The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, October 17 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, October 19
• Tuesday, October 20
• Wednesday, October 21
• Thursday, October 22
• Friday, October 23
• Saturday, October 24
• Sunday, October 25

Monday, October 19

Event name and location	Group	Time
Venice Area Toastmasters Club #5486 Online event	Toastmasters District 48	7:30 AM to 9:00 AM EDT
OrlandoPreneur Monthly Startup Happy Hour! PBR Cowboy Bar – Orlando	OrlandoPreneur Startup Happy Hour: Connect, Learn & Grow!	5:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
AI Curious to AI Confident Entrepreneur Collaborative Center	Tampa Bay Technology Leadership Association	5:30 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Airtable, Supabase, JSON DBs for Vibe Coding Web Apps Online event	Tampa AI Applications Meetup Group	6:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Speakeasy Toastmasters #4698 Online event	Toastmasters District 48	6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
ACE Advanced Toastmasters 3274480 Online event	Toastmasters Divisions C & D	6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Sarasota Blood on the Clocktower Clocktower meetup	Board Games and Card Games in Sarasota & Bradenton	6:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Games at Barriehaus Trinity Barriehaus Beer Company, Trinity	Advance 3 Spaces Neurodivergent Social Gaming	6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
MTG: Commander Night Critical Hit Games	Critical Hit Games	6:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
BRADENTON TTRPG D&D 5e Pathfinder ext. Fun night! Private Residence	Bradenton Dungeon Crawl 5e Meetup Group	6:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Dinner & The Shining @ NGC Cinemas NCG Cinemas	Tampa Horror	6:20 PM to 9:20 PM EDT
Toast of Lakewood Ranch Toastmasters Club Lakewood Ranch Town Hall	Toastmasters District 48	6:30 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
North Port Toastmasters Meets Online!! Online event	Toastmasters District 48	6:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Euchre – Voodoo Brewery Voodoo Brewery	Euchre- At Voodoo Brewery	6:50 PM to 8:50 PM EDT
Lakeland (FL) Toastmasters Club #2262 GFWC United Women’s Club of Lakeland	Toastmasters Division E	7:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Let’s Talk Toastmasters Online event	Toastmasters Divisions C & D	7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Hidden Gems Night, Presented by A Duck! Online event	Nerdbrew Events	7:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Virtual Event: Hiawassee Book Club Online event	Library Book Clubs – OCLS	7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
DigiMondays Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Weekly General Meetup Online event	Beginning Web Development	8:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Where is Bitcoin Going? Online event	Bitcoiners of Southwest Florida	9:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Tuesday, October 20

Wednesday, October 21

Thursday, October 22

Friday, October 23

Saturday, October 24

Sunday, October 25

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, October 19 – Sunday, October 25) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

NetFoundry’s VP Product Marketing Jack Poller has been writing a series of posts on the NetFoundry blog about microsegementation, and I’ve been doing supplementary “back of the envelope” to illustrate what he’s talking about. Jack’s latest piece is on network segmentation vs. cryptographic segmentation, and it made for a perfect four-panel comic, pictured above.

Here’s the article.

Network segmentation decides trust based on where a connection comes from (that is, its IP address). The problem is that an attacker who’s phished a valid credential or exploited host at a trusted address is already coming from the right place. Host-based firewalls narrow things down to the individual workload, but they run on the same machine that the attacker has “pwned”.

Cryptographic segmentation is another approach, and it’s the alternative that Jack presents. Every endpoint has an X.509 identity, and both ends verify each other with mTLS. A session starts if and only if a policy says that the identity is allowed reach that service. The IP address doesn’t come into play, so coming from “a good neighborhood” doesn’t give the attacker a way in.

Once again, the article’s here.

The post “Back of the envelope” comics on network vs. cryptographic microsegmentation appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The post This is what every AI company CEO sounds like appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Here’s the video…

…and here’s the transcript of the skit:

Colin Jost: According to a new poll, 75% of Americans would oppose an AI data center being built near them, making it one of the country’s most unifying issues.

Here to comment is the man who proposed building the world’s largest data center in Utah. “Shark Tank’s” Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Kevin O’Leary: Thank you, Colin. It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Colin: Thank you for being here. So what happened, Mr. Wonderful? Protesters in Utah are forcing you to downsize your project?

O’Leary: I’m glad you asked, Colin. And it’s very simple.

All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God’s untouched splendor and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job.

[ Laughter ]

Is it going to take up precious water? Absolutely.

Is it going to provide a necessary service? Who’s to say?

But on the flip side, it’s going to make me a tremendous amount of money. And I think that’s great.

[ Laughter ]

Colin: Right.

Well, most Americans don’t want data centers near them.

O’Leary: And I agree with them completely.

Colin: You do?

O’Leary: Of course, Colin.

These things are terrible and shouldn’t be anywhere. That’s why I’m building one in Utah.

And this is actually very simple. I’m going to show you on this map.

Alright? See, this is Stratos, my data center with the most evil name of all time. And sure, it looks big.

The noise and water pollution? That’s only going to affect this area. Colin, you have to understand, I don’t live there.

[ Laughter ]

Colin: Right. But, like, other people do live there.

O’Leary: You’re missing the point. That’s not real to me. Okay?

Those people’s lives, those are Sims. Alright?

Look, I’m a numbers guy, okay? When I missed out on investing in Scrub Daddy, I learned a very valuable lesson, which is I’m going to destroy the world.

[ Laughter ]

Colin: That sounds pretty extreme.

O’Leary: Well, that’s because you’re poor.

[ Laughter ]

Colin: Actually I’m not. My wife gives me lots of spending money.

[ Laughter ]

[ Cheers and applause ]

Colin: [to the camera] That’s not nice.

[To O’Leary] And aren’t you being sued for defamation in Utah?

O’Leary: Look, yes, I made the mildly inflammatory claim that every single person in Utah who opposes me is a paid communist super agent from China.

Was I wrong? Perhaps. But just because they’re not, doesn’t mean they aren’t.

Colin: What?

O’Leary: Look, Colin, when I missed out on Bombas socks, I could have gotten mad. But instead I made a decision.

I’m going to make the future go away. And we’re doing just that in Utah.

Colin: Mr. Wonderful, everyone.

[ Cheers and applause ]

O’Leary: And for that reason, I’m out.

