three things MCP can do, and an infinite number of things it can’t do (all of which make it great) AI agents can interact with the world using tools. Those tools can be generic or specific. Generic Run a bash command Operate a web browser Execute a SQL query Specific See my Google Calendar events … Read moreWhat is special about MCP?
Efficiency means doing the same thing with fewer resources. In software, efficient code is faster, because that uses less compute. If some other software is waiting on yours to return, then your speed is saving upstream compute. Efficient data uses less space, which means less network bandwidth to move it around. All this is very … Read moreWhen efficiency isn’t wasteful
Not only can things be otherwise, they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, Joyful Militancy Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2025. The system is broken, it is getting worse, and … Read moreThe world is terrible and great
Here’s a familiar 2×2, the Important & Urgent quadrants: Very early in my career, I was taught to beware the “Not Important & Urgent” quadrant. I’m used to working in the “Important & Urgent” quadrant most of the time, getting the important stuff done just on time. This is the quadrant of productivity. A friend … Read moreProductivity v Impact
a keynote from CppNorth This one is about everything else that a team needs to accomplish, besides writing the code, in order to provide useful capabilities to people.
a keynote for YOW! London Playing games, we can focus deeply and work really hard and also have a good time. This is what I want out of work, too. Traditional gamification adds points, competition, and badges to make work appear more game-like. This corrodes collaboration, replacing a deeper meaning with superficial characteristics of games. … Read moreGoing Deep on Gamification
This is a small talk for Bridges Summit, 28 August 2024. References and Recommendations: Combining, by Nora Bateson. ⬅ this is about seeing the second and third-order effects of what we do. It helps me live in a world that is so far from perfect, and work to make it better without despair. (I don’t … Read moreBridges Summit
For a demo app, I want a simple-as-possible deploy script. The simplest thing is to hard-code the version number (which gives my docker image a unique tag, which gets kubernetes to pull the new image1). But I’m tired of updating the version number. So I made the script update it for me. Why not use … Read moreStupid bash tricks: a self-updating script
Video from DevOpsDays Rockies, September 2024.Keynote at SwiftCraft, Folkestone, UK, 24 May 2024.also given at Explore DDD (video), March 2024; also given at Emerging Tech East, April 2024 At Honeycomb, we have a company value: Everything is an Experiment. Sometimes people take that too literally, and try to make every UI change an A/B test, … Read moretalk: Experimenting in Sociotechnical Systems
TL;DR: right now OTel Logs are a little harder to use than span events, but otherwise they are superior. Today I wanted to send OTLP Logs and see them correlated with my traces. First problem: logs aren’t available in the OTel JavaScript SDK. They’re still in development. (It is the end of 2023.) There is … Read moreSending OTLP Logs from JavaScript