You ever watch Olympic downhill skiing?
Not the highlight reel. The full run.
These athletes are flying down ice at nearly 90 miles an hour, right on the edge of control. And when they get ahead of their skis, there is a moment when they are still upright, still moving, but no longer really in co...

We went to the Moon with just 4 kilobytes of RAM.

That fact alone tells you something important about Apollo. It was never just a space program. It was a demonstration of what a civilization can do when it decides to do something extraordinary.

In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan Shimel breaks...

Why does the world feel so unstable right now?

In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan Shimel breaks down the collision of forces reshaping the global economy in real time: the AI arms race, mass infrastructure spending, tech layoffs, power-hungry data centers, rising debt and the growing pressure ...

What happens when a company stops talking about AI and starts running on it?

In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan “Shimmy” Shimel shares a firsthand look at how Techstrong is deploying agentic AI across real business operations. What started as cautious experimentation has quickly evolved into a...

What if the biggest technology races today aren’t separate — but mirror images?

In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan “Shimmy” Shimel explores humanity’s twin obsessions: creating intelligence in our own image and escaping mortality through technology. From AI consciousness and superintelligence ...

The leadership situation at CISA continues to raise questions.
In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan “Shimmy” Shimel looks at the latest controversy surrounding the nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and what it says about the state of America’s cyber defense lead...

Do AI agents actually need to be intelligent?
Or do they just need to get the job done?

We’ve spent months arguing about whether AI truly “understands” anything. Whether it has a mind. Whether it’s just autocomplete dressed up in confidence.

Meanwhile, inside real companies, AI agents are draft...

🪞 Blaming the internet for what’s wrong with society is like blaming the mirror because you don’t like what you see.

Platforms optimize for engagement.
Engagement rewards outrage.
Incentives drift toward shareholders.

Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification.

The uncomfortable truth is this.
Th...

This week on Shimmy Says, we’re talking about the scarlet letter we’ve stamped on AI-generated work.
The funny part?
It has almost nothing to do with quality and everything to do with fear.
What that hesitation means for DevOps teams, engineering culture, and how work gets done is at the center o...

AI is growing up fast — faster than our institutions, norms, and guardrails.

In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan Shimel explores AI’s “adolescent” phase through two powerful cultural lenses:
the unchecked power and volatility of The Twilight Zone, and the rules-driven optimism of Asimov’s robot...

DevOps isn’t dead. It’s evolving.

For more than a decade, DevOps has been declared finished, broken, or replaced by the next new thing. And yet, it continues to adapt—absorbing cloud native practices, SRE, platform engineering, and now AI.

This episode of Shimmy Says explores DevOps not as a to...

This week on Shimmy Says, Alan Shimel gets personal and reflects on the importance of perspective in leadership. He begins with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the news that longtime head coach Mike Tomlin stepped down after 19 seasons. Not fired. Not forced out. He chose to step away, closing the ch...

AI will create more jobs than it eliminates.” We hear this line all the time. It sounds reassuring. And it is often where the conversation stops.
In today’s Shimmy Says, Alan Shimel takes the conversation further: what exactly are these new AI jobs, and what do they actually require?
The episode ...

If one feeling defined this year, it wasn’t excitement or fear. It was uncertainty — not in the abstract, but in our own careers and lives. Everywhere I went, people weren’t asking what AI would do to the job market. They were asking what it would do to their job.
In this episode of Shimmy Says, ...

Should Big Tech be broken up? We’ve long approached this question with skepticism. Modern tech platforms function as infrastructure, and blunt government intervention often creates more problems than it solves.

In a new episode of #ShimmySays, Alan Shimel explores where the argument for breaking...

Tech isn’t evolving right now. It’s colliding. AI datacenter economics are cracking, AWS re:Invent turned into an AI monolith, VCs are levitating, robots are stepping into the real world, and people keep declaring “the cloud is dead” while quietly running everything on it.In today’s #ShimmySays, ...

Everyone walked into re:Invent expecting one story: AI everywhere. And yes, AWS pushed agenticAI, new models, new chips, and an “AI factory” vision hard. But the work happening on the floor told a different story. DevOps, CloudNative and PlatformEngineering weren’t sidelined. They were packed and...