Podcasts

Rethinking Data: Moving from the Traditional Three-Tier Web Stack to Client-Side Event Sourcing

Johannes Schickling explores how he moved beyond the traditional three-tier web stack to a local-first approach. He shares his experience transitioning from Prisma to developing Overtone—a music curation app leveraging client-side event sourcing and SQLite. The discussion highlights the trade-offs between event sourcing and CRDTs.

Strands Agents with Clare Liguori

Thomas Betts talks with Clare Liguori, the technical lead on the open source Strands Agents SDK. The conversation covers how Strands Agents has grown from a Python SDK to a full agent harness running in production. Liguori shares some lessons learned from building agents at scale, shifting to a model-driven architecture, and what comes next as the LLMs that underpin agents continue to improve.

Governance in the Age of AI: a Conversation with Sarah Wells

In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke to Sarah Wells about the relationship of governance to software architecture. Governance enables teams to work effectively by establishing procedures that minimize system complexity, improve security, and reduce repetitive tasks. Targeted checklists help engineers by reducing the stress over these procedures.

Spite-Driven Engineering: a New Blueprint for Cloud Security in the AI Native Era

In this episode, Alex Zenla (CTO/co-founder, Edera) challenges the "laissez-faire" attitude toward modern infrastructure. She promotes "spite-driven development", building software to solve genuine technical pain points rather than passively accepting flawed abstractions, as a philosophy of improving the world of software.

Architectural Patterns: Moving Beyond Cloud-Native to Local-First - Insights from Adam Wiggins

In this episode, Heroku co-founder and Ink & Switch founder Adam Wiggins argues for a 'local-first' architecture that reconciles cloud-based collaboration with the performance and data ownership of local software. He explores the role of CRDTs and version control primitives in non-code domains, and examines how a hybrid AI future might leverage local models for core productivity tasks.

The Technical Founder's Path: Code, Leadership, and Balance

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Trisha Ballakur about transitioning from coder to startup CEO, balancing technical leadership with business development, and avoiding burnout on the journey.

Culture Through Tension: Leading Interdisciplinary Teams with Nick Gillian

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Nick Gillian about building cross-functional teams for physical AI innovation, growing engineering culture through positive tensions, and navigating the journey from technical execution to organizational influence.

Why Engineering Culture Is Everything: Building Teams That Actually Work

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado about the central role of engineering culture, measuring team health through qualitative metrics, and learning from other engineering disciplines.

Effective Mentorship and Remote Team Culture with Gilad Shoham

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Gilad Shoham about building effective mentorship relationships, leading fully distributed teams and the evolving role of developers in an AI-augmented future.

Leading from Any Position: Richard Bown on Humane Engineering Organizations

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Richard Bown about transitioning from management back to individual contributor roles, leading from any position, and creating humane engineering organizations.