Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Adam Tornhill , founder of CodeScene, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene, and one of the very few repeat guests of the show. With Adam, we talked about how his team refactored the whole Street Fighter 3 code base, which is more than 300,000 lines of code in just a few days and spending a few thousand dollars in tokens, and measured how that led to better and cheaper AI devel...

Today's guest is Rahul Raina , co-founder of TRM Labs, which is a YC-backed company that works on solutions and products for security, fighting criminal networks, AI attackers, and more.  With Rahul, we had a great chat that covered a lot of ground, starting with the tough reality of cyber defense today, and why attackers by default always have the upper hand when AI and technology improves. A...

Today's guest is Dennis Pilarinos , who is the founder and CEO of Unblocked and a long-time developer tools expert, having founded BodyBuild and having served as a director at Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.  With Dennis, we talked about the latest trends in software development. We discussed why more tokens are not translating into more productivity, how to guarantee code quality with AI and wha...

Today's guest is Dominika Rogala , former VP of Engineering and now advisor for CTOs and tech leaders. With Dominika, we talked about burnout in engineering teams, on which she did a lot of research. She started from the various dimensions of burnout, which spoiler alert is different from simply being tired, and then we looked at the problem from a systemic angle, so how can you improve your t...

Today's guest is Charlie Guo , developer experience engineer at OpenAI.  With Charlie, we explore the evolution of AI coding tools, how this is affecting team organization, and the future of AI integration in software development. Charlie shared strategies and tricks to leverage AI effectively, and how this is all transforming the workflows that we all know and love. (00:00) Episode start (01:...

Today's guest is Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD. With Anush, we talked about how he thinks about open source as a key strategic driver in the AI era, and how his team is able to stay super fast while ensuring quality by combining their internal work with their external contributions. And then we got into a rabbit hole about how to get big companies ready for AI, how to think about h...

Today's guest is Geoffrey Litt , Design Engineer at Notion . With Geoffrey, we talked about malleable software, a type of platform that kind of always existed, but is now getting new meaning and opportunity thanks to AI. And then we talked about how Notion itself changed its place in the ecosystem, with the AI agents first, and now with the new developer platform, where you can ship code direc...

Today's guest is Michael Lopp , better known as Rands , who is writer of several popular books about engineering management, including "Managing Humans", which is a personal favorite of mine. Live at LDX3, we discussed his lifelong writing habit, the importance of giving feedback through stories and the leverage of leadership experience in the AI era. (00:00) Episode start (00:40) A...

Today's guest is Lara Hogan , an author, public speaker and coach for managers and leaders across the whole tech industry. And she's had a long career as VP of engineering at FLY, Kickstarter, Director Etsy and more.  So with Lara we talked about her journey in tech, which started with a philosophy degree. And then, taking from her work as a coach, we talked more about how successful teams...

Today's guest is James Stanier , CTO at Nordhealth, former director at Shopify, an author of several books about engineering management, remote work, and more. With James, we talked about what senior engineers will look like in the future, taking from a great article he wrote just recently, and then regarding how engineering management is changing, what's expected of managers today, and wh...

Today's guest is Doug Peete , Chief Product Officer at Atono, with whom over the last few months we have developed a deep industry report about the state of product development. In this chat we'll go through the main findings of the report, match them to our respective experience and explore ideas about how teams can do better with product development and AI( 00:00 ) Episode start( 01:38 )...

Today's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston .They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these comp...

Today's guest is Stuart Caborn, distinguished engineer at loveholidays, which is an online travel agency with millions of customers around the world. I'm talking with Stuart because his team is doing AI coding for real. They operate an extremely complex product and technology, with each engineer deploying to production more than 80 times a month, with more than 60% of production code being...

Today’s guest is Chris Lattner , one of the most important engineers for modern computing. Chris invented key compiler infrastructure tech like LLVM and MLIR, but he’s also the inventor of the Swift language, a key contributor in bringing Google TPUs to market, and a lot more. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Modular, where he’s reinventing AI infrastructure to make software portable across GPUs...

Today's guest is Amelia Wattenberger, former principal research engineer at GitHub and now partner at Sutter Hill Ventures. But she's also a product lead at Augment Code, where she developed Intent, a developer workspace for orchestrating AI coding agents and delivering complex work.  So this is a fascinating chat into the future and the present of software development with someone who has...

Today's guest is Richard Hughes - Jones , a professional executive coach with more than 20 years of experience.  With Richard, we talked about how to coach tech leaders through uncertainty and everything that's going on with AI, how to navigate it, how we should think about our role, and what it means to step outside of the framework. We also explored how to leverage AI for coaching, how t...

Today's guest is Austen McDonald , former hiring committee chair at Meta, and author of the book, "Mastering Behavioral Interviews."  Austen, in his career, conducted more than 1,000 interviews and coached more than 200 engineers, and is here today to tell us everything about why behavioral interviews are more important than ever and how to run them right, as a candidate and as a rec...

Today's guest is Paige Bailey , Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind. And before that, Principal Product Manager at GitHub, where she launched Copilot and several other AI products. With Paige, we went through a quick demo of how to build and deploy a fully functioning application just with your voice, one that includes accessing your camera, manipulating pictures, and having AI doing a...

Today's guest is Gonçalo Silva , CTO of Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist. This interview is an incredible behind the scenes about one of the most peculiar companies in tech. Because Doist is bootstrapped, profitable, has no office and has about 100 employees that are spread across about 40 countries. Yet, or maybe for this reason, they created one of the world's most beloved pro...

Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi! Thiago is former director of engineering at Nubank and with a long and successful tech career in companies like ThoughtWorks, Apple and more. But right now, he's on a sabbatical and he's been for more than six months. So get ready for an incredible chat where we talked about your identity as an engineering leader, psychology, Claude Code and more.(00:00)...

Today's guest is Matt McClernan , CEO of Augment Code! With Matt, we went through the findings of our own research that we developed together with Augment, surveying more than 400 engineering teams about how they're using AI. And we went through many topics, from the differences between personal and team adoption, challenges, how documentation looks like a secret weapon, how to manage cont...

Today's guest is Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI!With Rob, we talked about software delivery, the impact of AI, and how to build great product engineering teams. And next, we discuss trade-offs between standardization versus flexibility in software organizations, and lessons learned from our respective past mistakes.(00:00) Preview(01:22) Introduction(03:33) Industry Changes and AI's Impact on...

Today's guest is Hywel Carver ! Hywel is co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, which provides live team coaching for software engineering teams. With Hywel, we got deep into what makes traditional developer training awful, what engineers truly learn and what they should learn. Then we explored how to measure the impact of learning and how AI may possibly change both how learning works and our o...

Today's guest is Darragh Curran !  Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users. With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team res...

Today's guest is Meg Adams !Meg is Senior Director of Engineering for the New York Times. With Meg, we talked about her fantastic journey in tech, from management in sales and retail, to learning software development from scratch, to management again, but this time in technology. And then we especially talked about Neuro Leadership, what it is, how you can apply it in practice in your team pro...