/ THE FEED /

Read what ships.

Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

Martin Fowler Kubernetes Clear all

01Martin Fowler · architecture
When Software Meets Hardware
A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
02Martin Fowler · performance
Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?
An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.
DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
03Kubernetes · migration
The Shift to cgroup v2 in Kubernetes: What You Need to Know
Kubernetes has deprecated cgroup v1 in favor of cgroup v2, with complete removal scheduled for future releases. The transition requires migrating Linux nodes, updating container runtimes, and verifying kernel compatibility. Adopting cgroup v2 enables advanced features such as Memory QoS, improved OOM handling, and pressure stall information metrics.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read2 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate
04Kubernetes · scaling
Scaling Kubernetes Workloads with Node Swap
Kubernetes memory limits often cap node density for bursty agentic AI workloads that sit idle with large memory footprints. To solve this, the engineering team benchmarked Kubernetes v1.34 node swap backed by fast NVMe Local SSDs across CI/CD builds, headless browsers, and Python sandboxes. The approach successfully increased pod density up to three times without significant latency costs.
DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read2 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate
05Martin Fowler · practice
Fragments: October 21
This post discusses commentary on AI usage in writing, the cancellation of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and reviews a detailed article by Cindy Sridharan on debugging with AI agents. The reviewed article highlights that AI agents excel at processing raw data rather than reading code first, and outlines a three-step debugging process involving controls, signals, and hypothesis validation. The lesson is that engineers must guide AI agents by setting up verification loops and providing raw data rather than human-centric abstractions.
DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
06Kubernetes · tooling
Why Is My Kubernetes Job Still Pending? Tracing Kueue Admission with Headlamp
Kubernetes jobs managed by Kueue can remain pending while waiting for admission checks and resource allocation. The team implemented a Kueue plugin for Headlamp to trace pending workloads through local queues, cluster queues, and resource flavors within a unified interface. This approach allows engineers to quickly determine whether a job is blocked by admission policies or standard pod scheduling.
DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read11 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
07Martin Fowler · practice
Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet
The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.
DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read12 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
08Martin Fowler · practice
Fragments: October 4
This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.
DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read2 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate
09Martin Fowler · practice
Principles for effective slides
Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate
10Martin Fowler · practice
Build your slide template
Presenters often struggle with the visual design of slides and default to cluttered or uniform corporate templates. To build a better presentation foundation, the author recommends sticking to a restricted color palette, limiting the number of fonts, and using minimal layouts without unnecessary floodmarks like page numbers or logos. This approach results in a cohesive visual identity that provides greater flexibility during slide construction.
DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read11 days ago
Sign in to save and rate
11Martin Fowler · practice
Bliki: Sensible Default
The engineering post introduces the concept of a sensible default as an alternative to best practices in software development. Sensible defaults serve as reliable starting points for tasks in the absence of hard constraints, while still allowing teams to adapt and override them when context requires. Organizations like Thoughtworks utilize playbooks of these defaults to guide initial work while encouraging regular reflection and adjustment.
DEPTH ■■■■■2 min read3 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate
12Martin Fowler · practice
Fragments: September 29
This post discusses observations on coding agents, focusing on their persistence, the role of training material in hacking behavior, and the need for greater safety measures and liability. It examines experiments with unlimited tokens and explores regulatory and educational perspectives on agentic AI.
DEPTH ■■■■■4 min read3 weeks ago
Sign in to save and rate