What we talked about
Why a developer-focused analyst comes to Figma’s Config
Kate is a generalist at RedMonk with a background at the top of the stack, which gives her a real interest in design, front-end, and UX. Her prediction for the year: the vibe coders would go all in on design as the differentiator, and six months in, Config is where she puts that call through its paces.
Design systems, tokens, and the cost of staying on-brand
Evil Martians has hot takes on making UI kits and design systems sustainable under agentic coding — including stripping design elements out of skills and replacing them with linters to avoid burning tokens. Kate agrees token spend is the hottest of hot-button issues: keeping a vibe-coded app on a design system is pricey and memory-hungry, the Figma MCP and its predecessors are all circling the problem, and nobody has produced a clear winner yet.
From murals and literature to industry analyst
Kate’s path is anything but linear: art school and an English degree in parallel, murals in urban Cincinnati, grad school for English at Carnegie Mellon, literary and cultural studies, and the digital humanities — where she started Visual Haggard, a Ruby on Rails archive of illustrations. She taught in universities from age 23, published two academic books, did a postdoc at Georgia Tech, then pivoted through front-end and QA work into analysis. The through line, she argues, is visual communication and the long historical view.
What RedMonk is and what an analyst firm actually does
RedMonk sits under the same umbrella as Gartner, IDC, and Forrester, but it’s build-focused and obsessed with practitioner adoption. Twenty-two years old, founded by Stephen O’Grady and James Governor, it’s a tiny-but-mighty team — four analysts plus support. They go to conferences, run the MonkCast, and lurk on Reddit, Hacker News, and X for the authentic developer voice. The business model: briefings are free, podcast episodes can be sponsored, and consulting (message testing, pitch-deck feedback, domain reads) is the real backbone — no pay-to-play on writing.
How AI is squeezing the analyst business
Anyone can now ask Claude “what is vibe coding?” instead of asking RedMonk. Kate’s answer is authenticity: RedMonk won’t just say what clients want to hear. Every firm leans on AI for research now, which creates a new SEO-style problem where the most agent-friendly voices surface over the most accurate ones, plus the robots.txt blind spots agents can’t reach. Consulting everywhere — up to and including the McKinseys — is being forced to re-examine its value proposition, and Kate’s bet is that a great human analyst still connects dots and brings a corpus of knowledge that the machines can’t.
The open source crisis: slop, incentives, and the review bottleneck
The barrier to entry for open source has never been lower — an agent can code and commit to any project — but reviewing has never been more expensive. Maintainers are inundated with AI-generated PRs and (sometimes invented) vulnerability reports from people chasing a CV line, paid student-contribution programs, or bug bounties. Kate spoke with curl’s Daniel Stenberg at length: code is cheap, reviewing is what takes hours. Policies vary widely — some projects ban AI submissions outright, curl stays permissive — and a disturbing trend is emerging where projects like tldraw and Ladybird stop accepting external PRs entirely, alongside gatekeeping tools like Mitchell Hashimoto’s Vouch.
Supply chain worms are here and serious
Beyond slop, powerful new models are surfacing vulnerabilities that sat untouched for years. Kate points to TanStack getting hit by a Mini Shai-Hulud attack — chained exploits abusing CI/CD pipelines and GitHub Actions in ways nobody bothered to attempt before. npm has added guardrails, but the burden still lands on developers and infrastructure maintainers to avoid getting owned.
Agent experience vs. security: opening the aperture without getting owned
Developers now discover dev tools, databases, libraries, and packages through their agents — which is exactly what keeps CISOs up at night, because people who never picked packages before are suddenly pulling in dependencies. Kate is all for opening the aperture, but there’s a curve where openness has to meet how much is at stake: prototype freely and keep it local, but the moment private data, credit card numbers, or addresses enter the picture, bring in security folks (and mind Simon Willison’s “lethal trifecta”). On the discovery side, she praises how Netlify prints LLM-ready instructions on its hosting, and stresses keeping docs current so agents don’t drag in outdated framework versions.
Kate’s tools in 2026 and vibe coding a Rails archive back to life
Kate self-identifies as a front-end developer — CSS, HTML, a long history with WordPress and some Drupal — and is watching Astro and Cloudflare (Durable Objects, Sunil Pai’s PartyKit). Rebuilding Visual Haggard, she refused to switch off its Heroku Postgres database when a host demanded it, so she exported the ~3,000-page archive to static pages on GitHub Pages — keeping it “just hyperlinks,” Tim Berners-Lee style. The MonkCast site is an Astro build. Her real joy is the design layer: grabbing an animation she likes and adding an over-the-top floating blob to every personal site, “the new Tumblr.”
