Why do companies with the best intentions end up betraying their customers, employees, and mission? Eric Ries calls it “financial gravity” — an invisible force that pulls even the most principled companies toward corruption, and understanding it is the first step to resisting it. In this episode, Eric Ries, entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, shares why building a great company isn’t just about having a strong vision — it’s about building structures that protect that v...
Jun 01, 2026•1 hr•Ep. 259
What if faster coding is actually slowing your software delivery down? Most teams are pouring AI into the coding phase, but the real bottleneck is everywhere else. In this episode, Andrew Haschka, Field CTO at GitLab for Asia Pacific and Japan, explains why most AI strategies in software engineering are failing and what it takes to fix them. He introduces the AI paradox: teams invest heavily in AI-assisted coding, yet coding accounts for less than 20% of the software delivery lifecycle, leaving ...
May 18, 2026•1 hr•Ep. 258
(07:22) Brought to you by Mailtrap Mailtrap is a modern email delivery for developers with native SDKs support along with security compliant API & SMTP. Plus, you get 4,000 emails a month completely on their free tier! It also provides 24/7 support where you actually talk to real people, not an AI chatbot. Try Mailtrap for free at mailtrap.io . What does code review mean when AI writes most of the code? The answer isn’t to review more carefully. It’s a fundamentally different process, one ...
May 04, 2026•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 257
(05:00) Brought to you by Mailtrap Mailtrap is a modern email delivery for developers with native SDKs support along with security compliant API & SMTP. Plus, you get 4,000 emails a month completely on their free tier! It also provides 24/7 support where you actually talk to real people, not an AI chatbot. Try Mailtrap for free at mailtrap.io . What happens when AI ships code faster than your team can review it? As agentic development accelerates your SDLC, the guardrails matter more than ev...
Apr 27, 2026•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 256
What if vibe coding is the worst thing you could do with AI agents? The developers seeing the biggest gains aren’t prompting harder. They’re planning smarter, spec-first, and treating AI as a facilitator rather than a code generation engine. In this episode, Brian Madison, creator of the BMad Method, shares how a year of late-night AI experiments led him to a structured, Agile-inspired approach to building software with AI agents. Brian explains why jumping straight into agent mode without upfro...
Apr 20, 2026•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 255
Why do 80-95% of AI initiatives fail — and why is your organization’s structure to blame? Most companies are treating AI like a software upgrade, when it actually demands a complete rewiring of how work gets done. In this episode, Melissa Reeve, author of Hyperadaptive and organizational change expert, shares a practical model for transforming legacy enterprises into AI-native organizations built to thrive — not just survive — in the age of AI. Drawing on her experience with the Toyota Productio...
Apr 13, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 254
What does it take to build a world-class engineering culture when you start with five engineers on minimum wage? Tommy Sullivan did exactly that at Vidio — and the team’s average tenure of seven years tells you everything about whether it worked. In this episode, Tommy Sullivan, CTO of Vidio (Indonesia’s largest streaming platform) shares how he built an engineering culture from almost nothing, growing a team of five to over two hundred using Extreme Programming principles and a relentless focus...
Apr 06, 2026•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 253
Why do so many talented senior engineers struggle the moment they step into a tech lead role? Most of them are promoted based on their coding ability, but that same strength becomes a liability the moment they start leading a team. In this episode, Anemari Fiser, tech lead coach and author of “Leveling Up as a Tech Lead”, shares the three mindset shifts that define the transition from senior engineer to effective tech lead: moving from an “I” to a “We” mindset, shifting focus from code to value,...
Mar 30, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 252
In a world where AI can build your MVP overnight, what actually gives you a lasting competitive edge? Andrew Stevens argues it’s not the software — it’s the data, the trust, and the systems you build around them. In this episode, Andrew Stevens, CTO of Sakura Sky and a technology leader with 30+ years of experience building, scaling, and selling companies, shares hard-won lessons from his journey across startups, enterprises, and AI ventures. He explains why product-market fit matters more than ...
Mar 16, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 251
With AI generating code faster than ever, coding alone is no longer enough. The engineers who will stand out aren’t the ones who write the most code, but the ones who know what to build and why. In this episode, Drew Hoskins, author of “The Product-Minded Engineer”, shares how engineers can develop the product thinking skills that will define their careers in the AI era. Drew draws on his experience as a senior staff engineer at Microsoft, Meta, and Stripe to explain why the best engineers care ...