The post “Saturday Night Live” pokes fun at Kevin O’Leary and his Utah data center in a skit that’s funny because it’s true appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, October 10 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, October 12
• Tuesday, October 13
• Wednesday, October 14
• Thursday, October 15
• Friday, October 16
• Saturday, October 17
• Sunday, October 18

Monday, October 12

Tuesday, October 13

Wednesday, October 14

Event name and location	Group	Time
Clearwater Automate Your Workflow with Claude 2066 Douglas Ave	Building Better Software With Claude Code	2:22 AM to 3:22 AM EDT
Tampa Highrisers Toastmasters Hyde Park United Methodist Church	Toastmasters District 48	7:45 AM to 8:45 AM EDT
Computer Repair Clinic 2079 Range Rd	Tampa Bay Technology Center	8:30 AM to 12:30 PM EDT
Productivity Wednesday 300 E State Street	Kazba Cafe – Oldsmar FL	10:00 AM to 1:00 PM EDT
A Day in the Life of a Threat: What Log360 Sees, Knows, and Does Online event	Orlando Cybersecurity Meetup	11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Perplexity AI: Search Smarter & Research Faster with AI Online event	AI Tool of the Week	12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Free Webinar: To Be Announced Online event	Tampa SEO and Digital Marketing Meetup with Steve Scott	1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT
Make Your Brand Unforgettable with Claude [ONLINE] Online event	Bay Builders AI Club	2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Wednesday Night Gaming Nerdy Needs	Brandon Boardgamers	5:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
40k Escalation League Battlebrush Games	Battlebrush Games: Paint Minis & Play Warhammer/Warmachine	5:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
CNC Wednesday’s MakerSpace St. Petersburg	Makerspaces Pinellas Meetup Group	5:30 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Wednesday Board Game Night Bridge Center	Tampa Gaming Guild	5:30 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Orlando Chess Association West Osceola Library	Greater Orlando Chess	5:30 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Board game night at CHG! Critical Hit Games	Saint Pete Boardgamers	6:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Casual Commander Wednesdays Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	6:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Shut Up & Write!® Tales and Teas The Muddy Root Kava Cafe	Shut Up & Write!® St. Petersburg	6:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Tampa Writers Alliance Critique Group Online event	Tampa Writers Alliance	6:30 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Sun Coast Euchre Club The Hanger Restaurant & Flight Lounge	Suncoast Euchre Club -St Pete	6:50 PM to 8:50 PM EDT
Carrollwood Toastmasters Meetings meet In-Person and Online Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library	Toastmasters District 48	7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Games & Grog! Board game night @ Peabodies Peabodies	Nerdbrew Events	7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
St Pete Wednesday Game Night Right Around The Corner	St Pete Game Night	7:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Cardfight Vanguard!! OverDress Weekly Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Official Ybor City Ghost Tour King Corona Cigars Bar And Cafe	Tampa Bay Haunt Crew | Halloween & Horror Events	7:45 PM to 9:45 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Thursday, October 15

Friday, October 16

Saturday, October 17

Sunday, October 18

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, October 12 – Sunday, October 18) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The talk gets its material from my 12-month developer relations job search that took place in 2025. I kept a diary of my search, kept records of every resume and cover letter I sent, compiled email exchanges between me and prospective employers, and whenever possible, made recordings of conversations and interviews throughout the process.

If you’re looking for developer relations work today, you might find my observations and advice useful.

This talk’s title, The Market is Trying to Tell You Something, comes from an observation I made when watching a film that’s 21 years old now: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

During the scene where a not-yet-corrupted Anakin Skywalker and a not-yet-revealed-Sith-Lord Chancellor Sheev Palpatine are watching an underwater opera (its name is Squid Lake, and it’s the creation of a species called Mon Calamari; look it up!). Palpatine keeps talking about the power of the Dark Side and the knowledge of the Sith, and Anakin doesn’t seem to be cluing in. I imagine him thinking “I think the Chancellor is trying to tell me something”.

My argument is that the job market has been trying to tell us something for the past couple of years, and much of the guidance we’re still getting misses the signs as much as Anakin did.

I noticed this first signal barely a week into that year-long job search. It became apparent to me that developer relations job descriptions quietly rewrote themselves.

By “quietly”, I mean that the job descriptions as written didn’t change, but actual job descriptions did. The age of AI is turning us more into generalists, and the (often theoretical) wall between developer relations and the related fields of marketing and sales is disappearing.

The developer relations job description you see is often a copy-paste from 2023 or earlier, and it’s not an accurate description of the job today.

Screenshot

The quietly-rewritten job description reveals itself in the interview. I noticed this a couple of weeks into the process, after interviewing with a third prospective employer: The interviews were testing for things that weren’t in the job description.

One particular prospect made this painfully apparent to me. I was in the final interviews with this one company where they’d asked me to prepare a demo for developers. When the interview took place, they changed things up and said “Let’s do a mock sales call for Sony”, without my having any idea of what their particular development needs are (aside from the PlayStation, do they do anything technological that matters anymore?) or getting any prep time.

After that fiasco, I changed the balance of my questions in earlier interviews with companies to find out what figure out what was being left out of the written job description, the prospect’s idea of what “developer relations” meant (this was often very fuzzy), and identifying the person whom I’d really be reporting to, and what KPIs they were being measured on.

The final signal I saw took a couple of months’ worth of interviews to truly crystallize, because it’s the most subtle of the three. It’s that “DevRel ROI” now actually means something, and that “something” is what pays your salary.

This basically means that organizations no longer view “Hey, people have heard of us!” or “People like us!” as the measure of developer relations success. This was fine for the pre-COVID, pre-AI, middle-of-ZIRP era of the 2010s, but table stakes now. There now has to be some kind of financial success metric that can be connected to you.

So with these three signals in mind, I now have three action items that you can act on right now.

First, pick a metric that you can credibly own, and start tracking it right now. It doesn’t have to be a present-day metric if you’re currently out of work; find some number that you improved in your last role.

Developer relations’ effects are more indirect than those of marketing and considerably more indirect than sales’, so it’s forgivable in the beginning if you pick a vanity metric. One of mine is from Auth0, where I grew mobile developer readership (fortunately, I kept track of these things for a time when I’d need them) from 0 to 20,000/month, simply because I was the only one consistently writing mobile developer articles.

You probably already know this, but it’s worth repeating: Reframe what you’re doing around outcomes, not activities.

It may be obvious, but if you’re in any line of work that requires convincing people, know that there is great power in stating the obvious.

And finally: Read interviews as a diagnostic of whether the role will exist next year.

During an interview, if one of the interviewers says “Oh, by the way, we’re also bringing on we’re also bringing on a growth person and we may be reviewing how they interact with the developer relations team,” that’s a good sign that the developer relations team will get cut down or reshuffled. This has happened to me on three different occasions where the developer advocate role was cancelled sometime during the interview process.

One of the best things you can do, assuming you get permission to record (legalities about this will very on where you are), record everything. Then feed it to an LLM, and ask it to analyze what you and your interviewers say in the interview. Ask the LLM to be brutal. The evaluations it will give you will sometimes be unpleasantly revelatory, but LLMs are reasonable at picking up cues you might miss, usually because going through interviews is an emotionally distracting experience.