Community as RedMonk’s foundation
Beyond product-led growth and following developers where they are, Kate adds community as a core principle — and inclusivity, especially amid the current shenanigans around DEI. RedMonk runs two small, intimate conferences: Stephen O’Grady’s Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine (lobster rolls, a harbor cruise, emotional tinkerer talks, and Steve’s beers), and James Governor’s Monki Gras in London (wine, a legendary cheese table, and a recent theme of craft). The biggest reason to work with RedMonk, she says, is the Rolodex: James and Steve know everyone, which is also what makes the podcast possible.
Production, video, and where to find RedMonk
Kate does much of her own production, having taught herself DaVinci Resolve; tools like Riverside have opened up who can make video, though she still spends real time on compression because microphones are tuned for men’s voices. Asked what conference she’d run, she picks a bubbly festival — champagnes and proseccos, ideally in Épernay. To keep up with RedMonk: subscribe to the MonkCast on YouTube and podcast platforms, read the analysts’ free blogs, follow them on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn, and watch the events section (and Steve’s new Monk Signal) for in-person meetups.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. Today I’m here with Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, and I’m Victoria Melnikova, head of new business at Evil Martians. Hello, Kate.
[00:00:19] Kate Holterhoff: Hello. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:21] Victoria Melnikova: How are you today?
[00:00:22] Kate Holterhoff: I’m doing very well. Thank you for asking. Just arrived in San Francisco mere hours ago. I’m in town for Config, and, yeah, second time visiting SF since this June.
[00:00:33] Victoria Melnikova: I love Config. It’s a great design event. It’s definitely great vibes. Unlike many very technical events in SF, this one is very bright and juicy. As a senior analyst at a developer-focused firm, why do you come to Config?
[00:00:51] Kate Holterhoff: Well, we’re generalists at RedMonk. We’re developer-focused, and my background is in sort of top-of-the-stack technology, so I have a real interest in design, front-end stuff, UX, all of that, and Figma just seems to gather a lot of those folks together. I also have a lot of questions about what sort of AI moves they’re making, so I’m looking forward to talking with the leadership and seeing how they’re feeling about all these new competitors in the space. And I will say, this year I called it: all the vibe coders were going all in with design. That’s gonna be the differentiator. That was my prediction this year. So today is where I’m putting things through the paces, right? We’re six months in. If anyone knows what the situation around design is gonna be, it’s the folks who are here at Config.
[00:01:35] Victoria Melnikova: We actually actively talk about design and vibe coding and agentic coding at Evil Martians, and one of the things we talk about is UI kits and design systems and how to make them sustainable when it comes to agentic coding. Very interesting things that Martians bring to the table, hot opinions, so to speak. For example, one of the hot takes is to kind of remove all the design elements from the skills and create linters to avoid token maxing. What do you think about that?
[00:02:07] Kate Holterhoff: Well, I can’t think of a more hot-button issue right now than trying to optimize token spend. So it’s true, trying to make sure that your vibe-coded app — or whatever you’re working on, AI-engineered app — is using a design system can be very pricey. It takes a lot of, I don’t know, just memory. The skills have to be sort of expansive. I’ve talked to a few startups who are trying to grapple with this, and of course Figma’s right in there. So the situation around tokens and design, I feel like, is still kind of up in the air. We’re not sure where that’s going. And frankly, trying to figure out how to go about optimizing in that space, I think, is something that nobody’s quite figured out yet. So, I mean, MCP — the Figma MCP is well known, and there’s a lot of past solutions that are trying to integrate Figma designs even well before AI was all anyone could talk about. So I don’t know that there is a clear winner yet, but I feel like there’s a lot of room for expansion.
[00:03:05] Victoria Melnikova: I want to talk about your background because it’s not as linear as a typical technical career would be, perhaps. I did a little bit of research on you, and I found some gorgeous murals.
[00:03:17] Kate Holterhoff: Oh, thank you.
[00:03:18] Victoria Melnikova: That was very impressive. So you painted murals in Cincinnati. You are an academic. You did a postdoc at Georgia Tech?
[00:03:28] Kate Holterhoff: Correct.
[00:03:29] Victoria Melnikova: You studied at Carnegie Mellon? You did literature? You studied literature, actually?
