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Speaking at Papers We Love London on 28 Feb
Speaking at Papers We Love London on 28 Feb
I will be speaking about "ACLs Don't" on 28 Feb, it is a great paper and I will show how it is still relevant to recent…
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Justin Cormack reposted thisGreat day discussing OpenUK's strategy!Justin Cormack reposted thisToday’s OpenUK Board strategy meeting in a gloriously sunny London, a productive meeting all round! Amanda Brock Justin Cormack Chris Weston Margherita Di Cerbo Maria Lema Clare Schramm Fergus Ian Burgess Lorna Mitchell Chris Eastham #opensource #opentechnology #openuk
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Justin Cormack reposted thisJustin Cormack reposted thisOpenUK's “Annual Open Source Survey 2026” is now live!!! ⭐️ Survey submissions will enable our Economists in Residence The PSC to assess the economics of "Open Source". ⭐️ For the first time, this includes both software and AI 💪 ⭐️ The survey is open to our international colleagues, not just folks in the UK - also a first 🌐 OpenUK will be sharing the economic analysis based on the survey in our annual "State of Open The UK in 2026 Report" being published on 5 October. We have evolved our assessment of the economics of open source and value generated over the last five years, and this year, for the first time, we use the concept of eight "actors" - from user to creator. We ask you to answer questions relevant to your Organisation's role in the guise of the different actors. This approach is new - and exciting. You can learn more about the economic approach and its eight actors in our blog post. If you feel that there is something in relation to how we conceive actors that we should think differently about, please feel free to reach out to us to help improve our work in the future. Please circulate it within the communities you are active in. Follow the link in the first comment to the surveys and blog on our webpage #opensource #opensourcesoftware #openuk #openhq
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Justin Cormack reposted thisJustin Cormack reposted thisDeep debate on the pros and cons of AI on the software development side in open source with Chris Plank ☁, NatWest; Justin Cormack, ex-Docker, Inc; Keith Bergelt, Open Invention Network; Mike McQuaid, Homebrew; and Paula Kennedy, Syntasso. And special thanks to Chris Plank ☁ and NatWest for hosting us. #opensource #AI #opensourceai #aiskills #stateofopencon #soocon26 #openuk #openhq #aiscotland #AI #aimodels #aiagents
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Justin Cormack shared thisMy talk from AI native DevCon is online now https://lnkd.in/ebZdDaTa In which I talk about testing, and building complex software at scale with AI. And everything that goes wrong with tests and what to do about it.Justin Cormack - When Tests Lie: Using Observability to Keep AI Honest - AI Native DevCon June 2026Justin Cormack - When Tests Lie: Using Observability to Keep AI Honest - AI Native DevCon June 2026
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Justin Cormack reposted thisJustin Cormack reposted thisFormer Docker, Inc CTO Justin Cormack shared a powerful reminder today: Passing tests doesn't always mean your system is correct. As AI-generated software becomes more common, observability is emerging as a critical tool for validating behavior, enforcing security requirements, and building confidence in what agents produce. Great session on the realities of AI-native engineering.
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Justin Cormack reposted thisJustin Cormack reposted thisJoin us on 5th June in Edinburgh to discuss the impact of AI on open source software development 💻 with Chris Plank ☁, NatWest; with panellists Justin Cormack, Docker, Inc; and Keith Bergelt, Open Invention Network; Mike McQuaid, Homebrew; and Paula Kennedy, Syntasso. Bringing the conversation to you with State of Open Con 2026 On The Road. This Edinburgh event on 5 June is at the RBS Conference Centre, thanks to NatWest’s sponsorship. Thanks to our sponsors: Arm, NatWest, GitHub, Microsoft, ControlPlane, and Percona and our general sponsors Arm, Microsoft, Red Hat, GitHub, Linaro, Mozilla, and G-Research. See the speakers, schedule and get tickets at https://lnkd.in/eqq_9Q6y #opensource #AI #opensourceai #aiskills #stateofopencon #soocon26 #openuk #openhq #aiscotland #AI #aimodels #aiagents
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Justin Cormack shared thisI will be speaking at State of Open Conference in Edinburgh next Friday - a one day event on AI and openness - open source, open data, open AI. Looking forward to this, and it has been way too long since I have been to Edinburgh! Come along and catch up! https://lnkd.in/ekakjzvc #soocon26 #stateofopencon #openuk
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Justin Cormack reposted thisJustin Cormack reposted thisThe impact of AI on open source software development 💻 Join us on 5 June in Edinburgh for the session moderated by Chris Plank ☁, NatWest; with panellists Justin Cormack, Docker, Inc; and Keith Bergelt, Open Invention Network; Mike McQuaid, Homebrew; and Paula Kennedy, Syntasso. Bringing the conversation to you with State of Open Con 2026 On The Road. This Edinburgh event on 5 June is at the RBS Conference Centre, thanks to NatWest’s sponsorship. Thanks to our sponsors: Arm, NatWest, GitHub, Microsoft, ControlPlane, and Percona and our general sponsors Arm, Microsoft, Red Hat, GitHub, Linaro, Mozilla, and G-Research. See the speakers, schedule and get tickets at https://lnkd.in/eqq_9Q6y #opensource #AI #opensourceai #aiskills #stateofopencon #soocon26 #openuk #openhq #aiscotland #AI #aimodels #aiagents
