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.

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.

Increasing Users' Data Agency: from BlueSky's AT Protocol to the Local-First Software Movement

Martin Kleppmann, an associate professor at Cambridge and author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, discusses the evolution of data systems over the last decade, mainly the shift from monolithic databases to modular building blocks. Kleppmann underlines the importance of moving from cloud-centric data storage systems to decentralised data storage similar to Bluesky’s AT protocol.

Making Digital Accessibility More Than Just High Contrast: Building Truly Inclusive Software

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to accessibility expert Sheri Byrne-Haber, about how digital accessibility goes far beyond just high contrast colours. The discussion is emphasizing that it encompasses making products and services fully usable by people with disabilities.

Engineering Excellence: Declan Whelan on Technical Health, Agile Practices, and Team Culture

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Declan Whelan about technical health, useful metrics, modern technical practices, code stewardship and cultural aspects of good engineering teams.

Technical Excellence, Team Productivity and Scrum Anti-Patterns

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Stefan Wolpers about trends in product management, engineering productivity and the Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide.

Governance for Reducing Complexity

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Tony Ponton about the challenges of governance and how to avoid creating complexity while enabling agility.

The Evolution of Use Cases in Modern Software Engineering

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Ivar Jacobson about the evolution of use cases in modern software engineering.