I had the chance to talk to Eric Johnson, the CTO of GitLab about - How to manage remote teams: async, stand-ups, onboarding, burn out, internships, compensation, and more - How Gitlab uses git for everything from Marketing to Policy - The difference between servant-leadership and situational leadership and when to use what + A message to those who think parenthood :children_crossing:might take away from their career If you loved his straight-talking ReadMe about himself, you will also like this...
Jun 03, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast This Podcast episode is DOOMed 🔥🌋😈🧟🕯👿☠👹🦹 I had the chance to talk to John Romero, the inventor of DOOM, Wolfenstein and Commander Keen and founder of id Software about * Developing games in the early 90s and how they developed DOOM in a crazy small team * Developing games in 2021 and how it’s still possible to develop games with only a single person team * The crazy amounts of money they made with DOOM 🤑💶🤑 * The crazy amounts of energy drinks they consumed * Why not he would not start...
May 20, 2021•52 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Today with me in the Podcast is Tim O'Reilly, the Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media and boy, his 1,5 million twitter followers are there for a reason! People call him "the Oracle of the Silicon Valley", he came up with the term "Web 2.0" - This man is crazy a wizard! We spoke about: * Writing as superpower! How it helps you to structure your thoughts. * How he started OSCON and great nerdy 90s * The big tectonic "Platform changes" and how the giants use "Algorithmic Rents" to silently put more mon...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we dive deep into the principles of Blockchain together with Peter Grosskopf who is our guest for the 2nd time. Peter recently quit his job as CTO @ Börse Stuttgart to fully focus on building a decentralized bank in the DeFi (Decentralize finance) space. We spoke about: * How does a blockchain work * Why to use blockchains * Concrete use-cases and applications * How ether works and how to get started
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast This time I had Olivier Bonnet, the CTO of BlaBlaCar in the podcast. BlaBlaCar is the carpooling company: They own the market. They are active in 22 Countries, have 100M+ Users and acquired 12 other carpooling companies. Olivier, the CTO, joined me to talk about: * How his time at Apple taught him to think long term * 100 million users, 12 acquisitions: The strategy behind BlaCar * The complexity of route planning 🌐 * How writing 🖊️ helps people at Bla to structure their thoughts: They are w...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast How to make a living from Open Source? My guest Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of ☁️☁️ NextCloud ☁️☁️ the open alternative to Google Cloud and Microsofts Office 365 (!) does it for years and tells us where to start. He knows the game! **Other topics we touch?** - The 3 Ultimate tipps for open source developers/publishers How he leads his team of 50+ FTE almost fully remote - How GDPR can be seen as a chance for European entrepreneurs - How he built his company without any VC money Thanks a lot Frank...
Mar 25, 2021•55 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode I talk to Jason Warner, Github CTO aka "the PaaS Guru". He used to work for Heroku before and explained what he's planning and executing at Github and how Github uses it's massive amount of data to go away from pure repo-hosting. Topics that stand out: * How microsoft is working out quite well for them (Careful: contains Steve Balmer rants) * How Github will revolutionize the Platform as a Service world (PaaS) * His thoughts about developer productivity and the broken idea of mea...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast This time I spoke to John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of 🌩 Cloudflare🌩, a publicly listed CDN and Edge Computing platform. Topics we touched: * His GNU Make book ;-) * How they grew to 25 BN marketcap 📈 * What he thinks about edge computing and concrete usecases for it * How COVID changed the 🥷 security world 🥷 * How they operate and maintain a global network with millions of servers Thanks a lot John for the Chat. Looking forward to see what Cloudflare comes up with next.
Feb 25, 2021•51 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast This time I'm talking to an absolute legend: Mitchell Hashimoto, the CTO of HashiCorp the company behind a series of brilliant open source products (Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant) that are highly successfully both business wise and community wise. I would even argue that HashiCorp is the only company that manages to do that. We talk about: * The path from 7 to 1000+ employees in the last 10 years 📈📈📈 * How Mitch is still able to be a very active github user and contribute a lot of code whi...