[00:03:34] Kate Holterhoff: I did. Yeah, that’s my background.
[00:03:37] Victoria Melnikova: There’s so many lives in there. Can you just walk me briefly through your bio? What led you to today?
[00:03:44] Kate Holterhoff: Again, with the design thing — I mean, I was always interested in visual communication. I can see the through line pretty clearly, but I know maybe from the outside it seems like there’s a lot of breaks in there. So, yeah, I went to art school, and I studied English at the same time, so I was always doing both. And while I was in art school, I learned how to do website design. I talked a lot about the commons, which was why I was so interested in public art and what that means for space to be shared. So I found a lot of intellectually compelling things within that space. And so after I got done with my art degree, I went into painting murals in urban areas, painted many, and then went to grad school for English. What’s great about going to get post-secondary degrees in that is that you rarely have to pay for these degrees, because they want you to teach freshman English. So I have been teaching since I was 23 years old in universities, and I did that, got into Carnegie Mellon to continue teaching, and I studied literary and cultural studies, and that’s when I really became interested in this discipline called the digital humanities, which is where I started an archive called Visual Haggard, which studies illustrations. To me, this all feels very natural, right? I like literature, I like the stories behind narrative and visual, where these things meet. And so I created a digital archive. It was a Ruby on Rails site. I have since vibe-coded it back up from the grave. It was on Heroku and, you know, RIP to Heroku. I miss it dearly, but it’s okay because I was able to spin it back up using one of the many agentic IDEs at my fingertips these days. So, yeah, Visual Haggard still lives, visualhaggard.org. So I was able to go from creating art, which I still dabble in, to studying art and science. So my dissertation was on Darwin and epistemology and—
[00:05:38] Victoria Melnikova: I’m really impressed.
[00:05:39] Kate Holterhoff: Oh, well, thank you. So, yeah, I published two academic books. One was on illustration. The other’s on what’s called scientific romance, but basically proto science fiction — so how scientific technologies and ideas were expressed — and have since pivoted that into front-end work. I did some QA work, and becoming an industry analyst was a very easy move from that because it allowed me to take my technical expertise — again, I’ve been making websites since I was an undergrad many, many years ago — and pivot that into talking with interesting folks like the folks at Figma, folks like you, Victoria, and just get to spend a lot of time. History is a big part of what we do as analysts, right? Trying to take that long view, not just be caught up in hype cycles and chasing the new shiny. Folks who actually attend to where we’ve been before and look for patterns in the chaos. I mean, that’s basically what I did as an academic. So, spinning the story long, I was an academic for a decade and then got out, was a front-end engineer for a couple years, and then I’ve now been at RedMonk for four whole years.
[00:06:46] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about RedMonk, because I’m not sure if a lot of our audience know, but RedMonk, to my knowledge, is the only developer-focused analyst firm. And it’s not big. It’s just six people, seven?
[00:06:59] Kate Holterhoff: Four analysts, and then a few support folks. Yeah.
[00:07:01] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. So it’s a tiny but mighty team that takes on a huge developer industry.
[00:07:09] Kate Holterhoff: That’s very, very well put. Yes.
[00:07:12] Victoria Melnikova: What does it mean in practice? What does an analyst firm do?
[00:07:16] Kate Holterhoff: So usually when folks ask me that, I’d say the industry analyst — a lot of folks are familiar with, like, the Gartners, the IDCs, the Forresters. So you can put RedMonk under that larger umbrella of what an industry analyst is. But we are build-focused. We are interested in practitioner adoption. RedMonk’s been around for 22 years, started by Stephen O’Grady and James Governor. And like I said, I joined — I like to say it’s because they didn’t have anyone focused on the top of the stack. And I’m always arguing for the front-end engineers: folks need to pay more attention to us. There’s dozens of us. So that’s how I rationalize it. But we go to a lot of conferences. We do media stuff. We have our own podcast. We’re on webinars and things, and we talk about what we’re seeing in terms of tech trends and what developers are actually doing and thinking and saying. We lurk on the Reddits and the Hacker News’ and the Twitters, the X’s, in order to look for that authentic voice. I would also say that James published a book recently on progressive delivery. Steve’s probably most well-known for his New Kingmakers, which made that argument that developers are the ones that are making decisions. You have to pay attention to product-led growth. The developers aren’t necessarily just gonna use the tools that the C-suite tells them to use. They’re going to be motivated to use tools that actually work for them. And open source — I can’t leave that out, too. So we were one of the loudest voices calling for not just paying attention to the tools and technologies that are vendor-led, but also the ones that developers are backing. You know, we wanna be the voice for maintainers. We wanna talk about what open source means, especially in our AI era, when definitions are changing. And I like to think that we’re vibe analysts. We bring a vibe. If you’re interested in talking to folks who pay attention and have the ear of developers and value what these practitioners are actually doing, and not just what the vendors would like them to be doing, they’re a good bunch of folks to pay attention to.