Mar 09, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 250
What if the MCP server you installed last week is silently leaking your emails to a stranger? The AI tools boosting your productivity could already be your biggest security liability. MCP (Model Context Protocol) has quickly become the standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data sources. But as adoption accelerates, so do the risks – from malicious servers harvesting your credentials in the background, to local processes exposed to your entire network with no authentication. Mos...
Mar 02, 2026•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 249
Think you’re just “not a people person”? Most tech leaders quietly believe this about themselves, and it’s exactly what’s holding them back. In this episode, Martijn Versteeg, founder of peer leadership community Group Effort and former CPTO with a background in organizational psychology, makes the case that it’s not: human behavior follows predictable patterns you can understand and work with, just like any system. The conversation covers a six-variable model for understanding what drives behav...
Feb 23, 2026•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 248
Is your platform engineering initiative struggling to deliver results? The problem might not be your tools or technology at all. In this episode, Sam Barlien, Community Organizer at Platform Engineering (the world’s largest platform engineering community), shares insights from speaking with nearly 400 engineering leaders last year about why their platform initiatives succeed or fail. The biggest revelation: it’s almost never about the tools. Sam explains why treating your internal platform like ...
Feb 16, 2026•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 247
(05:13) Brought to you by Sweep AI Sweep is the fastest coding assistant for JetBrains. It lets you write code 10x faster. Finally, AI that works in JetBrains. Download for free at sweep.dev . What if Southeast Asia had its own ChatGPT that cost 20x less? Bruce Yang built Agnes AI to solve what global companies ignore: accessible AI for emerging markets. In this episode, Bruce Yang, CEO and founder of Agnes AI, explains how he’s built Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing AI platform with 4 million...
Feb 02, 2026•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 246
(05:22) Brought to you by Cyberhaven AI is exfiltrating your data in fragments. Not one big breach — a prompt here, a screenshot there, a quiet export into a shadow AI tool. Every week, AI makes your team faster and your data harder to see. Files are moved to new SaaS apps, models are trained on sensitive inputs, and legacy DLP is blind to the context that matters most. On February 3rd at 11 am Pacific, Cyberhaven is unveiling a unified DSPM and DLP platform, built on the original data lineage, ...
Jan 26, 2026•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 245
(06:23) Brought to you by Sweep AI Sweep is the fastest coding assistant for JetBrains. It lets you write code 10x faster. Finally, AI that works in JetBrains. Download for free at sweep.dev . Is the era of writing code by hand coming to an end? Gene Kim explains how vibe coding solved problems he abandoned for 13 years and why the best days of coding might be ahead of us. In this episode, Gene Kim shares his transformation from someone who hadn’t written production code in decades to building a...
Jan 19, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 244
Why are tech companies really laying off developers? The uncomfortable truth has nothing to do with AI efficiency and everything to do with running out of ideas. In this episode, Stephan Schmidt, CTO coach and author of “The Amazing CTO’s Missing Manual,” shares a perspective on AI adoption that most tech leaders aren’t talking about. Developer layoffs aren’t about AI replacing jobs; they reveal a deeper problem. Product management has become a bottleneck, creating shallow features just to keep ...
Jan 12, 2026•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 243
(04:11) Brought to you by Jellyfish AI tools alone won’t transform your engineering org. Jellyfish provides insights into AI tool adoption, cost, and delivery impact – so you can make better investment decisions and build teams that use AI effectively. See for yourself at jellyfish.co/platform/ai-impact . Are you managing your team the same way you did five years ago? With AI agents now part of the workforce, the old playbook no longer applies. In this episode, Jurgen Appelo, author of “Human Ro...
Dec 08, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 242
(04:00) Brought to you by Unleash Unleash is a private, flexible, and scalable feature flag system that lets teams decouple deployments from releases. It reduces the risk of shipping new features and gives organizations real-time control over what reaches production. And as AI accelerates development, Unleash helps engineering teams move fast and stay stable with safe rollouts and instant kill switches. Start a free trial of Unleash at getunleash.io/pricing . Why do so many software projects s...
Dec 01, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 240
(06:03) Brought to you by Unleash Unleash is a private, flexible, and scalable feature flag system that lets teams decouple deployments from releases. It reduces the risk of shipping new features and gives organizations real-time control over what reaches production. And as AI accelerates development, Unleash helps engineering teams move fast and stay stable with safe rollouts and instant kill switches. Start a free trial of Unleash at getunleash.io/pricing . Are you making critical decisions wi...