Feb 11, 2021•48 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Podcast time! In this episode I'm chatting with Jean-Denis Greze, the Head of Engineering @ Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Plaid is a fintech Unicorn from the US that just turned down an acquisition by Visa. We spoke about: * The upcoming topic 🔒 Privacy Engineering 🔒 and how it will change our thinking * How plaid handles 1000s of connections to banks and integrates with a lot of legacy APIs just fine * His thoughts around Defi and Blockchain * How they do good business ...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast This time in the podcast I have a very bright guest I admire for years: Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering at TomTom, Former VP Engineering at Zalando AND one of the developers behind the game "The Sims" 🧍♂️ He is a brilliant mind when it comes to tech leadership and has strong opinions on autonomy and empowerment. Topics we touched: * How 90s gaming development compares to 20s large scale tech teams * What TomTom does these days and the technical challenges in location based services & mapping thes...
Jan 14, 2021•57 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast This time, I have a very technical podcast on Webassembly and the new kid on the block: the Edge Cloud with Fastly's CTO Tyler McMullen, one of the leading CDNs and edge cloud companies out there. * The future of distributed computation: From Serverless to ☁️ Cloudless ☁️ * Webassembly as the new industry standard intermediate representation/micro container. And guess what? Your browser most likely already supports it! * How a CDN works internally and the challenges of building it * How he manag...
Dec 17, 2020•40 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast This time I had Jean Michel Lemieux or short JML, the CTO of 🛒 Shopify 🛒 in the podcast. Craziest fact: He took the time two days before black Friday 💥. In the podcast he also told me why. We spoke about: * His fight against crazy 👟 sneaker - sniping - bots and how Shopify keeps people in line happy with games * What it takes to run the largest Ruby on Rails (majestic ;-)) monolith on the planet * Why he does not believe in microservice architecture but still runs some services * How he keep...
Dec 03, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode I am thrilled to welcome David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, founder of Hey.com, book author of books like "Remote" or "It does not have to be crazy at work". Some topics we touched: * How David Discovered the magic of Ruby 💎 * How he finds moments of deep flow in programming and racing * Why Smartwatches are a gift from hell⌚ * Why the 60 hour work week is a stupid lie * Why he would immediately quit if he was hired as CTO of Zalando 👚 * How t...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Podcast time! This time I have the chance to talk to the judo brown belt owning CTO of the scooter& mobility startup TIER mobility Matthias Laug. Before TIER he co-founded Lieferando and boy, he's a nice guest to talk to. We spoke about: * Why he puts people over tech * What they use to run their large IoT stack * His vision of Scooters talking to each other in a huge mesh * Why he after founding Lieferando and having a large exit still started at Thoughtworks * When to not do backflips even if ...
Nov 05, 2020•46 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast This time I am talking to my friend Johannes Schaback, CTO of Home24, who is also originally a co-founder of alphalist and one of the brightest minds in the German engineering, tech and business-tech scene. We are talking about his journey through the AI and data world, the Do's and Don'ts and the real world, no bullshit application of machine learning. We are Tackle: * Data is the new oil - wrong or right? * The machine learning models @ Home24 * How ML-infrastructure evolved in the last decade...
Oct 22, 2020•55 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast In this podcast, it's all about complicated things and my guest masters them all: IoT, Robotics, AI and customer acquisition. Ahti Heinla is former founding engineer of Skype and now runs Starship Technologies as Founder and CTO. In this podcast we talk about * Robotics as the coolest thing to build as an engineer * How I stopped one of his Robots in Hamburg * The hard things about robots 🤖 * The hard things about bringing ML models to production Thanks again Ahti for being my guest and looking...
Oct 08, 2020•48 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Wow, my guest this time is able to see through the matrix 💊: It's Marty Cagan, inventor of product discovery and best selling author of the book "INSPIRED", one of the partners of the Silicon Valley Product Group and potentially the biggest eye opener for 90% of the delivery organizations out there: We are most likely doing our job wrong! He saw so much different product and delivery orgs from Apple to Google to Spotify and talks about his learnings: * How agile is interpreted wrong in 90% of t...