[00:09:18] Victoria Melnikova: So if we talk about the business of RedMonk, it’s companies hire you to understand what developers need.
[00:09:27] Kate Holterhoff: That’s a good way of framing it. Yeah. Anyone can brief us, tell us what they’re doing. That’s fine — that’s how we kind of keep up on what’s going on. But our clients, we will work with them… We don’t do pay-to-play in terms of writing, but if you wanna come on our podcast, you can sponsor an episode. We’ll do sponsored appearances at a sales kickoff or something like that. But the real backbone of the analyst industry is consulting. If folks wanna run their messaging by us, we can give them some feedback on that, or talk to them about what we’re seeing in a particular domain. So maybe some enterprises are interested in “what’s this thing called vibe coding that we keep hearing about?” We would talk to them about what we’re hearing and what we’ve seen at the local meetups in our hometowns and the way that we are thinking through these big topics.
[00:10:14] Victoria Melnikova: How does that work as AI ramps up? Because what we found, at least over the past couple of years, is that new categories are being invented, new tooling is being invented. Obviously for bigger guys it’s a little bit harder to catch up because they have to be SOC 2 compliant. There are a lot of different things that come into play. There are budgets, there are stakeholders. There’s a lot going on. How do you guys catch up with what’s going on?
[00:10:43] Kate Holterhoff: I think it’s an open question, because anybody could say, “Hey, Claude, what is vibe coding?” instead of saying, “Hey, RedMonk, what is vibe coding?” But I think that the pivot point right now is that authenticity. We’re not going to be just saying what folks wanna hear. That’s exactly right. We don’t do that. Any analyst firm is absolutely leveraging AI tools to help with that research component of trying to keep up on what all is out there, and I think that we’re encountering sort of the new SEO issue of, okay, we’re finding maybe the voices that have paid to have the most agent-friendly solutions rather than the ones that are the most accurate. And then of course the robots.txt situation, where there’s certain things that maybe the agents can’t even find. So I think that in terms of the research component of this, there’s still a case to be made for engaging with folks who are doing the legwork. And then the influencer part of it, I think, is a little icky to everybody. So having the business model also draw from their bucket of credits with us to participate in our podcast or to have us participate in maybe their own media — that’s sort of an evergreen opportunity. But yeah, I think the whole consulting industry — I mean, even including the McKinseys of the world — I think all of them are gonna have to revisit what is their actual value proposition. What are they actually bringing to this? I’d say that some of the things that we do is we’ll look at a pitch deck or message testing and give feedback about how this maybe connects to other messaging they’ve done in the past or competitors, things like that. And I still feel like a human brings a better eye to this than the machines can. So a lot of these things are not necessarily quantitative at this point, but if you have a great analyst from any firm, they’re still able to bring a corpus of knowledge and breadth of understanding and ability to connect a lot of dots that AI isn’t able to do at the moment. But I would say anybody should probably start by putting it into Claude and saying, “Hey, I’m interested in this idea,” or “Here’s what I would like our landing page to look like. What do you think?” So the symbiotic relationship is probably the best approach right now, but all consultants are feeling the pinch and are thinking through what it is that they bring that will differentiate them in our agentic era.
[00:13:11] Victoria Melnikova: And AI is changing everything, too, in open source. And some of the recent pieces that you published talk about what’s going on, the transformation, so to speak. And I feel very confident in backing up your opinions because we at Evil Martians produced a lot of open source, over 100 projects, like PostCSS and Browserslist, some really well-known open source projects, and we see what’s going on, right? And one of the topics that you bring up is that the barrier to entry into open source is as low as it’s ever been, because you can just use an agent to code and to commit to any open source project. But the cost of reviewing is as expensive as it could be, because there is so much — just the mass of code is ridiculous, right? And the number of inquiries is higher, so there is a lot of work to be done. In your opinion, does that threaten open source? Does it threaten the promise of open source in general?
