A note from James Governor, RedMonk co-founder.

I was going to talk about the cluster of AI companies in London’s Kings Cross neighbourhood for this edition of the newsletter, but after the calamitous events of last night I have to talk about football a little bit instead.

The 2-1 defeat by Argentina was grim, not least because the England team failed to do exactly what it was explicitly built to do - aggressively press and counterattack against the best teams in the world. By scoring the first goal England was in a great position to make its physicality and pace count, “in transition”, the term for that little bit of chaos and freedom as team structure and position becomes more fluid after an opposing team loses the ball. If Argentina had to attack, the game should open up more. Instead England became listless and passive, retreating further and further towards their own goal, exacerbated by coach Thomas Tuchel’s decision to take off one of his attacking players, Anthony Gordon, to be replaced by a defender. Argentina took full advantage, scoring a couple of goals in normal time.  

At the risk of sounding like an AI generated Linkedin post - what does England’s failure have to do with tech, developers and software infrastructure? Well for one thing - you really have to stick to the plan (unless you have some important armchair sportsball analysis to get off your chest). Pivoting is one thing, but if the plan is working you need to stick with it. Leadership needs to appreciate when things are working - and maybe not take the player off that just scored a goal off the field, with the idea that defence is more important than attack when you have a slight lead against the competition. Stick to the plan. But make sure your team is on the front foot, thirty yards further up the pitch.  

One of the things that makes football and sport in general so real is that it’s one of the few forms of entertainment which is not amenable to being replaced by AI slop. Lionel Messi is human sporting creativity made flesh, and as such he is one of the greatest shows on Earth. Thirty-nine years old and still terrifying defences everywhere.

The market is moving incredibly fast, and just as with England’s defence last night there is no time to take a breath. And that is why we all need a vacation. So enjoy our roundup of links for this month. And look out for my post about what’s happening in the Kings Cross area of London with AI companies, once I have licked my wounds a bit.

Links Roundup

• "Design your system around routing, not around models. Pick your models last."
• - "So if how you hold your position matters more than what the position is, what does holding it well actually look like? Whether you lean sceptical or optimistic, there are a handful of practices that separate a considered view from a reactive one." James Stanier on earning your skepticism.
• This piece by Mat Duggan breaks down why columnar storage (in particular Clickhouse) is a becoming a preferred choice for log workloads.
• This post provides interesting behind the scenes details about the process of re-writing Bun from Zig into Rust.
• There was a fair amount of community drama in response to the Zig>Rust post, but this take from Adam Jacob is a good macro perspective on what it entails to rewrite an application now.

Recent Videos and Media Appearances

• Stephen O’Grady joins Agentic Conversations to explore one of the biggest shifts happening in software engineering: AI is making code dramatically cheaper to produce, but everything downstream is becoming the new bottleneck: What Happens When Every Developer Has 20 AI Agents?
• Agents choose tools for engineers, and open source is drowning in AI slop: Full episode of Dev Propulsion Labs podcast with Dr. Kate Holterhoff
• 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: An Interview with Kyle Daigle at Microsoft BUILD 2026: Models, Tokens, Agents & Developer Calm
• Kate Holterhoff sits down with Chris DeMars, Senior Developer Advocate at TuxCare, for a conversation about patching and security in the AI era.
• 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: AI Code Optimization by Experimentation, Without Free Bread, with Mina Ilieva
• 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, about why he isn’t convinced: When Agents Become Users: Rethinking Developer Portals with Balaji Sivasubramanian
• James Governor talks with Paul Brookes, a senior AI engineer at TurinTech, about making AI inference faster and cheaper: Going Down the Stack: AI Inference, Kernel Fusion, and Model Tuning with Paul Brookes

Monktoberfest Diversity & Inclusion Scholarship

RedMonk believes that diversity in technology makes us all better. We'd like to help make Monktoberfest accessible to groups historically under-represented in the technology sector, including but not limited to women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and/or people with disabilities. That said, our definition of under-represented groups is tech is intentionally wide. We don’t exclude anyone on the basis of ability, class, color, gender, or creed.

If you are a member of an under-represented group in tech (in the US) and would like to apply to attend The Monktoberfest 2026 in Portland, ME this fall, travel/lodging expenses paid, here's our application.

Sponsor The 2026 Monktoberfest

The Monktoberfest is an intimate, exclusive and much discussed event. By sponsoring it, you become an integral part of that conversation. Besides being the only event of its kind blending expert-curated beer and technology, it’s an exclusive, high profile developer conference. Those who help us underwrite the costs of the conference don’t do so to buy speaking slots or a few square feet of booth space - which are not sold in any event - they do so because they want t help us build the premier developer conference in the world, and share in the credit for that.

This is a unique opportunity to reach an elite audience of technical people that transcend traditional developer categories. Just as you can’t find beers like this anywhere else in the world, you won’t find a crowd like this anywhere else in the world. From CEOs to hardcore developers, sysadmins to marketers to DBAs, the person sitting next to you is probably responsible for some of the software you use every day.

Sponsorship opportunities are available. Please contact Morgan Harris with any questions you might have about the programs.

Meet the Monks

Events we'll be attending:

• AMD Advancing AI 2026: July 21-23 in San Francisco, CA
• Render ATL: August 12-13 in Atlanta, GA
• Dreamforce 2026 September 14-16 in San Francisco, CA

Events we'll be hosting:

• The Monktoberfest 2026: October 1-2 in Portland, ME