Dev Interrupted

Fact: There are guidebooks for everything in programming except for actually leading, managing and inspiring programmers. That’s why I was so happy to have my friend Zach Goldberg on the podcast. Someone who has made learning and self-improvement a core pillar of his professional and personal life, Zach Goldberg is someone who I turn to when I need to know who smart CTOs are turning to. In this gr...

With registration for our free October Interact conference now open, we wanted you to hear one of our favorite sessions from this past April’s Interact. Featuring the best minds from Slack, Netlify and Ambassador Labs, our session on Inspiring Engineering Leaders & Driving Developer Creativity turned into one of the best conversations we’ve ever heard on topics like dev toil, dev focus and dev...

In an industry that has trouble looking beyond the next sprint, it’s good to know there are very smart people researching the conscious and unconscious pain points keeping devs from focusing on what they actually want to do: code. In our new series LinearB Labs we’ll be looking at the most interesting research on how devs work, communicate and code. The best way to start should be understanding wh...

The last thing anyone who does great work should be doing is having to take time out from doing great work to promote it to their higher-ups. Unfortunately, until the person you report to achieves omnipotence, you’re going to have to make sure their perception of your work lines up with the quality. In fact, when we asked our community what issue they would want professional coaching on, it was th...

When you think of a billion-dollar tech company, you probably imagine rooms full of monitors with dashboards and non-stop data streams. Well, after talking to Hippo - a certified unicorn and newly minted giant in the insurance industry - we realized this couldn’t be further from the truth. Mike Gordon, VP of Engineering at Hippo, sat down with Dev Interrupted to chat about what it’s actually like...

Almost every single company we talk to focuses on having their engineering teams solve problems. This is why we jumped at the opportunity to talk to Joshua Romoff from Ubisoft. Why? The goal of gaming companies isn’t so much to solve problems, but to enrich their customers’ lives. That’s a unique, powerful change in how to think about building, developing and shipping features. Something that requ...

If you’re doing your job right, most of your time and your team’s time should be spent actually building things. That means conversations should be reserved to the very important ones. In our latest Dev Interrupted episode, Reprise’s Director of Engineering Jennie MacDougall looks back on the most useful conversation she has ever had with her devs that are also the ones she encourages them to have...

There are so many books, videos and workshops on starting your own company. The problem for anyone listening to this podcast is that none of them come from the perspective of a developer. That’s why we were so excited that the founder & CTO of Drata, Daniel Marashlian – who has previously founded eight companies before hitting a billion-dollar valuation with Drata – was open to talking about w...

At LinearB, we like to think we spend all our time figuring out how to unlock developer potential. To find ways to let devs do more of the work they love and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with needless hurdles, idling and churn. We’re not the only ones thinking about how to do this, though. At our recent INTERACT panel, we assembled amazing engineering leaders from Netflix, FloSport...

Few companies have mastered making products consumers actually want to use like Toast. A $30 billion giant in the tech-food business, Toast faced their worst case scenario during the pandemic when the restaurants at the heart of their business were all forced to shut down. Toast rose like a phoenix to become one of the best success stories of pivoting during the pandemic by making users love using...

What do the teams at Stack Overflow, DataStax and Reprise have in common? First, they’ve all built amazing organizations powered by amazing developers.  Second, they’ve managed to build and retain these amazing developers in an ultra-competitive hiring market. Third, they all took time at our recent INTERACT conference to discuss how they created engineering organizations that are productive, succ...

You ever get the feeling that the way most companies are set up doesn’t really make sense? That the passion you have for coding and tech gets sucked out when you do it for a business, instead of it being amplified? Matt K. Parker had that realization… hard. A third-generation programmer, Matt’s epiphany that there was something wrong with the way the majority of the world sets up its teams and wor...