I closed by referring to Tim Falls’ talk at the start of the day, which he began with a heartbeat-like drumbeat on a hand drum as encouragement for the audience to listen with their hearts.

Then, after announcing that I would use music to help the audience overcome their fear of AI, I played Because of AI, my AI-flavored parody song based on Afroman’s Because I Got High.

My thanks to the DevRelCon organizers for a great conference and for considering my talk proposal worthy of putting onstage!

The post My DevRelCon NYC 2026 talk: “The Market is Trying to Tell You Something” appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, October 3 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, October 5
• Tuesday, October 6
• Wednesday, October 7
• Thursday, October 8
• Friday, October 9
• Saturday, October 10
• Sunday, October 11

Monday, October 5

Tuesday, October 6

Wednesday, October 7

Thursday, October 8

Friday, October 9

Saturday, October 10

Sunday, October 11

Event name and location	Group	Time
Clearwater Building Faster With Claude Code 25CM+JW Dunedin	Building Better Software With Claude Code	2:53 AM to 3:53 AM EDT
Clearwater Mastering Claude Code for Developers 399 3rd St	Building Better Software With Claude Code	10:17 AM to 11:17 AM EDT
Halloween Resin Crafting! ‍ Linda’s House	St. Pete Life & Fun 50+	1:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Adventures of the Tomb of Annihilation (5e 2024 D&D Campaign) Cozy Dragon Games	Adventurers of Central Florida	2:00 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Sunday Chess at Wholefoods in Midtown, Tampa Whole Foods Market	Chess Republic	2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
D&D Adventurers League Critical Hit Games	Critical Hit Games	2:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Book Discussion: Cutting for Stone Bayboro Brewing Co.	St Pete Women’s Book Club	3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Sunday Pokemon League Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	4:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Community Hang-out Night Online event	Nerdbrew Events	6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
A Duck Presents NB Movie Night Discord.io/Nerdbrew	Nerd Night Out	7:00 PM to 11:30 PM EDT
Tides of Tethered Terror: Tampa Ghost Tours	Tampa Bay Haunt Crew | Halloween & Horror Events	8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, October 5 – Sunday, October 11) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The demo built on the previous episode’s work where we took the OpenZiti Appetizer (a service that displayed whatever text you feed it on a public web page via a secure zero-trust OpenZiti overlay) and added a RoBERTa classifier to it to prevent users from entering offensive messages for the Appetizer to display. There are lots of people out there who seem to not have aged past 12, and that’s what this is supposed to handle.

RoBERTa classifiers are good at handling profanity and direct insults like “You are too stupid to understand this”. It *will* miss more subtle jabs like “Nobody wants you here and everyone knows it”, but try saying that to a cop who’s writing you a speeding ticket, and they will classify it very differently.

So in this week’s, the classifier keeps its job, but when it isn’t sure, it asks for a second opinion. LLM Gateway, the OpenZiti-based open source OpenAI-compatible gateway, decides which LLM gives that opinion: a small model on your own machine for everyday messages, and Claude for the subtle ones. You won’t change a line of the Appetizer’s code.

I did the demo without much chance for a rehearsal, and I’ll post a GitHUb repo with all the steps and material you need to try it out for yourself. But in the meantime, catch Clint and I work our way through the demo!

The post Ziti TV Oct 2 2026 – LLM Gateway meets the OpenZiti Appetizer! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Jack Poller, NetFoundry’s VP Product Marketing, kicked off a six-part microsegmentation series with the gap that nobody in the space likes to say out loud.

An Omdia survey of 352 security decision-makers found that:

• 99% of organizations are implementing or planning microsegmentation, and
• only 9% had protected more than 80% of their critical systems.

Half of them had been through a lateral-movement attack in the previous year, which is the exact thing microsegmentation is supposed to stop.

Here’s the article: The Microsegmentation Trap: Why 99% Are Planning It and Only 9% Protect Their Critical Systems.

Jack argues that the conventional playbook is the problem: Discover every flow, model the policy for the whole environment, simulate, then enforce. Each phase gates the next, and phase one never finishes because reality collides with your best laid plans:

• Applications talk to more things than anyone documented and
• dependencies shift while you’re charting them.

In the end, your initiative languishes in discovery for quarters and the crown jewels stay exactly as exposed as they were on day one.

The proposed fix? Turn the order upside down! Protect the single most critical asset first, one workload at a time, starting now.

Of course, this approach works only if enforcement stops depending on network location. As long as policy is based on IP ranges and zones, you’re back to needing the full topology before you can trust a rule. If you base policy on cryptographic identity, you can wrap one asset in tight policy today without having mapped what’s around it.

Once again, Jack’s article is here: The Microsegmentation Trap: Why 99% Are Planning It and Only 9% Protect Their Critical Systems.

The post 99% of orgs are PLANNING microsegmentation, but only 9% have followed through appeared first on Global Nerdy.

I’m just sayin’: if you’re trying to promote AI as a beneficial thing, maybe the whole Terminator 2 motif is something you might want to avoid. Those AIs, Arnie’s T-800 excluded, were not our friends!

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the classic line from that film:

The post How NOT to promote an AI initiative appeared first on Global Nerdy.

• John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, often called “The Kennedy Center”
• The U.S. Institute of Peace
• The Department of War
• Palm Beach International Airport
• TrumpRx, a prescription drug website
• Passes for national parks
• Trump Accounts
• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario
• Trump-class battleships and F-47 fighter plane

…and the list goes on.

And now the idiocy meaningless renaming has come to tech:

The executive order, titled INAUGURATING THE ERA OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE, basically declares that “AI”, a term that we’ve been using since 1955 when John McCarthy coined it, should now be referred to as “Super Intelligence” or “SI” in executive-branch communications.

It says that agencies of the federal executive branch must use the new terms in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents and other non-statutory documents. Thankfully (because it would mean a lot of pointless work otherwise), existing regulations, presidential actions, contracts, grants and historical documents don’t have to be changed.

It also means that any content I make aimed at a U.S. government buyers or techies (especially tutorials, presentations, and documentation) will need to include the “SI” terms for both practical (for example, search terms) and political (“We call it ‘SI’ here, son.”). I’m already not looking forward to this.

For now, “SI” means exactly what “artificial intelligence” already means under 15 U.S.C. § 9401(3).; only the name has changed.

Sometime in the next 60 days, Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), will have to propose legislative language for a federal definition of SI. It’ll have to say whether that definition should modify or replace the statutory definition of AI, and include any conforming amendments and follow-on executive actions. If such changes are made, expect them to be dumb.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the first kiss-ass to use the term in Trump’s presence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzKZwuUJWJQ

The post Trump’s executive order to rebrand “AI” as “SI” appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Last Friday, NetFoundry’s CEO Galeal Zino appeared on the weekly live YouTube show Super Cyber Friday, hosted by tech journalist David Spark.

