Not all dev orgs work in all situations. Especially if your dev org is looking to completely reshape and disrupt an entire industry. That’s why we were so excited to talk to Chris Bee, CTO of Lessen. Lessen is looking to change the way property owners hire vetted professionals for renovation, maintenance and turn services. That means so much of what their programmers are building hasn’t been built before. Chris opened up about how the company trains and empowers developers to design and build th...
Jul 02, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 27
Fact: There are guidebooks for everything in programming except for actually leading, managing and inspiring programmers. That’s why I was so happy to have my friend Zach Goldberg on the podcast. Someone who has made learning and self-improvement a core pillar of his professional and personal life, Zach Goldberg is someone who I turn to when I need to know who smart CTOs are turning to. In this great conversation, Zach talks about the most important things he’s learned in separating signal from ...
Jun 25, 2022•53 min•Season 2Ep. 26
With registration for our free October Interact conference now open, we wanted you to hear one of our favorite sessions from this past April’s Interact. Featuring the best minds from Slack, Netlify and Ambassador Labs, our session on Inspiring Engineering Leaders & Driving Developer Creativity turned into one of the best conversations we’ve ever heard on topics like dev toil, dev focus and dev burnout. This is a great preview of the type of content we’re working on for our conference in Octo...
Jun 18, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 25
In an industry that has trouble looking beyond the next sprint, it’s good to know there are very smart people researching the conscious and unconscious pain points keeping devs from focusing on what they actually want to do: code. In our new series LinearB Labs we’ll be looking at the most interesting research on how devs work, communicate and code. The best way to start should be understanding what is actually a well-performing engineering org versus one that’s struggling. That’s why we’re so e...
Jun 15, 2022•50 min•Season 2Ep. 24
The last thing anyone who does great work should be doing is having to take time out from doing great work to promote it to their higher-ups. Unfortunately, until the person you report to achieves omnipotence, you’re going to have to make sure their perception of your work lines up with the quality. In fact, when we asked our community what issue they would want professional coaching on, it was this: How to improve the impression of your work. With the help of the great Lena Reinhard, engineerin...
Jun 11, 2022•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 23
When you think of a billion-dollar tech company, you probably imagine rooms full of monitors with dashboards and non-stop data streams. Well, after talking to Hippo - a certified unicorn and newly minted giant in the insurance industry - we realized this couldn’t be further from the truth. Mike Gordon, VP of Engineering at Hippo, sat down with Dev Interrupted to chat about what it’s actually like to run the dev teams powering a company that just passed a $1 billion valuation. His insights about ...
Jun 04, 2022•45 min•Season 2Ep. 22
Almost every single company we talk to focuses on having their engineering teams solve problems. This is why we jumped at the opportunity to talk to Joshua Romoff from Ubisoft. Why? The goal of gaming companies isn’t so much to solve problems, but to enrich their customers’ lives. That’s a unique, powerful change in how to think about building, developing and shipping features. Something that required Ubisoft to bring in Research Scientists like Joshua to figure out just what it is customers eng...
May 28, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 21
If you’re doing your job right, most of your time and your team’s time should be spent actually building things. That means conversations should be reserved to the very important ones. In our latest Dev Interrupted episode, Reprise’s Director of Engineering Jennie MacDougall looks back on the most useful conversation she has ever had with her devs that are also the ones she encourages them to have with others. From the most important conversation when evaluating a prospective dev to the question...
May 21, 2022•43 min•Season 2Ep. 20
There are so many books, videos and workshops on starting your own company. The problem for anyone listening to this podcast is that none of them come from the perspective of a developer. That’s why we were so excited that the founder & CTO of Drata, Daniel Marashlian – who has previously founded eight companies before hitting a billion-dollar valuation with Drata – was open to talking about what it’s like to build a company from a coder’s perspective. From the signs you’re an entrepreneur a...
May 14, 2022•57 min•Season 2Ep. 19
At LinearB, we like to think we spend all our time figuring out how to unlock developer potential. To find ways to let devs do more of the work they love and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with needless hurdles, idling and churn. We’re not the only ones thinking about how to do this, though. At our recent INTERACT panel, we assembled amazing engineering leaders from Netflix, FloSports and the Refactoring.club newsletter to give us their inside knowledge on how they increase product...
