“Understanding what makes code readable from a cognitive perspective will help you design better. There are so many areas of programming where knowing something about knowing is just going to make you happier and more effective." Felienne Hermans is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain” and an Associate Professor at Leiden University. She is also the creator of the Hedy programming language, the co-founder of Joy of Coding conference, and a host at Software Engineering Radio podcast. In this ep...
Oct 25, 2021•54 min•Ep. 61
“Software engineering involves a lot of decisions, and that decision has some trade-offs. We have pros and cons. It’s not like one decision is always better than the other." Tomasz Lelek is the author of “Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs”. In this episode, Tomasz shared what led him to write his book and one of the past software mistakes from his career experience. He also gave advice on how software developers should approach the potential software mistakes and explained some typical trade-offs ...
Oct 18, 2021•44 min•Ep. 60
“DevOps is about creating a collaborative environment between the development team and the operations team, and aligning goals and incentives between those two teams. Because so many of the problems that we encounter in life, not just even in technology, are due to misalignment of goals." Jeffery Smith is the author of “Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions” and the Director of Production Operations at Centro. In this episode, Jeffery described DevOps essentials and emphasized what DevOps i...
Oct 11, 2021•52 min•Ep. 59
“The main goal of unit testing is to enable sustainable growth of your software project that enables you to move faster with a more quality code base." Vladimir Khorikov is the author of “Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns” and the founder of Enterprise Craftsmanship blog. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about unit testing. Vladimir broke down the four pillars of unit testing and the anatomy of a good unit test, as well as mentioned a couple of common unit testing anti-patt...
Oct 04, 2021•53 min•Ep. 58
“Software telemetry is what you use to figure out what your production systems are doing. It’s all about shortening that feedback loop between the user experience and the engineers who are writing the user experience." Jamie Riedesel is a Staff Engineer at Dropbox working on the HelloSign product and also the author of “Software Telemetry”. In this episode, Jamie shared an overview of software telemetry and explained why it is important for us to understand how our production systems are behavin...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 57
“Good code should be resilient to bugs. It should make it easier to do the changes that you want to the system. Some refactoring could make it harder to make changes. So, if you guess wrongly the direction of the software, then it can have a negative effect." Christian Clausen is a Technical Agile Coach specializing in teaching teams on how to refactor their code properly. He is also the author of “Five Lines of Code”. In this episode, Christian explained in-depth about refactoring, when and how...
Sep 20, 2021•50 min•Ep. 56
“Decide where it is you’re going and what kind of career you need to live the life you want and aim for that really deliberately. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, then you never will get there." Don Jones is the author of “Own Your Tech Career” and the VP of Developer Skills at Pluralsight. In this episode, Don explained why it is important for us to understand the career we want and aim to build that career deliberately, instead of keep chasing promotion and more money continuously...
Sep 13, 2021•55 min•Ep. 55
“Going from development to management is not a promotion. It’s an entirely new career. And there is normally a lack of proper guidance for that." Alvaro Moya is the founder of Lidr, a community that prepares and transforms the tech leaders and CTOs of tomorrow through immersive, experiential, and community-driven programs. In this episode, Alvaro shared the story of Lidr and why he started it, learning from his own journey working in multiple startups and scaleups. Alvaro then shared his view on...
Sep 06, 2021•51 min•Ep. 54
“The whole point of microservices and adopting microservices is not to have microservices. The goal is to improve the software delivery key metrics, i.e. rapid, reliable, frequent, and sustainable delivery of software." Chris Richardson is a recognized thought leader in microservices and the author of “Microservices Patterns”. In this episode, we opened our conversation talking about the current state of microservices vs monolith architecture. Chris then explained why he thinks monolith is not a...
Aug 30, 2021•53 min•Ep. 53
“Seriously good software is not just software that works. It is not just software that satisfies its functional requirements, so it does the right thing, but it also does it in the right way." Marco Faella is an associate professor at the University of Naples Federico II and the author of “Seriously Good Software”. In this episode, Marco explained what he means by seriously good software, looking at software quality from multiple different perspectives. We then dived deep into several of those s...