Super Cyber Friday is about cybersecurity practitioners and vendors, and every episode has a title that follows a “Hacking [Topic]” format. This particular episode’s title is Hacking Microsegmentation for Machine Workloads, and features:

• Galeal Zino, NetFoundry CEO (and my boss’ boss, and therefore the best damned skip-level in the world)
• Howard Holton, Founder and Principal Counsel at Phronia Counsel, an independent technology analyst and advisory firm

If you’re wondering what microsegmentation is, here’s the short version:

Microsegmentation is the practice of carving your network into tiny zones so that when something gets compromised (and something will), the damage stays in one small room instead of spreading through the whole house.

Everyone agrees it’s a good idea, almost nobody enjoys doing it, and few actually do it. It’s the brushing and flossing of cybersecurity.

Before the notes, some disclosure

You should know:

• I do developer advocacy work at NetFoundry in exchange for money, health insurance, and to convince people I’m more than just an accordion-playing reprobate.
• Once again, Galeal is my boss’s boss. And he’s a great boss’ boss!
• NetFoundry sponsored this episode.

Feel free to apply the appropriate amount of skepticism to this writeup, but keep in mind that this episode features both a CEO who builds security stuff with an analyst who’s had to live with the results. The episode’s a little more blunt than your typical PR piece.

The tl;dr

C’mon, this article isn’t that long! But still, if you want a very quick summary, here it is…

“Early microsegmentation sucked so bad…”

Howard set the tone in the first minute, when David asked for his microsegmentation pet peeve (0:08):

“Early microsegmentation sucked so bad that it’s hard to get people to listen when you talk about microsegmentation.”

For the record, Howard is a big microsegmentation fan. What drives him (and us at NetFoundry too) up the wall is the feedback he hears most often: “Nope, we did that before, we’re not doing it again.” People tell him it was too complicated and a waste of money. He hates that feedback because, in his words, “it’s just wrong.”

Later in the show (7:25), he explained how early rollouts earned that reputation. Teams would get frustrated during the discovery stage, put some segments in place, and then cause an outage by blocking something that only ran once every 30 days and that nobody had planned for. After that happened a few times, they’d shelf whatever microsegmentation tool they were using. His summary: “Complexity always bites you in the ass.”

If you’ve ever been anywhere near a rollout like that, you probably just winced. The problem wasn’t the idea. Least privilege and blast-radius reduction are good ideas! The problem was that vendors tried to implement them with the tools that just happened to be conveniently lying around: IP addresses, subnets, VLANs, and firewalls.

When an audience member asked whether application-level or network-level microsegmentation is more effective, Galeal didn’t mince words (9:05):

“Network-level is DOA: dead on arrival. It’s an oxymoron to begin with… It’s spilled milk, and you can’t put it back in the bottle. If you’re going to try and use IP addresses, VLANs, and firewalls to do ‘microseg,’ good luck to you. It’s not going to happen.”

That’s coming from someone who’s been doing network engineering for 30 years. Here’s the core problem, especially for machines: an IP address tells you where something is, not what it is. In a world of containers, autoscaling, and serverless functions, the IP address your billing service has this morning might belong to something completely different by the time lunch rolls around. Writing security policy against IP addresses is like keeping track of your friends by remembering which seats they sat in the last time you all went to the movies. Or, as Galeal put it later in the show (35:10), “IP addresses are not identities.”

Howard then described what happens when you try to brute-force it anyway (10:03):

“Microsegmentation and segmentation are not the same thing… If you’re like, ‘Well, I’m going to create 437 subnets in my network and I’m going to create 300 VLANs and I’m going to turn on host-based firewalls,’ you’ve just created a nightmare that no one is ever going to be able to manage after you. And you have failed job number one, which is make sure that the next person can be as successful as you are.”

“Make sure that the next person can be as successful as you are.” I want that on a poster, and not just for network engineers. It applies to code, documentation, and pretty much anything you build that someone else will inherit.

And if you try to do it the classic way regardless, making your firewalls enforce all that traffic between your services? According to Galeal (29:48), that’s the first lesson you’ll learn: “You will melt your firewalls.”

Credentials aren’t identity

My favorite moment in the episode came from an audience question. Sierra Montgomery asked (11:05):

“If a compromised workload acquires valid credentials and begins behaving like a legitimate service, what signal does your microsegmentation architecture use to distinguish legitimate machine-to-machine communication from lateral movement?”

Galeal’s answer was one word: Attestation. His reasoning: a credential doesn’t prove whether Howard, David, or an AI agent should have it. Credentials, he said, are “necessary but not sufficient.”

Explaining bearer tokens is something that goes back to my first article for Auth0, which was also my “take-home assignment” in the job interview process. The concept always needed the most careful explaining, even though the name told you everything: whoever bears the token gets the access. The token doesn’t know or care who’s holding it. It’s more like cash than a credit card.

That’s fine as long as you know where the token is. The trouble starts when you don’t. A credential proves that something possesses a secret. It doesn’t prove that the thing should have that secret, and it says nothing about whether the machine presenting it is in the state it’s supposed to be in. Attestation fills that gap: it’s verifiable evidence that the workload is what it claims to be, and that it’s running where and how it’s supposed to.

Take the pwning like a champ

At a DEF CON party a long time ago, a few friends and I came up with a joke talk title for the following year’s edition of the conference: “Security is for lightweights. Take the pwning like a champ.”

But behind the joke was an important idea: every boxer gets hit. What makes a champ isn’t never getting punched; it’s being able to take the punch and stay on your feet. Security works the same way. Sooner or later, one of your credentials is going to end up in the wrong hands, whether it’s through a phished password, a leaked API key, or a token that got copied out of a log file. Back then, planning on getting pwned was a punchline. These days, it’s a design principle, and it’s exactly where Galeal starts.

The DEF CON joke came to my mind when an audience member asked how a platform can alert on a compromised token moving laterally (16:06). Galeal’s answer was in the spirit of “Take the pwning like a champ”: Assume that tokens will be compromised, and design your system so that a token by itself doesn’t grant access.

If your architecture opens the door and grants network reachability before it verifies identity, an ill-gotten token can be a starting point to explore your network. The “Take the pwning like a champ” approach that NetFoundry takes verifies identity first and uses policies to spells out which identities can talk to which services. A stolen token doesn’t open any new doors, because the path the attacker wants isn’t accessible to them.