[00:14:14] Kate Holterhoff: Well, that’s a really interesting question, because I think we all agree that the way that open source has been functioning for years is — I don’t wanna exaggerate, but I think a lot of maintainers think it’s a crisis. And what that looks like right now is we have the AI slop issue, where it is cheap to spin up code, PRs, and to just inundate these maintainers with vulnerabilities — or even invented ones — in the hopes that they will get either a line on their CV to differentiate themselves, right? Because committing to a well-known open source project, of course, looks very good, and then will make it more likely that they’ll be hired. You’ve also got some of these groups which will pay junior developers or students to commit, so you get the, like, Summer of Code, Outreachy. So there’s immediate financial reasons to sort of have AI do open source commits for you. And then the most obvious one is bug bounties. So curl — the curl project — I spoke with Daniel Stenberg about this at length, and he’s been sort of the most vocal voice on LinkedIn and elsewhere — I mean, he’s got a newsletter and things — talking about what that looks like right now, because there is a real balance. So the research that I’ve done on how open source maintainers are approaching AI-generated submissions varies widely. Some folks are banning it entirely. Others are permissive. curl is permissive, but Daniel has talked about the fact that there is a real bottleneck in terms of reviewing these CVEs. It takes hours. So you can speed up the code production. Code is cheap. That’s not the problem. It’s the reviewing part. And so we’ve seen this disturbing trend where folks are excluding third parties from submitting. So in a way, this is business as usual, where these maintainers ask potential contributors to join the Slack channel, become a face, attend some meetups, whatever — get to know the community before you submit. So that’s well known, but now we’re seeing things like Vouch, which is Mitchell Hashimoto’s way of excluding contributors who are not fitting certain qualifications. So there’s some debate about whether or not this is a good or bad thing. Vouch is maybe a little contentious. I had a conversation with Mitchell and some other folks on X about this recently, because there’s the potential to misuse some of these tools, but they haven’t been misused yet. But the idea that you have tldraw and Ladybird, who are no longer accepting external PRs, is really a sort of canary in the coal mine when it comes to how these maintainers are going to deal with being inundated with low-quality submissions. But at the end of the day, you’ve got these extremely powerful new models that are able to find vulnerabilities that have been sitting there for years. And I spoke with the folks at TanStack — they, of course, got hit with a Mini Shai-Hulud attack, and a lot of these are chained attacks that nobody thought was even… No one would take the time to do this, but there are these very tricky ways that folks are getting — using CI/CD pipelines and GitHub Actions in order to exploit these vulnerabilities in ways that haven’t been done before. And so the bad actors are very powerful right now, and so nobody can ignore — calling it AI slop is, sure, there is slop, but there’s also very big vulnerabilities that everybody needs to lock down right now, because the exploits are here, and they’re serious. I mean, these worms — it’s very bad. npm has set some guardrails in place, but at the end of the day, it lands on the shoulders of the developers and the folks who are maintaining the infrastructure to make sure that they do not get owned by one of the Mini Shai-Huluds today or in the future.
[00:18:08] Victoria Melnikova: And let’s stay on this topic of vulnerabilities, because we talk about agent experience a lot now with our customers, and agent experience allows you to grow exponentially at this point, because agents have really direct, great access to your product. But that exposure to vulnerability is the other side of the coin, right? Like, if you make it easy for agents to use your tool, you make it easy for bad agents too. And obviously for bigger companies the question is bigger, because more is at stake. What is your general consensus within RedMonk on agent experience, especially when it comes to finding that balance between security and agent accessibility?
[00:18:52] Kate Holterhoff: So, no question that folks are finding dev tools via their agentic tools. They’re using Claude, they’re finding what database they’re gonna use. They’re going with the libraries and packages that are introduced to them. So I think the problem, and the thing that keeps CISOs up at night, is that folks who have historically not done a lot of programming, who haven’t been bringing in packaging, are suddenly in charge of, well—
[00:19:18] Victoria Melnikova: Taking a database.
