The MonkCast

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212

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Join the developer-focused industry analysts at RedMonk as they discuss news and trends in the software space with leaders and practicioners in cloud, AI, IaC, security, DevOps, developer relations, observability, data, and more. Can't get enough of the Monks? Visit the RedMonk YouTube channel or check out our research at RedMonk.com . You can also follow RedMonk on Bluesky , Twitter (X), and LinkedIn . Meet RedMonk's Analysts James Governor , Principal Analyst & Co-founder @monkchips , LinkedIn , Blog Stephen O'Grady , Principal Analyst & Co-founder @sogrady , LinkedIn , Blog Rachel Stephens , Research Director @rstephensme , LinkedIn , Blog Kate Holterhoff , Senior Industry Analyst @KateHolterhoff , LinkedIn , Blog

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August 25, 202634 min

The Digital Sovereignty Questions Every Enterprise Should Be Asking with Jason Willeford

James Governor sits down with Jason Willeford, Global Lead for Secure Global Support at Red Hat, to dig into digital sovereignty and why it's become such a big deal for European enterprises. Jason explains Red Hat's Confirmed Sovereign Support, launched last year, which keeps EU customer data and the engineers handling it inside the EU. They cover what sovereignty actually means, why banks and telcos now care about it as much as public sector agencies do, and how AI complicates the picture when you don't know where a model was trained or what data it consumed on the way there. The conversation also touches on IBM's Sovereign Core, Project Lightwell, and RHEL for SAP. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Red Hat. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/ jason-willeford / Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Digital Sovereignty 02:26 Understanding Sovereignty: Definitions and Spectrum 05:31 The Complexity of Sovereignty in Europe 08:21 Data Sovereignty and Support Models 11:28 AI Sovereignty and Its Implications 14:15 Operational Sovereignty and Customer Engagement 17:20 The Role of Red Hat in Sovereignty 20:40 Sovereign Core and Global Expansion 23:36 Mindset Shift Towards Sovereignty 26:22 Engaging Developers and Enterprises on Sovereignty 29:36 The Future of Sovereignty and Open Source

August 20, 202617 min

The Data Behind the Agents with MongoDB's Boris Bialek & Intellect Design's Raman Jatkar

In this RedMonk conversation, Stephen O'Grady sits down with Boris Bialek, VP of Industries at MongoDB, and Raman Jatkar, Head of Product Management for Purple Fabric at Intellect Design, to examine where agentic AI and data platforms converge. The discussion makes the case that data, not models, determines enterprise outcomes. Raman reframes hallucination as a data architecture and sequencing problem, solved through deliberate ingestion, chunking, and retrieval strategies rather than model swaps. Boris stresses governance, lineage, guardrails, and the often-overlooked security risks of agent-to-agent interactions like open banking. Both argue that data and AI platforms should be treated as one interconnected capability, with governance built in rather than bolted on. The conversation closes on the renewed importance of operational, real-time data, what Boris calls OLTP returning to center stage, and keeping the human customer at the end of every workflow. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by MongoDB. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/boris-bialek-raman-jatkar/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the AI Agentic Era 01:58 Understanding Purple Fabric and Its Tech Stacks 05:52 Addressing Hallucinations in AI Models 09:26 Governance and Compliance in AI Systems 12:33 Challenges and Opportunities in Data and AI Integration

August 12, 202619 min

From Dashboards to APIs: Day Two Operations in VCF 9.1 with Sehjung Hah

In this MonkCast conversation, Rachel Stephens talks with Sehjung Hah, a product marketing engineer at Broadcom, about how VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is shifting private cloud operations from click-driven dashboards toward programmable, API-first workflows. Hah walks through the expanded VCF API surface that lets developers pull network details, vSphere diagnostics, and real-time infrastructure health in a self-service fashion. They also discuss a new fleet management capability that centralizes password rotation, certificate updates, and identity management across massive compute footprints. This RedMonk video is sponsored by VMware by Broadcom. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/vcf9dot1-dashboards-to-apis-sehjung-hah/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:30 Removing Developer Friction in Private Cloud 02:44 Fleet Management for Platform Engineers 04:23 From Dashboards to Telemetry-as-Code 08:27 Killing Static Credentials and Shrinking the Blast Radius 11:29 AI Workloads, Sovereignty, and Cost Visibility 14:56 The 3 AM Scenario 17:27 Putting It All Together

August 13, 202646 min

Evidence Over Certificates: John Ellis on the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework

What does it mean to trust software? For this RedMonk Conversation, Kate Holterhoff sits down with John Ellis, President of Codethink and the contributor to the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework, to pull that question apart. Ellis leans on an old image: the bridge builders who once slept under their own bridges to prove the work was sound. Modern software rarely faces that kind of test, even when it steers a car or flies a plane. He explains where trust tends to break, especially the integration step where hidden dependencies finally show themselves, and points out that a safety certificate almost never uses the word "safe." Rather than pass-or-fail box-ticking, the framework asks teams to state their confidence and back it with evidence that others can inspect and challenge. They also dig into AI-written code, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and why rising software recalls suggest current habits fall short. This RedMonk video is sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/john-ellis/ Chapters 00:04 Introduction to the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 02:57 Understanding Trust in Software 05:59 The Integration Moment of Truth 08:54 Challenges in Software Development Lifecycle 11:25 The Role of the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 14:39 Managing Change in Software Development 17:20 Versioning and Continuous Improvement 20:01 Risk Analysis and Trustworthiness in Software 24:39 Automating Testing and Confidence in Software 25:23 Bridging the Gap with Regulators 27:15 The Complexity of Software and Safety Standards 29:18 Understanding Certification and Safety Claims 31:12 The Need for a Shift in Mindset 32:16 The Role of the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 34:18 Navigating the EU Cyber Resilience Act 37:41 The Journey of Compliance and Awareness 39:16 AI's Impact on Software Provenance 43:34 Future Directions for the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework

August 6, 202650 min

Dealing with the Next Bottleneck: Build Management at AI Scale with Helen Altshuler

AI agents are writing code faster than anyone can build, test, and ship it. James Governor talks with Helen Altshuler, CEO and co-founder of EngFlow, about why the bottlenecks that once happened at Google scale are now showing up everywhere. Helen traces the story back to Google's 2008 push for five-minute builds, which produced Blaze and eventually Bazel, and explains why that system is finally having its moment a decade after it was open sourced. The numbers are hard to ignore: EngFlow's customers went from 250 million build actions a week to nearly 2 billion in a single year. Companies like Snowflake, Databricks, and Tinder are using Bazel, managed by EngFlow to keep up. James and Helen also dig into agent-ready documentation, why verification is increasingly automated or even ignored, and what happens once people stop using pull request workflows. We're about to hit a wall of AI created scale, and companies are going to fundamentally rethink architectures and approaches if the want to make it. This RedMonk video is sponsored by EngFlow. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/helen-altshuler/ Chapters 00:04 Introduction and Context Setting 01:25 Challenges of Build Management at Scale 04:29 Google's Historical Perspective on Build Management 07:15 The Impact of AI on Software Development 10:19 Bazel's Role in Modern Development 13:23 Community Growth and Open Source Collaboration 16:36 Enhancing Developer Experience with AI 19:22 Customer Insights and Scaling Challenges 22:34 Bazel's Unique Advantages and Market Position 25:21 Multi-Cloud Strategies and Infrastructure Flexibility 29:36 Scaling Software Development with Data 33:06 Investing in Developer Infrastructure 36:37 Embracing GitHub and CI Challenges 42:13 The Evolution of Code Review Practices 47:11 The Future of Build Management at Scale

August 4, 202650 min

"Don't Submit Code You Don't Understand": Angie Byron on AI and Open Source Trust

Open source has a new problem: you often can't tell whether the contributor on the other end is a person or an agent working on their behalf. In this RedMonk Conversation, Kate Holterhoff talks with Angie Byron, Senior Manager of Community and Advocacy at Temporal and lead of applied AI at Drupal, about AI's effects on open source communities. They discuss the issue of AI-generated slop on maintainers, the credit and trust systems AI breaks, and the policies projects are testing, from disclosure rules to outright bans. Angie also makes the case for the upside: tools that let product managers and marketers ship real code, security work that surfaces decades-old bugs, and a much lower bar for who gets to contribute. Underneath all of it sits a harder question about identity, and what happens to developers who built a career on the craft of writing code. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/angie-byron/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Angie Byron and Temporal 02:47 AI's Impact on Open Source Communities 05:57 Trust and Contribution in Drupal 08:40 Navigating AI in Open Source Contributions 11:40 Demographic Shifts in Open Source Contributions 14:30 The Role of AI in Contributor Onboarding 17:29 The Future of Open Source with AI 20:30 Challenges and Opportunities in AI Contributions 23:49 Conclusion and Future Outlook 27:46 Navigating AI in Code Review 29:22 Challenges of Incentivization in Open Source Contributions 30:14 The Bug Bounty Dilemma 31:08 AI's Role in Security Vulnerability Detection 32:30 Onboarding and Community Engagement in Open Source 35:09 The Impact of AI on Content Management Systems 38:40 AI Integration in Drupal and CMSs 41:21 The Future of CMS in an AI-Driven World 45:02 Call to Action for Open Source Collaboration

July 21, 202626 min

Tech for Chickens with JT Perry

In this MonkCast Conversation, RedMonk Research Director Rachel Stephens talks with JT Perry, co-founder of Barn Analytics, about building ChickenSense — a hardware and software product that uses RFID tags and in-coop sensors to monitor backyard chicken health. JT shares how his own farming experiences led him to build a solution for detecting illness in egg-laying chickens before it's too late. They discuss the challenges of designing custom circuit boards for the first time, managing Bluetooth communication in environments without Wi-Fi, navigating tariffs and supply chain uncertainty, and the chicken-and-egg problem (pun very much intended) of building a data analytics platform before you have the data. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/ tech-for-chickens-with-jt-perry / Chapters: 00:00 Introduction and Background 01:32 From Tech Burnout to Farming (With Computers) 02:46 The Hypothesis: Weight Loss as a Health Indicator 05:34 Bluetooth, Battery Life, and Coop Connectivity 09:18 Protecting Hardware from Chicken Grossness 11:22 Manufacturing and Supply Chain Challenges 12:26 The Platform 16:24 Biggest Engineering Challenges 17:54 Target Market and the Cattle-Pets Spectrum 20:08 Roadmap and Product #2: USDA Temperature Monitoring 22:37 The Team Behind Barn Analytics 23:16 Lightning Round: Chicken Names, Horrors, and Eggs

