A brilliant start to Platform Engineering Day at #Kubecon with @hazelweakly.me speaking about hiring for platform engineering. Very insightful and also funny. And sparkles… ✨✨

QCon London 2025 | [SOLD OUT] Become an InfoQ Certified Software Architect in Emerging Technologies (ICSAET) Get practical inspiration and best practices on emerging software trends directly from senior software developers at early adopter companies.

Post 7:
For my #QConLondon workshop next week, I’m using RAG to tune ChatGPT with QCon-specific content—so it can answer questions in context and boost learning for attendees.

qconlondon.com/training/apr...
7/7

Once you’ve democratized LLM access (like GPT-4, Claude, or OSS models), real advantage comes from tuning them to your domain. That’s where RAG and SLMs shine.
6/7

⚙️ SLMs (Small Language Models):
Smaller models fine-tuned on specific domains. They're fast, cheap, and easier to run—especially when your data doesn’t change much.
5/7

That’s where RAG and SLMs come in. Both help bring domain-specific knowledge into the model—but in different ways.
3/7

🧠 RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation):
Store your own data, search it at runtime, and pass it to the LLM for context-aware answers. Great when data changes often or needs to stay fresh.
4/7

Big takeaway for me relates to RAG and LLMs.

LLMs (like GPT-4) are trained on massive datasets and can talk fluently about things Napoleon and Python—but they don’t know anything about your specific domain unless it’s publicly available.
2/7

Great podcast from Sunil Mallya on SE Radio about Small Language Models. Lots of insights on fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, RAG vs. SLM, and what this all means for enterprise AI. 🎧
se-radio.net/2025/03/se-r...
1/7

Spring Boot 1.0 GA Released Level up your Java code and explore what Spring can do for you.

happy 11 year anniversary to the first 1.0 release of Spring Boot ! It was released on the 1st of April 2014

spring.io/blog/2014/04...

InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2025 | June 9-10 | Peer Insights for Senior Developers Join senior developers in Boston for insights on AI, scalable architectures, and more. June 9-10, 2025. Early bird pricing available.

Ben Wilkes’ post truly resonates with my thinking. At #InfoQDevSummit, I'll be speaking about Chat Oriented Programming (ChOP) and agentic engineering—sharing how I used them to build a RAG for the InfoQ Certified Architect in Emerging Technologies certification at #QConLondon. #QConLondon

"...how do we prevent these concerns and use agentic engineering to deliver good-quality commercial software? In a word: discipline. We apply the same discipline—and very similar practices—that we applied to manual engineering as we do to agentic engineering."

Love this! I couldn't agree more.

The trouble with vibe coding: why AI-driven software needs discipline | Equal Experts Vibe coding sounds fun, but is it reliable? Discover why AI-powered software development needs structure, discipline, and agentic engineering to succeed.

My colleague Ben Wilkes published a pragmatic post about agentic engineering and the area of ChOP.

I like the vocabulary of "agentic engineering" to describe how we should be using AI to write professional software today.

www.equalexperts.com/blog/data-ai...

I continue to be humbled to lead the speaker webinar for QCon software conferences.

avgSpeakerAttendance==30
highSpeakerWatermark==38

There are so few conferences I'm aware of that truly practice "We Care" like QCon. Things like this webinar are great! Hope to see you this year! #QConLondon

As always, an outstanding annual review of the dbms space... Good stuff on license blowback and Databricks v Snowflake.

Takeaways from me:
- Continually revisit your understanding of DDD (understanding what is truly an aggregate and why it matters)
- Make sure you don't split your transactions across service boundaries
- ...and, of course, make sure you can ship with autonomy. Afterall, that's the point (6/6)

Upper Bound: A Microservice shall be no larger than that which allows a two-pizza team to release a single complete, appropriately sized user story to production within a single day. (5/6)

Lower bound: A Microservice should consist of no less than an Aggregate (or at least an independent Entity) and the associated Services that operate on the entities of that Aggregate. (4/6)

What’s the right size for a Microservice? Kyle Brown, IBM Fellow, CTO Cloud Architecture, IBM Cloud Garage Shahir Daya, IBM Distinguished engineer, IBM Global Business Services

Sarah references Kyle Brown and Shahir Daya's post "What’s the right size for a Microservice?" There are some great upper and lower bounds for a service size I really like. (3/6) kylegenebrown.medium.com/whats-the-ri...

I've struggled recently with a large team where we over-optimized a microservice architecture (dozens of services when a handful were really needed) so this phrase resonated with me. (2/6)

Returning to Enabling Microservice Success @sarahjwells.bsky.social. On the right size for a microservice:

"When you're designing your microservices and finding your boundaries one thing you should be guided by is your transaction boundaries."

Seems intuitive, but it's not. 🧵(1/6)

Key Takeaways #5
"We look for executives who can both scale up and scale down. Scale up: you can speak credibly to the board, at the right level of abstraction vs detail [...] Scale down: you know what “good” looks like for work all over your organization, you can get down in the weeds... "

Key Takeaways #4
"You want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses."

Key Takeaways #3
Start small. You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.

Key Takeaways #2
"Hypergrowth encourages a raft of bad habits, and attacking every problem by hiring more people is one of them." – @mipsytipsy.bsky.social

Key Takeaways #1
There has never been, nor will there ever be, a universal approach to leadership. What works for one person or organization might not work for another. What works depends on your culture, your challenges, and the tradeoffs you’re willing to make.

“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking I’ve never been good at “hot takes”. Anyone who knows anything about marketing can tell you that the best time to share your opinion about something is when everyone is all worked up about it. Hot …

@mipsytipsy.bsky.social rarely disappoints. Her unfiltered reflections on "Founder Mode and the Art of Hiring” are awesome. It makes you reflect on the kind of leader you aspire to be (and why).

charity.wtf/2024/12/17/f...

Shout out to Tommy Hinrichs for the conversation today around Dagger and reminding me I wanted to post this video!

Taming Your Application’s Environments - Marcos Lilljedahl & Mauricio "Salaboy" Salatino YouTube video by CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]

One of my major takeaways #KubeConNA '24:

Dagger continues to hit it's stride. The promise was always there (how could it not with @shykes.bsky.social as CEO), but it's only 🚀.

@salaboy.com and Marcos Lilljedahl did a great job showing Dagger & DAPR together in SLC
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSen...

Platform Engineering is a product-focused approach to enabling stream aligned teams to deliver with substantial autonomy. Effective Platform Engineering is a great additional the conversation! This was a fun chat with some wonderful platform engineers!

Key Takeaway #4

APIs developed with domain-driven design, providing multi-channel support for diverse business applications

#QConSF