Tracking Mean Time To Restore (MTTR) is standard industry practice for incident response and analysis, but should it be? Courtney Nash, an Internet Incident Librarian, argues that MTTR is not a reliable metric - and we think she's got a point. We caught up with Courtney at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas, where she was making her case against MTTR in favor of alternative metrics (SLOs and cost of coordination data), practices (Near Miss analysis), and mindsets (humans are the solution,...
Feb 07, 2023•34 min•Season 3Ep. 6
We're still in January and AI might already be the buzzword of 2023 - and for good reason. AI powered startups have been layoff resistant and machine learning engineers are one of the fastest growing jobs, not in tech, but in the entire economy. This week, we sit down with Pinecone Founder and CEO, Edo Liberty. An AI and machine learning expert, Edo graduated from Yale with a PhD in Applied Mathematics and worked as Head of Amazon’s AI Labs before founding Pinecone. Listen as he explains why the...
Jan 31, 2023•41 min•Season 3Ep. 5
"Is my team solving the right problem?" To answer this seemingly simple question, we assembled a panel of some of the smartest engineering leaders we know and asked them how they answer this question with their own teams. Featuring Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Platform Engineering at Slack, James Stanier, Dir. of Engineering at Shopify, and Smruti Patel, VP of Engineering at Apollo, the following conversation debuted in front of a live audience at the Interact engineering conference. Originally an excl...
Jan 24, 2023•48 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta, thinks that every engineer should "go deep" - all the way to understanding the transistors if you have to. He implores us never to be satisfied with black boxes, believing that it's not only risky not to understand what your code is really doing, but it's not fun either. We love this episode because Randy's joy is infectious. He reminds us why we got into software engineering in the first place. If you've been looking for a reminder yourself, this is the episode for y...
Jan 17, 2023•47 min•Season 3Ep. 3
As your startup scales it's not enough to know what to measure - you have to know WHEN to measure. Metrics that are important in one growth phase might not be in the next. To help us make sense of it all, we invited Laura Tacho onto the show. Laura is a VP of Engineering & Leadership Coach, and an expert when it comes to startup growth and metrics, having worked with over 125 different companies. We love this episode because it takes a team-first approach to metrics and then relates those me...
Jan 10, 2023•45 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Happy New Year and welcome to Season 3 of Dev Interrupted! We couldn't think of a better way to kick off Season 3 of the podcast than with the immensely talented Forrest Brazeal. Not only is Forrest the Head of Developer Media at Google Cloud, but he lists being a writer, speaker, cartoonist, cloud architect and AWS Serverless Hero, among his many accolades. To top it all off, Forrest is an all around great guy with a passion for education and advocacy. That's why he's working to help educate, t...
Jan 03, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Sit back, relax, grab your favorite beverage and listen as Dev Interrupted co-hosts Dan Lines & Conor Bronsdon recap the Season 2 of the podcast. In this special episode, our co-hosts describe their perfect holiday meal, share some of their favorite moments from the past year (personal and professional!) and give a sneak peek at what the audience can expect from Season 3 of the podcast. From our family to yours, have a wonderful holiday season and we’ll see you on January 3rd for Season 3! S...
Dec 20, 2022•28 min•Season 2Ep. 51
Picture this: an auto manufacturer with no clue what parts are in its supply chain, where those parts come from and no ability to recall those parts if vulnerabilities are discovered. That’s not a reality consumers would accept. So why do organizations (and manufacturers!) tolerate it when it comes to software? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Brian Fox, co-founder & CTO, and Stephen Magill, VP of Product Innovation, join us to talk about Sonatype’s State of the Software Supply Cha...
Dec 13, 2022•37 min•Season 2Ep. 50
Sometimes among all the sprints, the pressure to ship faster, tools to measure lines of code written, it seems like we as an industry forget a simple fact: developers are knowledge workers, not robots To remind us what it means to be a human, we invited some of the most empathetic engineering leaders we know to Interact and asked them to sit on a panel together. The conversation that followed is one of the most insightful and relevant conversations we've heard all year. Whether you are an IC, ma...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 49
Dev Interrupted takes a detour to Vegas! In a first for the show, we took the podcast on the road to attend the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. While at DOES, we had the pleasure of interviewing Gene Kim, famed researcher and author of "The Phoenix Project" and "Accelerate". Also attending DOES were friends of the podcast Bryan and Dana Finster, whose presentation on the Rise and Fall of DevOps inspired us to invite them onto the pod. Listen to this two-part episode as Gene breaks down al...
