The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast - podcast cover

The Tech Debt Burndown Podcast

Chris Swan and Nick Selby, two long-time technology industry and information security leaders, discuss issues related to reducing technical debt.

Episodes

S2E1 Krzysztof "Chris" Daniel

Krzysztof - Chris - Daniel talks to Nick and Chris about Wardley Mapping and better corporate strategies.

Jan 09, 202342 minSeason 2Ep. 1

S1E11- Allan Friedman and SBOMs

Allan Friedman of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has long been one of the world's leading proponents of Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM. With the President's Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, SBOM has begun to receive the wider attention it deserves, and Allan joins Chris and Nick to discuss SBOM and how it can help with tech debt burndown.

Jun 20, 202128 min

S1 E10 - Eoin Woods on Identifying Tech Debt

Eoin Woods has developed quite a bit of software, and created and dealt with quite a lot of technical debt. He is CTO at Endava, and co-author of two software architecture books. On the Tech Debt Burndown he joins Chris and Nick to talk about his role in the International Conference on Technical Debt and some of the research highlighted in the virtual 2021 edition of that conference, as well as his own personal experiences in the field.

Jun 13, 202126 min

Episode 9 - Observability With Charity Majors

Charity Majors joins Nick and Chris to discuss the difference between observability and metrics, some great insights into good debt (like college loans) versus bad debt (like charging stuff we want on a credit card), and thoughts on efficiency.

Jun 06, 202132 min

Episode 9a: Memorial Day/Spring Bank Holiday Weekend

With the US closed for Memorial Day weekend, and the UK closed for Spring Bank Holiday, we're firing up the grills, and pausing to reflect. In the next few episodes, we'll discuss toil and build times with Charity Majors, Tech Debt burndown strategies with Eoin Woods, the Biden Executive Order with Yosef Lehrman, SBOMs with Allan Friedman, and much, much more!

May 29, 20211 min

Episode 8: The Six Ways with Olivier Jacques

On this episode, Chris and Nick are joined by Olivier Jacques, DevOps transformation principal at DXC Technology, who discusses his article, Six Strategies to Set Time Aside to Improve. The six approaches capture some very insightful observations into technical debt burndown.

May 23, 202134 min

Episode 6-The Flow

Lots of things get improved by building continuous delivery pipelines and then going back to them and iteratively making improvements. Pipelines themselves can be a place where we accrue tech debt - even at the entry point to those pipelines. So let's look at branching strategies.

May 09, 202130 min

Episode 4 - The Report with Wendy Nather

When Wendy Nather began work as an information security analyst, she started asking her CISO friends a question: ‘If you just took a CISO job at a company that had no security, what would you buy?’ The answers fascinated her. Now at Duo (Cisco), she set out to formalize research that was released as Cisco Secure’s Security Outcomes Study. Wendy discusses the process on this week’s podcast.

Apr 25, 202126 min

Episode 3: Supply Chain Attacks and Tech Debt

We’ve been hearing about software supply chain vulnerabilities quite a bit lately, from Solar Winds to CodeCov. How do these relate to technical debt? Ah, that’s a complicated questions, because each of its components are discussing complex things. In this episode, Chris and Nick try to hash it out, and to sort through what’s important.

Apr 18, 202130 min