iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Once you’ve democratized LLM access (like GPT-4, Claude, or OSS models), real advantage comes from tuning them to your domain. That’s where RAG and SLMs shine. 6/7

100

⚙️ SLMs (Small Language Models): Smaller models fine-tuned on specific domains. They're fast, cheap, and easier to run—especially when your data doesn’t change much. 5/7

100

🧠 RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Store your own data, search it at runtime, and pass it to the LLM for context-aware answers. Great when data changes often or needs to stay fresh. 4/7

100

That’s where RAG and SLMs come in. Both help bring domain-specific knowledge into the model—but in different ways. 3/7

100

Big takeaway for me relates to RAG and LLMs. LLMs (like GPT-4) are trained on massive datasets and can talk fluently about things Napoleon and Python—but they don’t know anything about your specific domain unless it’s publicly available. 2/7

100

SE Radio 661: Sunil Mallya on Small Language Models – Software Engineering Radio

Great podcast from Sunil Mallya on SE Radio about Small Language Models. Lots of insights on fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, RAG vs. SLM, and what this all means for enterprise AI. 🎧 se-radio.net/2025/03/se-r... 1/7

se-radio.net

100

Reposted by Wesley Reisz

Josh Long 🍃 @starbuxman.joshlong.com · 31/03/2025

happy 11 year anniversary to the first 1.0 release of Spring Boot ! It was released on the 1st of April 2014 spring.io/blog/2014/04...

spring.io

Spring Boot 1.0 GA Released

Level up your Java code and explore what Spring can do for you.

3406

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 18/03/2025

Ben Wilkes’ post truly resonates with my thinking. At #InfoQDevSummit, I'll be speaking about Chat Oriented Programming (ChOP) and agentic engineering—sharing how I used them to build a RAG for the InfoQ Certified Architect in Emerging Technologies certification at #QConLondon. #QConLondon

devsummit.infoq.com

InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2025 | June 9-10 | Peer Insights for Senior Developers

Join senior developers in Boston for insights on AI, scalable architectures, and more. June 9-10, 2025. Early bird pricing available.

010

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 18/03/2025

"...how do we prevent these concerns and use agentic engineering to deliver good-quality commercial software? In a word: discipline. We apply the same discipline—and very similar practices—that we applied to manual engineering as we do to agentic engineering." Love this! I couldn't agree more.

100

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 18/03/2025

My colleague Ben Wilkes published a pragmatic post about agentic engineering and the area of ChOP. I like the vocabulary of "agentic engineering" to describe how we should be using AI to write professional software today. www.equalexperts.com/blog/data-ai...

equalexperts.com

The trouble with vibe coding: why AI-driven software needs discipline | Equal Experts

Vibe coding sounds fun, but is it reliable? Discover why AI-powered software development needs structure, discipline, and agentic engineering to succeed.

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 18/02/2025

I continue to be humbled to lead the speaker webinar for QCon software conferences. avgSpeakerAttendance==30 highSpeakerWatermark==38 There are so few conferences I'm aware of that truly practice "We Care" like QCon. Things like this webinar are great! Hope to see you this year! #QConLondon

020

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 01/01/2025

As always, an outstanding annual review of the dbms space... Good stuff on license blowback and Databricks v Snowflake.

000

Takeaways from me: - Continually revisit your understanding of DDD (understanding what is truly an aggregate and why it matters) - Make sure you don't split your transactions across service boundaries - ...and, of course, make sure you can ship with autonomy. Afterall, that's the point (6/6)

010

Upper Bound: A Microservice shall be no larger than that which allows a two-pizza team to release a single complete, appropriately sized user story to production within a single day. (5/6)

100

Lower bound: A Microservice should consist of no less than an Aggregate (or at least an independent Entity) and the associated Services that operate on the entities of that Aggregate. (4/6)

100

What’s the right size for a Microservice?

Sarah references Kyle Brown and Shahir Daya's post "What’s the right size for a Microservice?" There are some great upper and lower bounds for a service size I really like. (3/6) kylegenebrown.medium.com/whats-the-ri...

kylegenebrown.medium.com

Kyle Brown, IBM Fellow, CTO Cloud Architecture, IBM Cloud Garage Shahir Daya, IBM Distinguished engineer, IBM Global Business Services

I've struggled recently with a large team where we over-optimized a microservice architecture (dozens of services when a handful were really needed) so this phrase resonated with me. (2/6)

100

Returning to Enabling Microservice Success @sarahjwells.bsky.social. On the right size for a microservice: "When you're designing your microservices and finding your boundaries one thing you should be guided by is your transaction boundaries." Seems intuitive, but it's not. 🧵(1/6)

121

Key Takeaways #5 "We look for executives who can both scale up and scale down. Scale up: you can speak credibly to the board, at the right level of abstraction vs detail [...] Scale down: you know what “good” looks like for work all over your organization, you can get down in the weeds... "

010

Key Takeaways #4 "You want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses."

Key Takeaways #3 Start small. You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.

Key Takeaways #2 "Hypergrowth encourages a raft of bad habits, and attacking every problem by hiring more people is one of them." – @mipsytipsy.bsky.social

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 11/12/2024

Key Takeaways #1 There has never been, nor will there ever be, a universal approach to leadership. What works for one person or organization might not work for another. What works depends on your culture, your challenges, and the tradeoffs you’re willing to make.

100

Shout out to Tommy Hinrichs for the conversation today around Dagger and reminding me I wanted to post this video!

000

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 11/12/2024

One of my major takeaways #KubeConNA '24: Dagger continues to hit it's stride. The promise was always there (how could it not with @shykes.bsky.social as CEO), but it's only 🚀. @salaboy.com and Marcos Lilljedahl did a great job showing Dagger & DAPR together in SLC www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSen...

youtube.com

Taming Your Application’s Environments - Marcos Lilljedahl & Mauricio "Salaboy" Salatino

YouTube video by CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]

262

Wesley Reisz @wesleyreisz.com · 05/12/2024

Platform Engineering is a product-focused approach to enabling stream aligned teams to deliver with substantial autonomy. Effective Platform Engineering is a great additional the conversation! This was a fun chat with some wonderful platform engineers!

020

Key Takeaway #4 APIs developed with domain-driven design, providing multi-channel support for diverse business applications #QConSF

020

Key Takeaway #3 Asynchronous boundaries between cloud/on-prem resources decouple applications from connectivity/availability issues. #QConSF

Key Takeaway #2 The ‘Customer Graph’ system-of-reference provides the capability to scale independently from the mainframe and be resilient to on-premise volatility. #QConSF

Key Takeaway #1 Change data capture enables near-real time synchronization #QConSF

Last week's proud Tech Principal moment! Jason Roberts & Sonia Mathew discussing transforming a 35 year old mainframe into a near real-time system surfaced with a domain-oriented GraphQL! qconsf.com/presentation...

232

Just wrapped up a great Platform Engineering conversation for #GotoBookClub. Ajay Chankramath, Bryan Oliver, Sean Alvarez, & Nick Cheneweth's new book is loaded with real-world experience! Check out the book and watch for the interview online! www.manning.com/books/effect... @gotocon.com

011