Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Certbot is good software in the classic Linux tradition: it does one thing simply and expects you to chain it together with everything else. One server, one certificate, done. The trouble is that most environments are not simple. And the moment yours isn’t, you discover that renewing a certificate and getting it deployed are two different problems, and deployment is your problem.

Most engineering leaders today understand that diversity matters. They've built teams that reflect a range of backgrounds, functions, and experience levels. They run postmortems, retrospectives, and architecture reviews that bring multiple voices to the table. They believe, not unreasonably, that this variety of perspectives leads to better decisions. But there's a problem hiding inside that assumption that can undermine everything: who people are is a surprisingly poor predictor of how they think.

On March 18, Jensen Huang took the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in San Jose for a keynote that ran well over two hours — covering everything from CUDA’s 20-year history to humanoid robots that may one day wander Disneyland. But buried inside the spectacle was a remarkably clear-eyed articulation of the economic forces now bearing down on every enterprise that builds on cloud infrastructure.

For longer than I’m proud of, I was an AI skeptic. Then, over the holidays, I vibe coded an app whose sole purpose was to make me a better person. The app is a motivator. It’s programmed to send me timely reminders along certain themes, like reading every day, making healthy eating choices, and giving myself plenty of time to plan for anniversaries and birthdays.

Writing code is moving from the good old IDE into the realm of autonomous AI agents. One example of this is OpenAI, which has been developing internally with 0 lines of manually written code. You can read about their workflow in their engineering blog: Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world. For me, the main takeaway of OpenAI’s article is how AI has rewritten the constraints equation.

Tech headlines are being dominated by the perfect storm that has led to a global shortage of Random Access Memory (RAM). As the short-term, temporary memory that handles data for processing and applications, RAM – and specifically Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) – is a foundational business technology. The primary driver of this shortage is an industry-wide shift to High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This is the specialised memory required for artificial intelligence (AI).

Internal platform adoption usually doesn’t fail because developers “hate standards.” It fails because the platform doesn’t make their day easier. If your portal still means waiting, waiting on an environment, waiting on an approval, waiting on the platform team, it becomes one more tab that people stop opening. But if the platform lets engineers get the common stuff done quickly (with guardrails that keep things consistent), they’ll come back on their own.

Most engineering teams know the difference between “we have tests” and “we know we’re well-tested.” Your CI builds may be green, but without code coverage, it’s hard to prove how much of your code is actually exercised by automated tests. Code coverage measures what percentage of your code runs during tests (lines, branches, and functions), and when you wire it into CI gates, it becomes an enforceable quality signal and not a vanity metric.

At SREday NYC 2026, the ShipTalk podcast welcomed Birol Yildiz, Co-founder and CEO of ilert, for a conversation about the next evolution of incident response. In the episode, ShipTalk host Dewan Ahmed, Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, spoke with Birol about how artificial intelligence is transforming reliability engineering—from simply assisting engineers during incidents to autonomously diagnosing and resolving outages.