AI agents are chaos monkeys nobody scheduled

History time! If you were a developer around the time the iPad came out, you might remember Chaos Monkey, Netflix’s tool designed to randomly shut down servers in production. The idea behind it could be summarized as “The random shutdowns will continue until resiliency improves”. Netflix’s dev teams were forced to build in such a way that their systems would survive failure. It’s a brilliant (if sadistic) idea, and it works because Netflix chose to unleash it deliberately, with rules.

This isn’t all too different from a pattern Galeal described (28:56): taking an AI agent and saying, “Hey, cool. Here’s some API keys. Here’s the internet. Here’s some enterprise resources. Go do something useful.”

Howard’s response: “I see that like 40 times a week.” That’s a chaos monkey too, except nobody scheduled it, nobody wrote the rules, and it will explain its reasoning very confidently afterward.

My last job prior to my current Developer Advocate gig at NetFoundry was optimizing an MCP server, so this isn’t a hand-wavey “some customer has this issue” thing to me. Every tool or function you expose through an MCP server is something an agent can decide to call, whenever it wants, for reasons you didn’t anticipate. Its network traffic doesn’t follow a script.

When an audience member asked how to segment an AI agent whose needed connections change with each task, Howard’s advice was (27:27):

“If you try to design something that is entirely flexible, what you’re going to end up with is opening yourself up for AI chaos in your network… If you do it the other way around and hope that your microsegmentation tool set is going to keep up with your AI, you’re basically saying, ‘I want microseg to follow my chaos monkey.’ Do it the other way around. Use microsegmentation to restrict the chaos monkey.”

Galeal’s answer to the same question (26:43) supplies the other half: The old bag of tricks isn’t going to work on agentic flows. Treat agents as identities, define a graph of what each one can talk to and under what conditions, and have the visibility and enforcement to make sure they stay on that graph.

That’s the right mental model. An AI agent isn’t a human employee sitting behind your SSO portal, and it isn’t a cron job that does the same thing at the same time every night. It’s a whole new thing.

As Howard put it later in the show, it isn’t another application, and it doesn’t act like a human either. It needs boundaries defined up front, including things like:

• A specific identity,
• ashort list of things it’s allowed to reach, and i
• solation that travels with it whether it’s running in AWS, on bare metal, or in an OT facility.

What this looks like if you write code

Time for me to put my work hat on for a minute. The table above mentions “an identity-driven overlay” enforced “inside the application,” which is a mouthful, so here’s what it means in practice.

OpenZiti is the open source zero trust networking platform that NetFoundry builds, and one of the things it lets you do is embed zero trust directly into your application with an SDK. Your app gets its own cryptographic identity, and it can only reach the services that policy says it’s allowed to reach. On the other side, services don’t need open inbound ports at all, so there’s nothing sitting on the network for an attacker to scan, probe, or point a stolen token at.

Galeal’s “kill switch” (more on that below) gets pretty concrete here too: if an identity is compromised, you revoke it or change the policy, and its paths go away. No firewall surgery required.

If you want to try it yourself, the docs and quickstarts are at openziti.io.

What do you tell the board?

Near the end, David read an audience question: Which metric best shows leadership that microsegmentation is working? Galeal boiled his answer down to three questions (39:11):

1. The graph: Can you answer the question “What identity can talk to what identity, according to what policy?” (Note that he said identity, not IP address.)
2. The kill switch: When something unexpected happens, where’s the kill switch that lets you deal with it without compromising uptime, human safety, or business continuity?
3. Centralized governance: How much of all this can you see and govern from one place, instead of going to a bunch of different environments and firewalls?

Then Howard put on his gloves (41:27): “I couldn’t disagree more.” Speaking as a CISO, he said:

“What my board said 10, 15 years ago was, ‘We better never get hacked.’… Today they say, ‘How bad will it be?’ That is their question to me. That is the question they want me to answer in every board meeting they invite me to.”

My answer would be “Take the pwning like a champ”.

David pointed out that the two answers aren’t really in conflict: Galeal was describing what you measure for yourself and your security team, and Howard was describing what you tell the board. Galeal agreed. Howard then explained why the board version has to be so compressed (43:29):

“I get one slide as a CISO… I get like five minutes… I make that one slide tell them how I’m spending money to make it less bad than the last time they gave me money.”

Ah, the dreaded “You get one, and only one, slide” directive for board meeting presentations. Replace “board” with “VP of Engineering” or “whoever approves your budget,” and it’s still excellent advice.

My takeaway

If I had to boil the whole episode down to one idea, it wouldn’t be about AI, firewalls, or attestation. It would be Howard’s “job number one”: make sure the next person can be as successful as you are.

Galeal landed in the same place from a different direction. When David asked why he started NetFoundry (24:00), he said that after years of beating his head against walls like microsegmentation, he wanted to tilt the playing field so that the next person who has to solve these problems doesn’t have to.

That’s the real case against building microsegmentation out of subnets and VLANs. Even if you get it working, you’ve built something nobody else can understand, let alone maintain.

A policy that says “the billing service can talk to the orders database, and the AI agent can talk to these three APIs and nothing else” is something the next person can read, reason about, and change without breaking everything. And when some of the things doing the talking are AI agents that nobody can fully predict, that kind of clarity is what keeps the chaos monkey in its cage.

Go watch the episode, and if you’re a developer who wants to see what identity-first networking looks like from the inside, take OpenZiti for a test drive!

The post Super Cyber Friday: “Hacking Microsegmentation for Machine Workloads” (or: Old cybersecurity tricks don’t work with new AI agents) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

You can also use the text below when explaining the concepts; feel free to “copy, paste, and adjust to taste”:

North-south crosses the boundary of your environment. A browser hitting your web tier, an API call from outside, your service calling a third party. Up and down the diagram, in and out.

East-west stays inside. Web tier to app tier, app tier to database, service to service, pod to pod. Sideways across the diagram, and it typically never touches your perimeter controls at all.

The entire traditional security stack is pointed at north-south. Firewall, WAF, load balancer, the DMZ, the VPN concentrator, most of the alerting.

East-west traditionally get an implicit pass, because it’s inside, and inside was assumed to be fine. If this were true, we wouldn’t have expressions like “It was an inside job!”

An attacker who phishes a laptop or pops a container has already cleared every north-south control. From that point on they’re moving east-west, which is the direction that typically has the least in the way. The initial breach is usually small. The blast radius is what turns it into an incident, and the blast radius is all east-west.

That’s the gap microsegmentation exists to close: putting authorization on the connections between your own workloads, not just on the ones crossing your perimeter.

The post North/south vs. east/west (or: Where the security budget goes vs. where the attacker *actually* moves) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

you sent a message, but it can’t be qualified at this time for offensiveness

There’s a hate-speech classifier on the path every message takes, and it’s been waiting for a classifier to talk to. On the September 18 Ziti TV episode, I got curious about it and went down the “How do I get this thing to work?” rabbit hole. It turned out to be a nice tour of how OpenZiti authorization actually works!

