one of my specialties is sneezing after applying liquid eyeliner and ending up looking like I lost a fight with a sharpie

Gender policing hurts everyone, and there is no gender equality that excludes our trans friends.

Just FYI that some of the iPad apps use math questions as a parental control barrier to prevent kids from getting to the advanced settings, and you should be wary of your five-year old suddenly asking you "mama, what's six times eight?"

dammit, I am at 10273 Spotted Owl Ave looking for 2+ window replacements this week if only I had the correct hair color for this deal!

Trying to reconcile the advice for developers to decouple their identity from their dev tools with a Flutter community happy hour redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

New on the MonkCast! JSON Schema underpins every OpenAPI spec, MCP tool, and LLM structured output, but mostly nobody talks about it. Come listen to Juan Cruz Viotti as we chat about the power that comes from caring about a technology layer everyone else is ignoring.

our application to the animal rescue said "our house is already baby proofed" with such confidence. alas...

so I know that it's just automated marketing. I know it is completely impersonal. I know they are playing me. but I still like it when my dentist, eye doctor, and former mortgage broker wish me a happy birthday.

There was a moment during this video production where we thought we wouldn't have access to @kateholterhoff.com's picture with Weezer. I made this masterpiece as a placeholder, and I think it's pretty good. But you should probably watch the video and see the real one.

as someone who has battled with the model to try to get it to stop saying 'goblins' I feel somewhat vindicated reading this also... cc/ @quinnypig.com

I recently filmed a MonkCast episode with Audrey Bian from Broadcom. She explained the features of the latest VKS 3.6 release and talked me through how the platform benefits various roles in the enterprise. Check out the full episode (with visuals!) here: redmonk.com/videos/vks-a...

I recorded a delightful conversation with Jay Thontakudi, talking about how developers and platform teams can benefit from VMware's partnership with Canonical

I truly truly can't wait for the edition of @matt-levine.bsky.social 's Money Stuff that will cover this ir.allbirds.com/news-release...

"I'm just calling to see what the Senator is doing today to prevent war crimes?" is not a phone call I had ever planned to make.

not your typical "am I overreacting" content www.reddit.com/r/AmIOverrea...

The world feels particularly cruel right now so I want to say this again with my full chest. To the amazing transgender people I know and love (and all those I haven't met yet): you make the world better. Thank you for being you in an increasingly hostile world. We are so lucky to have you. 🏳️‍⚧️💕

Using this opportunity to talk about my really cool clock again

Come hang out with @kateholterhoff.com and me while we livestream with @darko.rup12.net We're live at 9:30 Pacific! www.twitch.tv/kirodotdev

CHEESE MOUNTAIN!

A system always includes the mental model of the people using it, the people, the tools, and the dialogue. Numbers are scary because they change how the world affects people. Show your working Be correctable, not just correct Extent existing mental models Design for safe failure

Double-entry accounting as observability and verifiability for money is a sensational parallel. “Don’t just be correct - be correctable.” @ashley.rolfmore.com #monkigras

kicking off #monkigras with @monkchips.com! (this year’s conference is about preparedness, with a decidedly RedMonk amount of chaos mixed in)

I love that @nathenharvey.bsky.social is making sure we all have enough fucks to give

Spice Labs is giving away tastes of its Post Quantum Cryptography discovery and inventory tools Get PQC compliance information on post-build artifacts (CBOM, static call analysis, runtime call analysis) as well as a crypto-agility rating without burdening eng www.einpresswire.com/article/9000...

Video evidence of the time we ran around London @monkchips.com talking about all things #observability. I love this video. It highlights that context is king, how you approach observability matters, and how to understand what you are looking at. Relatable for both data AND life! @redmonk.com

from now on i will now be introducing myself as “rachel with technology“

from an outsider's perspective, I spent 20 minutes this morning booking appointments. but that myopic view erases the 6 months of avoidance, denial, and general anxiety it took to get me to this 20 minutes. please respect my art.

There are always so many gems in this newsletter.

a joke from my preschooler for your timeline: What does a penguin call its water bottle? … A waddle bottle

Databases aren’t going away, but how they fit in the modern data landscape is shifting. Here's how we're thinking about the unbundling of storage, compute, and interface layers at @redmonk.com redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

me, feeling sick over the weekend: Ugh, why am I always the one who catches the preschool colds? me, getting licked on the nose while putting my son to bed: Ahh, I see.

If you're a technical IC who cares about application performance, you should check out Monster Scale Summit. I had a great time keynoting last year, and the speaker lineup this year looks excellent! youtu.be/eon5E356kNE

I'm trying really hard to replace unnecessary apologies with gratitude (in the vein of "thanks for your help" instead of "sorry for the trouble") The problem is my muscle memory around apologizing is strong And so sometimes I ask a server for extra napkins and then say "sorry very much"

Can everyone building agent orchestration tools *please* stop using the term "overseer" to describe human oversight? We already learned this lesson with master > main. Words matter.

Maybe "Sisu".

Sheep.

A fantastic discussion with @rstephens.me @aeva.online and Chris about the Complex World we live in. It’s the power of the @redmonk.com community redmonk.com/videos/compl...

New video up: a conversation about how the observability market is evolving and the role vendors like @dynatrace.com are playing. Worth a watch if you’re thinking about tooling and data strategy. redmonk.com/videos/obser...

I really like this piece from @kateholterhoff.com

very cool. well done, anthropic. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/12/anth...

what do VMs, microservices and agents have in common? and what does Yeats have to do with all of that? redmonk.com/sogrady/2026...

Join the dora.community today for a discussion with @wiredferret.bsky.social about progressive delivery. Heidi will give a brief overview and then we'll have a lean coffee-based discussion about the topic. Meeting starts at 12PM ET, details on the mailing list. #DORA #GBGB #Community

Maybe not every SaaS service needs a year in review...

our kids sleep with stuffed animals that you can warm up in the microwave before bed. the result is super cozy, but it’s always a little unsettling to be the person in charge of nuking the baby animals.

the most relatable part of Little Mermaid as a parent is the horror of discovering your child has built a shrine out of random trash they found on the playground, and they are emotionally attached to every single “treasure” whole fucking house is full of dinglehoppers I can’t throw away.

Still can’t speak Spanish past what I remember from high school, still terrible at chess, still fiercely protective of my streak

The @redmonk.com team allows* me to plan activities for the team holiday happy hour every year, and I am SO EXCITED for today's Show and Tell festivities. *begrudgingly allows

I talked with @zachlloyd.bsky.social from @warp.dev about how the terminal is changing, why agentic development needs new interfaces, and what comes after writing code by hand. redmonk.com/blog/2025/12...

Have you been following the JavaScript Bundler Grand Prix? Consider recent announcements including @voidzero.dev's Vite+, @bytedance.bsky.social's Rspack 1.6, @vercel.com's @nextjs.org 16 (beta) release enabling Turbopack by default, & @anthropic.com's Bun acquisition. redmonk.com/kholterhoff/...

ain't no party like a reinvent party cuz a reinvent party don't sto ---- wait hold on, it's almost midnight and I haven't done my duolingo yet, give me a couple minutes