How do you become an engineering leader? Is it the right fit for your career? And if you do, how do you become a good one? In this multi-part series on the career journey of an engineering leader, Dev Interrupted answers these questions and many more by inviting expert guests from the software industry to share their experiences, lessons, failures and triumphs as leaders. Whether you started your career today - or 20 years ago - this series has something for everyone. In our first episode, host ...
Sep 05, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 36
In an industry buzzing with enthusiasm for Engineering Platforms, many are developed without a clear product vision, leading to poor adoption or even hindering organizational performance. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, cohost Conor Bronsdon talks with Simone Casciaroli, Head of Engineering at Onto. We first encountered Simone's insights at LeadDev New York and immediately knew he'd be the perfect guest to discuss how to build engineering platforms using the right metrics. Join us as ...
Aug 29, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 35
Considering expanding your engineering team overseas? While daunting, the rewards could outweigh the challenges. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon welcomes Kelly Vaughn, Director of Engineering at Spot AI, back to the show. One of our most listened-to voices, Kelly dissects the decision-making process behind opening a new office - from the long list of potential countries to the myriad factors that clinched the decision. Outside of the big picture stuff like navig...
Aug 22, 2023•38 min•Season 3Ep. 34
The wrong internal tools can hold your team back. So how do you find the right ones, and how the heck do you get engineers to adopt them once you do? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon welcomes Debo Ray, co-founder & CEO of DevZero, to discuss the challenges developers face due to inadequate tools. With a keen sense of developers' needs, Debo explains why many companies fail in this domain, squandering precious dev time. Debo also offers a peek into the future ...
Aug 15, 2023•26 min•Season 3Ep. 33
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, host Dan Lines speaks with Mike Hamrah, CTO at Flowcode. Together, the two detail the fundamental responsibility of developers and tech leaders: shipping code. Mike shares a candid view of the industry's current state, lamenting how the focus on code shipping is getting lost amidst the complexities of agile methodologies, stand-up meetings, and sprint planning. He urges developers and leaders alike to recenter their conversations on the essence of their...
Aug 08, 2023•41 min•Season 3Ep. 32
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon and Ben Lloyd Pearson, LinearB’s Director of Developer Relations, detail the evolution of Continuous Merge and the tool behind it, gitStream. Joining the conversation is Nik LeBlanc, VP of Engineering at DevCycle. Nik shares the ways his team is using gitStream to streamline code reviews and offers practical advice for anyone looking to implement the tool on their own team. He also explores the somewhat controversial practice of s...
Aug 01, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 31
Amid the escalating buzz surrounding AI tools, many development teams grapple with deciding which ones suit their needs best, when to adopt them, and the potential risks of not doing so. As AI continues to pose more questions than answers, the fear of falling behind the competition lurks for many. This week's episode of Dev Interrupted aims to dispel these uncertainties by welcoming CodiumAI’s founder & CEO, Itamar Friedman. In one of our most illuminating discussions this year, Itamar pierc...
Jul 25, 2023•55 min•Season 3Ep. 30
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, co-host Conor Bronsdon welcomes Francisco Trindade, Director of Engineering at Braze, to discuss strategies to improve collaboration and effectiveness within engineering teams. Francisco notes a shift in the tech industry over the past decade from focusing on rapid hiring and individual growth to a need for more effective team dynamics. Criticizing the tech industry's aversion to micromanagement, he argues that it has inadvertently resulted in a lack of...
Jul 18, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 29
Does the emergence of feature flags affect the interpretation and utility of DORA metrics? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, host Dan Lines and Ariel Perez, VP of Engineering at Split.io, discuss the state of DORA metrics and whether they need reimaging in a world of feature flags. Listen as Ariel explains why he believes feature flags are more than a tool, and have begun to reshape our understanding of software development and the metrics we use to measure it. Dan and Ariel also touch ...
Jul 11, 2023•47 min•Season 3Ep. 28
In this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we’re focusing on the increasingly valuable role of DevRels. Francesco Ciulla, Developer Advocate at the open-source daily.dev community - which has more than 100,000 daily active users - joins us for a DevRel deep dive. Listen as Francesco explains how a career change in his thirties set him on a path towards becoming a developer, being hired by the European Space Agency and, eventually, landing a role as a developer advocate, crediting much of his suc...