Here’s the fun part. The first thing you notice is that the classifier URL has no instance prefix, while every other service name in the demo is scoped. That looked like the answer, but it wasn’t.Prepare tags the Appetizer’s own identity with an unprefixed classifier-clients attribute, deliberately, in a file where everything else goes through scopedName. The dial side was built with one shared classifier in mind rather than one per instance. The URL is right as written.

What’s left to build is the network side: the service and a dial policy. The application was always correct, and it’s been accurately reporting that it couldn’t reach something that wasn’t there yet.

In the end, the fix was a service and two policies, and (yay!) no changes to the code at all.

I’ve posted a preliminary (but complete) walkthrough as a repo here. It’ll be posted in a more official place (that is, a NetFoundry page) as an article and supporting scripts and files in the OpenZiti Test Kitchen on GitHub.

In the exercise, you add a real classifier (a RoBERTa model fine-tuned on OffensEval tweets) and host it as a dark service. By the end you have two processes talking by service name, with ss -ltn showing nothing listening inside the classifier container while the controller shows it actively hosting. Then you take access away with one policy change and watch the caller get “not found” for a service that’s running perfectly well three feet away.

The exercise shouldn’t take longer than a half hour, and it all runs in Docker containers, which means you don’t need Python, Go, or even the ziti CLI installed locally. I wrote it for people new to OpenZiti, with the diagnosis reasoning spelled out rather than just the commands, since that part transfers to debugging your own dials.

A few things I’d have liked to know going in, which I haven’t seen written down elsewhere:

• Flask’s built-in dev server can’t host a ziti service. The bind succeeds and a terminator registers, but it never accepts. werkzeug polls the listening fd through selectors, and a ziti fd isn’t pollable that way. Callers see EOF and the Python side logs nothing. waitress works, and it’s what the SDK’s own Flask sample uses.
• The SDK enumerates services at startup and doesn’t re-check per dial, so a service created after your process starts stays invisible until it refreshes.

Thanks to Clint for the Appetizer, which is a genuinely good teaching demo, and for co-hosting the episode this came from.

This is the first in a series! I’m turning Ziti TV episodes into standalone repos people can work through on their own. Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenZiti/streams

Issues and PRs welcome, especially if you hit something the troubleshooting section misses. Help make it better!

Once again, the repo is here: https://github.com/AccordionGuy/openziti-appetizer-classifier

The post The first in a new walkthrough series: Add a working classifier to the Appetizer and host it as a dark service! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

If David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World 2026 felt like “the most confusing funeral I’ve ever experienced,” Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote was the raucous Irish wake that brought the corpse back to life, handed it a pint, and told everyone to get back to their laptops once they’ve sobered up.

The tl;dr table

To appreciate how thoroughly Aaron answered DHH, lI put together a table comparing the two keynotes:

A tale of two keynotes

“Your AI has not made this promise to you.

There is no ‘As-If Rule’ for your English.

I am not going to concede my destiny to AI.

I’m going to keep reading my code, and I hope that you will too.

Get in loser, we’re going programming.”

— Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove), Rails World 2026 Closing Keynote

The contrast between the two bookends of Rails World 2026 couldn’t have been more stark. It was a clash of two diametrically opposed philosophies.

The opening keynote gave us an embittered, insulated tech executive treating code as disposable corporate slop…

…and for the closing keynote, we got a loveable systems hacker who reminded us why software craftsmanship mattered in the first place:

The Parody: “Aaron XP” and the curse of the slop grenade

Aaron stepped on stage in Austin and wasted zero time skewering DHH’s opening theatrics.

If you watched the video of DHH’s keynote (remember to turn the volume down a little, he’s still deep in his “Al Pacino yelling” phase), you know about breathless obsession with his Linux distro Omarchy, bragging about driving install times down from three minutes to nine seconds, and treating it like the Second Coming of Computing. I half expected him to borrow the line from Deadpool and Wolverine and declare himself Linux Jesus (and hey, it still might happen).

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IQc4FVQXkJU

Aaron opened with his own “major announcement”: Not to be outdone, he too had vibe-coded his own Linux distribution, Aaron XP!

“It installs in 100 milliseconds. It’s very important for me to get the install time down because I’m doing that constantly. Wake up in the morning, install my OS. Get some coffee, install my OS. Upgrade Chrome, reinstall the OS… I think it’s ironic to make a joke about the financial crisis and then encourage everybody to generate a whole bunch of Rust code without reading it. I’m going to start selling insurance on technical debt, so come see me afterwards.”

Then came the jab that sent ripples across the room: “slop grenades”.

For anyone tracking the broader industry discourse, the phrase wasn’t just a casual joke; it was a direct nod to Aaron’s ultimate boss (and my former ultimate boss), Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke. A year ago, Lütke made headlines with his sweeping “all-in on AI coding” proclamations, hyping how agentic workflows would supercharge engineering output across Shopify.

Lütke recently took to social media to vent about the grim byproduct of unbridled vibe coding: the “slop grenade”. It’s the result of a developer casually tossing an AI-generated, 2,000-line pull request that took three minutes to generate over the cubicle wall, expecting a human colleague to spend three agonizing hours reviewing it for edge-case horrors.

Aaron leaned right into the irony on stage:

“I know everybody here loves using AI. I do too. I love using AI to make slop grenades, it’s great… But I want to take a poll of the audience here: How many of you like receiving slop grenades?”

In a hall packed with hundreds of engineers, exactly two or three hesitant hands went up in the front row.

The message was undeniable: Generating unchecked tokens is cheap, addictive, and fun for the sender; dealing with the resulting fallout is an asymmetric tax levied on everyone else.

Aaron’s core technical thesis: The “As-If” Rule and why we read code

Where DHH’s talk was a seemingly never-ending, increasingly ranty (and of course, scream-y) collection of Silicon Valley buzzwords, vague analogies about 19th-century Danish portraiture, and unchecked hubris, Aaron gave a masterclass on the mechanics of compilers and runtime semantics.

He grounded his talk in a foundational concept from systems architecture: the “As-If” Rule. In C++ and language runtimes, a compiler is permitted to make any transformation, inline any method, eliminate allocations, or reorder execution, provided that the observable behavior remains strictly identical to the code the programmer wrote.

Aaron walked the audience through the real work being done by the Ruby core and infrastructure teams:

1. Parallel execution with ractors: How Ractor-local garbage collection in Ruby 4.1 eliminates singleton GC bottlenecks by giving each Ractor its own isolated heap.
2. Interpreter inlining: How Ruby 4.0 inlines method initializations into call sites, stripping stack frames to make object allocations 70% faster without even touching a JIT.
3. ZJIT and abstract interpretation: How ZJIT’s high-level intermediate representation (HIR) simulates execution, using algebraic substitution and dead-code elimination to turn a 1,000-allocation Rack loop into just 8 allocations.

