Okay, so that's a wrap on 2025. We made it. We did the thing and it's now pretty much the shortest day of the year. Time to start moving on. We've finished our Q4 stuff and now of course it's all about executing on the strategies and planning for Q1 and into 2026. But first a break to recharge and take a breath.

It's been a solid year for RedMonk. We really began to find our groove in establishing the RedMonk voice in this new world of AI, and we expect that to continue. Everyone needs an AI strategy, but looking around the market there are more questions than answers. We’re here to help! The challenges are stiff. The market as a whole is over its skis, frankly. We're likely to find out how well people can perform in a tougher market. We end the year optimistically, but on the other hand there are definitely growing headwinds. Execution skills and sales are going to be at a premium, as is free cash flow. Hitherto super well-funded AI companies will find that life is not quite as easy. We're going to start to see more commoditisation of frontier models, for example.  

All in all though 2025 has been a transformative year - in some ways it’s felt like the early Internet era. See the rise of e-business and the promise of a fundamental transformation of businesses in every sector of the economy. That happened of course between 1995 and the present, but with AI and agents and the future beginning to unfurl, it is clear there is a lot more transformation to come. There are going to be winners, there are going to be losers and we're all going to have to work really really hard being on for the former.  

One huge personal milestone for me this year was publishing a book on Progressive Delivery with Adam Zimman, Heidi Waterhouse and Kimberly Harrison, launched last month. Progressive Delivery is the principle that we're going to do more experimentation with things like blue/green deployments, canarying and A/B testing. We moved to an era where experimentation is no longer an expensive luxury for software development organizations and people building digital products, but it’s now essential. We're gonna need to be able to roll things back if things don’t work as we hoped. If you just roll out slop you’re going to be punished in the market. We're going to want to test things with users, to well identified and specific cohorts. In the agent era users (some of them agents) will need to be brought ever closer to application development. Testing and tight feedback loops become essential.

Looking forward to next year - the theme for my conference Monki Gras 2026 in March is “Being Prepared in Software and in Life.” In an era of uncertainty we will explore how to make people, communities, products, and platforms safer and more resilient. We’ll take a meta view, linking software testing strategies and resilience engineering directly to real-world preparedness, covering everything from managing cloud outages to living off-grid.  

Key Topics:

• Resilience Engineering and Progressive Software Delivery.

• Structural Changes of AI: skills and strategies software developers and engineers will need to maintain relevance and build sustainable careers in the face of the AI revolution.

• Authenticity and Information Overload: cutting through the avalanche of AI slop and propaganda.

• Community and Calm: the most important preparedness is building strong, sustainable communities, which you’ll find here at Monki Gras.

The call for talks is open, we’d love to hear from potential sponsors, and of course you should buy a ticket. Check me out - still selling as we close out the year.

The real purpose of this post is to wind down though - it’s time to be reflective and have some downtime. Quality of life requires that occasionally you switch off. So it's time to get some rest, and hopefully spend some time with our loved ones. To celebrate our wins, and celebrate ourselves. Maybe eat a little bit too much. We hope you enjoy this break, before we kick everything off again. RedMonk we love to thank all of our clients, and our community more broadly. You mean everything to us, and you’re why we do what we do. Thanks so much. 2025- that’s a wrap. See you in 2026.

— James Governor

Recent RedMonk Research

• Over the past two years, DORA quietly changed how it's measuring software delivery. Performance tiers are gone, archetypes are in. Metrics are more holistic, which sounds good on its face but also results in a process that seems squishier and harder to operationalize. All of these changes are in service of reflecting how AI has impacted software development. Rachel Stephens wrote up an analysis of what changed and why it matters. RM clients mentioned: Google and Atlassian

• In this RedMonk post, Kate Holterhoff argues that given how much time developers waste waiting for builds, the investment is reasonable, but there’s an irony here. Huge amounts of energy have gone into improving developer experience, while user experience—the actual runtime performance of what ships to the browser—remains an afterthought: The JavaScript Bundler Grand Prix

