Come join in!
"If you cover normal graffiti you are “repairing” it, but when you cover gentrified graffiti you are “vandalising” it?!"
It seems hacking is using the same playbook. The decision on whether it's a crime has a strong "who did it?" bias.
https://www.phonotonal.com/2022/01/the-gentrification-of-graffiti-rant/
Platform Engineering has changed so much since 2025 and this report, with Dr. Charlotte Fleming PhD at the helm, is chock full of really amazing insights. It's free to download (not even an email needed).
https://octopus.com/publications/future-of-platform-engineering-report
It's too hot for #Caturday so Luna is hanging out by the fan.
I couldn't wait for the official publication date on this one! A #mwid sneak peek!
I don't have much time for people who wouldn't do things for other people, but do them for AI.
Writing docs. Adding tests. Externalising CSS and JavaScript. Thinking up a clear specification. Paying it for doing work. Saying please and thank you. Worrying that they are working it too hard.
RE: https://dragonscave.space/@jscholes/116886273722247873
Which is the Wilhelm Scream, option 1, option 2, or the person being asked to do these horrendous CAPTCHAs.
LinkedIn bro with an AI-generated profile pic posts an AI-generated cartoon about how AI will make the user of AI unemployed.
This reminds me of an effect we found in our AI Pulse report. Across all job roles, people think AI will disrupt everyone else's job, but not theirs (as they've seen how weak it is when it does something they understand).
Developers, though, were uniquely self-aware.
Happy #Catutday all you cool #CatsOfMastodon from Luna
Meanwhile in DevOps No.67
A weighty subject.
Replying to
@paco@infosec.exchange feels like an ancient proverb... the most expensive thing you'll ever receive is something you get for free.
I just called my daughter and did the whole call as Gollum. After the call I said to my wife, "Andy Serkis got paid a lot of money for that." To which she replied, "Yeah. But he was good at it."
Replying to
@earth2marsh@hachyderm.io I can't think of any reason why it would be there, just delete it!
You can always play Pipeline while you're blocked from working.
Replying to
@michelestrider@mastodon.social I knew the observation car would be too busy, so picked food.
I’m caught between a rock and a hard place on generative #AI. While I can see potential uses for it, I’m unable to ignore the harms. This led me to a thought exercise where I asked "would I use AI if it wasn't evil, and what would I use it for?"
Long article. Human written.
I used to worry that the Fediverse would eventually collapse into one big server. Once you've been subjected to a couple of shutdowns your selection criteria for an instance factors in longevity.
I think things are more positive than I originally thought, because I think we'll end up with a collection of large servers and lots of very small ones.
Replying to
@norootcause automation does tend to solve the problems of fallibility, rather than reliability (i.e., automation doesn't make your software more robust, but it does eliminate a lot of "oops").
Replying to
@kevlin you'll eat your words if they arrive at 09:50, spend five hours unloading your order, and leave at precisely 14:45.
It is genuinely difficult not to lose it when you've been pulled in as involuntary tech support for a company who forces users to use the phone app (even if they are on a laptop) and the phone app doesn't work.
Enough users have left them 1-star reviews about this for them to accept they have a problem.
If you're in the UK and look at any of the proportional representation or alternative vote maps, bear in mind they don't show what you would have voted if you didn't select "the one to avoid the other".
Hello darkness my old friend...
♫ ♫ oh please, baby, please
can you do it for me ♫ ♫
♫ ♫ update all my npm
dependencies ♫ ♫
♫ ♫ but not that pinned one
and don't update 'em too soon ♫ ♫
♫ ♫ and kick those post install scripts
'cause they bring only doom ♫ ♫
... or don't use AI and just run pnpm update.
If you put on new soccer boots, the rules of the game are still the same. If they help you run faster, that only matters if it helps you win possession, set up an assist, and score more goals.
How To Measure AI’s Organizational Impact...
https://coderlegion.com/15292/how-to-measure-ais-organizational-impact
Replying to
@thirstybear@agilodon.social @jefframnani@mastodon.social but what if we assign twice as many developers to our agents... 😬
A future etymology site will teach out grandchildren why "fake" means "something you don't like". It will say it used to mean "not real, but made to look or seem real" until people "who are not what they claim to be" used the term to "show or pretend to feel emotions that are not sincere".
Great job from Michael Sheen on House of Games. I'm so happy it's still enjoyable quizzing.
It's so great to see all the responses arriving for the State of Continuous Delivery survey.
If you've responded, thank you (and please share with your friends). If you haven't, please join our huge collective effort in exploring software delivery in the modern era.
I earned the Writer (2026) badge from Phonotonal.
https://www.phonotonal.com/badges/assertion/bdeaf036f228d4d3/
Replying to
@thirstybear commits and pull requests also emerging like zombies from what we believed to be their graves!
Replying to
@sil I feel that if we could get string templates in before Doug writes the JSON spec and you liberally the sandwiches we might get..
{
/* A quote by Oscar Wilde*/
"quote": Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working
}
Replying to
@RonJeffries@mastodon.social I'm trying to work this out right now. My technique is compiling a list of harms so I can work out what the red lines are, who I need to campaign to remove harms, and what I would and wouldn't do with AI if the harms were to be resolved.
There's a benefit to bundling a bunch of concepts into a single term, as it captures the wisdom in a way we can communicate efficiently. It's easier to say "train" than "a collection of carriages linked together in sequence, running on rails, for the purpose of..."
The problem comes when people try to tell you their car is a train. Or their bicycle is a train. On some other misunderstood definition that misses the key properties of being a train.