[00:19:19] Kate Holterhoff: Yeah, exactly. And it might just be for a small hobby project. But there’s all sorts of dependencies which could be that opening for these bad actors, and they don’t know to pick their packages to make sure that they’re picking one that has been around for a few days, so they know it’s a good one. It’s a good and a bad thing. I’m all about opening the aperture. I’m all about bringing in as many people as possible. Software is this wonderful thing. I mean, folks like Simon Willison have said this. I do not wanna shut down or gatekeep. But I do realize there’s a chart somewhere, right, where the amount of openness needs to intersect with how important the thing being built is. So, yeah, prototype away, great. Keep it local, whatever, but the minute that you’re bringing in private information, credit card numbers, addresses, something like that, you wanna make sure that you’ve involved some security folks who maybe have a little bit more of an understanding of what’s going on there. So, speaking of Simon, right, the — I think he calls it the lethal trifecta. You wanna make sure that there’s not an opening for things to go very awry. But in terms of how dev tools companies should deal with agent experience in the sense of making sure that folks can find them, there’s a whole new philosophy around urgency, around making sure that your docs are accessible. And actually Netlify does a great job of this. If you go onto their hosting, they’ll actually print out instructions about what to do for the LLMs. That’s the future there. But making sure that the users of these tools are able to find it not only through the traditional ways — of, like, outreach through the community and maybe through their open source tools — but also by way of the agents. That is something that folks are still trying to figure out, and make sure that their APIs are working the most optimal way for these tools. Again, documentation — you wanna make sure that you have the newest documentation available, because that’s the thing: these models have a long memory, and so they’re bringing in information that is outdated. And so especially for some of these frameworks who’ve had huge version changes — I’m thinking of, like, Vue or something — you don’t wanna be bringing in docs that are no longer relevant. And I think a lot of us who use AI tools for coding have seen this, where the old information is brought in and you’re like, “Wait, that’s not true.” Or maybe you’re trying to use Bun or something, and it’s like, “Oh, no, no, we’re gonna use a different tool here,” because this is a more recent tool that there’s just not as much documentation for as maybe you’d have for something that’s been around longer.
[00:21:57] Victoria Melnikova: As a developer — as a front-end developer or Rails developer?
[00:22:01] Kate Holterhoff: Oh, well — I self-identify as a front-end developer. A little CSS, a little HTML. Also CMSs, you know. Spent a long time doing WordPress, a little on Drupal. My goodness, yeah.
[00:22:13] Victoria Melnikova: So as a front-end developer in 2026, what are your favorite tools? What are some tools that you’re reaching for today?
[00:22:21] Kate Holterhoff: Well, you know, Astro’s great. And I don’t know, Cloudflare’s doing so much interesting stuff as well, like Durable Objects — that Sunil Pai, his PartyKit was really interesting to me. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily front-end, but I guess that would be where I’m paying attention.
[00:22:36] Victoria Melnikova: As a builder in 2026.
[00:22:38] Kate Holterhoff: As a builder. Yeah. Gosh. Okay, well, yeah.
[00:22:39] Victoria Melnikova: ‘Cause you’re vibe coding, right?
[00:22:40] Kate Holterhoff: Oh, absolutely. All the time. Yeah, I mean, I usually keep it pretty simple. But the last thing I did was a Ruby on Rails app. And then it’s interesting — I used the database, I think I mentioned this, was on Heroku. So when I was looking for where to host it, I was looking at, like, OCI, and they’re like, “No, no, you’d have to change the database.” And I was like, “I’m absolutely not doing that. I’m not getting into that. You’re killing me.” So, again, I think I’m here at the top of the stack, but then suddenly I’m dipping down into the database layer and I’m like, “Oh, Jesus, we’re in trouble here.” So what I ended up doing was using GitHub Pages and, like, exporting each page, because of the archive that I was working on — it needs like 3,000 pages, so it’s not that large. So, again, I’m trying to keep things as static as possible, because that’s the beauty of the web, right? We’re trying to Tim Berners-Lee stuff. Let’s keep it just hyperlinks. I have created a few things for RedMonk. So the MonkCast website, I coded that up. That was an Astro site. Just trying to keep things as static as possible. You know what I love doing, though, is messing around with the design stuff. I’ll look for inspiration and then, like, take a screen grab and be like, “Okay, I want this animation.” So, like, tacky stuff. I really enjoy that. The more animations we get in there, the better. And also just the ability to keep some of the colors there. So I think every personal website I have has, like, a floating little blob there, stuff that I wouldn’t waste my time coding otherwise. But this is like the new Tumblr or something. You know, we all get to express ourselves with our over-the-top animations and, like, bubble designs.
