Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Rebecca Murphey . Rebecca is field CTO at Swarmia, former manager at Stripe and Indeed, and the author of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization. With Rebecca, we talked about her journey through Indeed, Stripe and Swarmia and the three pillars of her book, business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience. Here is what we talked about: (00:58)...

Today's guest is Rachel Potvin . Rachel is SVP of Engineering at Sanity, ex-VP of Engineering at Github, and previously worked at Google and Ubisoft. She has had an incredible career journey and is a world renowned speaker. With Rachel we talked about her journey across what feels like different generations of companies. We talked about scaling teams, challenges, lessons learned and the great...

Today's guest is Denis Yarats . Denis is co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, one of my favorite products and one of the most successful AI startups today. Perplexity was founded less than two years ago and has just raised $250M in venture capital, at a $2B+ evaluation. With Denis, we talked about the state of AI products and his vision of where they're going. Then we talked about Perplexit...

Today's guest is Aditya Agarwal . Aditya is a legend: he joined Facebook as employee #10 and, years later, joined Dropbox as CTO when there were ~20 engineers. Today, he is partner at South Park Commons, through which he invested in more than 300 companies. Today we talked about early stage Facebook, differences and similarities with Dropbox, engineering teams in hyper growth and the future of...

Today's guest is Charity Majors , CTO at Honeycomb and one of my absolute favorite writers. I believe I have recommended more articles from her blog than any other author on the newsletter. Today we talked about observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, developer experience and much more. Here is what we talked about: (00:49) Introduction (01:57) What is observability (07:00)...

Today's guest is Laura Tacho , CTO at DX, engineering leadership coach, and speaker. At DX, she works with hundreds of companies on improving their developer experience and engineering productivity. Here is what we talked about: (02:20) Introduction (03:36) Why measure engineering productivity (05:58) Finding the proper framework (13:33) Value metrics to find issues (15:00) Identify and ease t...

Today's guest is Daniel Vassallo , the creator of the Small Bets community, which counts more than 5 ,000 members and includes engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds. Daniel is also a former software engineer at AWS, the author of The Good Parts of AWS and created a successful Twitter course. With Daniel, we will talk about his unconventional journey in tech, the Small Bets philos...

Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi , Director of Engineering at Nubank. Thiago has had an incredible tech career. Before Nubank, he worked at Apple, Amex and ThoughtWorks. He is also a deep thinker, hosts a podcast and constantly shares great advice on X and LinkedIn. During our chat with Thiago, we talked about what makes managers successful, career expectations and frameworks and how to build a g...

Andrew Weaver is co-founder and CEO of CTO Academy, an educational product that works with thousands of CTO today. Andrew has over 25+ years of executive-level experience with companies of various size, including enterprises, SME and early-stage companies across multiple sectors. With Andrew, we discussed gaining the proper skillset to be a good CTO, the imbalances in the tech space, and how to ke...

Wes Kao is a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and advisor who writes an amazing newsletter for high-performers in tech. She is co-founder of Maven, an edtech company that raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she co-founded the altMBA with bestselling author Seth Godin. Here is what we talked about: (00:00) Introduction (03:08) Managing up (10:13) Bridging the gap bet...

Maria Gutierrez is the VP of Engineering at Personio, and ex VP of Engineering and Operations at Twitter. With Maria we talked about how to build healthy and impactful engineering orgs as they scale. We touched on everything from processes to remote work, development cycle, hiring, structuring teams and more. (00:00) Introduction (02:12) Maria's career journey (05:18) How hyper-growth breaks e...

Kathryn Koehler is the Director of Productivity Engineering at Netflix. Her teams focus on the development environment and associated experiences, which enable and empower developers at Netflix to bootstrap, code, build, test, debug, and maintain software more effectively and efficiently. Productivity is an ever-controversial topic in engineering, and with Kathryn we dived right into it! Here is w...

Farhan Thawar is VP of Engineering at Shopify, angel investor, and entrepreneur. Shopify is a public company with thousands of employees, and one of the very few companies of its scale to be remote-first . While other big tech quietly issued RTOs, Shopify doubled down on processes and culture that allowed it to stay remote, or, in their own words: digital-first. So, today, Shopify has ports instea...

Today’s guest is Kent Beck, original signer of the Agile manifesto, creator of Extreme Programming, and all-round programming legend. With Kent we had the unique opportunity to talk about the  big picture . I inquired him about the state of the software engineering craft today, discussing things like: (00:00) Introduction (02:27) Agile vs Power Structures (08:37) The Return of Waterfall (12:33) Ex...

Disheng Qiu is VP of Engineering at Translated , one of the largest translation companies in the world, powering localization for the likes of Airbnb, Uber, Skyscanner, and more. Translated has been working on proprietary AI models and tools for 20+ years. It has an internal research team and develops tools that power the work of tens of thousands of professionals. With Disheng we explored what it...

Aadil Maan is Lead Engineering Program Manager at Humane and a big tech veteran, having worked at the likes of Google, Apple, and Blackberry. Today’s theme is The World Builder Framework — Aadil's own approach to problem solving and solutioning processes, frameworks and workflows for product and engineering teams. Here are a few things we discussed in our chat: What do TPMs do? 🗺️ The World Bu...

Lena Reinhardt has dedicated her career to helping technology leaders build successful engineering organizations. Her background includes roles such as VP of Engineering at CircleCI and TravisCI, along with being a co founder and CEO of a SaaS startup. She now works as a leadership coach, management trainer, and organizational developer. Here are a few things we discussed in our chat: Challenges i...

Weekly interviews with world-class engineering leaders, available for free to everyone, in video and audio. 🗓️ New episodes drop every Friday. 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter at refactoring.fm to receive the episodes via email. 📺 Check out the full videos on the Youtube channel