July 23, 202651 min

Charity Majors on AI, Determinism, Instrumentation, & Eating Your Broccoli

James Governor talks with Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, about what AI is doing to engineering practices. Majors argues that non-determinism takes more discipline, not less, and every CEO who wants their AI cookies has to eat their broccoli first. Agents in production are finally forcing teams to do the instrumentation work they should have done years ago. They get into Chad Fowler's Phoenix architectures and the idea that the system, not the code, holds the truth about how software behaves. Also: which problems AI has genuinely solved and which it hasn't, why bragging about token spend is like driving a Hummer, and the last year of AI hype has been aimed almost entirely at individual productivity when the hard useful work is always about software development as a team sport. They discuss Honeycomb's Canvas, the company's AI-guided Observabiolity workspace. And finally they discuss the difference between performative outrage and actually artists in the AI era - and make some recommendations accordingly! Honeycomb is a RedMonk client, but this video is free an independent content. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/charity-majors/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:51 Nobody has any change budget left 03:15 AI is forcing the discipline conversation 05:37 Broccoli first, then ice cream 06:01 Phoenix architectures, and why code isn't the source of truth 08:47 The problems AI hasn't solved 11:30 Where determinism meets non-determinism 13:29 Token maxxing, Goodhart, and the Hummer problem 15:34 Superpowers for one vs engineering as a team sport 19:00 npmx and doing open source in public 20:41 Honeycomb Canvas, and social debugging at 2am 26:22 AI norms and values 27:42 Writing is thinking 32:25 Work you stand behind vs feedback you can't outsource 35:06 The other bitter lessons 37:33 If you support artists, support artists 43:05 Performative anger and Bluesky 44:49 Knowledge management is back 46:27 Canvas, timeline analysis, and what's next

July 28, 202646 min

Where Crochet Meets Code: Fiber Arts and the History of Computing with Abbey Perini

What do Viking needlework, the Apollo guidance computer, and a $7 Etsy crochet pattern have in common? More than you'd think. In this episode of the MonkCast, Kate Holterhoff talks with Abbey Perini, web developer at Hygiena, technical writer, and prolific crafter, about the tangled history of fiber arts and programming. Abbey walks through a condensed version of her CodeMash talk, from the earliest knitted scraps around 6500 BCE to the women who wove core rope memory for NASA and got written off as "little old lady" needleworkers. Along the way she makes the case that the Jacquard loom gets too much credit, that knitting patterns really are programs (loops, debugging, DRY and all), and that AI slop has already found its way into crochet. The conversation closes on something quieter: why building a physical thing still matters when so much of our work disappears the moment we close the laptop. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/ abbey-perini / Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Fiber Arts and Programming 05:49 Historical Context of Fiber Arts 12:54 The Intersection of Fiber Arts and Computing 20:37 Patterns as Programs: Similarities and Differences 25:42 AI's Impact on Fiber Arts 28:30 The Intersection of Tech and Fiber Arts 32:35 Learning Through Craft: The Developer's Journey 37:26 The Emotional Connection to Crafting and Coding 42:31 Finding Meaning Beyond the Screen

July 14, 202625 min

Going Down the Stack: AI Inference, Kernel Fusion, and Model Tuning with Paul Brookes

In this MonkCast conversation, RedMonk's James Governor talks with Paul Brookes, a senior AI engineer at TurinTech, about making AI inference faster and cheaper. TurinTech predates the generative AI boom, having spent years optimizing complex code with genetic algorithms, and now points those tools at the models themselves. Brookes walks through techniques like kernel fusion and model compilation that squeeze more tokens per second out of specific hardware, drawing on the company's work with Intel on OpenVINO and vLLM. The two get into running capable open models such as Qwen on local machines, the spiraling cost of AI , and why judging engineers by tokens burned misses the point. Brookes also describes Artemis and its discovery harness, which lets agents learn from past results, and traces his own route from quantum physics into low-level performance engineering. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by TurinTech. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/paul-brookes/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to AI and TurinTech 01:42 Optimization Challenges in AI 04:30 Working with Semiconductor Companies 08:46 The Cost of AI and Local Model Deployment 11:29 Local Model Performance and Infrastructure 14:44 Partnerships and Breakthroughs with Intel 16:54 Key Techniques for Optimizing Inference 19:39 The Role of AI Engineers 21:50 Bridging the Gap with Customers 23:21 Harnessing AI for Continuous Improvement