[00:24:11] Victoria Melnikova: Speaking of Rails, I just want to quickly plug our conference. So we’re doing SF Ruby Conference, second time this year. It’s gonna be at gorgeous SFJAZZ. It’s gonna be amazing, and we got Garry Tan to open with the keynote, which is gonna be really lovely. So all folks that ship with Ruby on Rails, please come join our conference. It’s gonna be a lot of fun, and we’re creating a second track, which is gonna be heavily focused on networking, which is gonna be a really good time. So, SF Ruby Conference, November 10, 11, 12. Join us. I want to actually go back and talk about the principles of building for developers, because you’ve touched on it early in our conversation. And you mentioned something like developers are the ones that are making the calls, right? Developers don’t buy BS marketing stuff. They really want to see the product for its worth, so product-led growth is something that we really deeply care about when it comes to building developer tools. What are some other core principles on which RedMonk builds its strategy or philosophy?
[00:25:24] Kate Holterhoff: I’d say that it goes to just paying attention to following developers where they are and trying to have that authentic voice. So going to not only sort of large vendor conferences, but making sure that we are at the places where they assemble, and I guess just paying attention to the things that are pain points for them. And I guess I would add community to that. You know, that’s something I didn’t really talk about much yet. We have our own two conferences. They’re small, they’re intimate, but I think that we just care about people. I couldn’t think of a kinder bunch of folks — not only the folks that I work with, but also just the community that we draw around us. And I think that that’s something that everybody needs, especially with, you know, the shenanigans around DEI right now. That’s just not something that we would mess with, because we believe in inclusivity and supporting that community. And so we’re always gonna lend our voice to that and reach out to folks when they need help and just try to be a force for good in the world right now.
[00:26:25] Victoria Melnikova: What are your conferences like? What are they about? What do you guys do there?
[00:26:40] Kate Holterhoff: Yeah. So, Monktoberfest, run by Stephen O’Grady — it’s up in Portland, Maine. Again, smaller venue. It’s got a lot of, like, Maine flair, in the sense of good food with lobster rolls and stuff. There’s also a very nice harbor cruise, which is great. But I think what draws folks is the talks. They will be not always tech-related, but tech-adjacent, and they always touch this emotional chord, or just be sort of like tinkerer talks, where it’s like, “Here’s something that I think is interesting.” So maybe it’s something about gardening, or talking about their relationships. There were some really touching talks on, like, how to prepare for an impending death in your family.
[00:27:27] Victoria Melnikova: Oh.
[00:27:28] Kate Holterhoff: So, yeah, things that you don’t necessarily see at a tech conference very often. But it’s great, because the community really cares, and it’s a group of people who sort of have a like-minded sensibility, and so having them all together becomes a reunion. And in terms of Steve’s conference, he’s also quite the beer connoisseur, so there’s also, like, a lot of very nice beers. I don’t drink beer. So that’s Monktoberfest. That’s probably the one that’s most well-known. And then James is based in London. He runs Monki Gras, another smaller conference. Lovely. James is a little more into wine, so there’s not only good beer, but also wine there. He’s got a great cheese table. He’s a gourmand, so lovely food. But same sort of thing, where these wonderfully emotional and often just really resonant talks. And a lot of them will focus on a particular theme, so the last one was on craft, and really interesting talks about what that looks like today, and, again, draws together a lot of really awesome speakers. And, you know, the hallway track is just phenomenal. You can imagine. So, you know, for Steve, part of the hallway track is on a boat, which is kind of fun. But the community — I’ve often said one of the biggest reasons to work with RedMonk is because of the Rolodex. I mean, James and Steve just know everyone. And a lot of times I’ll be working on a research piece and just offhand mention it, and James will just list all these people that he knows. He just remembers everything. You bring up anything and he can start talking about the Sundays. But that’s a skill. I wish I could. He draws all these connections and is able to often point me to an expert, which is why our podcast, I think, has been successful. I was having all these private conversations with these huge folks in the industry, and I was like, “Why am I not recording these?” Like, these are stories that need to be told. Steve O’Grady had his own little podcast called Hark years ago, but after COVID, RedMonk started doing a lot more video work, and so it just kind of translated. But, again, the depth of their connections — I think it says a lot about them that they’re able to maintain these relationships. But community absolutely is a foundation of RedMonk.
[00:29:35] Victoria Melnikova: And how often do you record?
