Recaps - Open Source Summit and Observability Summit 2026

18 May 2026 🔖 professional development 💬 EN

As assigned as homework during my #OSSSummit talk, (#OSSHomework!), here are my conference highlights from the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit and the CNCF’s Observability Summit. Still a work in progress; keep refreshing through next week until I get a chance to fully fill it in.

Microsoft wishlist

18 May 2026 🔖 professional development 💬 EN

Hi, Microsoft! Here’s that wishlist I approached you about toward the end of the day at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit:

Observability Summit 2026 conference talk

17 May 2026 🔖 web development security iam 💬 EN

Register now for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (“CNCF”) 2026 Observability Summit (“#O11ySummit”) because:

1. Minneapolis is amazing, and
2. You can watch me speak!

Bookmark “Secure by Design: Rethinking Test Credentials for Synthetic Monitoring” in Sched to make sure you don’t miss it. Last talk of the day on Thursday, May 21st.

Open Source Summit 2026 conference talk

17 May 2026 🔖 professional development 💬 EN

3:05 TODAY (Tue. 5/19): Bookmark “Tiny Repos, Big Impact: Level Up Through Open-Source Teaching” in Sched to make sure you don’t miss my talk at the Linux Foundation’s 2026 Open Source Summit (“#OSSummit”)!

How to switch Visual Studio license assignment from individuals to groups

13 May 2026 🔖 architecture tutorials iam 💬 EN

So – you’ve been dutifully opening the Visual Studio Subscriptions Admin Portal, adding individual users, removing them when they leave, and generally keeping the whole thing running? Yay – very happy it works. But there’s a slightly more enterprise-friendly way to assign Visual Studio licenses using Entra security groups, if your identity provider is Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory).

Minnebar 2026 recap

04 May 2026 🔖 professional development 💬 EN

Session notes from the Minnebar conference’s 20th anniversary, May 2, 2026 below.

Azure Managed DevOps Pools cross-contamination

09 Apr 2026 🔖 devops integration security 💬 EN

Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Managed DevOps Pool (“MDOP”) agent VMs let you privately network Azure Pipelines without having to self-host your own long-running VM, but if you set the agentProfile kind parameter to Stateful instead of to Stateless, then they wouldn’t be fully ephemeral. So you’d still have the problem that sequential workloads on the same VM could be exposed to residual state from prior runs. It’s a heck of a lot shorter VM time-to-live (“TTL”) than your average self-host – no more than 7 days – but if you set the TTL long enough, you could end up with an afternoon job still seeing an environment variable named HELLO set to world, even though it was a morning job that set that value. Cross-contamination vectors may include:

I haven't had a desktop query tool in years

09 Apr 2026 🔖 professional development databases 💬 EN

I just noticed someone on a huge monitor working in a query tool – the kind where you type out the query up top and surf an Excel-like spreadsheet down below – and realized that it’s been a while since I needed one of those installed onto my machine.

Music, bird brains and LLM math

08 Apr 2026 🔖 music prompt engineering 💬 EN

Wanna go really trippy about philosophy and LLMs? Check this shower thought about “what if language itself is sorta deterministic?”:

Pyramid summaries for LLMs

08 Apr 2026 🔖 prompt engineering 💬 EN

This notion of Pyramid Summaries for, as Simon Willison puts it, “providing multiple levels of summary, such that an LLM coding assistant can enumerate the short ones quickly, and zoom in on more detailed information as it is needed,” is interesting, because I’ve done forms of it intuitively for a long time when using LLM coding assistants: