Podcasts

[Video Podcast] The Craft of Software Architecture in the Age of AI Tools

AI coding assistants promise speed, but what do they mean for quality, trust, and the architect’s craft? In this inaugural episode of Next Gen Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Grady Booch explore a principled view of how architecture must evolve when machines begin writing code alongside humans. They unpack the third golden age of software engineering, where productivity gains are real.

[Video Podcast] Improving Valkey with Madelyn Olson

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and a Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. The conversation covers how Valkey started as an open source fork of Redis and how the maintainers optimized the memory usage and improved throughput.

Developers Can Improve the ESG Aspects of Software by Tackling Early Ethical Debt

Erica Pisani, host of the Performance and Sustainability track at QCon London 2025, reflects on lessons from assembling the track and from attending the talks. She touches on the importance of the environmental and social aspects of software and hints at how developers can improve them through small steps in the architecture and practices of software development.

Startup Software Architecture - You Never Really Throw it Away: a Conversation with David Gudeman

In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with David Gudeman about software architecture for startups. The discussion starts by illuminating how to make decisions with imperfect information, and how uncertainty and ambiguity flow through all aspects of developing the architecture. This leads to analyzing how the architect must focus on both product strategy and technical decisions.

[Video Podcast] AI-Driven Development with Olivia McVicker

In this episode, Thomas Betts chats with Olivia McVicker, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft about AI-driven software development. The conversation covers the current, mainstream AI coding assistants and gets into where those tools are quickly heading. They then look to the future of how the entire software development lifecycle will see the benefits of AI in the next few years.

From Code to Strategy: Drive Organizational Impact Through Strategic Conversations and User Focus

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Mark Allen about how engineers can expand their influence through strategic conversations, user-focused development practices, and excellence in incident management. Mark emphasizes the importance of building cross-organizational relationships and working on meaningful problems with positive impact.

Productivity Through Play: Why Messing Around Makes Better Software Engineers

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Holly Cummins about productivity in creative knowledge work like software engineering. She talks about how "messing around and having fun" actually enhances problem-solving, while exploring the shift from coding to code management with AI tools and the importance of managing cognitive load in modern development practices.

Technology Radar and the Reality of AI in Software Development

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Rachel Laycock, Global CTO of Thoughtworks, about how the company's Technology Radar process captures technology trends around the globe. She is sceptical of the current AI efficiency hype, emphasizing that real value of generative AI tools lies in solving complex problems like legacy code comprehension rather than just writing code faster.

Using AI Code Generation to Migrate 20000 Tests

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Sergii Gorbachov, a staff engineer at Slack, about how they successfully used AI combined with traditional coding approaches to migrate 20,000 tests in 10 months, discovering that AI alone was insufficient and required human oversight and conventional tools to work effectively.

Emerson Murphy-Hill on Engineering Productivity, Team Dynamics and Equity

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Emerson Murphy-Hill about how measuring developer productivity is tricky, why team dynamics and psychological safety matter more than things like meeting load, the impact of systemic bias and how new AI tools are shaping equity in engineering - sometimes helping, but sometimes risking new kinds of unfairness.