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Justin Cormack shared thisThe fastest way to get an AI to ship buggy infrastructure code is to give it a test suite to write to. I've been learning that the hard way over the last few months, building an AWS S3-compatible storage system with AI, and the most interesting moments have been the ones where every test passed and the system was still wrong. Or when the tests failed intermittently due to an unrelated race condition. Having an API oracle you can test against is great, but the implementation has plenty of room to be subtly wrong, and both I and the models came in with our own opinions on how it should actually work. Where we disagreed turned out to be where the bugs were, and tests against the customer-facing API could not tell us who was right. What did work was enforcement of properties at compile time plus observability of the remaining deeper implementation properties at runtime, and more testing and review than you would ever expect. That has changed how I think about working with AI on serious infrastructure code, and on June 2 at AI Native DevCon I'll share what I've learned: where AI is genuinely useful at this scale, where it falls over, and the practical workflow I've ended up running. Programme and registration here: https://lnkd.in/eREAvnxp Come and say hi if you're at the event! #AINativeDev #AIDevCon #AINativeDevCon
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Justin Cormack liked thisThe story between Flox and NVIDIA has been growing since Jeff and Cullen first brought Flox into the company. Coincidentally, around that same time, Dwight, Michael and I had some really good food together (while talking about how AI is impacting eng much more than what folks assumed! 😉). A few months after that, I met another incredible NVIDIAn, Greg. With no questions asked, just jumped in to help out. So it goes without saying that I’m pumped to partner with Evergreen and the amazing folks behind it to host a Flox showcase together with our team. We'll be diving into a few cool things we're building, including: instant CUDA & AI stacks, zero-drift agent pipelines, and 0 image size deployments. If you're around next week, join us for some green and purple, a bit of Flox, and a dash of NixOS. More soon ;)Justin Cormack liked this📣 We’re excited to announce the next EverGreen Startup Showcase, featuring Flox. Flox is building a new foundation for how modern software and AI applications are developed and deployed. Its platform creates reproducible environments that run identically from a developer’s laptop to CI and Kubernetes in production, eliminating version conflicts, setup delays, and environment drift. Especially relevant to the NVIDIA alumni community, Flox is one of only a handful of companies licensed to package and redistribute the NVIDIA CUDA stack - and the only developer-environment platform among them. Join us to hear co-founder and CEO Ron Efroni share Flox’s story, its work with NVIDIA, and the opportunity ahead. 📅 August 5 🕛 12:00 noon Pacific Time 🔗 Register here: https://luma.com/bs6d41in #NVIDIAAlumni #Flox #AIInfrastructure #AcceleratedComputing #Evergreen
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Justin Cormack liked thisJustin Cormack liked thisRequest for help! Netflix runs their own LLM inference. Who else in my broader network is doing this? If you run vLLM, SGLang, etc in your environment, I would love to talk to you. Drop me a note please! https://lnkd.in/gDPWzcEe
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Justin Cormack liked thisJustin Cormack liked thisHomebrew is thriving while other open source projects struggle. Its scarcest resource isn't money: it's maintainer motivation.
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Justin Cormack liked thisNeeding some LinkedIn love on this one! TRUE: We are growing fast and looking for our Founding Account Executive in NYC. You’ll get to tag-team not just with Ben Futoriansky (who is... okay, I guess), but with amazing folks like James Bayer, Jason Flashberg, and even a dash of Kelsey Hightower. FALSE: My legendary purple Android phone with the NixOS logo is absolutely not from 2012. If you're a builder-seller who wants to own the enterprise sales cycle at a wild developer and agent-infra inflection point, check out the JD in Ben’s post below! 👇Justin Cormack liked thisI'm hiring a founding Account Executive at Flox, based in NYC. You'd be our first dedicated seller, working directly with me, taking point on converting our strong inbound and enterprise adoption, and owning the full sales cycle end to end. The best part of this journey has been watching the largest engineering organizations in the world trust Flox in production. We're at a real inflection point. As you can see, we now have drones taking our team photos. Not just Ron Efroni's 2012 Android phone. If this sounds like you, or someone you know, please reach out! JD below.
