Lori MacVittie
Distinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist at F5, Lori has more than 25 years of industry experience spanning application development, IT architecture, and network and systems' operation. She co-authored the CADD profile for ANSI NCITS 320-1998 and is a prolific author with books spanning security, cloud, and enterprise architecture.
Appears in 32 Episodes
VibeOps: Guardrailed agents for deterministic production
Ops used to be a world of YAML, caffeine, and careful deploy rituals. Now it’s probabilistic models, token-based cost surprises, and reliability questions that sound m...
WebAssembly: A programmability paradigm shift
Programmability is experiencing a paradigm shift, and this episode explains why WebAssembly is at the center of it. F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by We...
Unstructured Integration: The hidden surface area putting AI privacy & compliance at risk
"It's just a chat" is the most dangerous sentence in AI. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by data science expert Sc...
Logging for Giants: High-Speed Telemetry in an AI World
When OpenAI discovered they could reclaim 30,000 CPU cores simply by tuning the log-forwarding agent Fluent Bit—disabling a single function that ate ~35 % of one serve...
Low-Code Automation Tools with Teeth: FlowFuse & N8N
Low-code automation has grown up, and the competition is getting spicy. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Aubrey ...
The New New User Interface: AI in your brain
The capability to map brain activity to language isn’t just another UI shift—it’s a paradigm shift in how humans and machines might communicate. If you’re building sys...
The Impact of Inference: Reliability
Traditional reliability meant consistency. Given identical inputs, systems produced identical outputs. Costs were stable and behavior predictable. Inference reliabilit...
The Impact of Inference: Performance
Traditional performance meant deterministic response times. Identical inputs produced near-identical execution times. Optimizations reduced latency, but variance was m...
The Impact of Inference: Availability
What does "availability" mean in a world of AI inferencing and ever-shifting workloads? It’s no longer just about servers responding or apps being online—availability ...
Taking a holiday break – Pop Goes the Stack returns after New Year’s!
Hi, Pop Goes the Stack listeners! The holiday season is here, and we’re taking a short break to recharge, enjoy time with loved ones, and maybe step away from our stac...
Reshaping the web for AI agents and LLMs
The web we built—a tangle of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, APIs, and SEO quirks—has always been messy. But with AI agents and real-time apps now consuming the web as data, th...
Five nines of wrong: Detecting drift and errors in AI systems
Uptime used to mean reliability. But in the LLM era, five nines just means your liar is always available. Real reliability now includes correctness and that means prob...
Now you see me, now you don't: Ephemeral Auth and AI agents
Agents are popping up everywhere: tiny bots spinning up for a task, then dying off. They shouldn’t carry long-lived credentials any more than you carry a master key ev...
Holiday hiatus: Revisiting tech trends, AI, and more!
Hi everyone! This is Lori MacVittie, host of Pop Goes the Stack. This holiday week, we’re pressing pause to recharge, spend time with loved ones, and maybe even step a...
BOLA exploits: The #1 API threat and how to stop it
The 2025 API Threat Report is out, and shocker: we’re still getting wrecked by injection, data leaks, and BOLA. That’s Broken Object Level Authorization, for those of ...
MCP tools and AI risks: The case for slow, secure adoption
Remember when APIs were quiet little endpoints that waited politely for humans to click buttons? Yeah, that’s over. Now you’ve got swarms of LLM agents duct-taping too...
LLM-as-a-Judge: Bias, Preference Leakage, and Reliability
Here's the newest bright idea in AI: don’t pay humans to evaluate model outputs, let another model do it. This is the “LLM-as-a-judge” craze. Models not just spitting ...
Bots vs Business: AI Fraud & Defending Your Margins
A North Carolina musician was arrested after using AI to generate fake bands and bots to stream their songs—racking up over a billion plays and pocketing $10 million i...
Crossing the streams
Prompt injection isn't some new exotic hack. It’s what happens when you throw your admin console and your users into the same text box and pray the intern doesn’t find...
Agentic APIs Have PTSD
Your APIs were designed for humans and orderly machines: clean request, tidy response, stateless, rate-limited. Then along came agentic AI—recursive, stateful, jittery...