Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Birgitta Böckeler! Birgitta is is a distinguished engineer and global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at ThoughtWorks. Her full-time work is to figure out how engineering teams can make the most out of AI. With Birgitta, we talked about her favorite workflows, how she uses AI in the IDE, in the terminal or in a genetic mode. We discussed AI impact on productivity and what t...

Today's guest is Antonia Scheidel! Antonia is Director of Engineering at Duolingo, where she made the whole career progression, starting as a simple intern 12 years ago. Antonia is an expert at designing good, automated processes for your team. We discuss how to create good automation to avoid people doing glue work, how not to become a bottleneck as a manager, and how to make the team own the pro...

Today's guest is Adam Tornhill! Adam is the author of the popular book Your Code as a Crime Scene, and he's the founder of Code Scene. With Adam, we discussed his unique insights about technical debt and code quality, which come from his study of forensic psychology. We explored how static analysis is not enough to understand code health and why you need to look into version control history to und...

Today's guest is Meri Williams, who is the CTO of Pleo and the host of LeadDev conferences for more than 10 years. With Meri, we started by talking about diversity, why it is such a controversial topic, why diverse teams make for stronger teams, and what are the mistakes engineering leaders should avoid. Then we took from her experience with Lead Dev to explore what makes for a good talk, and what...

Today's guest is Annie Duke, who is a former world-class professional poker player and one of the world's top experts on decision-making. She's a bestseller author and coach of many tech founders and teams. With Annie we talked about her journey from studying decision science to becoming a top poker player and back to decision-making. We explored how to make good decisions under uncertainty, alone...

Today's guest is Maude Lemaire, who is a principal engineer at GitHub and author of the book, "Refactoring at Scale."With Maude, we talked about her journey in tech, from Rent the Runway to joining Slack and leading its performance engineering team to joining GitHub as a principal engineer. And then we discussed what it means to do refactoring at scale, how to do it right, how to bring people on b...

Today's guest is Kevin Smith, who is co-founder of Snipd, one of the world's most popular podcast apps. With Kevin, we talked about his journey in tech, starting from quantitative finance and then running an AI team in a high-growth startup up to actually founding one with Snipd. Then we segued into talking about Snipd itself and what are the technical challenges of working with AI models all the...

Today's guest is Dennis Pilarinos, who is founder and CEO of Unblocked. With Dennis, we talked about his journey in tech, which is just incredible, starting from director roles at Microsoft and Amazon, then founding BuddyBuild and later selling it to Apple, and eventually to these days where he founded Unblocked. And later we talked about Unblocked itself, which is one of the few developer AI tool...

Today's guest is Michael Lopp, better known as Rands, who is Senior Director of Engineering at Apple and writer of several popular books about engineering management, including "Managing Humans", which is a personal favorite of mine. With Rands, we discuss his journey into writing and the impact it had on his personal and professional growth. We reflected on his leadership style and the complexiti...

Today's guest is Guillermo Rauch, who is CEO and founder of Vercel. With Guillermo, we talked about his journey in tech, from a small-town in Argentina, to successful open-source developer, to CEO of a billion-dollar company. Then we covered the unique Vercel model, which combines open-source and commercial work. And finally, we discussed the future of AI, engineers, open-source and software engin...

Today's guest is Ori Keren, who is CEO and co-founder of LinearB and has more than 25 years of experience in the industry, especially in developer experience and productivity. With Ori, we talked about how AI is infiltrating all the stages of the development process, from coding to testing to code reviews. We discussed  how AI is already restructuring teams and how engineering leaders can drive ad...

Today's guest is Abi Noda, the CEO and founder of DX, one of the leading engineering intelligence platforms. With Abi, we talked about measuring developer experience. We started with the early days of Accelerate and why we feel like most people got the book wrong. And then we continued to present days and how research focuses on driving great developer experience. And finally, we couldn't avoid ta...

Today's guest is Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as Antirez! Salvatore is the creator of Redis, an open source data store used by hundreds of thousands of developers across the world. And he's also a writer. He published the popular sci-fi novel called Wohpe, which anticipated a lot of what is happening today with AI.With Salvatore, we talked about open source — what makes a project successful an...

