Develpreneur: Become a Better Developer and Entrepreneur

Building an AI-ready organization requires more than giving employees access to ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or another AI platform. Without training, standards, and a clear understanding of where AI belongs, organizations can create more confusion and expense instead of improving productivity. The technology may be new, but many of the problems it exposes have been hiding inside businesses for years...

Success stories often sound much cleaner after the fact. Someone starts a company, grows it, sells it, and moves on to the next opportunity. What usually gets left out are the mistakes, difficult decisions, and moments when the business almost did not survive. In Part 2 of our conversation with Glenn Poulos, we get into that side of entrepreneurship. Glenn has started companies, sold companies, wo...

Building a career beyond the code does not necessarily mean leaving technology behind. Sometimes it means learning how to take technical knowledge and apply it differently. That might involve sales, leadership, consulting, or eventually building a company of your own. In this episode of Develpreneur, we talk with Glenn Poulos, an entrepreneur who started his career as an electronic technician befo...

Developer work-life balance is often treated as a productivity problem. We look for better schedules, better tools, fewer meetings, or another technique for getting more done. However, our second conversation with Gaylen A. Wilson raises a different question: what happens when the problem is not how much work you have, but your inability to stop working the problem? Developers spend their careers...

Career reinvention for developers is usually discussed in terms of learning a new language, moving into leadership, adapting to AI, or finding a new job. Our conversation with Gaylen A. Wilson takes that idea much further. His story shows what happens when careers, businesses, health, and even our assumptions about the future stop following the plan. Season 29 of Building Better Developers is abou...

AI communication skills are becoming increasingly important as developers and leaders rely on artificial intelligence to summarize meetings, draft emails, organize ideas, and prepare for conversations. These tools can save time, but Salvatore Manzi warns that using AI to improve your communication is different from letting AI do your communicating for you. In Part 2 of our Develpreneur conversatio...

Leadership communication becomes increasingly important as developers move beyond writing code and begin leading people, projects, and technical decisions. Being the smartest person in the room does not automatically make you the most effective leader. In fact, technical expertise can sometimes work against a team when the people with the strongest opinions dominate the conversation while everyone...

AI can produce code faster, automate repetitive work, analyze enormous amounts of information, and move development tickets at a pace that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. Yet faster execution does not automatically create better software delivery systems. In fact, speed can expose weaknesses that organizations previously managed to hide. That distinction becomes central in the s...

Software development careers have traditionally been measured by technical ability: the languages you know, the systems you can architect, the bugs you can solve, and the quality of the code you produce. But developer systems thinking expands that definition. As developers advance in their careers, their value increasingly comes from understanding not only how software works, but how people, proce...

Software development is changing quickly. AI can generate code, build prototypes, test ideas, and turn concepts into working software faster than most of us would have imagined just a few years ago. That raises an important question for developers: If writing the code is becoming easier, what makes you valuable? Welcome to Season 29 of the Develpreneur Podcast. This season, we're returning to an i...

AI is changing software development faster than most organizations can adjust their processes around it. Developers can generate code, tests, documentation, and prototypes in a fraction of the time those tasks once required. Business owners who have never written software can now describe an idea to an AI tool and have something working surprisingly quickly. That creates tremendous opportunity, bu...

AI has become almost impossible for businesses to ignore. Every week brings another model, another tool, another promise of automation, and another story about a company transforming itself with artificial intelligence. The problem is that all of this activity can make it harder to answer the question that actually matters: What value is AI creating for the business? We explored that question with...

AI value creation is not the same as doing more work with AI. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as AI compresses the time required to build, market, analyze, and deliver products. Faster execution can create remarkable leverage, but it can also accelerate activity that was never particularly valuable in the first place. In the second part of Rob Broadhead's conversation with Scot...

Founder knowledge transfer becomes critical when a business reaches the point where effort and intuition can no longer carry it forward. Early-stage companies often succeed because a founder or small team knows the customer, product, history, and processes so deeply that they can make decisions almost automatically. That expertise is an advantage, but it can become a constraint when growth require...

In part one of our conversation with John Godlove and Piyush Agarwal, co-founders of Fusion Hive , we talked about starting with the workflow instead of the AI. Before choosing a model or building an agent, you need to understand the problem. You also need to understand the process, the data, and what you're trying to improve. In part two, we took that conversation further. We looked at what happe...

AI is everywhere right now. Businesses are being told they need to adopt it, developers are being asked to build with it, and almost every software product seems to be adding some kind of AI feature or AI Workflow Automation. But just because you can put AI into a process doesn't mean you should. That was one of my biggest takeaways from our conversation with John Godlove and Piyush Agarwal, co-fo...

What happens when the technology helping you build your business also threatens the way customers discover it? That question is becoming increasingly important for entrepreneurs as artificial intelligence changes software development, content creation, search, marketing, and online discovery. In Part 2 of our conversation with Amit Zandberg , Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore what it means...

Online education has never been easier to access. You can learn almost anything through YouTube, Udemy, online communities, independent creators, coaches, and specialized training programs. Access isn't the problem anymore. Trust is. There's a big difference between spending $10 on a course and investing $2,000, $5,000, or more in a mentor, mastermind, or coaching program. When the investment gets...

Most of us grew up hearing the same lesson: treat others the way you want to be treated. It's the Golden Rule, and it's one of the first lessons we learn about kindness and respect. But apply that same philosophy to leadership, and it starts to break down. Joseph Rockey Jr., founder of Elite Business Cruises, argues it's actually one of the biggest obstacles to building a high-performing team. Dur...

For years, businesses have relied on a simple formula to motivate employees: pay them more. Need better performance? Offer a bonus. Need to improve retention? Raise wages. Need people to work harder? Add another incentive program. Compensation matters, but it isn't always the deciding factor leaders think it is. In a recent conversation with Joe Rockey, founder of Elite Business Cruises, we explor...

Hiring help doesn't automatically solve your workload. Many entrepreneurs believe bringing on a virtual assistant instantly creates more free time, but in reality, a VA simply magnifies whatever systems already exist inside your business. If your processes are organized, documented, and repeatable, a VA becomes a force multiplier. If your business runs on memory, interruptions, and last-minute dec...

One of the hardest transitions every founder faces is delegation. Building a business often starts with doing everything yourself—sales, customer support, scheduling, bookkeeping, marketing, operations, and everything in between. That's usually necessary early on, simply because there's no one else to do the work. Eventually, though, success creates its own bottleneck. The same habits that helped...

For decades, startup success followed a familiar path: build a prototype, raise venture capital, hire a team, develop a product, and hope to reach market before the money runs out. Artificial intelligence is rewriting that playbook. An effective AI capital strategy now requires founders to think beyond fundraising and focus on building systems that create value long before investors write a check....

Artificial intelligence has become the centerpiece of countless business conversations. Every week brings another announcement promising faster development, cheaper operations, or a revolutionary new way to build software. Yet the organizations seeing the greatest long-term success aren't necessarily the ones adopting AI the fastest — they're the ones investing in an effective AI readiness strateg...

Having an AI policy is a great first step, but successful AI Governance Implementation goes much further. Governance isn't about creating documents that sit on a shelf—it's about building processes that become part of everyday development. As organizations continue integrating AI into products and workflows, the challenge shifts from whether to use AI to how to manage it responsibly. In Part 2 of...