ABCD = Always Be Connecting Dots. I’ve had this written on my white board for years. Rajeev Pandey taught me this over a decade ago. There are two different ways I’ve always looked at this.

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It’s been almost a decade since I launched a new podcast. In that time the technologies available have changed. So, when I started the Software Madhouse with Robert Sirchia there was an opportunity to re-think how we built the site, hosted the podcast, and even recorded the show. This post contains an overview of the technologies I setup this time.

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I ran an experiment. Have Qwen3.8 and Claude Opus 5 try to optimize a codebase for performance. I wanted to see which was better and how far the gap was between them.

These models are very different from one another. Opus 5 is one of the top frontier models. Qwen3.8 is a model I could run locally, in my case on a Framework Desktop. For the harnesses, I used the claude CLI and opencode (for Qwen3.8).

Going in I knew Opus was the better model. This wasn’t about finding the winner. It was about seeing how far local models have come and what I could squeeze out of Qwen3.8.

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Open standards and specs are often more powerful than open source. Especially in the age of AI.

Open source has been a dominant force in software development and operations. It’s enabled the growth of Linux, Kubernetes, React, Node.js, and so many other projects that power modern day infrastructure, web applications, and more. Open source is significant. It’s enabled careers, it’s accelerated product development, it’s given people software to tinker with at home, and it’s helped people learn how to build software. I don’t want to downplay open source.

But, have you ever thought about …

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Helm v4 has been released after a year of development. There were a number of people who have contributed to Helm v4 and I want to say a big Thank You to them.

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