May 07, 2022•51 min•Season 2Ep. 18
Few companies have mastered making products consumers actually want to use like Toast. A $30 billion giant in the tech-food business, Toast faced their worst case scenario during the pandemic when the restaurants at the heart of their business were all forced to shut down. Toast rose like a phoenix to become one of the best success stories of pivoting during the pandemic by making users love using their food delivery systems. To understand how Toast became one of the great success stories of the...
Apr 30, 2022•48 min•Season 2Ep. 17
What do the teams at Stack Overflow, DataStax and Reprise have in common? First, they’ve all built amazing organizations powered by amazing developers. Second, they’ve managed to build and retain these amazing developers in an ultra-competitive hiring market. Third, they all took time at our recent INTERACT conference to discuss how they created engineering organizations that are productive, successful and - best of all - happy. It’s a rare treat to have this many amazing minds on one live panel...
Apr 23, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 16
You ever get the feeling that the way most companies are set up doesn’t really make sense? That the passion you have for coding and tech gets sucked out when you do it for a business, instead of it being amplified? Matt K. Parker had that realization… hard. A third-generation programmer, Matt’s epiphany that there was something wrong with the way the majority of the world sets up its teams and workplaces led him on a journey to explore the way the world’s best companies operate. After diving int...
Apr 16, 2022•55 min•Season 2Ep. 15
If you looked up the term “firing on all cylinders” in the dictionary, I’m fairly confident there would be a picture of Sarvenaz Myslicki next to it. A next-gen leader who earned the role of VP of Technology at American Express by the age of 30, Savernaz is a published author, an in-demand thought-leader on mentorship and has one of the largest followings on programmer TikTok. Our favorite thing about Sarvenaz, though, is that all her work is aspirational but radically inclusive. She tailors her...
Apr 09, 2022•55 min•Season 2Ep. 14
In so many professions, the reward for exceptional work is a promotion to management. Unfortunately, for developers whose programming gets them singled out for promotion, the skills to manage a team have nothing to do with the work that got them recognized in the first place. James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify, understands the pitfalls of being promoted from an IC to an engineering manager, and began writing as a way to think through the mistakes he himself was making. Today, Jame...
Apr 02, 2022•45 min•Season 2Ep. 13
The world is shortly going to need another 20 million developers and with over 1,000 engineering leaders joining us for INTERACT on April 7th, there’s no better time to talk to two people who have captured the minds of millions of developers - and will be featured at INTERACT - Tiffany Janzen and Masha Zvereva. In addition to their own tech careers, both women have become prominent voices in the dev community, Tiffany is most well-known for her Tiff in Tech Youtube channel and Masha for her comp...
Mar 26, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Modern problems require modern solutions, right? The problem is, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand what solutions are required for a given problem and even harder to task a team with finding them. That’s why Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, thinks the top-down management model is dead. To replace it, Bob is championing a “team of teams” model that provides his developers with far more autonomy - so much, in fact, that they can even self-elect their leaders. On this week’s ep...
Mar 19, 2022•44 min•Season 2Ep. 11
For decades Artificial Intelligence has been a focus of best-selling science fiction authors and an antagonist for blockbuster Hollywood movies. But AI is no longer relegated to the realm of science fiction, it inhabits the world around us. From the biggest enterprise companies to plucky startups, businesses everywhere are building and deploying AI at incredible speed. In fact, open source allows anyone with a laptop to build impressively good AI models in a day. But for all the recent advances ...
Mar 12, 2022•50 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Hate interruptions? Ever feel like you’ve lost your ability to focus on coding? Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, knows your pain and she’s on a crusade to help devs everywhere reclaim their focus. Spoiler: She's got a message for managers who can’t meet with devs whenever they want: “Don’t like it? Well, suck it up.” The thing about productivity is, you can’t have it both ways. You can either protect your devs’ ability to focus by providing them meaningful time for creativity o...
Mar 05, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 9
It used to be that in order to make your parents proud you had to go into management. Then along came the self-contained IC career path. Today, this dual-track career path remains the unchallenged standard of companies everywhere. Or does it? Peter Bell, the founder and CTO of CTO Connection, wants developers everywhere to know that there are several dev adjacent career paths. From product to dev advocate to sales engineer, Peter has the insights you need if you’ve ever considered switching up y...
