The MonkCast

In this RedMonk conversation, Jack Bridger, host of Scaling Devtools and Developer Experience at Layercode, chats with Kate Holterhoff about founders. Jack shares insights from his interviews with founders on the importance of understanding users, overcoming fear in business, and challenges faced in the startup ecosystem. They also discuss marketing strategies around the role of differentiation, and the debate between bootstrapping and seeking venture capital, and the necessity of sales teams in DevTools. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/11/13/rmc-jack-bridger/

In this RedMonk conversation, Deb Nicholson, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation, discusses the PSF's responsibilities, recent challenges with a government grant proposal, and the community's strong support with Kate Holterhoff. The conversation highlights the importance of cybersecurity in open source, the role of PyPI, and the evolving landscape of programming languages. Deb emphasizes the PSF's mission to support the global Python community and the significance of educational initiatives in teaching Python effectively. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/rem-deb-nicholson-psf

In this RedMonk Conversation from IBM's TechXchange conference, Matt Rodkey speaks about and demos Bob, IBM's newly announced agentic IDE, with RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff. Currently in private preview, Bob is designed to help enterprise developers navigate complex codebases and modernization challenges. Rodkey emphasizes that Bob's differentiation lies in addressing enterprise deployment needs—security compliance, regulatory requirements like HIPAA and FedRAMP, and production readiness—rather than just code generation. This RedMonk video is sponsored by IBM. Show Notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/rmc-bob-matt-rodkey-ibm-techxchange/

What happens when you build an ultra low-latency compute platform and then realize the round trips are going to kill you? Absent changing physics or your cap table: you partner! This RedMonk Conversation explores how Fermyon - a platform that compiles serverless compute into Wasm - partnered with Akamai - a company that started out as a CDN and has evolved into a full-fledged alternative cloud - to build a better together story. Join RedMonk's Research Director Rachel Stephens, Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher, and Akamai's Director of Product Management Allen Duet to discuss the future of serverless computing at the edge. This RedMonk video is sponsored by Akamai. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/akamai-fermyon/

In this RedMonk conversation, Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb and a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, chats AI, Olly, and OTel with Kate Holterhoff. They explore the implications of AI on SREs and observability practitioners, the development of honeycomb's MCP server, and the challenges vendors face in adapting to changes in the observability space. The discussion also touches on the balance between speed and quality in feedback, the complexities introduced by software abstractions, and the future role of OpenTelemetry in the AI-driven observability space. Honeycomb is a RedMonk client, but this content is unsponsored. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/10/23/rmc-austin-parker/

In this RedMonk Conversation on the Road at IBM TechXchange 2025, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady chats with Kate Soule, IBM's Director of Technical Product Management for Granite about the newly announced Granite 4.0 family of large language models. Soule explains IBM's strategic focus on small, efficient models that are open sourced under Apache 2, highlighting how these models achieve better performance than previous generations while reducing costs and improving latency through new architecture and training approaches. This RedMonk video is sponsored by IBM. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/rmc-ibm-techxchange-granite-kate-soule/

In this RedMonk conversation, Pascal Martin, principal software engineer at Bedrock Streaming, and Valentin Clavreul, principal backend engineer at Bedrock Streaming, discuss the evolution of streaming architectures and their partnership with Fastly as a crucial element in optimizing performance with RedMonk's James Governor. They explore the challenges of scaling streaming services, the transition from PHP to Go for backend development, and the importance of interoperability with AWS and edge compute. The discussion also highlights the significance of observability in ensuring reliable architectures and the preparations needed for major sporting events like the Euros. This RedMonk Conversation is sponsored by Fastly. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/bedrock-streaming-from-cdn-to-compute-for-50m-people-watching-the-euros/

In this conversation, Rachel Stephens (Research Director at RedMonk) and Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation) discuss the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Mike explains the law, its implications for the software industry – particularly open source software – and the responsibilities it places on manufacturers. This episode covers: the evolution of the CRA from a “near-death experience for open source” in its initial drafts to a “workable piece of legislation” understanding the responsibilities the legislation places upon different industry roles exploring the CRA's potential impacts on open source communities discussing how to get prepared This discussion is emphatically important if you sell software into a European market. Come listen to Mike to help understand the new legal obligations that come with the CRA. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/10/8/rmc-cra-ecplisefoundation

In this RedMonk conversation, Taylor Barnett-Torabi , Staff Product Manager at Netlify, and Lyle Schemmerling, Senior Software Engineer at FusionAuth, discuss the impact of large language models (LLMs) on developer experience with Kate Holterhoff. They chat about the evolution of agent experience (AX), the integration of LLMs into documentation, and the challenges of ensuring that documentation remains relevant and secure in a rapidly changing landscape. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/09/30/rmc-taylor-barnett-torabi-lyle-schemmerling/

In this MonkCast with the Monks episode, RedMonk analysts Rachel Stephens, Kate Holterhoff, and James Governor discuss the current 'grumpy era' of AI, where developers are questioning the ROI of AI tools and their effectiveness. They check in on AI code assistants, vibe coding, agentic IDEs, AI spec-driven development, and the AI Engineer. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/blog/2025/09/11/ais-grumpy-fun-era/