Jul 04, 2023•39 min•Season 3Ep. 27
Fact: You can’t become better at anything unless you understand what getting better would actually look like. This is especially true in the case of engineering teams. Following the analysis of 2,000 dev teams and over 4 million code branches, the 2023 Engineering Benchmarks report is out. To walk us through the performance metrics of the top 10% of engineering teams, LinearB’s Head of Developer Relations Ben Lloyd Pearson makes his first Dev Interrupted appearance. From how long elite teams tak...
Jun 27, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 26
The world is what we make it. Tech - and AI - follow the same principles. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Christina Enchevta, a Director of Engineering at GitHub, to unravel the link between the values we hold and the things we build. We delve into how AI applications mirror our values, intentionally or not, and how this can lead to surprising outcomes, no matter how benevolent our intentions. Christina also shares practical advice for engineering leaders on how to ta...
Jun 20, 2023•30 min•Season 3Ep. 25
The push for digital accessibility aims to ensure equal access and inclusion for all individuals. So why are healthcare companies failing to keep up? In this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Plum Ertz, Director of Engineering at Ro, to dissect healthcare’s digital accessibility problem. Following explosive growth in telemedicine due to consumer behavior changes brought on by the pandemic, the healthcare industry has struggled to provide accessible healthcare services on the in...
Jun 13, 2023•26 min•Season 3Ep. 24
Remote, hybrid, or in-office? Opinions are divided on what has quickly become one of the most controversial topics in tech: Should we return to the office and if so, how and when? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Duolingo’s Sr. Director of Engineering Fabio Lessa, to discuss how to successfully transition your engineering org back to the office - and why Duolingo has done it so successfully. [Hint: it all starts with culture.] Fabio also discusses Duolingo’s training p...
Jun 06, 2023•32 min•Season 3Ep. 23
As the milestone book Atomic Habits laid out, the key to life-changing habits is adopting one effectively and then layering another desirable habit on top of it. The same is true for efficiencies in software engineering. When your team adopts one efficiency, sees it bear fruit, then adds the next efficiency habit on top of it, the result is compounding efficiencies. In this conversation, LinearB’s CTO Yishai Beeri reveals the data on compound efficiencies as experienced by real dev teams out in ...
May 30, 2023•44 min•Season 3Ep. 22
Imagine a future where anyone can be a musician. Now ask yourself what that has in common with building Twitter Spaces. The answer? Org-based innovation. On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we’re joined by the talented Pablo Jablonski, the engineer responsible for leading the team behind Spaces. Today, Pablo is reshaping the music industry as the VP of Engineering at United Masters. In this free-flowing conversation we unravel the intricacies of building Spaces, discuss Twitter’s pivotal ...
May 23, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 21
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we talk to Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, and author of the book Learning eBPF: Programming the Linux Kernel for Enhanced Observability, Networking, and Security . Liz is an expert on open source, containers, and cloud-native technologies, and joins us to discuss her book, what she describes as some of the eBPF "superpowers" people are talking about, and some of the fascinating projects surrounding eBPF like Project Kepler. Liz also g...
May 16, 2023•38 min•Season 3Ep. 20
The tech industry has seen a significant change in the skills, qualifications, and titles listed in job postings over the past few years. What does that mean for companies - and for the candidates themselves? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we talk to Maryam Jahanshahi co-founder and Head of R&D at Datapeople, who breaks down the biggest hiring trends in tech from title inflation to salary transparency and the skyrocketing costs of recruitment. Maryam also discusses how the storyt...
May 09, 2023•43 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Do our personal learning preferences actually affect how well we learn? And what makes learning new skills - like a programming language - so hard in the first place? On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we’re joined by Hywel Carver, founder & CEO at Skiller Whale. An expert in the principles and practices behind learning and knowledge retention, Hywel walks us through the best learning techniques for engineers. He also discusses how engineering leaders can upskill their teams without ...
May 02, 2023•42 min•Season 3Ep. 18
If you think your org doesn’t have any incidents, it’s time to change your definition of an incident. This week we’re joined by Nora Jones, Jeli's founder & CEO, to help us make sense of incident analysis and explain why so many incidents go underreported. Before beginning her journey as a founder, Nora helped pioneer chaos engineering at companies like Netflix and Slack where she developed a passion for understanding the intersection of software and people. A stellar engineer, manager &...
