Ken Finnigan

Logo for Chris Short Consulting LLC — a dark green background with a geometric upward-pointing triangle rendered in light green with diagonal hatching, above the text "Chris Short Consulting LLC"

I'm currently available for consulting work. If you need help with open source strategy, developer relations programs, Kubernetes & cloud native advisory, event programs, or technical content, including podcasts & live streams — let me know! Learn more at shortconsulting.io

Machine Learning Platform Engineering - Benjamin Tan Wei Hao, Shanoop Padmanabhan, and Varun Mallya Get your machine learning models out of the lab and into production! Delivering a successful machine learning project is hard. Machine Learning Platform Engineering makes it easier. In it, you’ll des...

Machine Learning Platform Engineering from @manning.com is an incredibly detailed look into all aspects of ML platforms and the their tools: MLflow, Kubeflow, and BentoML.
The authors share insights on data analysis, model training, inference and serving, and monitoring.
shortener.manning.com/wxr5

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Check out this week's o11y newsletter with lots of good OpenTelemetry content and more:

o11y.news/2026-02-23/

#observability

Latency - Pekka Enberg Practical techniques for delivering low latency software.

@penberg.org's book on Latency with @manning.com is incredibly detailed! Covering latency in all its forms, and real practical approaches to reduce or minimize its impact. Brought me back to writing about event loops for Reactive Java with @cescoffier.bsky.social

shortener.manning.com/X1ME

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Check out this week's o11y newsletter, with great contributions from OpenTelemetry hands-on articles to a Prometheus storage deep dive:

o11y.news/2026-02-16/

#observability

This article shows how to measure RAG behavior, not just generate answers:
faithfulness, relevance, grounding, hallucination detection.

Built with #Quarkus, #LangChain4j, and local LLMs.
Written for #Java devs who ship to production.

buff.ly/cLZpGIG

#RAG #AIEngineering #LLM

More info and demo would be super interesting. No rush needed

Apica Flow sounds a lot like the quality/data problems with telemetry I've been thinking and pondering on how to solve for a while now. Very cool!
Have you looked at Sawmills?

Really enjoyed reading Practical FinOps by Mohamed (lnkd.in/gP4WdrCv) from @manning.com Discusses the FinOps framework and FOCUS in detail. Plenty of practical queries for AWS cost and data tracking!
lnkd.in/g4P-aVr5

Anyone you know of working on something outside the box?

Yeah, thanks mate. Data quality is huge. Quality >> volume. 💯

But #Observability is so broken. Megavendors know it is the old CA "cash cow in the basement" (side note, Bjarne was actually a good guy and this was not his own isolated opinion).

While in secret they all know it doesn't fucking work.

Super interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Data platform and quality with respect to Observability are definitely what I’m thinking about a lot

Migrating from #Fluentd to the OpenTelemetry Collector?

Fluentd buffers to disk. The Collector defaults to memory - so a pod restart can mean lost #logging data.

Here’s how to configure #OpenTelemetry persistent queues safely.

👉 dash0.link/otel-fluent-...

Hey. I don't know who needs to hear this.

It's gonna be okay.

We will get through this.

This is, sadly, cyclical in human society.

And we've always been okay. Eventually.

It's okay to be afraid. To take a break to recharge.

You can't pour from an empty cup.

Please care for yourself.

Hold on.

Screenshot of the RootsTech schedule page

The #RootsTech schedule is live. I’ve just created my own schedule of talks I want to watch. I will be attending online #NotAtRootsRech

Hello World On platform choices, professional responsibilities, and picking your battles

I made a substack: charitydotwtf.substack.com.

Some people questioned the ethics of doing so, so I put the project on hold for a few days to think and ask questions.

I have decided to stay. Here is why. (also xpost: charity.wtf/2025/12/19/h...)

charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/hello-worl...

Transformers in Action - Nicole Koenigstein Understand the architecture that underpins today’s most powerful AI models. Transformers are the superpower behind large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Transformers in Actio...

Transformers in Action (shortener.manning.com/JdAP) is an excellent resource for learning how various transformer models work, how to specialize and train models, and ethical LLMs.

Thanks to Nicole Königstein for this @manning.com book! It's a great read

putting this out there - anyone know someone or have recs for leadership coaches that specialize in tech + autism/adhd?

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Check out this week's o11y newsletter with great content from OpenTelemetry to OpenSearch:

o11y.news/2025-12-01/

#observability

Quokkas are the best! Always smiling

A book-lined office at night: a researcher studies documents while a translucent AI assistant stands beside the desk; city lights glow outside—human + AI co-research.

You will hear of launches and rumors of launches—but here's how to test Gemini 3 yourself. Pick one stubborn document or photo. Run it through our #genealogy research-tuned Gem today (Gemini 2.5). Save everything. When G3 lands, rerun the exact same prompts. If it's real, you'll feel the difference.

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Check out this week's o11y newsletter with great news on OpenTelemetry releases to instrumentation score coming to Prometheus to AIOps and more:

o11y.news/2025-11-17/

#observability

Picture of partially built McLaren P1 Lego set sitting on a bookcase next to instruction book and Lego pieces ready to be built

Current progress of McLaren P1 LEGO. By far the most complex and intricate set I’ve ever built!

#opensource #opentowork | Andres Almiray Hi everyone! An ongoing reorganization at my current employer has prompted me to seek for a new role and would appreciate your support. I'm open to remote (anywhere) and hybrid roles in Switzerland (...

Hi everyone! An ongoing reorganization at my current employer has prompted me to seek for a new role and would appreciate your support.

I'm open to remote (anywhere) and hybrid roles in Switzerland. I have 25+ years experience as a software developer, 8 as devrel www.linkedin.com/posts/aalmir...

Secrets of Performance Tuning Java on Kubernetes - The Article (Part 2) In Part 1, we saw that the JVM doesn’t always play nicely with containers, and we must be aware of that, and adjust accordingly. Now let’s invite Kubernetes to the party and see how things get really ...

Excited to share Part 2, the final article of my research on Secrets of Performance Tuning #Java on #Kubernetes. Your support means a lot! Drop a comment and share your thoughts!

www.linkedin.com/pulse/secret...

Come and see what we cooked up! #Observability #MagicTheGathering #OpenTelemetry

That's a wrap for #NODES2025!

Our 7th edition brought together an incredible global graph community!

24-hour streaming 160 talks from 200 speakers from all over the world.

Soon: all talks will be available on our YouTube channel (you can already watch some! https://bit.ly/43WU14G)

THANK YOU!

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Check out this week's o11y newsletter with excellent contribs from non-pillars to new instrumentation method and OpenTelemetry material:

o11y.news/2025-11-03/

#observability

This was on for me when I checked. If you use LinkedIn, it's worth checking on. I definitely don't want my posts there being used as training data.