At KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kat Cosgrove — one of the most influential people in the Kubernetes ecosystem right now. Kat is Head of Developer Advocacy at Minimus, an elected member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, technical lead for SIG Docs, and owner of the Kubernetes Release Team subproject. So yes — she is very busy. We talked about one of the biggest topics in the cloud native world right now: security.

From speaker to Master of Ceremonies 🎤 Cloud Native Rejekts EU 2026 in Amsterdam on 21st March was special. When the organizers asked me to MC the event at Miro HQ, I immediately said yes. Rejekts has always been one of my favorite parts of KubeCon week: raw technical content, zero marketing fluff, and a room full of people who genuinely build, run, break, and improve the cloud native ecosystem. Together with Julia Hahn, I had the pleasure of welcoming 300+ engineers for a full day of Kubernetes, open source tooling, security, platform engineering, runtime stories, user experiences, and the kind of talks that deserve way more visibility. That is what makes Cloud Native Rejekts so important. Many talks do not make it into KubeCon + CloudNativeCon simply because there are thousands of submissions and limited slots. Rejekts gives those ideas a second stage — and often, some of the best technical conversations of the whole week happen there. MC-ing taught me something new: - Being a speaker is about delivering one story well. - Being an MC is about connecting every story, keeping the room alive, respecting the schedule, supporting speakers, reading the audience, and creating space for the hallway track where the real magic happens. - A few lessons I will take with me: - Energy is contagious. - Brevity is respect. - Names matter. - Timing matters. - The hallway is part of the program. - Community is built in the spaces between talks. Huge thanks to the Cloud Native Rejekts organizers, all speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and everyone who showed up with curiosity and energy. If your KubeCon CFP gets rejected, do not stop there. Submit to Rejekts. And if you are attending KubeCon, block the day before for Cloud Native Rejekts. You will not regret it. https://lucaberton.com/blog/master-of-ceremonies-cloud-native-rejekts-2026/

At Sequoia, we see that speed is the best predictor of start-up success. Most companies are focused on AI as a productivity enhancer. Few are focused on the potential of AI to change how we work together. Block is showing what it looks like to fundamentally rethink organization design, ultimately harnessing AI to increase speed as a compounding competitive advantage. Two thousand years before the first corporate org chart, the Roman Army solved a problem that every large organization still faces: how do you coordinate thousands of people across vast distances with limited communication? Their answer was a nested hierarchy with a consistent span of control at every level. The smallest unit was the contubernium, eight soldiers who shared a tent, equipment, and a mule, led by a decanus. Ten contubernia formed a century of eighty men under a centurion. Six centuries made a cohort. Ten cohorts made a legion of roughly 5,000. At each layer, a named commander held defined authority, aggregated information from below, and relayed decisions from above. The structure (8 → 80 → 480 → 5,000) was an information routing protocol built around a simple human limitation: a leader can effectively manage somewhere between three and eight people. The Romans discovered this through centuries of warfare. Even today, the US Army's hierarchical chain follows a similar pattern. We now call it "span of control," and it remains the governing constraint of every large organization on earth. https://block.xyz/inside/from-hierarchy-to-intelligence

Cursor now lets companies run AI coding agents on their own infrastructure, keeping source code and build data in-house to meet security and compliance needs. https://thenewstack.io/cursor-self-hosted-coding-agents/

I’m excited to share that my newest course is now live on Coursera: Open Source Observability Stack Essentials. This course is built for software engineers, SREs, and platform engineers who want a practical, hands-on way to learn the foundations of modern observability using the open-source tools that matter most: Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry. In just a few hours, you’ll go from concepts to practice: - understanding metrics, logs, and traces - deploying a minimal local observability stack - instrumenting an app with OpenTelemetry - building a Grafana dashboard for requests, errors, and latency - creating alerts that are actually useful in real environments I designed this course to be practical, not theoretical. By the end, learners will have working configs, starter queries, and a clearer path toward production-ready observability, including topics like SLOs, burn rate alerts, retention, and exporter strategy. Observability is no longer optional in cloud-native systems. Modern applications rarely fail loudly — they fail through latency, partial degradation, and noisy dependencies. My goal with this course is to help learners build the skills to detect, understand, and troubleshoot those issues with confidence. Thanks to everyone who has supported my learning journey so far through books, courses, and the open-source community. I’m proud to keep contributing content that helps engineers build stronger systems. https://www.coursera.org/learn/open-source-observability-stack-essentials/ #Observability #OpenTelemetry #Prometheus #Grafana #SRE #DevOps #CloudNative #Monitoring #Engineering #Kubernetes #OpenSource #Coursera