Recent Monkcasts and Media Appearances

• A conversation with Kate Holterhoff, who shares her unique journey from earning a PhD in Victorian literature to becoming a self-taught developer and analyst. She discusses Redmonk’s “new kingmakers” philosophy that recognizes developers as key decision-makers in tech adoption: Ep. 35 | Decoding Developer Trends: Inside the Life of a Developer-Focused Analyst with Kate Holterhoff by Overcommitted

• In this RedMonk conversation, Alex Russell, Partner Product Architect at Microsoft, discusses the state of mobile development, focusing on JavaScript performance, the state of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and the impact of major players like Apple (iOS) and Google (Android): Alex Russell on PWAs, App Stores, and Mobile Performance

• James Governor interviews Jamie Dobson, Co-Founder of Container Solutions, about his book Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, which traces the evolution of computing technology from 1799 through Edison’s workshops, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, to the modern cloud, creating what he describes as a “relay race of stories” that has not been comprehensively told: From Light Bulbs to Large Language Models: Jamie Dobson on Technology’s Relay Race Through History

• Rachel Stephens sits down with Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp, to unpack how the terminal has evolved from an overlooked productivity bottleneck into the center of the agentic development workflow: A New Take on the Terminal with Zach Lloyd

• Rachel Stephens joins Ned Bellavance and Kyler Middleton on their podcast, Day Two DevOps, to discuss the state of DevOps and the impact of AI: E. 290 | Rachel Stephens on Day Two DevOps

Recent Videos

• Java turned 30 this year, and we’re celebrating. In this RedMonk conversation, Sharat Chander, Senior Director of Java Product Management & Developer Engagement at Oracle, stopped by to discuss this milestone with Kate Holterhoff- A RedMonk Conversation: Java at 30 with Sharat Chander

• James Governor sat down with Anush Elangovan, VP of AI at AMD, for a deep dive into the evolving landscape of GPU development—tile-based programming, Pythonic DSLs, Mojo, ThunderKittens, and everything reshaping how developers write high-performance AI code- A RedMonk Conversation: The future of GPU programming and AI – languages, frameworks, stacks (with AMD’s Anush Elangovan)

• James Governor speaks with Deepak Singh, VP of Agents and Experience at AWS, about the evolution of developer tools, particularly in the context of generative AI and the introduction of Kiro- From Containers to Kiro: AI and DX at AWS with Deepak Singh

• Al Harris, Principal Engineer at AWS, discusses the development of a natural language system aimed at helping developers translate specifications into code and vice versa, particularly as it relates to AWS’s agentic IDE, Kiro: Al Harris On Kiro And Spec-Driven Development

• In this New Builders conversation, RedMonk’s Kate Holterhoff speaks with Jessie VanderVeen, Global Head of Product Marketing, Agentic AI, Developer Experience and Ali Maaz, Head of WW GTM, Agentic AI and Developer Experience about how AWS is approaching the crowded agentic IDE market: Inside AWS’s Agentic AI Marketing Strategy with Ali Maaz & Jessie VanderVeen

• Stephen O’Grady chats with Ali Spittel, head of DevRel at AWS, about the importance of developer experience, how the role of developers is evolving, and the new challenges and opportunities devs face in the AI era: AWS Developer Experience State of the Nation with Ali Spittel

• In this RedMonk Conversation, James Governor sits down with Kun Chen, Lead Principal Engineer at Atlassian, to explore what “context engineering” really means in practice—and why it matters far more than one-shot “vibe coding” demos for real software teams: Context Engineering in Practice: How Atlassian Is Building AI for Real Developer Work with Kun Chen

Sponsor Monki Gras!

Monki Gras, the intimate London conference about software, craft, and tech culture, returns on March 19th & 20th, 2026.

This year’s theme is Prepping Craft – being prepared in software and life. Interested in sponsoring the conference? Please reach out to Morgan Harris for options!

Meet the Monks!

Events we are attending:

• Dynatrace Perform: 26 - 28 January 2026, Las Vegas, NV

• KubeCon EU 2026: 23 - 26 March 2026, Amsterdam

Events we are hosting:

• Monki Gras 2026: 19 - 20 March 2026, London, UK