Nov 29, 2022•52 min•Season 2Ep. 48
Bad habits have a way of resurfacing during difficult times. Unfortunately for engineering teams everywhere, this is one of those times. In this topical episode of Dev Interrupted, LinearB co-founders Dan Lines & Ori Keren discuss the current macroeconomic climate, its effect on engineering teams, and why individual metrics are - and should remain - a relic of days gone by. Our heart goes out to anyone who has been affected by the layoffs across the tech industry. Please reach out to the Dev...
Nov 22, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 47
When your startup is struggling to find its product-market fit, security is the last thing on your mind - and according to security expert Matt Spitz, that’s perfectly fine! Matt is Vanta's Head of Engineering and he joins this week's episode of Dev Interrupted to explain everything you ever wanted to know about startups and security. Matt debunks the real security risks we face (think S3 buckets, not nation states), how to create a company culture that embraces security and when your startup ne...
Nov 15, 2022•39 min•Season 2Ep. 46
It's no secret this has been a difficult year for many companies in tech. The truth is, it's easy to be a leader when times are good. It's less easy in the midst of a storm. That's why we assembled a panel of some of the smartest engineering leaders we know at Interact to talk about the leadership principles that help guide an engineering organization no matter what is happening in the world. Today's episode of Dev Interrupted features Michael Stahnke, VP of Platform at CircleCI; Lewis Tuff, VP ...
Nov 08, 2022•57 min•Season 2Ep. 45
Live from Interact, we're bringing you an interview with our favorite CTO, Charity Majors. Never one to be shy about speaking her mind, Charity is an outspoken advocate for devs everywhere - and this passion made her a fan favorite at Interact. Listen as Charity discusses her career, why the hierarchy is bullshit (disclaimer: she likes to swear - we like that about her), and why platform engineering is the most exciting place to sit in computing today. Show Notes Learn about the power of Continu...
Nov 01, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 44
Hosts Dan Lines & Conor Bronsdon remind listeners that Interact is today - October 25th - and why it's the must-attend event for engineering leaders. They also rundown some of the most exciting speakers at Interact, why they are so proud of what the event has become - and which of the two is Robin to the other's Batman. Join Dan & Conor and thousands of other engineering leaders at Interact. Watch them live from 8am-2pm PDT today: https://hopin.com/events/interact-october#schedule You ca...
Oct 25, 2022•4 min•Season 2Ep. 43
How does a platform with 150 million monthly active users build for the future? In a word: Developers. Discord is betting big that the future of their company, their product and their community is in supporting developers - and they're putting their money where their mouth is. On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, Anjney Midha, Discord's VP of Platform Ecosystem, sits down with us to discuss Discord's past, present and future. In this incredible episode, Anjney details Discord's recent prod...
Oct 18, 2022•40 min•Season 2Ep. 42
Where has all the focus time gone? Why does there seem to be less of it at big companies than at startups? And do managers really have as little as they claim? It should come as no surprise to our listeners that we're big fans of data here at Dev Interrupted. The coolest thing about having Dan Kador, VP of Engineering at Clockwise, on the show is that he brings data we already intuitively understood but could not quantify . Armed with data from 1.5 million meetings, 80,000 engineers and over 5,0...
Oct 11, 2022•44 min•Season 2Ep. 41
The argument about which programming language reigns supreme is about to get a lot more clear with the release of research on the best and worst languages for dev workflow. In this episode of LinearB Labs, CTO Yishai Beeri reveals what the company’s data scientists have discovered about programming-language productivity following analysis of thousands of dev teams and hundreds of thousands of pull requests. Industry-changing research on which programming languages linger under excessively long s...
Oct 04, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 40
When you get the chance to geek out over the metrics behind happy dev teams, you take it. As one of the companies shaping how the modern workforce, well… works, Atlassian is one of the foremost thought leaders in the space thanks to an amazing research and data team. Case in point: Atlassian’s State of Teams Report. In this week’s episode, modern work evangelist Mark Cruth takes us through the most interesting, insightful and counterintuitive findings from their deep dive on what is separating h...
Sep 27, 2022•48 min•Season 2Ep. 39
Branching strategy has been reimagined. Meet the mind behind it. In his first-ever podcast appearance, Rouan Wilsenach, author of Ship/Show/Ask: A Modern Branching Strategy, joins Dev Interrupted to talk about his work as an author and the inspiration behind his musings on branching strategy. If you haven’t already read Ship/Show/Ask, you can find it on Martin Fowler’s website. It’s one of the most influential articles we’ve read in years. Rouan has been more than an inspiration, he’s changed th...
