We are finally done talking about (digital) supply chains. I think. Until then, I wanted to switch it up and take a look at a very interesting policy proposal that came across my desk. “The Great Refactor” by authors from the Institute for Progress (IFP) is an essay proposing a way “to secure critical open-source code against memory safety exploits by automating code hardening at scale” to “secure US critical infrastructure and our software supply chains” (okay I lied this is still about supply chains).

The past couple of weeks have been very focused on Europe. There’s a lot going on in this region, between the ongoing tariff negotiations, trade deals* (concepts of deals?), and general shakeups in the relationship between the EU and the rest of the world. Part of the themes we’ve covered a lot this year have revolved around the shifts in digital supply chains amidst this chaos. In today’s piece, we’ll keep the focus on the digital supply chain and Europe specifically, but we’ll take a look at something other than tariffs: the EuroStack project.

Almost a year ago, we broke down one of the tech industry’s less covered (but no less impactful) beefs, looking at all the parties involved, their lawsuits, and most importantly, how it was impacting the larger ecosystem and community.(Quick plug: you can check that out here)

Last month, we published a piece taking a look at the digital goods supply chain, its overlaps with the real economic supply chain, and how tariffs affect that. A lot of it was predictive in nature. Anytime we get to predicting, we like to follow up to see how accurate our predictions have been. It’s only been a month since that post…so let’s call this a short-term reflection. We can check back later this year to see if it has aged any better.

Recently, there’s been a lot of focus on the material and physical supply chains of global trade (thanks to the latest round of seemingly endless tariff escalations). As trade tensions and geopolitical realignments reshape global commerce, much attention has focused on physical supply chains – container ships, manufacturing plants, and border crossings. Yet a parallel transformation is silently unfolding in the world of digital goods

Melvin Conway is a programmer and computer scientist who has made a lot of important contributions to the world of software. Among them is an often repeated phrase amongst people who spend their time “optimizing” things:

“Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

This past week, when DeepSeek’s AI app hit #1 on Apple’s App Store, it triggered a $1 trillion market selloff and widespread panic about the future of AI companies. It also sparked numerous takes, both good and bad. What most of these

A lot of our recent posts have focused on external IT events or ideas. We’re changing that up this time around. Instead, we want to highlight some tools and work that we’ve found usefu

“AI” is everywhere. I don’t have to tell you twice. It’s Q4 2024! There are Anthropic ads at the airport and Gemini commercials during major sporting events. Kids say “ChatGPT it” instead of “Google It.” So…yeah, it’s everywhere and (don’t quote me on this), it might actually be moving beyond the early adopter phase. With that in mind, I won’t talk about it from either the doomer or shill “AGI” perspective today. There’s enough of that out there. Instead, we’re going to take a far more pragmatic approach and look at a prevalent system design pattern for generative AI applications: Retrieval Augmented Generation (or RAG)

There’s a fun stat that gets thrown around every so often that goes something like “75% of the internet was built on WordPress.” While not exactly true, it’s directionally correct. A giant chunk of the internet was indeed built with WordPress. Released in 2003, it is sort of in the background of the modern tech world, so you might not think about it much. Recently however, WordPress (and variations of it) has been all over the media lately in strange and confusing ways.