[00:29:37] Kate Holterhoff: Lately it’s been very often, but I think maybe it’s because I keep traveling, and so when I get home, I suddenly have, like, three in a row. But pretty often. Two weeks ago I recorded three in that week. I had been traveling, so it’s like every day. But I also do a lot of the production, which is fun. Taught myself DaVinci Resolve recently, and I think that’s great. Talk about dev tools — Riverside and some of these technologies have really opened up who can do this, and I’ve always had an interest in video. Like I said, I did some video work when I was still a teenager. My God, years ago. So I’ve always had an interest in this, but before, it was like the equipment that you would need and the amount of time that you would spend futzing with all this stuff was just sort of intimidating. And now you can get pretty good results with just a SaaS product. It’s not perfect. Audiophiles will be like, “This is not awesome.” But, yes, I’ve acquired many opinions about all this as well. Maybe we could vibe on this. I do feel like a lot of the microphones are tuned towards men’s voices. So women’s voices, I spend a lot of time trying to work on the compression. I’ll raise the bass, ‘cause otherwise I feel like I sound very squeaky. I don’t think I have a naturally squeaky voice, but here I am. I spend a fair time doing it, and then, of course, I sometimes guest on lovely podcasts like yours.
[00:30:56] Victoria Melnikova: And my follow-up question to the previous segment: if you were to run your own conference — so your folks are doing beer and wine — what would you do? What would be your conference?
[00:31:08] Kate Holterhoff: You know what would be fun? I have been on a bit of a bubbly kick, so I would do one maybe about all the champagnes and proseccos.
[00:31:17] Victoria Melnikova: Oh, I love that.
[00:31:17] Kate Holterhoff: Wouldn’t that be fun? Mimosas in the morning, maybe like a rosé — bubbly rosé — in the afternoon, and then in the evening, proseccos.
[00:31:26] Victoria Melnikova: So you got a ticket to France.
[00:31:28] Kate Holterhoff: I know. I love this. Yeah, Épernay. I would love that. But I’ll tell you what, in my advanced years, I cannot keep up when it comes to drinking, and so I probably should not do that, or just drink coffee until the evening. But, yeah, if they say, “Kate, it’s your turn. You’re up. We’re doing the bubbly.”
[00:31:46] Victoria Melnikova: Okay. That works for me. This actually brings us to an end of this interview, and I like to wrap up with the same question every single time, and I call it a warm fuzzy question: what makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:32:02] Kate Holterhoff: I am so fortunate to be in my current role. As you pointed out, I’ve had many jobs. I didn’t really know where I would end up. I thought I wanted to be a college professor, and the longer I spent in academia, the more I realized that that actually was not what I wanted. I thought that was it, but I realized that it was not for me. Whether that’s because of the state of the academy or because of something in my own personality is up for debate. But every day I wake up and I love what I do, and I feel so fortunate to be able to be doing the sort of things that I love, which is talking to interesting people, critical thinking, creating stuff. I mean, I get to have a hands-on role in doing production and writing and all the things that I’ve wanted to be part of. And, of course, I work with the best folks at RedMonk, so I’m loving life.
[00:32:55] Victoria Melnikova: Sounds amazing. Finally, I would like to provide you with space to share how people can find RedMonk, what they can read, what they can watch, ‘cause you guys produce a lot of content.
[00:33:05] Kate Holterhoff: We do. We do. Well, I would welcome you to subscribe to our podcast, the MonkCast, which is on YouTube and any podcast platform. We don’t gate our content, so if you wanna read our blog posts, just go to RedMonk’s website. All four of the analysts have our own blogs, and so you can just kind of keep up with all of us on there. And we’ve all been on a roll with writing about AI a lot, so follow us that way, and then, of course, you can find any of us on the social medias. We’re on X, we are on Bluesky. LinkedIn is always a good choice as well.
[00:33:40] Victoria Melnikova: And also, I wanna say that RedMonk analysts come to different events, so in the events section on the website, you can see what you guys are attending and meet in person.
[00:33:50] Kate Holterhoff: That would be awesome. Yeah. I mean, on that note, Steve just created the Monk Signal. Talk about vibe coding. And so you could sign up for that as well if you wanna keep up. When we are in town, we will… planning on having, like, a RedMonk beers or a meetup — an informal meetup. That’d be a good way to find out where we’re planning to head on a certain day, and that way we don’t have to be texting a million folks. But the website is a good place to start in terms of discovering all the things.
[00:34:16] Victoria Melnikova: Perfect. It’s really nice to meet you, Kate, and thank you so much for coming to record this interview.
[00:34:21] Kate Holterhoff: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
[00:34:24] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you for catching yet another episode of Dev Propulsion Labs. We at Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. If your developer tool needs help with product design, development, or SRE, visit evilmartians.com/devtools. See you in the next.
