Episode 129: The Extinction of Enterprise Architects, Fifty Secrets Managers, and Deodorant Before AI, with Rick Clark

Software Defined Talk — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Rick Clark is Global Head of Cloud Advisory at UST, and co-founded OpenStack. His argument is that enterprise architecture is nearly extinct, killed off by fifteen years of shifting every decision left, and that this is how one insurance company he worked with ended up running over 50 secrets managers in production. Whitney and Coté push on whether platform engineering was meant to solve exactly that, and on what a modern enterprise architect would do instead - write the rules the platform enforces. The back half is agents: why nobody is ready to run them in production, and the difference between a rule an agent cannot break and one it must not break.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Rick on LinkedIn, which is where he sends people.
The Construct, his newsletter on agentic workloads in production.
From tokenmaxxing to tokenomics: you're still doing it wrong, his first op-ed for The Stack.

Special Guest: Rick Clark.

Episode 124: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross

Software Defined Talk — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0200

Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.

Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Bryan Ross’s home page on the World Wide Web, which links to everything else.
Chief Therapy Officer, Bryan’s Substack.
Bryan on LinkedIn.
Coté's list of "laws," anecdotes, and common shit people say. See also Hacker Laws.

Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

Software Defined Interviews - Episodes Tagged with “Platform Engineering”

Episode 129: The Extinction of Enterprise Architects, Fifty Secrets Managers, and Deodorant Before AI, with Rick Clark

Episode 124: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross