Acima Development

This episode of the Acima Developers Podcast continues a series on a NASA paper about engineering failures, focusing this time on decentralization of authority. The core question Dave poses is where breaking things down and simplifying goes wrong, and the group lands on a shared answer: complexity doesn't disappear when you split systems or teams apart, it migrates into the seams between them. Wil...

This Acima Development Podcast episode connects a NASA document on critical failures to the modern temptation to over-rely on AI. The hosts open with examples of reward-function failures: a reinforcement learning agent in the game Coast Runners that racked up points by endlessly circling a lagoon instead of finishing the race, and an early GPT model that compulsively opened a calculator because it...

This episode of the Acima Development Podcast centers on "normalization of deviance" — the pattern where small anomalies get repeatedly ignored until they cause catastrophic failures. Mike opens with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster as the anchoring example: engineers warned that cold O-rings could fail, but their concerns were drowned out by schedule pressure and accumulated tolerance for sm...

This Acima Development Podcast episode centers on a NASA root cause analysis document from 2012 that concluded the agency needed to "reestablish the culture of technical excellence based on hands-on work." Mike opens with stories of Dutch Renaissance painters Rachel Ruysch and Maria Merian, both of whom spent decades honing their craft and improved continuously through sustained hands-on practice....

This episode of the Acima Development Podcast starts with a discussion about the frustration of U.S. tax filing and uses it as a metaphor for poorly run standup meetings in software development. The hosts argue that many teams repeat painful, unnecessary processes simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.” From there, they unpack the most common standup failures: meetings turning into stat...

The episode of the Acima Development Podcast centers on database performance, using the concept of indexing as its foundation. Mike opens with a story about discovering Google in the early 2000s to illustrate how powerful indexing systems transformed access to information. That same principle applies to databases: indexes act as shortcuts that make retrieving data dramatically faster, especially i...

This episode explores how AI coding tools are changing the role of code review. The hosts point out that AI can generate large amounts of code quickly and even review it, which shifts the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing it. While AI can handle repetitive or low-risk tasks like documentation updates or simple refactors, it can also produce inconsistent feedback and get stuck in loops. Bec...

This episode explores the role of a data engineering team within a company and how it differs from traditional application development. While app developers focus on performance and real-time systems, the data team is responsible for collecting, syncing, and organizing data from many sources into a central warehouse (like Snowflake). Using tools such as Fivetran, data is continuously pulled from d...

Mike opens by framing “production incidents” with a vivid non-software story. As a teenager he smashed bathroom tile with a dead-blow hammer, drove his pinky knuckle into a jagged shard, and had to manage both the injury and the panic of his little brother who got sick from seeing it. He uses that as the metaphor for on-call life. Bad things happen, reactions vary, and what you do in the first mom...

The episode turns into a freewheeling, funny, very human conversation about how AI is showing up in developers’ day-to-day lives, especially for the “I can do it, I just hate it” work. Will talks about getting wildly inconsistent AI PR review comments, but still finding real value in using Claude to refactor boring-but-necessary code like splitting up bloated classes and shared components. Dave ri...

This episode unfolds like a long, curious conversation among people who can’t help but see software everywhere—even when they’re not writing code. Mike opens with a story about large language models: how something as simple as guessing the next word, repeated trillions of times, leads to strange and powerful emergent behavior. Models start writing poetry, solving math problems, and following instr...

Mike opens with a post-apocalyptic “choose your team” trope to frame today’s job market for junior developers: brutal competition, few openings, and the need to stand out with real, survival-level skills. He shares examples like his niece (strong student, no offers) and Acima’s internship receiving 300+ applicants, then asks the group what actually helps new grads stay relevant and get picked. Wil...

Mike kicks off with stories from his career to argue that SQL is a “never-goes-away” superpower. He describes early jobs where everything was handcrafted queries and good database design was foundational, then later roles where rapid growth made inefficient queries and missing indexes painful fast. Even with modern ORMs making raw SQL feel like a “code smell” in app code, he still relies on SQL co...

The episode opens with host David Brady introducing a panel to talk about recent advances in AI, kicking off with “story time” from Mike. Mike describes how massive investment has accelerated progress and uses a hotel analogy to explain the shift from traditional AI tools (you ask for a specific thing and it does exactly that) to agentic AI (you describe a goal like “I’m cold,” and the system take...

On this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike hosts a large panel discussion about balance in engineering and why extremes tend to hurt teams. He opens with a cycling story about staying upright on a narrow strip of packed gravel, using it as a metaphor for finding the “middle path” instead of letting the pendulum swing from one extreme to another. The group quickly agrees balance is ever...

The episode centers on miscommunication—why it happens so often and how to handle it better, especially in remote work. Mike opens with a story about baking baguettes for his in-laws: he and his wife look at the same “thin and crusty” loaves but interpret that comment totally differently. He thinks she’s critiquing what he intentionally made; she’s trying (poorly) to request thicker, softer loaves...

On this episode of the Acima Development podcast, the crew leans into a Halloween “code horror” theme, using real-world stories to explore the scariest things they’ve seen in software. Mike opens with a literal horror from homeownership: a drain pipe so clogged with roots it had become a pipe-shaped root sculpture, a perfect metaphor for an ancient 3,000+ line Rails controller crammed with overlap...

On this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, VP of Engineering Elishia Williams joins Mike, Dave, Will, and Kyle to talk about her path from curious kid to technology leader—and the lessons she’s learned along the way. Elishia shares how her dad first sparked her love of tech by putting her “in charge” of maintaining the family computer, a moment that planted the seed for a lifelong career in...

The episode opens with Mike sharing two stories that set up a theme: context beats dogma. First, a bike rack bolt snaps seven miles from home with his toddler on board; he “hacks” a fix using a strap to limp back safely—imperfect but right for the moment. Second, he yells to stop that same child from leaning over a railing—normally a “don’t,” but justified to prevent harm. Bridging to software, Mi...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike kicks things off with a cycling story that serves as an analogy for problem-solving in software engineering. Planning a long ride to Illinois’s highest natural point, he had to carefully map his route with handwritten directions before realizing he could quickly write a small program to calculate distances. The story highlights how coding, eve...

The panel digs into the perennial question: how much SQL should developers know? Kicking off with a war story, Mike recounts a hyper-growth phase where ~20 performance issues were fixed—almost all by database changes, especially adding (or rethinking) indexes—yielding order-of-magnitude speedups. The moral: ORMs are great for safety and productivity, but when things get slow, it’s “usually the dat...

The episode frames engineering as an investment rather than a cost. Mike opens with a parable: leaders who put capital (or engineers) to work create value; those who “protect” resources without progress destroy it. The panel builds on that: impact comes from choosing work that improves tomorrow—planning enough to ship, avoiding ivory-tower perfection, and recognizing that “cheap” talent can be exp...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike hosts a roundtable with Eddy, Dave, Chloe, Jordan, Ramses, and later Will, to explore the differences between small and large projects. Mike kicks things off with a personal story about industrial dishwashing as a teenager and how that shifted his perspective on “small” problems like doing dishes at home. He ties this to software by noting tha...

This episode of the Acima Development Podcast focuses on the complexities of evaluating and selecting vendors, whether for software, contract labor, or specialized services. Host Mike opens with a cautionary tale about a vendor that initially impressed with a knowledgeable representative but turned out to have major security flaws, poor integration practices, and overall incompetence once the cont...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, host Mike opens with a gardening metaphor to frame the episode’s central theme: cultivating healthy company culture. Drawing from his personal experience transforming barren soil into fertile ground, Mike contrasts short-term fixes like chemical fertilizers with long-term strategies like feeding the soil itself—likening these to how companies often...