“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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “Your digital agenda is your business agenda. You got to be very deliberate and intentional about your transformation journey. You do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you got to figure out what is that right thing for your organization." Johnny Wijaya is the Head of Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon APAC Innovation Center. In this episode, we learn from Johnny the sustainable innovation story at BNY Mellon, being an internationally renowned financial institution for over 237 years. Being a...
Mar 22, 2021•46 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast “Be the supply to the unmet demand. Things that you could make a huge difference on if only you just go and do it. You don’t need to seek permission. That’s how you end up growing and being noticed." Annie Vella is a technologist with almost two decades of hands-on software engineering and technology leadership experience. In this episode, Annie shared her engineering career dilemma story, why she resisted getting into management early in her career. She highlighted why women get singled out for...
Mar 15, 2021•56 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast “If a user is even reading documentation that a technical writer has produced, they’re probably already annoyed." Helen Scott is a technical writer and Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. In this episode, we discussed many things about technical writing, such as the technical writer role definition, the traits of a good technical writer, and how to create a good technical content, including a few gotchas that a technical writer needs to be aware of. Helen also shared with me the concept of com...
Mar 08, 2021•54 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast “The output of a manager is the output of the manager’s team plus the output of the organization that they influence." James Stanier is the SVP Engineering at Brandwatch and author of “Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager”. In this episode, we explored on how one can become an effective software engineering manager and how to build and run effective engineering teams. We started off by discussing why the tech industry is facing a skill crisis because of the inability of many managers...
Mar 01, 2021•56 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast “I truly believe that what set the superstars or people who are very successful is the ability to tell to themselves to quit. Winners quit fast and quit without guilt." Doron Shachar is an Israeli entrepreneur living in Vietnam over the past 12 years and the founder & CEO of Renova Cloud, an AWS and GCP Consulting Partner in Vietnam. In this episode, we looked at the essence of Israeli entrepreneurship as we first learned about Doron’s childhood & education in Israel and how he built val...
Feb 22, 2021•49 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast "Most people confuse a technical capability with technology. Ultimately, technology is a technical capability plus the human outcome that it creates." Tim Kobe is a design leader, author, and founder of Eight Inc., a global award-winning strategic design firm also widely recognized as “Apple’s best kept secret”. In this episode, we looked at how successful brands build radical impact by creating ground-breaking human experiences with design. We started off with Tim’s career journey, the founding...
Feb 15, 2021•58 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast “When I think about well-crafted software, it’s code that we are not scared to change. The code clearly specifies what it does. When we change one part of it, don’t break the other. You always feel that you are in control. You are controlling the code, not the other way around." Sandro Mancuso is the author of “The Software Craftsman” and co-founder of Codurance. In this episode, Sandro shared his great insights on how developers can become a software craftsman by adopting professionalism, pragm...
Feb 08, 2021•56 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast “When you recruit an engineer on your team, you actually want to make sure from their first day on, you give them the smoothest entry into your company and help them and assist them in as many ways as you can to become productive as fast as possible." Tanaka Mutakwa is the VP of Engineering at Names & Faces and the founder of the Tech Leadership community in South Africa. In this episode, Tanaka shared with me his best practices for onboarding new technical hires and developers into the team...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast “I always deliver myself against these four things: you should stay true to learning; be curious, understand what is going on; optimize for people, don’t optimize for money; and if you want to do something, there’s only one reason to do it, that you want to do it." Ajey Gore is an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital India who was previously the Group CTO of Gojek. He helped build a strong Gojek engineering team with his passion, strategic insight, and innovative mindset, which was highly crucia...
Jan 25, 2021•57 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast “A retrospective is a time set aside where you are looking at what has happened, you’re appreciating what happened, and you’re learning from what happened. And then you improve the ways of how you’re doing things." Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, agile coach, and the founder of Metadeveloper. She recently published her book ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” that describes the antipatterns and mistakes that she has made from facilitating retrospectives for the past 15 years, and what w...