Feb 26, 2022•42 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Data junkies rejoice, this is the episode for you. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Einat Orr, co-founder and CEO of Treeverse, sits down with us to talk about the state of data… where it’s been, where it’s going and why having bad data might be worse than having no data at all. Einat's path to becoming a CEO is different from many of the folks who come on the podcast. After graduating with a PhD in mathematics, she spent much of her career as a CTO due to her extraordinary technical e...
Feb 19, 2022•42 min•Season 2Ep. 7
How does a former-CTO-turned-VC assess companies now that they're the one with the money? What do they look for - and expect to find - in a company’s engineering team? Enter Jason Warner on the Dev Interrupted stage. Jason is the most unique of investors: He made the jump from being a CTO to managing his own $725M fund at Redpoint Ventures. After leading GitHub to one of the best exits in the history of Silicon Valley, Jason is now dedicating his full time to picking the tech, teams and products...
Feb 12, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Anyone who’s been in a rapidly scaling company with an ever-expanding engineering team knows that communication is never as simple as it seems. That’s why we were so excited when Shankar Ramaswamy decided to sit down with Dev Interrupted's Conor Bronsdon. Shankar is a veteran leader in the engineering space, having helped recruit, build and guide developer teams at companies like Amazon, eBay, Paypal and Google - where before leaving he managed a team of 300+ people. Now the Head of Engineering ...
Feb 05, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 5
You’ve heard of the supply chain, but what about the software supply chain? Unlike the standard supply chain that you often hear about in the news, this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted dives into the supply chain responsible for holding together the systems that companies, orgs and governments depend upon. Kim Lewandowski, a software supply chain security expert, co-founded Chainguard in 2021 with a mission to make the software supply chains secure by default. In our conversation, Kim discusse...
Jan 29, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Like most fast-growing companies, LinearB spends WAY too much time trying to hire developers. So when we came across a brilliant article about hiring autistic talent, we knew we had to have its author Matt Nigh on the podcast. Matt is one of the most prominent thought leaders on neurodiversity in the workplace. Matt himself was diagnosed with autism late in life following a very unique job interview at Google. He’s since spent countless hours researching, writing and talking about how companies ...
Jan 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Building a platform that 100,000 devs use every day is no accident, but it can happen (almost) overnight. Daily.dev is the fastest growing online community for developers to stay updated on the hottest developer news, and their mission is to build the home page that every developer deserves. It pulls together and rewards dev-focused content from 400 sources – letting its users vote on which ones they find the most useful, the most interesting or the most entertaining. Co-founders Nimrod Kramer a...
Jan 15, 2022•27 min•Season 2Ep. 2
We knew we had to kick off the new year with something big - so welcome to Season 2 of Dev Interrupted! This episode probes the murky depths of a time before the pandemic by exploring the story of LinearB's founding in 2018, how co-founders Dan Lines and Ori Keren met at Cloudlock in 2012 - and how they decided to co-found a company while 5,000 miles apart. Listen as Dev Interrupted host and all-around renaissance man, Dan Lines, steps behind the mic to be interviewed not as host of the podcast,...
Jan 08, 2022•46 min•Season 2Ep. 1
It's finally here, the end of season 1 of the podcast is upon us! To celebrate, Santa is bringing something special - entrepreneurship advice for all the would-be founders of the world, ages 1 to 92. Brian Singer, co-founder & CPO of Nobl9, sits down with Dev Interrupted to help us close out season 1 with a conversation on what it takes to found your own company. Having founded a pair of companies, one of which he sold to Google, Brian has a deep understanding of what it takes to successfull...
Dec 29, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 59
Companies that do business in the native language of their customer build better customer relationships. Although this may seem fairly obvious, it's easier said than done. After all, when your customer base is spread around the world, how do you scale your customer service? Unbabel has built their business around the idea that customer service can be delivered in any language quickly and efficiently with the right blend of AI and human intelligence, creating a platform they call "Language Operat...
Dec 18, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Let’s get nerdy with it. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Dan gets technical with Sergei Egorov, co-founder and CEO of AtomicJar. With the mission to make integrated testing simpler and easier, AtomicJar created the Testcontainers Cloud which allows developers to test their code against real dependencies, not mocks. Today, Testcontainers powers over a million builds per month, helping developers build and release their software with confidence. Dan and Sergei also talk about the diffic...
Dec 11, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 57