Nov 24, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 240
(06:06) Brought to you by Jellyfish AI tools alone won’t transform your engineering org. Jellyfish provides insights into AI tool adoption, cost, and delivery impact – so you can make better investment decisions and build teams that use AI effectively. See for yourself at jellyfish.co/platform/ai-impact . Why do organizations constantly complain about having too much technical debt? Because they’re solving the wrong problem. In this episode, Dr. Andrew Brown, author of “Taming Your Dragon: Addre...
Nov 17, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 239
Why does an AI that brilliantly generates code suddenly fail at basic math? The answer explains why your LLM will fail when you least expect it. In this episode, Emmanuel Maggiori, author of “Smart Until It’s Dumb” and “The AI Pocket Book,” cuts through the AI hype to reveal what LLMs actually do and, more importantly, what they can’t. Drawing from his experience building AI systems and witnessing multiple AI booms and busts, Emmanuel explains why machine learning works brilliantly until it make...
Nov 10, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 238
Can decades-old management philosophy actually help us tackle AI’s biggest challenges? In this episode, John Willis, a foundational figure in the DevOps movement and co-author of the DevOps Handbook, takes us through Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge and its surprising relevance to today’s most pressing challenges. John reveals how Deming’s four-lens framework—theory of knowledge, understanding variation, psychology, and systems thinking—provides a practical approach to managi...
Nov 03, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 237
In this episode, Honey Mittal, CEO and co-founder of Locofy.ai, explores one of the most exciting transformations in software development: the convergence of design and engineering through AI-powered automation. Honey shares the fascinating journey of building Locofy, a tool that converts Figma designs into production-ready front-end code. But this isn’t just another AI hype story. It’s a deep dive into why Large Language Models (LLMs) fundamentally can’t solve design-to-code problems, and why h...
Oct 27, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 236
Can you navigate AI disruption without understanding your landscape? Discover how to gain true situational awareness. The rise of AI has exposed a fundamental problem in how organizations make decisions. Most leaders operate using stories and graphs, not actual maps of their landscape. This leaves them vulnerable to disruption and unable to make informed choices about where to apply new technologies. The result is chaos, waste, and strategic mistakes that could have been avoided. In this episode...
Oct 13, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 235
How much of your code exists only to prevent failures? Discover a new paradigm for building reliable applications. In this episode, Preeti Somal, SVP at Temporal, explores a paradigm shift that can dramatically boost productivity and give developers peace of mind. Drawing on her experience leading massive infrastructure at Yahoo and HashiCorp, she explains Temporal’s concept of durable execution that helps developers focus on business logic and remove reliability concerns. Preeti also discusses ...
Oct 06, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 234
“Engineering leaders are stuck between the expectations put out by sensational headlines and the reality of what they’re seeing in their organization. There’s a big disappointment gap.” Is your AI investment paying off? Many leaders struggle to see real ROI beyond the hype. In this episode, Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, shares DX’s new research on measuring AI adoption success across 38,000+ engineers. Our conversation reveals why acceptance rates are misleading metrics and introduces DX’s new AI Meas...
Sep 29, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 233
“Architecture is something that has to emerge naturally from the code. If it doesn’t make the code better, more elegant, and more flexible, then you should not be doing it.” Why do so many developers have a love-hate relationship with ORM? The creator of Hibernate reveals the real reasons behind the controversy and what’s being done to fix the fundamental issues. In this episode, Gavin King, the creator of Hibernate, shares the story behind its creation, from a debate with his boss to its rise a...
Sep 22, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 232
Are long code review cycles killing your engineering team’s velocity? Learn how top engineering teams are shipping code faster without sacrificing quality. In this episode, Greg Foster, CTO and co-founder of Graphite, discusses the evolution of code review practices, from the fundamentals of pull requests to the future of AI in code review workflows. He shares the secrets behind how the Graphite team became one of the most productive engineering teams by leveraging techniques like small code cha...
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 231
Struggling with technical debt and code quality? Learn how a technical coach can help your team level up. In this episode, Emily Bache, a Samman technical coach, shares her proven method for building better engineering teams through structured learning and collaborative coding. We explore ensemble programming, learning hours, and why AI makes fundamental engineering practices more important than ever. Key topics discussed: The role of a Technical Coach and the Samman Method explained How AI ampl...
Aug 25, 2025•57 min•Ep. 230