Jan 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast “Programmers have to come out of their cubicles. Innovative software development doesn’t happen with one person in a cubicle with great ideas. Because it’s not just even about code. Anybody can write code. It’s about what does the code accomplish. And if the code accomplishes something innovative, great!" Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and reactive software development. He is well-known for his best-selling DDD books and IDDD workshops. In this episode, we discus...
Jan 11, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast “The most important thing we can do in order to get whatever success we want—build the best product you can. Invest all your energy in making the product absolutely best that you can think of. If you really focus on building an absolutely best product possible, everything else will follow." Arno is an inspiring tech leader with decades of experience in two major creative companies—Apple and Adobe. I’m honored to have him sharing his career journey and passion in this episode. Arno shared his ama...
Dec 21, 2020•59 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast “With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with people, the interesting part is: if you get all the parts right, the sum of the parts will be definitely greater than adding them together." Ranganathan Balashanmugam is the co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams, where most of us can relate to with the remote working becoming a norm nowada...
Dec 14, 2020•56 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast “What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily teach fundamentals. When you start to focus on the fundamentals, then you don’t mentally get attached to one particular implementation." Kelsey Hightower is one of the leading figures in open source, cloud computing, and Kubernetes. I’m extremely excited to have him with me sharing a lot of his insights around many things in tech. We started the conver...
Dec 07, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast “Asynchronous communication promotes flow. And flow is generally what we’re all looking for. Not only because it’s more productive. Not only it’s because it’s within this state that we produce the best work. It’s also within this state that we feel the most fulfilled." Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, the remote-first company behind Todoist and Twist that has a mission of building the future of work by creating tools that promote more fulfilling ways to work and live. Doist has been a remote-first c...
Nov 30, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast “Having the conversation within the business, the data science teams, and the technology teams about what problems are you trying to solve? What can AI do with the data that you have? Sometimes business comes with a lot of problems that are like science-fiction." Feng-Yuan is the co-founder and CEO of BasisAI, a Singapore-headquartered augmented intelligence software company that helps data-driven enterprises deploy AI responsibly. He has a vast experience in the tech sector, working with the La...
Nov 23, 2020•52 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast “The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much." Gergely is a seasoned software engineer and engineering manager, previously worked in hypergrowth companies such as Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype. He is the author of “The Tech Resume Inside Out” book and “The Pragmatic Engineer” blog. In this episode, he shared about his interesting programmer-to-manager career journ...
Nov 16, 2020•58 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast “Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s job. It’s the CEO’s job." Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore who played a major part in the Office 365 founding team. In this episode, I had an inspiring discussion with him around his journey founding the Office 365, the challenges he faced, and on how to approach digital transformation adoption. Our conversation started with some interesti...
Nov 09, 2020•50 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast “Goal on the behaviors that matter. Don’t goal on your vanity metrics. Figure out what it is that, not just works for your product, but also for you as an individual." Crystal Widjaja is a startup growth advisor and a Forbes 30 Under 30. She was most recently the SVP of Business Intelligence and Growth for Gojek. She is also the co-founder of Generation Girl, a non-profit organization that introduces young girls to STEM. In this episode, I had a fascinating chat with Crystal on many things about...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast “You can run an organization where you communicate clearly, and you treat people fairly, and you try to set people up for success. I have seen it work, and I can make that happen, and I remember that it is possible." Hongyi is the Director of Open Government Products, a division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. He leads an experimental team of engineers, designers, and product managers who build technology for the public good, such as Data.gov.sg, Parking.sg, FormSG, Go.gov.sg, ...
Oct 26, 2020•46 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast “Courage needs to be emphasized even more in software development context. That’s related with respect. We cannot expect the developers will be courageous, to tell the truth, to have integrity, unless the organization, the management respect them as a professional." Joshua initially started his career as a software developer, but over time became more interested in the people aspect of software development, which then brought his interest in Scrum. He has a decade of experience as a Scrum Master...
Oct 19, 2020•39 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 
