Rachel Stephens

It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.” “But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied. “No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

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.

I prefer subtle influence and plausible deniability.

If telecoms and governments happen to reorganize themselves around my pivot tables, that’s between them and their macros.

There are always so many gems in this newsletter.

(to get the full effect say the punchline about 4 times, getting increasingly louder and more frustrated each time because no one can understand the difference between you saying “water” and “waddle”)

a joke from my preschooler for your timeline:

What does a penguin call its water bottle?

…

A waddle bottle

The Disintermediation of Databases The database has been the center of gravity in data architecture for decades. It owned the storage, the query layer, and the interface. That center of gravity is changing. We’re seeing this structural...

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.

RedMonk Quick Take: Monster Scale Summit 2026 YouTube video by RedMonk

If you're a technical IC who cares about application performance, you should check out Monster Scale Summit. I had a great time keynoting last year, and the speaker lineup this year looks excellent!

youtu.be/eon5E356kNE

I told my kids that when I was growing up our tv didn't have a remote, and if you wanted to change the channel you had to walk across the room to change the dial. They truly could not comprehend.

I'm trying really hard to replace unnecessary apologies with gratitude (in the vein of "thanks for your help" instead of "sorry for the trouble")

The problem is my muscle memory around apologizing is strong

And so sometimes I ask a server for extra napkins and then say "sorry very much"

Can everyone building agent orchestration tools *please* stop using the term "overseer" to describe human oversight?

We already learned this lesson with master > main. Words matter.

unrelated but I love that website's design!

that's my favorite pharmaceutical disclaimer

Maybe "Sisu".

Kid handwriting: flip the paper over

Kid handwriting (with misspellings): you just took directions from paper

Sheep.

❤️

oooooh i love this measurement system

Complex, Not Complicated Modern software systems are frequently described as “complicated,” but that framing obscures the nature of the challenge. Complicated systems can be decomposed, reasoned about, and managed through cle...

A fantastic discussion with @rstephens.me @aeva.online and Chris about the Complex World we live in.

It’s the power of the @redmonk.com community

redmonk.com/videos/compl...

Yay!

Same, but we are 6 am wake ups and I rarely have anything worth staring at past 10 pm (9 if I am being totally honest)

Dynatrace and the Observability Market In this conversation, Rachel Stephens, the research director at RedMonk, discusses the evolution of observability in the tech industry. She highlights: – the shift from traditional monitoring to a bro...

New video up: a conversation about how the observability market is evolving and the role vendors like @dynatrace.com are playing. Worth a watch if you’re thinking about tooling and data strategy.

redmonk.com/videos/obser...

I really like this piece from @kateholterhoff.com

avoidance or binging?

very cool. well done, anthropic.
pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/12/anth...

When Julia speaks, we all should listen

The Blood Dimmed Tide of Agents Many years ago, a large European bank spoke to analysts after its first transition from purely physical hardware into virtual machines. While expressing overall satisfaction with the move, its enthusi...

what do VMs, microservices and agents have in common? and what does Yeats have to do with all of that?
redmonk.com/sogrady/2026...

ooh, that's a good one

DORA Community of Practice The DORA Community provides opportunities to learn, discuss, and collaborate on software delivery and operational performance. Enabling a culture of continuous improvement.

Join the dora.community today for a discussion with @wiredferret.bsky.social about progressive delivery.

Heidi will give a brief overview and then we'll have a lean coffee-based discussion about the topic.

Meeting starts at 12PM ET, details on the mailing list.

#DORA #GBGB #Community

confession: sometimes I just shut the door so it can't get back in.
I'm a "don't come home until the street lights are on" vacuum parent

the robot vacuum lives in my office and the noise it makes when it re-docks and cleans itself scares me truly every time.