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The MonkCast

A RedMonk Production

Technology analysis and insights from the RedMonk team

Join us for in-depth conversations with technology thought leaders, industry experts, and the RedMonk analysts as we explore the intersection of technology, business, and culture.

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Latest Episodes

When Agents Become Users: Rethinking Developer Portals with Balaji Sivasubramanian - Cover Art
New Episode
July 9, 2026

When Agents Become Users: Rethinking Developer Portals with Balaji Sivasubramanian

Are internal developer portals dead? In this RedMonk conversation, Kate Holterhoff talks with Balaji Sivasubramanian, Senior Director, Product Management, Agentic AI Developer Platform at Red Hat, who isn't convinced. While some thought leaders claim that developers will soon live inside their own coding agents, making portals obsolete, Balaji argues that enterprises still need the golden paths and guardrails IDPs provide. Balaji's case is that a portal's UI matters less now, while the curated, verified context behind it matters more. Along the way they get into MCP's limits, context freshness, the rising cost of tokens, and why human judgment still beats an agent at some tasks.This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Red Hat.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/balaji-sivasubramanian/Chapters00:00 Introduction to the Conversation00:54 Balaji's Role at Red Hat01:58 The Importance of Developer Portals in AI02:30 Debunking the 'Death' of Developer Portals04:12 The Evolution of User Interfaces and AI Agents06:50 The Impact of AI on Developer Workflows10:32 Understanding AI Hallucinations in Development13:25 Navigating Permissions and Audit Logs with AI15:37 Challenges of Agent-Driven Actions23:49 Transforming Ticketing Systems with AI26:25 Navigating Enterprise Complexity31:33 Building Effective Agents36:36 The Challenge of Freshness in Data43:16 Ensuring Safe Agent Deployment49:01 The Future of Portals in an Agentic Era

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AI Code Optimization by Experimentation, Without Free Bread, with Mina Ilieva - Cover Art
July 2, 2026

AI Code Optimization by Experimentation, Without Free Bread, with Mina Ilieva

RedMonk's James Governor sits down with Mina Ilieva, AI engineer at TurinTech AI, to talk about a problem everyone in 2026 recognizes: we're shipping a lot of code slop. Ilieva explains how TurinTech's platform, Artemis, fights back. It began life running a genetic algorithm that scores candidate code against a fitness function, and it now has a newer tool, Discovery, built on an empirical loop where agents form hypotheses, turn them into experiments, and verify every change before a human approves it. The two get into what clients actually optimize for — throughput, latency, memory, runtime — and why none of it is free. Ilieva walks through real wins with Intel's vLLM work, QuantLib, BLAKE3, and a quantized Nemotron model. They also take apart "token maxxing," the habit of burning tokens to look busy, and make the case that verification skill, not raw output, is what keeps engineers employable.This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by TurinTech AI.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/mina-ilieva/Chapters00:00 Introduction to AI and TurinTech02:52 Code Optimization and Its Importance05:35 Use Cases and Client Engagements08:55 Token Efficiency and Cost Management11:46 The Role of AI in Software Development14:47 Trade-offs in Optimization17:37 Future of AI and Model Deployment

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Chris DeMars on Patching and Security in the AI Era - Cover Art
June 30, 2026

Chris DeMars on Patching and Security in the AI Era

RedMonk's Kate Holterhoff sits down with Chris DeMars, Senior Developer Advocate at TuxCare, for a conversation about patching in the AI era. Chris started writing code in Q Basic in the mid-90s and now spends his time at conferences explaining the JavaScript supply chain to people who'd rather not think about it: typosquatting, the Shai-Hulud worm, and getting locked out of his own VS Code editor at Vueconf. They get into why a Dockerfile that Claude wrote him pulled in an insecure version of Node, why most enterprise customers are nowhere near migrating off end-of-life software regardless of the modernization story being sold to them, and what rebootless live patching actually looks like once a CVE drops.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/chris-demars/Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background of Chris DeMars02:59 The Role of Developer Advocacy in Security05:52 JavaScript Ecosystem and Security Challenges08:54 AI's Impact on Security Practices11:42 Developers' Awareness of Security Issues14:50 The Importance of Patching and CVEs17:37 The Future of Security in Development21:09 The Process of Fixing Vulnerabilities24:01 Modernization vs. Legacy Systems24:50 Engagement with the Open Source Community26:45 Challenges for Open Source Maintainers27:36 Enterprise vs. Smaller Companies29:39 The Role of AI in Upgrading Systems33:37 Compliance and Regulation Concerns38:24 Understanding Live Patching41:32 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

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Jack Herrington on TanStack's npm Mini Shai-Hulud Compromise - Cover Art
June 23, 2026

Jack Herrington on TanStack's npm Mini Shai-Hulud Compromise

Kate Holterhoff sits down with Jack Herrington, Principal Software Engineer at Netlify and maintainer of TanStack AI, to walk the May 2026 TanStack npm supply-chain compromise. They discuss the incident in depth, including the risk of chained attacks, the role of GitHub Actions, what we know about the hackers and mini shai-hulud. Jack also weighs in on why developers are becoming more security aware and why the supply chain and CI/CD is more important than ever in the AI era.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/jack-herrington/Chapters:00:00 Introduction and Background09:08 The TanStack Hack Incident19:26 Security Insights and Lessons Learned26:45 Evolving Cybersecurity Threats34:22 Understanding Vulnerabilities in Open Source40:47 AI in Development and Security Concerns49:50 Advice for Open Source Maintainers

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An Interview with Kyle Daigle at Microsoft BUILD 2026: Models, Tokens, Agents & Developer Calm - Cover Art
June 25, 2026

An Interview with Kyle Daigle at Microsoft BUILD 2026: Models, Tokens, Agents & Developer Calm

At Microsoft Build 2026, RedMonk's James Governor sits down with Kyle Daigle, COO at GitHub and CMO of Developer at Microsoft, to unpack the event. The conversation looks at Microsoft's first homegrown frontier models, the growing importance of "token economics", new NVIDIA Spark-powered hardware, the push toward containerization and isolation for agents both on-device and in the cloud, and Windows improvements aimed at a calmer developer experience. Daigle also previews the agent-first GitHub Copilot app with its shareable canvases, and addresses developer anxiety amid industry layoffs, insisting Microsoft's principle remains keeping developers in the loop.This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Microsoft.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/kyle-daigle/Chapters00:00 Introduction to Developer Marketing at Microsoft02:08 Microsoft's Frontier Models and AI Innovations05:06 Local Model Execution and Security Concerns07:58 The Role of AI in Developer Productivity11:08 GitHub Copilot and the Future of Software Development14:20 Windows for Developers: Enhancements and Configurations17:05 Hardware Partnerships and Performance Expectations20:10 Supporting Developers in a Changing Landscape23:12 Addressing Reliability and Scalability Challenges

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Inside the Acquisition: VoidZero Joins Cloudflare with Evan You - Cover Art
June 16, 2026

Inside the Acquisition: VoidZero Joins Cloudflare with Evan You

In this MonkCast Conversation, RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff talks with Evan You, the creator of Vue.js and Vite and founder of VoidZero, just days after VoidZero announced joining Cloudflare. Evan clarifies what the deal does and does not include, as well as the history of how it came about. He's also candid about the motives that inspired VoidZero to look for partnership with a cloud provider. They also discuss the state of open source and frontend tooling in 2026. Can independent open source infrastructure survive today without getting bought by a bigger platform? Why Evan is still unconvinced that Vue needs a foundation. What is AI doing to the economics, and the craft, of building in the open?Cloudflare is a RedMonk client, but this RedMonk conversation is unsponsored.Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/evan-you/Chapters:00:00 Introduction to Evan You and VoidZero02:37 The Acquisition and Its Implications05:26 Vue and Vite: Independence and Future Directions08:15 Monetization Challenges and Business Models11:23 Collaboration with Cloudflare and Development Experience14:34 Community Concerns and Competition in the Market17:08 Funding and Support for Open Source Contributors29:34 Building a Community and Team Dynamics31:02 Lessons Learned from Open Source Monetization38:26 Navigating AI's Impact on Open Source44:24 The Foundation Debate for Open Source Projects49:31 The Bundler Wars: Performance and Artifact Size

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Steren Giannini on Google Cloud Run: Past, Present & Future - Cover Art
June 11, 2026

Steren Giannini on Google Cloud Run: Past, Present & Future

Google Cloud Run is a few years old now, and in this RedMonk Conversation, James Governor sits down with one of its founders, Steren Giannini, to talk through where it came from and where it's going. Back in 2017, most people assumed serverless meant functions. Steren's team disagreed. They figured the real value of serverless was simplicity, scale, and paying only for what you actually use, and that the thing you deploy should be a container, not a function. That call ended up shaping the whole product. James and Steren get into the decisions that gave Cloud Run its longevity: staying opinionated about simplicity without boxing developers in, a Kubernetes-compatible API designed so you can walk away whenever you want, and an open debt to Heroku's git-push experience. Steren is also honest about the messier parts, from fighting feature creep, to building the enterprise networking and security that big customers needed, to handling the traffic that AI agents are now generating. Looking ahead, Steren argues that the next generation of developers might be anyone who can describe an app in a prompt and hit publish.Google is a RedMonk client, but this is an independent piece of content.Show Notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/steren-giannini-google-cloud-run/Chapters:00:00 Introduction to Google Cloud Run01:08 The Origins of Cloud Run02:12 Design Principles and Longevity05:35 Openness and Portability in Cloud Run07:23 Open Source Strategy and Knative10:42 Simplicity and User Experience12:22 Progressive Complexity in Design14:23 Embracing Developer Standards16:21 Learning from Heroku18:02 Focus on Quality and User Feedback19:44 Cloud Run's Satisfaction and Popularity22:01 The Rise of AI Agents24:56 Adapting to Evolving Workloads27:44 Collaboration with Other Google Cloud Products30:23 Innovations for AI and Long-Running Workloads31:19 Notable AI Companies Using Cloud Run34:28 Cloud Run's Growth and Success37:19 Infrastructure Preparedness for Scale40:02 Scaling and Resource Management in Cloud Services44:09 Enterprise Features and Customer Needs46:53 Refocusing on Developer Experience51:16 Simplifying Complex Systems56:50 Security Challenges and Solutions01:05:03 Real-World Applications and Use Cases01:10:30 The Future of Cloud Run and AI Integration

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Join the developer-focused industry analysts at RedMonk as they discuss news and trends in the software space with leaders and practicioners in cloud, AI, IaC, security, DevOps, developer relations, observability, data, and more.

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