Today's guest is Joel Chippindale! Joel is a full-time CTO Coach and one of the coaches-in-residence in the Refactoring community, where he runs monthly mastermind sessions and other community events. So with Joel, we dived into what coaching is, the difference with mentoring, one-on-one versus group coaching, and what are the top challenges that CTO faces today, based on the work that Joel does w...

Today's guest is Dan Shipper! Dan is the CEO and founder of Every, which is one of the world's most popular publications, writing about AI and our relationship with technology. And Dan is one of my heroes. His newsletter was the first I ever paid for on Substack, and single-handedly inspired me to start Refactoring. But he doesn't know. I will tell him during the interview and you will see what he...

Today's guest is Marco Trombetti! Marco is the CEO and founder of Translated, one of the largest translation companies in the world, powering translations for the likes of Airbnb, Uber, Skyscanner, and more. Translated is also an AI pioneer. It has developed its own models for more than 20 years and has recently released the most advanced translation LLM in the world. With Marco, we talked about t...

Today's guest is Adam Wiggins! Adam is the General Manager of Platform at The Browser Company and co-founder of Heroku. With Adam, we talked about innovating user experience in software and AI, we discussed what Local-first software means and we explored the future of developer tools. (02:49) Introduction (04:01) Adam's journey in tech (06:15) The rise of developer experience (10:03) The constant...

Today's guest is Martin Fowler! Martin is chief scientist at ThoughtWorks. He is one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and author of several legendary books, among which there is Refactoring, which shares the name with this podcast and this newsletter. With Martin, we talked about the impact of AI on software development, from the development process to how human learning and unde...

Today's guest is Aviv Ben Josef! Aviv has more than 20 years of experience in tech. He is an executive coach working with hundreds of engineering teams and leaders. With Aviv, we talked about profitable engineering, what makes engineering valuable, why impact is hard to measure,and what are the cultural and organizational traits that make engineering teams successful. (01:43) Introduction (02:20)...

Today's guest is Pat Kua! Pat is a professional engineering and leadership coach with more than 20 years of experience in tech. He was CTO of N26 and principal consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is an accomplished speaker and writes an awesome newsletter for tech leaders called Level Up. With Pat, we talked about his journey in tech, from Australia to London to Berlin. We talked about the future of en...

Today's guest is Francesco Dominidiato! Francesco Dominidiato is CTO at Moneyfarm, one of the largest wealth management companies in Europe, and former CTO at high-growth startups like Casavo and Docebo. During his career he scaled organizations from zero to hundreds of employees, and has incredible experience at all levels: from leading small teams to NASDAQ-listed companies. With Francesco, we t...

Today's guest is Stephanie Wong! Stephanie is the Head of Technical Marketing at Google Cloud, where she blends storytelling and technology to inspire developers and build customer growth. She’s an award-winning host, global keynote speaker, and creator of viral tech content. With Stephanie, we talked about her journey from sales to content creation to product management and generative AI. We talk...

Today's guest is Pramoda Vyasarao! Pramoda is a leadership and communication coach, he has 20+ years of experience in big tech, wrote the book “Beyond Your Limits”, and runs a course called Communication Engineering With Pramoda, we will talk about what good communication looks like, especially for engineers and managers, how it impacted his career and the career of the leaders he helps. Here is w...

Today's guest is Camille Fournier! Camille is an accomplished CTO and executive with 20+ years of experience in tech, and author of the timeless The Manager’s Path, possibly the most influential book ever about engineering management. With Camille we talked about good vs bad management, the controversial new founder mode, career advice for managers and her next book about platform engineering. Her...

Today's guest is David Heinemeier Hansson! David is the creator of Rails, co-founder & CTO of Basecamp, a NYT bestselling author, and professional racing driver for 10+ years! In our chat, we explored many of David's strong opinions on software development, including today's excessive complexity in software and infrastructure, the role of AI, and the future of open source. We also talked about...