Why did this matter? Because of the punchline Aaron delivered at the one-hour mark.

Proponents of vibe coding argue that AI agents are “just another compiler”, and that since you don’t inspect the assembly generated by LLVM or GCC, you shouldn’t care about inspecting the Rust or TypeScript spit out by Claude or GPT.

Aaron obliterated that comparison in two sentences:

“The compiler made a promise to you: the As-If Rule. Whatever it does, the behavior that you can observe matches the code that you wrote. And everything that I showed you in this presentation shows you what it costs to keep that promise.

Your AI has not made this promise to you. There is no As-If Rule for your English.”

There’s no contract when you write ambiguous English prompts into a model, nor is there any mathematical proof of correctness. There’s no guarantee of invariant preservation.

Simply put: Treating code as an opaque black box isn’t high-level visionary leadership; it is reckless abdication.

The real world: When the bots turn against you

Aaron then delivered an astonishing, previously undisclosed case study: the May 2026 RubyGems exploit.

He detailed how automated, AI-driven bots executing the “gem stuffer” attack discovered a Rube Goldberg chain of zero-day vulnerabilities:

• RubyGems webhooked to rubydoc.info.
• rubydoc.info processed YARD documentation inside a networked Docker container.
• YARD executed arbitrary .yardopts configurations, invoking malicious scripts.
• When the RubyGems team began revoking credentials, the bots independently leveraged a 6-year-old cached HTTP authorization vulnerability behind Fastly to sniff valid maintainer keys.

It was a chilling counterweight to DHH’s utopian fantasy. While DHH urged everyone to blindly delegate business infrastructure to autonomous agents, the security engineers at RubyGems were in the trenches defending against autonomous agent swarms exploiting undocumented edge cases.

And who saved the ecosystem? Not English prompts. Human engineers reading raw code, dissecting diffs, and understanding HTTP packet headers.

Reclaiming MINASWAN: Community over ego

Beyond the technical fireworks, Aaron’s keynote reminded everyone why the Ruby community existed long before DHH’s latest crusade.

Earlier in the conference, DHH talked extensively about himself, his great-great-grandfather, his 20-year-old talks, and his personal productivity stats. His talk had a lot of “Me, me, me”. (It made me wonder if he had a obsessed “human printer” assistant like a certain world leader we all know.)

Aaron used his stage time to bring up Mike Dalessio, a quiet, tireless open-source contributor who has maintained Nokogiri, SQLite3, and Ruby security for two decades. He announced Dalessio’s appointment as the newest member of the Rails Core Team.

It was an intentional, emotional tribute to the values of MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice”). It centered the workers, the maintainers, and the collaborative joy of open source.

Early reactions in the comments

As I write this article (Sunday, September 27, 2026, 11:34 p.m. EDT), the video has been up only 4 hours.

The overwhelming sentiment in the comments was one of profound relief mixed with lingering exasperation over the conference’s rocky start.

My favorite was one commenter wry sobriquet for Aaron’s keynote, “Damage control: the talk”.

Another vented about the financial reality of attending: “Ah, good to see a technical talk about Rails in the last day, in the last keynote of this $700 USD event.”

Longtime fans who felt burned by Thursday morning’s eulogy found their footing again, with viewers praising Aaron for actually delivering on the conference’s namesake: “If I want to see talks about AI, I’ll watch talks about AI. I watched Rails World, expecting talks about Rails and its future.”

A few lone voices dismissed Aaron’s plea to keep reading code as an unsustainable luxury that businesses will soon steamroll in pursuit of pure feature velocity. Others immediately countered with the hard reality of accumulated tech debt: companies can afford not to care about code quality until the unreadable slop starts breaking production and costing them customers.

For a community nursing collective whiplash, Aaron’s keynote proved that the heart of Rails is still very much beating, even if its original architect was eager to call time of death.

The verdict: Don’t concede your destiny

DHH opened Rails World 2026 by declaring that the era of human programmers writing code is dead, telling an anxious room of working engineers that caution is for “fucking losers.”

Aaron Patterson closed Rails World 2026 by showing that the people actually building Ruby’s compilers, runtime, and security infrastructure haven’t quit. They’re making the language faster, safer, and more concurrent than it has ever been.

You don’t have to swallow the black pill of defeatist obsolescence, nor do you have to swallow DHH’s white pill of corporate gaslighting and throwaway slop.

As Aaron proved, there is a third way: Remain curious, keep mastering your tools, understand the abstractions beneath your feet, and refuse to surrender your agency.

Get in, loser. We’re going programming.

The post Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote (and antidote to the DHH funeral) at Rails World 2026: “Get in loser, we’re going programming” appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The best one-line summary of David Heinemeier Hansson’s (DHH) keynote at Rails World 2026 was Stefan Lindbohm’s comment on its YouTube video:

“This is the most confusing funeral I’ve ever experienced”

This was the flagship keynote for the framework’s premier gathering, and it felt less like an affirmation of Rails’ future and more like an intellectual abandonment of its foundational craft, delivered by a creator increasingly insulated from the core community that used, supported, and helped build Rails alongside him.

(And DHH also did it so LOUDLY. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that late-career DHH is a lot like late-career Al Pacino, who seems to think that the most effective way to get a message across is by YELLING.)

The keynote cannot be understood as an isolated technology talk. It set up a lawnchair right on the crossroads of two growing crises:

1. The existential disruption of generative AI on software as craft, and
2. A deep, multi-year revolt within the Ruby ecosystem against DHH’s personal politics, power concentration, cultural alienation, and let’s face it: he’s become yet another techno-dick.

Abandoned by its own creator

In his hour on stage, DHH barely mentioned the technology the audience had gathered to celebrate. In fact, an AI transcript analysis by a commenter revealed  that the word “Ruby” was spoken just 11 times throughout the entire presentation.

Instead, DHH unveiled a series of radical repudiations of the doctrines he spent two decades embedding into software canon:

“Pencils Down” on manual code. DHH announced that 37signals has banned hand-written code as standard operating procedure. Hand-writing code is now treated as a failure state. He also declared, “I have retired from being a professional programmer,” and that English is now his favorite programming language. He said that in the past year, only ~3% of the code he produced was Ruby. This. could be a hard pill to swallow for a community that had a tenet called “Exalt beautiful code”.

Ditching the web app. For 20 years, DHH championed server-rendered web applications, HTML over the wire, and the “Majestic Monolith”. At the keynote, he announced that 37signals’ flagship email client, HEY, is abandoning the web app model entirely. Armed with agentic code generators, a small team was tasked with pumping out six native desktop and mobile applications simultaneously.

