Software Defined Talk

Every project has environment variables. Almost nobody manages them well. This week Brandon talks with Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim, who built varlock to fix that — bringing structure and security to the humble .env file.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 579

Show Links:

varlock.dev

varlock on GitHub

@env-spec Overview

DMNO (corporate site)

Varlock MCP Server (docs)

howtostore.food — Theo's side project on the best way to store produce

unsafeharbour.com — Phil's music label

Nautical Artifacts on Bandcamp

bumpy

Contact Phil Miller:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/themillman

Email: phil@varlock.dev

Music: unsafeharbour.com

Contact Theo Ephraim:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/theo-ephraim

Website: theoephraim.com

Twitter/X: @theozero

Bluesky: @theozero.bsky.social

Email: theo@varlock.dev

General Contact:

hello@varlock.dev

hello@dmno.dev

Varlock Community

Varlock Discord — Chat with the team and other users

GitHub Discussions — Suggestions, questions, and feature requests

varlock on GitHub — Star the project and follow updates

Varlock on X

Varlock on Bluesky

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

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Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Special Guests: Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim.

This week, we discuss Anthropic's 18-day Fable timeout, whether AI is actually killing jobs, and OpenAI's trillion-dollar IPO problem. Plus, SoftBank's golden goose slides.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 579

Runner-up Titles

Everything is Files

It’s just about meetings

Did you do the pre-meet?

Meetings

Judgement

Let it ride

If it’s hot, turn on the AC

I don’t have time for a towel.

Headless HEB

Rundown

I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI

Fable is Back

White House lifts export control on advanced AI model from Anthropic

Trump administration lifts restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5

OpenAI and Anthropic limit new AI models to Trump-approved customers during cybersecurity review

AI News of the Month - June 2026

AI is NOT killing jobs

Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short

AWS puts $1 billion into new AI unit to embed engineers with customers

A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs

The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact

Cloudflare Acquires VoidZero to Build the Future of the AI-Native Web

OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for I.P.O.

SoftBank’s slides are just trolling us

The PDF of the Slides

Relevant to your Interests

The Australians fighting AI slop in open-source code

Axios Future of Cybersecurity Thought Bubble

SpaceX Is Getting Fast-Tracked Into Indexes. Ordinary Investors Could Lose Out.

News Flash: You Are the Exit Liquidity for the SpaceX IPO

Cerebras Systems Announces Strong First Quarter 2026 Results

The AI Compass

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware

Listener Feedback

Introducing Omnigent: A Meta-Harness to Combine, Control and Share Your Agents

Conferences

WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting.

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon: Walmart+ for Grocery Delivery

Coté: Supermarkt Meerwijk Watergraafsmeer, also in Instagram

This week, we discuss Fable follow-up, Gartner's AI Governance MQ, and the war for AI talent. Plus, Matt and Brandon review Disclosure Day.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 578

Runner-up Titles

Ready to podcast from a sailboat

It’s just people fighting

Calculator budget

Ask Siri to do your homework

Software Defined Consulting: SDC

The Magic Platform

AI Curious

I watched ALLLLL the keynotes.

I don’t know that, but I know that

You gotta stay to vest

Brandon, remember Cursor?

Educated Hater

Rundown

Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms

IBM recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for AI Governance Platforms 

What is an "AI Governance Platform?

AI Consolidates Talent

Alphabet paces for worst day in a year on AI concerns after high-profile exits

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team

Supercharge your cloud operations with the Kiro power for AWS DevOps Agent

Relevant to your Interests

Intel ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger joins faith-focused tech firm Gloo

Explore more than a decade of survey data across markets

Did Slate Accidentally Reveal Its Electric Truck Price? Shocking MSRP

Apparently The Real Reason Anthropic’s Models Are Offline: A Six-Year-Old Trump Grudge

Introducing Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS

'Fix this code.' The three words that led the U.S. government to ban …

Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million

Opinion | The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week

Meta Exposed Data Internally From Its Controversial Employee-Tracking Program

Chevron to fuel massive Microsoft data center in Texas using natural gas

Getty Images Soars 200% in Early Trading After OpenAI Deal

U.S.-Backed Chipmaking Startup Chaired by Former Intel CEO Is Raising $350 Million

OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs

Anthropic’s Claude Tag is learning your company, one Slack message at a time

Sponsors

Sentry - Quit Buggin': use code sdt26 for $100 in credit for new customers

Nonsense

Wiz Ice Cream for CISOs

IN THE WEIGHTS

Conferences

WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting.

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon: Disclosure Day

Matt: Izzard: The Tragedy of Hamlet

Coté:

The Millennial Aesthetic

Coté’s CFP acceptance rate chart

Coté’s newsletter

This week, we discuss the Fable ban, SpaceX's $60B Cursor buy, and why Lovable wins when AI picks your stack. Plus, Europeans are at the World Cup and already drank Boston dry.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 577

Runner-up Titles

Waited out the storm

Maybe we should build some castles or something

Years of lawsuits ahead of us

The ultimate dream

AI SEO

I hope you’re paid by the hour

Always be monitoring to me

Rundown

Anthropic

How Amazon and the White House ended Anthropic's Fable

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential

Cursor

Live Updates: Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading

SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO

Vibe Coding

Lovable says it has hit $500M in annualized revenue, with 1 million new projects a week

Vibe-coding phenomenon lifts AI startup Supabase to $10.5 billion valuation

Database startup Supabase raises $500 million $10.5 billion valuation

curl summer of bliss

Relevant to your Interests

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

apple/container

The Virtual OS Museum

YouTube has eclipsed Netflix in viewership via (@lucas_shaw)

OpenAI to acquire Ona

Keycap Quarry – Artisan Keycaps for Mechanical Keyboards

Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

VCs behaving badly

Databricks Agrees to Acquire Panther

Sponsors

Sentry - Quit Buggin': use code sdt26 for $100 in credit for new customers

Nonsense

The AI coding agent that runs on stolen Chipotle compute

Minesweeper 3D No Guess – Free 3D Browser Game | Logic Solver

Fly around the world (Experimental) | Google Earth | Google for Developers

Commodore’s newest gadget is a flip phone that blocks social media and browsers

Conferences

WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Germany.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon: Digital ID

Matt: Murderbot Diaries: Platform Decay

Coté: WordPress.com. Tetilla cheese from the Camino de Santiago.

Brandon talks with OpenObserve's Prabhat Sharma and Shani Shoham: why observability is still broken, how they fixed it, and where AI takes it next.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 576

Show Links

OpenObserve

OpenObserve on GitHub

Series A and Observability 3.0 announcement blog post

Launching OpenObserve

OpenObserve 2-Minute Demo

Download OpenObserve

Contact Prabhat Sharma

LinkedIn: hiprabhat

Twitter/X: @hiprabhat

Contact Shani Shoham

LinkedIn: shanishoham

Twitter: @shohams

SDT News & Hype

Join us in Slack.

Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you free laptop stickers!

Follow us: Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads and YouTube.

Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, Digital WTF, so $5 total.

Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk!

Special Guests: Prabhat Sharma and Shani Shoham.