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Justin Cormack liked thisJustin Cormack liked thisA year ago, agent workloads were a rounding error at Fly. Today they're the majority of revenue from Fly’s top accounts. A new category is forming - computers for agents - and it's moving faster than the market has noticed. Specifically, agent workloads now drive 66% of revenue across Fly’s top 100 accounts, up nearly 12X y/y. This isn't a projection - it's what's already running on Fly today. The category forming here is far bigger than any one company, but Fly is unusually well-positioned to define it. That's why I'm joining as CEO - and why we've raised $25M to go all in. I've been fortunate to have worked with great teams through a few of these shifts in the past - app servers at Netscape, PaaS at Loudcloud, DevOps at Puppet, containers at Docker. Each was a category crossing from early adopters into the mainstream, and the pattern held every time: being early is necessary but not sufficient. Outcomes are also determined by: i) whether the foundation you've built is what the market turns out to need, and ii) the focus to bet everything on it. Fly's foundation is exactly that kind of bet. Years before agents, Kurt Mackey focused Fly on the core primitives - compute, networking, storage - of Linux computers because he believed developers deserved real computers, not simplified abstractions. It turns out that's precisely what agents need. Foundation was step one. Focus is step two - and that's my job. We're pointing all of Fly at one thing: computers for agents. Not just where agents run, but where they build, test, and ship the software they're creating - the full environment agents need to do real work. We think the next decade of software gets built by developers directing agents - and those agents need real computers. That's the bet, and it's why developers stay at the center of everything we do: computers for agents, run by developers. If you're building agents, I'd like to hear from you - what's working, what's missing, what you wish existed. Full announcement in the first comment.
Experience & Education
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OpenUK
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Committer
NetBSD
- Present 12 years 7 months
Science and Technology
NetBSD committer, speaker and organizer of community events.
Publications
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Docker in Production: Lessons from the Trenches
Bleeding Edge Press
Docker is the new sliced bread of infrastructure. Few emerging technologies compare to how fast it swept the DevOps and infrastructure scenes. In less than two years, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and nearly every cloud provider announced support for running Docker containers. Readers with intermediate to advanced DevOps and ops backgrounds will likely gain the most from this book. Previous experience with both the basics of running servers in production as well as the basics of creating and…
Docker is the new sliced bread of infrastructure. Few emerging technologies compare to how fast it swept the DevOps and infrastructure scenes. In less than two years, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and nearly every cloud provider announced support for running Docker containers. Readers with intermediate to advanced DevOps and ops backgrounds will likely gain the most from this book. Previous experience with both the basics of running servers in production as well as the basics of creating and managing containers is highly recommended. Many books and blog posts already cover individual topics related to installing and running Docker, but few resources exist to weave together the myriad and sometimes forehead-to-wall-thumping concerns of running Docker in production.
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Miguel Enriquez
While I get this statement, it's important to understand that it's not only about understanding but also about making sure it follows a contract you can trust when you modify it. It's not so much about whether I can or not understand the code, it's about how reliably I can change it. This is where I get a 50-50 chance of messing up code I didn't write, and with LLMs is even harder to reason the change. It's important to understand scope vs abstraction vs contract when dealing with these changes. For example, I cannot mess with a library I delegated execution to because I am not modifying it, so my current abstraction layer is the problem. With LLMs and all this code I can delegate to my scope is bigger now.
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Lorna Mitchell
🤦♀️ Sharing the story of how I was outwitted by git (no big moral reveal, it was a wicked hard problem and I don't really have solutions but I wrote about it anyway in case it helps anyone else). I've worked with git extensively - teaching, consulting, running engineering and documentation teams (also wrote a book about it once, as you do). I know that git doesn't "do" renames, it infers them from similarity between added and deleted files. But when I restructured directories in a monorepo that included some similar-but-not-identical boilerplate files, that knowledge didn't save me from ending up with merges producing phantom changes that didn't exist on either branch 😱 I wrote up the whole thing in a blog post. If you work with monorepos or are planning any kind of repository restructure, this might save you a headache. https://lnkd.in/eRahXFmq
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Steve Officer
Following on from my previous post on the current conflict between Agentic coding suites and GitHub's premium request billing model, I decided to have a go at creating a set of agents that are GitHub premium request friendly. Introducing Squadron: https://lnkd.in/gjjX4K4K It's mainly for my own entertainment, but if it's useful to someone out there then I'm glad it helps. It's based on a spec-driven development concept. You interact with the Refine Requirements agent to define what you want. It asks pertinent questions and creates a backlog of tasks. You interact with the Task Dispatcher agent and tell it to work on the backlog. It then kicks off the suite of agents to analyse, implement, review, test the backlog tasks and ensure the backlog is kept up to date. There's slightly more to it under the hood to keep things interesting 😁 - Multi agent debate approach to code reviews - Context friendly backlog - Review friendly chunks of work
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