If you looked up the term “firing on all cylinders” in the dictionary, I’m fairly confident there would be a picture of Sarvenaz Myslicki next to it. A next-gen leader who earned the role of VP of Technology at American Express by the age of 30, Savernaz is a published author, an in-demand thought-leader on mentorship and has one of the largest followings on programmer TikTok. Our favorite thing a...

In so many professions, the reward for exceptional work is a promotion to management. Unfortunately, for developers whose programming gets them singled out for promotion, the skills to manage a team have nothing to do with the work that got them recognized in the first place. James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify, understands the pitfalls of being promoted from an IC to an engineering...

The world is shortly going to need another 20 million developers  and with over 1,000 engineering leaders joining us for INTERACT on April 7th, there’s no better time to talk to two people who have captured the minds of millions of developers - and will be featured at INTERACT - Tiffany Janzen and Masha Zvereva. In addition to their own tech careers, both women have become prominent voices in the...

Modern problems require modern solutions, right?  The problem is, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand what solutions are required for a given problem and even harder to task a team with finding them.  That’s why Bob Ritchie, VP of Software at SAIC, thinks the top-down management model is dead. To replace it, Bob is championing a “team of teams” model that provides his developers wit...

For decades Artificial Intelligence has been a focus of best-selling science fiction authors and an antagonist for blockbuster Hollywood movies. But AI is no longer relegated to the realm of science fiction, it inhabits the world around us. From the biggest enterprise companies to plucky startups, businesses everywhere are building and deploying AI at incredible speed.  In fact, open source allows...

Hate interruptions? Ever feel like you’ve lost your ability to focus on coding?  Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs, knows your pain and she’s on a crusade to help devs everywhere reclaim their focus.  Spoiler: She's got a message for managers who can’t meet with devs whenever they want: “Don’t like it? Well, suck it up.” The thing about productivity is, you can’t have it both...

It used to be that in order to make your parents proud you had to go into management. Then along came the self-contained IC career path. Today, this dual-track career path remains the unchallenged standard of companies everywhere. Or does it? Peter Bell, the founder and CTO of CTO Connection, wants developers everywhere to know that there are several dev adjacent career paths. From product to dev...

Data junkies rejoice, this is the episode for you.  On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, Einat Orr, co-founder and CEO of Treeverse, sits down with us to talk about the state of data… where it’s been, where it’s going and why having bad data might be worse than having no data at all. Einat's path to becoming a CEO is different from many of the folks who come on the podcast. After gradua...

How does a former-CTO-turned-VC assess companies now that they're the one with the money? What do they look for - and expect to find - in a company’s engineering team? Enter Jason Warner on the Dev Interrupted stage. Jason is the most unique of investors: He made the jump from being a CTO to managing his own $725M fund at Redpoint Ventures. After leading GitHub to one of the best exits in the...

Anyone who’s been in a rapidly scaling company with an ever-expanding engineering team knows that communication is never as simple as it seems. That’s why we were so excited when Shankar Ramaswamy decided to sit down with Dev Interrupted's Conor Bronsdon. Shankar is a veteran leader in the engineering space, having helped recruit, build and guide developer teams at companies like Amazon, eBay...

You’ve heard of the supply chain, but what about the software supply chain?  Unlike the standard supply chain that you often hear about in the news, this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted dives into the supply chain responsible for holding together the systems that companies, orgs and governments depend upon.  Kim Lewandowski, a software supply chain security expert, co-founded Chainguard in 2021...

Like most fast-growing companies, LinearB spends WAY too much time trying to hire developers. So when we came across a brilliant article about hiring autistic talent, we knew we had to have its author Matt Nigh on the podcast. Matt is one of the most prominent thought leaders on neurodiversity in the workplace. Matt himself was diagnosed with autism late in life following a very unique job intervi...

Building a platform that 100,000 devs use every day is no accident, but it can happen (almost) overnight.  Daily.dev is the fastest growing online community for developers to stay updated on the hottest developer news, and their mission is to build the home page that every developer deserves. It pulls together and rewards dev-focused content from 400 sources – letting its users vote on which ones...