Sep 17, 2020•46 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast It's podcast-time! This time, I spoke to Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero 🍔 and formerly Rocket Internet 🚀 on how to scale an engineering org from 200 to 2000 people. Delivery Hero just entered the DAX a week ago and is worth almost 20 BN as of today. He shared his perspective and thoughts on: * How to measure software developers at scale * How they keep up the pace / velocity * What he thinks about OKRs * How they manage to integrate all the acquired entities and teams * Their secre...
Sep 03, 2020•49 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast This time, I have the honor to talk to Peter Grosskopf, CTO of Börse Stuttgart digital exchange and former CTO of Solarisbank. He's an amazing guy for philosophical discussions around finance, tech and we share one love that is no longer as cool as it was in the 00's: Ruby on rails! This time we discuss: * How he made regulations his hobby 👓 and wants developers to feel like working for Spotify or Soundcloud even with regulations in place * The do's and don'ts in Fintech * Why he rather picks m...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast I had the chance to interview Sergei Anikin about how to scale a SaaS product. Sergei Anikin comes with vast experience in “large scale tech” as he was with Skype when it was sold 3 times (eBay, Private Equity, Microsoft) and is CTO at 90-million funded pipedrive (CRM SaaS) now. Laser sharp focus on the essential features “Scaling problems are good problems to have” Microservices vs. Monoliths Team structure at scale: Missions and tribes (https://medium.com/pipedrive-engineering/scaling-pipedriv...
Aug 06, 2020•59 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast I had to deal with cybersecurity topics recently; I've even been in touch with the FBI 👮. On this occasion I invited a brilliant guest for the alphalist Podcast: It’s Mikko Hyppönen, a computer security specialist and scientific director at the security company F-Secure. He spent half of his life hacking and chasing hackers and he knows how to talk about it: I saw at least 3 TED Talks by him and yes, they are very entertaining and helpful. Key topics in the Podcast are: - The recent twitter hac...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast I am thrilled to announce this weeks podcast guest: Prof. Sebastian Thrun Brief overview: He is a Stanford professor, founder of Google X, built the first self driving car, won the Darpa-Award for it, started the online-academy Udacity and is now building autonomous planes at Kitty Hawk. Wow. Can you tell why I highly admire him and how excited I was when I won him for my podcast? We talked about the car nation in Germany, how competitive we are in the AI and software world, Stanford vs. TU-Muni...
Jul 09, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Tobias talks to Daniel Gebler, the CTO of the “Dutch supermarket unicorn” Picnic about his story from the 4k Demo Scene to operating and growing picnic to a billion Euros marketcap and 5000+ employees. Topics we touch in this episode: - How Picnic works - Why they chose to build an app-only platform - Picnics secret sauce in data science, supply chain and fulfillment - How there business and tech literally exploded with Corona - His thoughts on Microservices And many more! Thanks a lot to Daniel...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast In dieser Ausgabe begrüssen wir Jan Ramm, den CTO der FreeNow Gruppe (ehem. MyTaxi). Wir sprechen unter anderem - von seinem Werdegang vom Schulschwimmer zum CTO - wie und wo FreeNow seine Entwickler sucht & findet - wie sich der Mobility Markt entwickelt hat und noch entwickelt - was sein Blick auf Mobile-Frameworks ala Flutter ist. Danke an Jan für das tolle Gespräch.
Jun 11, 2020•43 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Stephan Schulze ist bei alphalist Mitglied der ersten Stunde. Als CTO von Project A hat er sehr viele Startup-Technologien von innen sehen - quasi der Mann, der schon alles gesehen hat ;-) Wir sprechen heute aus der Vogelperspektive unter anderem über folgende Themen: Tech in Project A Startups (Frameworks, Tools, Sprachen, Trends & Prozesse), seinen Einfluss als VC auf die Technologie in Project A Startups und natürlich über mein Lieblingsthema, die technical due diligence. Also den Qualitätsch...
May 28, 2020•55 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast In der heutigen Folge spreche ich mit Sebastian Betz, dem CO-CEO und CTO von About You über technologische Trends, Frameworks und aktuelle Hypes sowie seinen Job als CTO und wie der Tech Stack von about you unter der Motorhaube aussieht.
May 14, 2020•48 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