Black-box Rust backends. Admitting he despises Rust (“like pouring acid in my eyes”, “inhumane to ask people of flesh and blood to subject their eyeballs to”), DHH celebrated outsourcing the entire HEY backend to AI agents writing Rust. His justification was rooted in total detachment: he never has to read or maintain it. It functions purely as an opaque black box.

The “loser” ultimatum. Dismissing concerns over job displacement, intellectual property theft, or code maintainability, DHH commanded the room to “take the white pill” and embrace extreme acceleration (the 2026 version of “move fast and break things”). His parting assessment for anyone feeling cautious or skeptical about turning software development into black-box agent orchestration: “The black pill is for fucking losers. Don’t be a loser.”

(The most extreme example: that two-hour unedited Primeagen interview with DHH from 2024. Caffeinated baboons would’ve been less noisy.)

Alienating the audience

To understand why this keynote felt less like bold leadership and more like a betrayal, you have to look at the cultural fracture that preceded it.

In a poignant, widely read November 2025 reflection, In Praise of DHH, long-time developer (and my friend) Filipa MV captured the tragic arc of DHH’s relationship with the community:

“Prologue. I never met him, but I liked him. He was cool. He could be arrogant, and brash. He was maybe a little too self-satisfied. But on the whole I would say he was someone I admired, someone I looked up to. He was a role model. David Heinemeier Hansson (aka dhh), indirectly, through the creation of Ruby on Rails and the community that sprung up around it, had a big impact on my life… Rails was the connective tissue that threaded together many meaningful friendships of mine.”

As Filipa noted, many in the community historically tolerated DHH’s arrogance because of his undeniable taste and track record: “I have always liked David’s technical leadership! I have historically thought that he’s right more often than he’s wrong!”

Yet, as documented across the ecosystem, from Filipa’s essay to David Celis’s The DHH Problem, to Tekin Süleyman’s The Ruby Community Has a DHH Problem, DHH made a JK Rowling-like slide from a brash, opinionated visionary into a reactionary figure engaged in institutional power games:

The culture war shift. In recent years, DHH turned his public channels toward culture-war grievances: railing against DEI, adopting anti-trans talking points, praising far-right British agitators like Tommy Robinson, and describing London’s multicultural demographics as a “nightmare.” For a global community founded on the Ruby ethos of MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice“), watching the titular figurehead of Rails embrace xenophobic tropes and exclusion felt like an assault on the community’s foundational spirit.

Power and institutional captivity. When community members and contributors pushed back, they discovered that DHH had architected a structure where he could not be held accountable. Between controlling the Rails trademarks, chairing the Rails Foundation, dominating Rails Core alongside Basecamp and Shopify (who also have a problematic leader), and exerting leverage over events (such as the contentious Ruby Central and RubyGems funding dramas of 2025), DHH built, as Filipa MV observed, “a world where people can’t say no to him.”

The Eeection of the community. When DHH told his Rails World audience not to be “losers,” it confirmed what critics had warned: the empathy was gone. To quote Filipa MV: “He has great technical taste but he is not a good leader… To have him keynote and hold a veto over the community is to say to people like me, and brown-skinned people everywhere, ‘you don’t belong here.’”

“Feel the fucking room, ffs” and the revolt in the comments section

DHH probably intended his keynote to be an exhilarating, Steve Ballmer-style “Oh, what a time to be alive!” rally. The public reception in the conference hall and across the YouTube comment section was characterized by shock, grief, and exhaustion.

The “conference tax” vs. the pitch. Attendees and remote viewers quickly noted the absurdity of paying premium ticket, travel, and lodging fees for a Rails conference only to be told that Rails is an afterthought and programming is dead:

“I attended Euruko a few days ago… Matz talked about tech. I feel sorry for everyone who bought a ticket and ‘has’ to be there to endure the rest of what’s coming.”

“Came here for Rails, got told I’m a loser in the shadows lol.”

“Imagine being a speaker following this talk and having to talk about Rails after DHH dumped it for Rust.”

Wealthy techie vs working techie. Commenters drove home the stark class divide between a multi-millionaire founder playing with unlimited API tokens and everyday developers navigating a brutal tech market and a rising cost of living:

“He’s a multimillionaire talking to a room of people who still need a paycheck for the next 30 years. He has his bag, of course he’s excited. He’s got nothing to lose like the rest of us.”

“The problem is not really that AI will end careers, the problem is that the people who will end it are trying to convince you to be happy about it… Feel the fucking room, ffs.”

The knowledge freeze and architectural decay. For years, DHH and 37signals marketed themselves as the ultimate defenders of digital sovereignty. They led the charge on leaving the public cloud (“Cloud Exit”), crusaded against Apple’s App Store tax, championed self-hosted SQLite, and preached independence from Silicon Valley oligarchs.

Yet at Rails World 2026, that posture inverted entirely:

• From sovereignty to model rent-seeking: The software pipeline was surrendered to centralized model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. As one commenter observed: “Rails World 2025: End to end freedom. Rails World 2026: Just depend on other companies.”
• From craft to disposable slop: Software is no longer a well-tended garden engineered for human delight and maintainability. It’s now an unread, disposable byproduct generated in mass volume. To cite the work of another techno-dick: We are now the pointy-haired bosses from Dilbert.
• Cannibalizing his own moat: If an email client, a desktop utility, or a SaaS backend can be vibecoded in 20 minutes from plain English prompts, the economic justification for 37signals vanishes. Why pay a monthly SaaS subscription to HEY or Basecamp when an agent can compile a custom personal client directly to native bytecode?

The end of an era

Programming languages and frameworks are like Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees; they’re hard to kill and live longer than expected.

Ruby on Rails won’t vanish overnight. Thousands of monoliths power the backbone of global businesses, and Ruby’s and Rails’ expressive designs will always offer genuine joy to developers who care about the craft of programming.

But something did die on the keynote stage in Austin: the social contract between the framework and its creator. For years, developers looked the other way during DHH’s controversies because he remained the ultimate champion of developer ergonomics, craftsmanship, and the indie hacker’s right to build elegant software.

By taking the stage at Rails World to declare coding obsolete, dismiss Ruby as a relic, flaunt unreadable Rust generated by third-party black boxes, and label his own audience “losers” for caring about their craft, DHH finalized a break that had been brewing for years.

Rails may endure, but its original architect has officially left the building. It’s now up to the community to decide whether it continues to chain itself to an alienated founder, or finally gather the courage to build a post-DHH future.

Postscript

why the lucky stiff, where are you when we need you?

Post-postscript

Monday, September 28, 2026: Fortunately, the closing keynote’s vibe was so, so different.

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