Sep 20, 2022•39 min•Season 2Ep. 38
In the last decade there have been enormous advances in infrastructure and ops, so why does it suck to build stuff? That’s the question Tanmai Gopal kept asking himself before founding his company, Hasura. Now, as Hasura’s CEO he’s channeling his chaotic energy in order to solve this problem. This week’s episode of Dev Interrupted implores listeners to forget about pivoting (it’s just the story other people impose on your journey), shames backend devs for their elitist tendencies and asks why, i...
Sep 13, 2022•42 min•Season 2Ep. 37
Today, we are releasing the full interview of one of our favorite episodes: Dan’s 2021 conversation with engineers-turned-authors, Hyrum Wright & Titus Winters. As two of the most senior staff engineers at Google, both guests brought a deep understanding of software engineering to the show: Hyrum is semi-famous as the "Hyrum" of Hyrum's Law; while Titus is responsible for managing 250 million lines of code. In their brilliant book Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programm...
Sep 06, 2022•52 min•Season 2Ep. 36
Your early tech stack decisions won’t ensure long term success, but they can certainly set you up for long term failure. Pragmatists rejoice! This week’s episode of Dev Interrupted features Sam Lambert, CEO & President of PlanetScale, a tech leader known as the ‘Oracle of Pragmatism’. In a winding conversation that touches on Sam’s time at GitHub, where he helped the then 40th most-trafficked website in the world run on just 2 servers , to his experience working at Facebook where he learned ...
Aug 27, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 35
The unofficial first rule of engineering: When the minds behind the world’s most valuable startup, Stripe, want to talk about making better dev orgs, you listen. In this episode of Dev Interrupted, Stripe’s Head of Engineering Smruti Patel joined us to talk about the daily, weekly and yearly engineering decisions that have engineered the company’s meteoric success. Smruti has a gift for making the logic behind make-or-break strategic decisions digestible for every engineer, regardless of where t...
Aug 20, 2022•49 min•Season 2Ep. 34
Fact: The state of pull requests is broken and we finally have the data to prove it. In our latest LinearB Labs episode we reveal the information that has led us to the inevitable conclusion that pull requests have become a massive source of toil, bottlenecks and a huge barrier to shipping. Better yet, two people who have been thinking about how to attack this dev workflow issue – Dan Lines and Ori Keren of LinearB – are ready to actually propose a solution: continuous merge. The next step in CI...
Aug 13, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 33
Everyone who manages a team would like to think that their employees admire them as individuals and as leaders. That you make an impact on those employees while they work under you and long after you end up moving to new companies and opportunities. One such engineering leader who has mastered the mix of manager, friend and mentor is Carolyn Vo. A Partner and Head of Engineering at Oliver Wyman, Carolyn is one of engineering’s leading advocates on the benefits of creating a culture of approachab...
Aug 06, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 32
Like every other team-based profession, engineering needs leaders. But identifying a true, tested and proven road for taking a programmer and putting them in a position of managing projects & priorities is still a work in progress. That’s why I was so excited to speak with Rajah Kalipatnapu, Global Head of Product Engineering at Equinix. One of the most experienced minds in building world-class engineering orgs, Rajah credits his success with focusing on different ways to incrementally ident...
Jul 30, 2022•25 min•Season 2Ep. 31
Not only is Kelly Vaughn one of the pioneers in building thought-leadership content for the developer community, she’s one of the rare programmers who comes to the craft with the background of a trained therapist. From knowing what content devs need to grow to being able to recognize the cognitive-behavioral impacts of the developer experience, Kelly Vaughn is truly one of our most unique guests to date. In our conversation, Kelly leveraged her background as a therapist to explore what dev orgs ...
Jul 23, 2022•51 min•Season 2Ep. 30
In a field like engineering, to have a truly unique 30,000-feet view of the profession, you need someone with 30 years of experience in adapting, innovating and creating in the space. That’s why we were so excited to talk to Drew McManus, CEO and Cofounder of 33 Teams. An engineer who’s helped shape the formative years of Apple, Adobe and so many more companies you have on your phone right now, Drew McManus is now advising rapidly growing dev orgs across the world at 33 Teams. Drew is an oracle ...
Jul 16, 2022•49 min•Season 2Ep. 29
There’s an open secret about open source: Developers use it. Teams use it. Businesses use it. But no one really thinks about how they contribute to it. That’s why we jumped at the chance to get a state-of-open-source discussion with Gitlab’s John Coghlan, Senior Manager of Developer Advocacy. Someone who joined the open source community with the goal of making developers’ lives better, John came to the table with a wealth of insights into just how individual engineers leverage open source, how b...
Jul 09, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 28