Apr 25, 2023•39 min•Season 3Ep. 17
Engineers make great entrepreneurs. So a startup that has two engineers as its founders must be twice as good, right? Not exactly. On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we talk to Jake Lumetta, founder & CEO of ButterCMS. A serial entrepreneur, Jake found success (and failure) with numerous startups before striking it big with ButterCMS. He joins us today to discuss practical advice for engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, like knowing when to step away from the keyboard and handover the cod...
Apr 18, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 16
It hasn't been smooth sailing for startups this year. As this week's guest Nick Cobb puts it "You can add bank runs to the list of things founders have to deal with." Of course, it hasn't been easy going for engineering leaders either. That's why Nick, the VP of Engineering & Head of Product at Kyte, sat down with us to discuss how to build an engineering culture with a bias toward action, why he deleted his team's staging environment, and what it takes to outmaneuver his former employer, Ub...
Apr 11, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 15
What does building an engaged community really mean for your business? When we look at a company like Postman with over 20 million active users and one of the most passionate groups of evangelizers in tech, we find that Postman's story is really a story of community success. In fact, after product-market fit, community has become a must-have for any startup looking to survive. But community building is a tricky thing, so where and how do you start? On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, list...
Apr 04, 2023•29 min•Season 3Ep. 14
"DevOps is dead." Well, not exactly. But the DevOps methodology of "you build it, you run it" has been failing development teams for years. On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Kaspar von Grünberg, founder & CEO of Humanitec. Listen as Kaspar explains the significant cognitive load placed on developers as a result of DevOps practices, how that has caused software engineering to be the only industry since Medieval times not to drive towards specialization, and why platf...
Mar 28, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? That's the question posed by authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais in their highly-acclaimed book, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we revisit Dan's 2021 conversation with Matthew and Manuel. Since first airing, the...
Mar 21, 2023•48 min•Season 3Ep. 12
It's time to make noise. Developers need to take back their happiness and their productivity. But where should they start? On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we're joined by Justin Reock, Field CTO and Chief Evangelist at Gradle. With a mission to mitigate the toil, friction, and frustration felt by so many developers, Justin has become a tireless advocate of Developer Productivity Engineering. Listen as Justin explains DPE by exploring the connections between productivity, developer exp...
Mar 14, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 11
No company is immune to transformation, not even one with as storied a history as IBM. This week on Dev Interrupted, Rosalind Radcliffe, the CIO DevSecOps CTO at IBM, joins us to chat about how one of tech's greatest legacy companies is positioning itself for the future. Rosalind shares what it means to be named an IBM Fellow, her work to bring DevOps and open source to the z/OS environment, and what the future looks like at IBM. [Hint: it involves quantum computing and AI!] OFFERS Start Free Tr...
Mar 07, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Whether you're at a startup, enterprise, or something in between, authorization and access control are likely major pain points for your team. This week on Dev Interrupted we talk to Omri Gazitt, co-founder and CEO of Aserto. Omri joins us to chat about the future of authorization, how to handle access control on your team, and how to avoid the toil and tech debt often associated with access control. Show Notes From Aserto's blog: Why multi-tenant SaaS applications need real access control from ...
Feb 28, 2023•38 min•Season 3Ep. 9
The days of growth at all costs are over; your 2023 engineering strategy needs to be about scaling efficiently. In the first Labs episode of the year, Dan invites LinearB's VP of Product, Eran Shitrit, on the show to discuss how teams are proactively addressing concerns around cost reduction and efficiency through smarter project allocation. Dan and Eran also discuss the rollout of LinearB's resource allocation dashboard and the success of the Scaling Developer Efficiency workshop. Show Notes Wa...
Feb 21, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 8
A decades-old physical goods manufacturing concept is being applied to modern dev teams with great results. What can software development learn from the past? Value Stream Management (VSM) has been a focus of business and manufacturing for years but big tech has only recently taken notice. Steve Pereira, a.k.a. "The VSM Guy", joins us to talk about what engineering leaders can learn from VSM, its impact on individual and team workflow, how it differs from Agile and DevOps, and why its emphasis o...
Feb 14, 2023•43 min•Season 3Ep. 7