Aug 23, 2021•53 min•Ep. 52
“The most important thing is to make it easy for people to contribute. And the second thing is to have as many people as possible. For that, you build a community, and decide what people you want in your community." Julien Dubois is the creator of JHipster and manages the Java Developer Advocacy team at Microsoft. In this episode, Julien shared about the state of Java for cloud native applications, as well as Java adoption within Microsoft and Azure. Julien also shared his story on founding JHip...
Aug 16, 2021•49 min•Ep. 51
“The cloud is a change in operating model. It isn’t IT procurement. If you don’t change the way your organization works, the cloud is going to look much more like another data center.“ Gregor Hohpe is the author of “Software Architect Elevator” and “Cloud Strategy”. In this episode, Gregor started our conversation by explaining the role of a software architect, the reason for the latest resurgence of the role, and his software architect elevator concept. He then described what a good architectur...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 50
“Kanban is a flow strategy that helps you to optimize the flow of value through your value streams from ideation to customer." Dimitar Karaivanov is a Lean-thinker, a Kanban practitioner, and the CEO and co-founder of Kanbanize. In this episode, Dimitar shared his story on how he got fascinated by the simplicity and the effectiveness of Kanban, which then led him to start Kanbanize. He shared in-depth the concept of Kanban and why Kanban becomes one of the most popular Lean practices. Dimitar th...
Aug 02, 2021•47 min•Ep. 49
“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to have changed in the environment. By becoming a better communicator, you will also become happier." Chris Laffra is an experienced and talented software engineer having worked in companies such as IBM, Google, and Uber. His wide variety of experiences ensures Chris understands what motivates engineers, what stresses them out, and how to help them get t...
Jul 26, 2021•59 min•Ep. 48
“Micro-frontends are representations of business subdomains. We should differentiate them from components, because components are solving technical problems. Micro-frontends are looking from the product side on how you can create value in isolation for your users." Luca Mezzalira is a Principal Architect at AWS, an expert on micro-frontends, and the author of the upcoming “Building Micro-Frontends” book. In this episode, Luca described the concept of micro-frontends in-depth, along with the wher...
Jul 19, 2021•52 min•Ep. 47
“Business agility is a set of organizational capabilities, behaviors, and ways of working that afford your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, no matter what the future brings." Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of Business Agility Institute. In this episode, Evan shared about the current maturity of agile adoption and how agile has matured over the years by looking at 3 different agility categories, including business agility. Evan then explained further...
Jul 12, 2021•51 min•Ep. 46
“A lot of us in clinical practice always thought of technology as a tool. Today, technology has become not just a “what”, but it’s become a “how”. That means how you practice medicine can be enabled through technology itself." Dr. Yong Chern Chet is the founding COO of a Southeast Asian region early stage digital health start-up headquartered in Singapore with a simple mission of enabling “Better Healthcare for All”. In this episode, Dr. Chet shared about the current challenges in healthcare and...
Jul 05, 2021•50 min•Ep. 45
“Practices and principles are necessary and useful, but they should be informed by what the constraints are in the first place. We need to acknowledge the constraints, and then build and decide on practices and principles based on that." Manuel Pais is the co-author of “Team Topologies” and a DevOps thought leader, focusing on team interactions, delivery practices, and accelerating flow. In this episode, Manuel shared great insights from his book “Team Topologies”, starting from highlighting som...
Jun 28, 2021•52 min•Ep. 44
“Hybrid work is here to stay. It is going to continue. But we want to make sure that it comes in a way that’s equitable and everyone gets to experience the benefits of it." Dr. Jenna Butler is a Visiting Research Fellow at Microsoft Research in the Productivity and Intelligence Team. She is also an adjunct Professor at Bellevue College in radiation therapy. In this episode, Dr. Jenna shared about the SPACE of developer productivity framework and how developer teams can use the 5 dimensions to me...
Jun 21, 2021•58 min•Ep. 43
“Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on the system in order to increase your confidence that the system will survive difficult conditions." Mikołaj Pawlikowski is an engineering lead at Bloomberg and the author of “Chaos Engineering: Site reliability through controlled disruption“. In this episode, Miko shared about what chaos engineering is, including clarifications on some of the common misconceptions. Miko also mentioned about the chaos engineering tools, steps and prerequisi...
Jun 14, 2021•53 min•Ep. 42
“Back when work from home became suddenly virtually overnight, it was all about enabling the business to continue. A lot of this move was rushed out of necessity, but the focus was on speed. The focus was not on security. And security took a backseat." Tony Jarvis is a CISO advisor and cybersecurity strategist who has advised Fortune 500 clients across the world and served as a thought leader within the industry. In this episode, Tony shared about the importance of network and Operating System k...
Jun 07, 2021•59 min•Ep. 41
“By and large, the way people put together the delivery process is by gut and instinct. The next step up from there is to use the data that comes out of your system to help you make the right decisions. When I say data-driven DevOps, don’t rely on this human experience, and let the system tell you. We should be able to find that kind of information from data." Kohsuke Kawaguchi is widely known as the creator of Jenkins and currently is the co-CEO & co-founder of Launchable. In this episode, ...
May 24, 2021•50 min•Ep. 40
“Technology is really impacting our daily life, sometimes without us knowing, and it’s important that we start understanding or relearning what is ABCDEFG. In the future of business, or future of work, there are many use cases of technology that are non-traditional, non-techie people need to learn and know how to use them." Jim Lim is the founder of the socio-techno network 59stVentures, the healthcare sector lead for NCS, and previously the CEO of Good Doctor Technology. In this episode, I had ...
May 17, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 39
“Tech Capital is about creating something that enables things that weren’t possible before, that genuinely helps the business and enables other people in your organization, and those are the kind of stuffs that eventually end up paying long term." Aviv Ben-Yosef is an advisor and consultant for tech executives to help them create world-class engineering teams. In this episode, Aviv shared with me in-depth about “The Tech Executive Operating System“, his latest book for first-timers and veteran t...
May 10, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 38
“Lean Inception is about aligning a group of people to be successful. It’s about aligning the vision and the MVP from three different angles: the business, the users, and the engineers, so they align and decide what is the very first step." Paulo Caroli is a Principal consultant at Thoughtworks, co-founder of Agile Brazil, and the author of the best-seller Lean Inception and the recent FunRetrospectives. In this episode, Paulo shared in-depth with me about Lean Inception, its connection with Lea...
May 03, 2021•56 min•Ep. 37
“A high-performing team is one that gets to spend almost all of their time solving interesting problems that move the business forward. Not doing a lot of toil. Not working on things they have to do in order to get to the things they want to do." Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, the observability tools for engineering teams to debug production systems faster and smarter. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about building high-performing teams by having observability and ...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 36
“One of the technological opportunities that we have taken during the pandemic has been transforming the mindset to thinking on products, to thinking on platforms. And I think that’s the foundations of the super app." Pablo Sanz is the CTO of AirAsia. In this episode, Pablo shared with me the tough challenges that AirAsia had to go through during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has to pivot and transform in order to survive. He explained what the AirAsia leadership team did to align the...
Apr 19, 2021•54 min•Ep. 35
“Developer productivity is not lines of code written. It’s not the number of commits. It has to do with the ultimate problem you’re solving and the users that you’re solving it for." Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a developer tools company that brings universal code search capability for developers. In this episode, Beyang shared with me his perspective about developers’ productivity and how we should go about measuring developers’ productivity, including the danger of meas...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 34
“Simplicity is an experience that makes things easy for users that leaves positive emotions." Jin Kang Møller is an award-winning customer experience strategist, design practitioner, and the author of “The Simplicity Playbook for Innovators“. She was the driving force behind FRANK by OCBC and OCBC OneWealth app that won her a Singapore Good Design Mark Gold award in 2017. In this episode, Jin shared with me her insightful perspectives on simplicity and how simplicity naturally leads to innovatio...
Apr 05, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 33
“The CIO is a person who uses IT to facilitate and enable a company so that it becomes more competitive, and it becomes more profitable." Alex Siow is currently a Professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Director of NUS’s Advanced Computing for Executives. With a career that spans over four decades, Alex Siow is well-known as Singapore’s first CIO in the 1990s. He recently published a book, “Leading with IT: Lessons from Singapore’s First CIO”, which...
Mar 29, 2021•54 min•Ep. 32
