Rachel Stephens

couple of you have asked, and while @rstephens.me and i will be at kubecon, we're not doing official redmonk beers. that said, we will likely do a smaller get together somewhere, so if you want to be notified of where we end up we have added a new "city" to our monksignal list. monksignal.com

I'm at All Things Open this week! Let's chat if you're at the show, and come hear me speak on Tuesday at 3:15!

We're excited to have Rachel Stephens (@rstephens.me), Research Director for @redmonk.com, presenting "When Code Costs Nothing: Tech Debt in the Age of GenAI" at #AllThingsOpen! 2026.allthingsopen.org/sessions/whe...

Salesforce spent the Dreamforce keynote telling customers they might never need to log into Salesforce again. My takeaways from the event are up at @redmonk.com: personas are flattening, the interface is up for grabs, and 'our product is trust' is about to get tested. redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

The announcement that interested me most at VMware Explore was TrueSource, a collection of products designed to help devs and agents use open source packages more safely. In the vid I talk about the announcement and broader industry trends around it. youtu.be/OpsuNzxKxaY

How does a database best known for running on developer laptops help a cloud win workloads? My take on @amazonwebservices.bsky.social's acquisition of @ducklabs.com: redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

This is legitimately so good!

hot damn this is great

If you’re an AI skeptic, may I please suggest “convert this shitty pdf of my child’s school calendar into an .ics file” as a use case?

Hey San Francisco! @redmonk.com beers tomorrow (Tue Jul 21). We're meeting up at Orbit Room on Market, 7:00 to whenever we're done. :)

Fucking yikes.

I'm in San Francisco for AMD and will be hosting RedMonk beers! Tue Jul 21 - more details to come If you want to get notified when we're throwing down in your city, be sure to sign up at monksignal.com

Canadian graffiti

When you cash in your kids’ BookIt coupons and realize that you also deserve a little something for your exemplary summer reading (with a cross-realization that you have grownup money and can order what you want)

one of my specialties is sneezing after applying liquid eyeliner and ending up looking like I lost a fight with a sharpie

Gender policing hurts everyone, and there is no gender equality that excludes our trans friends.

Just FYI that some of the iPad apps use math questions as a parental control barrier to prevent kids from getting to the advanced settings, and you should be wary of your five-year old suddenly asking you "mama, what's six times eight?"

dammit, I am at 10273 Spotted Owl Ave looking for 2+ window replacements this week if only I had the correct hair color for this deal!

Trying to reconcile the advice for developers to decouple their identity from their dev tools with a Flutter community happy hour redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

our application to the animal rescue said "our house is already baby proofed" with such confidence. alas...

so I know that it's just automated marketing. I know it is completely impersonal. I know they are playing me. but I still like it when my dentist, eye doctor, and former mortgage broker wish me a happy birthday.

There was a moment during this video production where we thought we wouldn't have access to @kateholterhoff.com's picture with Weezer. I made this masterpiece as a placeholder, and I think it's pretty good. But you should probably watch the video and see the real one.

as someone who has battled with the model to try to get it to stop saying 'goblins' I feel somewhat vindicated reading this also... cc/ @quinnypig.com

I recently filmed a MonkCast episode with Audrey Bian from Broadcom. She explained the features of the latest VKS 3.6 release and talked me through how the platform benefits various roles in the enterprise. Check out the full episode (with visuals!) here: redmonk.com/videos/vks-a...

I truly truly can't wait for the edition of @matt-levine.bsky.social 's Money Stuff that will cover this ir.allbirds.com/news-release...

"I'm just calling to see what the Senator is doing today to prevent war crimes?" is not a phone call I had ever planned to make.

not your typical "am I overreacting" content www.reddit.com/r/AmIOverrea...

The world feels particularly cruel right now so I want to say this again with my full chest. To the amazing transgender people I know and love (and all those I haven't met yet): you make the world better. Thank you for being you in an increasingly hostile world. We are so lucky to have you. 🏳️‍⚧️💕

Come hang out with @kateholterhoff.com and me while we livestream with @darko.rup12.net We're live at 9:30 Pacific! www.twitch.tv/kirodotdev

CHEESE MOUNTAIN!

A system always includes the mental model of the people using it, the people, the tools, and the dialogue. Numbers are scary because they change how the world affects people. Show your working Be correctable, not just correct Extent existing mental models Design for safe failure

Double-entry accounting as observability and verifiability for money is a sensational parallel. “Don’t just be correct - be correctable.” @ashley.rolfmore.com #monkigras

kicking off #monkigras with @monkchips.com! (this year’s conference is about preparedness, with a decidedly RedMonk amount of chaos mixed in)

I love that @nathenharvey.bsky.social is making sure we all have enough fucks to give

Spice Labs is giving away tastes of its Post Quantum Cryptography discovery and inventory tools Get PQC compliance information on post-build artifacts (CBOM, static call analysis, runtime call analysis) as well as a crypto-agility rating without burdening eng www.einpresswire.com/article/9000...

Video evidence of the time we ran around London @monkchips.com talking about all things #observability. I love this video. It highlights that context is king, how you approach observability matters, and how to understand what you are looking at. Relatable for both data AND life! @redmonk.com

from now on i will now be introducing myself as “rachel with technology“

from an outsider's perspective, I spent 20 minutes this morning booking appointments. but that myopic view erases the 6 months of avoidance, denial, and general anxiety it took to get me to this 20 minutes. please respect my art.

There are always so many gems in this newsletter.

Databases aren’t going away, but how they fit in the modern data landscape is shifting. Here's how we're thinking about the unbundling of storage, compute, and interface layers at @redmonk.com redmonk.com/rstephens/20...

me, feeling sick over the weekend: Ugh, why am I always the one who catches the preschool colds? me, getting licked on the nose while putting my son to bed: Ahh, I see.