Podcasts

Engineering Stable, Secure and Scalable Platforms: a Conversation with Matthew Liste

In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke to Matthew Liste about building and managing software platforms. Platform services act as the basis for application development, and must always be stable, secure, and scalable. Scaling these systems is particularly difficult because unknown resource contention often causes them to break.

How SBOMs and Engineering Discipline Can Help You Avoid Trivy’s Compromise

Viktor Peterson, part of the CISA task force working on SBOM blueprints and co-founder of sbomify, explores the shifting landscape of software supply chain security as the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) comes into force, a "GDPR moment" for the industry.

Context Engineering with Adi Polak

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful.

Failure as a Means to Build Resilient Software Systems: a Conversation with Lorin Hochstein

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Lorin Hochstein about how real-world failures provide insight into how software systems actually work. Our first topic was understanding that while automated fault injection tools can introduce basic robustness into a system, they cannot replicate the understanding that comes from mitigating complicated software failures in the real world.

[Video Podcast] Agentic Systems without Chaos: Early Operating Models for Autonomous Agents

In this episode, Shweta Vohra and Joseph Stein explore what changes when software systems start planning, acting, and making decisions on their own. The conversation distinguishes truly agentic use cases from traditional automation and looks at how architects and engineers should think about boundaries, orchestration, and system design in this new environment.

Using Brain Science to Communicate and Lead Technical Teams Effectively

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg about how understanding brain science and emotional intelligence can help engineers and technical leaders improve communication, manage conflict, and build stronger teams.

Building Engineering Culture Through Autonomy and Ownership

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Marcos Arribas about building and scaling engineering culture as an organisation grows, emphasizing autonomous teams, ownership mentality, progressive feature rollouts with flags, small pull requests, strategic AI adoption, and the importance of hiring junior engineers for long-term organizational growth.

How Blameless Culture Transforms Engineering Teams

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Tameem Hourani about building a blameless engineering culture through radical transparency, focusing on system resilience over individual blame, and creating high-performing teams that can embrace change and learn from failures.

The Myth of 100% Utilization: The Neuroscience of Productive Teams

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Shannon Mason about optimizing team productivity by understanding the neuroscience behind cognitive load, distinguishing between beneficial "slack time" and detrimental "idle time", and how the pursuit of maximum utilization that leads to burnout and poor decision-making.

Why Software Development Sucks And 7 Mental Models To Help Fix It

Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Thanos Diacakis about how teams often struggle with software delivery. He proposes a shift in mental models and a four-step framework to systematically improve software development by focusing on bottlenecks, balancing different types of work beyond just feature delivery, and investing 20-30% of effort in improving how the team works.