alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

I spoke with Snir Yarom, CTO at Codility,🧑‍💻 - a leading technical assessment platform - about data-driven technical recruiting 💼, the typical hiring process and how to attract talent in a competitive market. Listen to find out: - How to use data 📊 to optimise each stage of your technical recruiting pipeline (e.g. sourcing, screening, interviews, assessment etc.) - How to lead different tech t...

I spoke with Marco Palladino, Co-Founder & CTO at Kong 🐒, the market-leading API Manageent Gateway Solution. Learn deep insight into APIs, the future of the API Economy, and what it takes to build a great API from someone who has been involved in the API industry since its infancy. Listen to find out: - How to build an API for each use case (external, microservice & mobile). - Why it's only the b...

Chad Fowler -  an engineer, musician, and author  -   transformed Wunderlist 📋 from a messy monolith to a neat multi-language microservice. Be inspired by his unique view on technology stemming from his background as a  musician 🎵 and RPG player 🎮.  Open your mind 🤯and prepare to reevaluate 🤔after you hear from this creative thinker who -in the course of his 25-year career -  has worked as bo...

I spoke with Sagnik Nandy, CTO & President of Technology at Okta, the market leading IAM Solution 🔐. Discover deep insight into the world of identity management🆔, user feedback 👥, and why the best products provide a simplified interface to a complex solution (with customizability ⚙️ for advanced users). Don’t miss out on this opportunity to hear how to build scalable products ♾️ from someone wh...

I spoke with Fabian Wesner, Founder at ROQ, a FaaS (Feature-as-a-Service) for web applications. Learn deep insight into the world of web applications and frameworks from someone who had to launch an eCommerce shop each week (in different countries 🇧🇷 🇦🇺 🇯🇵 and industries!👗🛏️🧸). Fabian, as former Rocket Internet CTO and Spryker Co-Founder and CTO is the hidden gem of the German CTO scene. Listen...

I spoke with Kore Nordemann, CTO at Frontastic, a Frontend-as-a-Service for headless CMS and commerce systems. Learn deep insight into what it takes to build a web app today: from choosing a stack to hiring frontend/backend/full-stack developers. Listen to find out: - Which ECommerce 🛒 features are Amazon’s Achilles Heel - Why Pair Programming 🧑‍ 💻‍🧑 works better than Pull Request Reviews - Th...

I spoke with Alesia Braga, CTO at SmartRecruiters, an end-to-end recruiting solution. She shares with us insights into the recruiting world, how to improve diversity and what she does to shorten the recruiting cycle time to avoid losing top candidates She also shares with us: - Why she uses a literal scorecard 💯 for each candidate she interviews - How she juggles 🤹 product and tech in the CTO ro...

I spoke with Mark Porter, CTO at MongoDB. His 40-year career spans time working at companies like Oracle, AWS, and Grab. He shares with us insights into technical leadership, company culture, and the open-source world, Listen to find out -Where DEI initiatives fail〽️ -Why they don’t use OKRs 📏 at MongoDB -How to Build A product around the Open Source 👥 +How being a parent makes him a better man...

I spoke with Andreas Schranzhofer, CTO of Scalable Capital about the best ways to secure an app. Scalable Capital is a Neo-Broker and robo-advisor based in Munich with over 250 million in funding. Learn about app security from someone highly experienced in running an app in the highly regulated FinTech 💰 industry. Learn: - Why you need both security and obfuscation 🛡️ - How to prevent Supply Chai...

I spoke with Charity Majors, CTO of HoneyComb, a prolific Twitter user, and blogger. WHO TESTS IN PRODUCTION. 😱 And is proud of it. She also shares her insight into socio-technical leadership, observability, and databases. Learn: The importance of a tight feedback loop 🔁 Why the maximum deploy time should be 15 minutes. 🕒🚀 How microservices make engineers job harder😓 Why she wants to do away...

Alex Solomon of PagerDuty is working on making the DevOps world more efficient with on-call-management, AIOps, and automating routine debugging tasks. He shares with us about: - On-Call Management: The only notifications that provide a better Work/Life Balance - How AIOps and Runbook Automation are the future of DevOps (+other trends) - Partner vs Compete: Why they became an ecosystem - How he gre...

We spoke with Cheryl Hung of Cloud Native. She runs the ecosystem of over 600 members contributing to over a hundred open source projects. She also started the Cloud Native London meetup where she promotes developer advocacy and diversity. As an early adopter of kubernetes, she has a lot to share! Cheryl shared with us: - The importance of Developer Advocacy 👩‍💻 - How Edge Computing is the next...

We spoke to Matthias Jugel, the co-founder of ubirch, the company behind the 🇩🇪 German digital vaccination passes 💉His technology has generated over 30 million vaccine passes giving German their summer holidays back! And they launched in a matter of weeks! We discussed what was involved in creating digital vaccine passports that worked OFFLINE and allow movement around the EU 🇪🇺; Blockchain verif...

We spoke to Rasmus Rothe, leader in AI space- he has 5 products just based on machine learning. - What is involved in productising and commercialising a machine learning-based service 📈➡️💰 - The need for ML ops 👨‍💻 - Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure and why he doesn’t stick to one ☁️ - AI and its applications in medical field ⚕️, autonomous driving 🚘and BI 📊 + His go-to resources for libraries,...

I had the chance to talk to Eric Johnson, the CTO of GitLab about - How to manage remote teams: async, stand-ups, onboarding, burn out, internships, compensation, and more - How Gitlab uses git for everything from Marketing to Policy - The difference between servant-leadership and situational leadership and when to use what + A message to those who think parenthood :children_crossing:might take aw...

This Podcast episode is DOOMed 🔥🌋😈🧟🕯👿☠👹🦹 I had the chance to talk to John Romero, the inventor of DOOM, Wolfenstein and Commander Keen and founder of id Software about * Developing games in the early 90s and how they developed DOOM in a crazy small team * Developing games in 2021 and how it’s still possible to develop games with only a single person team * The crazy amounts of money they ma...

Today with me in the Podcast is Tim O'Reilly, the Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media and boy, his 1,5 million twitter followers are there for a reason! People call him "the Oracle of the Silicon Valley", he came up with the term "Web 2.0" - This man is crazy a wizard! We spoke about: * Writing as superpower! How it helps you to structure your thoughts. * How he started OSCON and great nerdy 90s * The...

In this episode we dive deep into the principles of Blockchain together with Peter Grosskopf who is our guest for the 2nd time. Peter recently quit his job as CTO @ Börse Stuttgart to fully focus on building a decentralized bank in the DeFi (Decentralize finance) space. We spoke about: * How does a blockchain work * Why to use blockchains * Concrete use-cases and applications * How ether works and...

This time I had Olivier Bonnet, the CTO of BlaBlaCar in the podcast. BlaBlaCar is the carpooling company: They own the market. They are active in 22 Countries, have 100M+ Users and acquired 12 other carpooling companies. Olivier, the CTO, joined me to talk about: * How his time at  Apple taught him to think long term * 100 million users, 12 acquisitions: The strategy behind BlaCar * The complexit...

How to make a living from Open Source? My guest Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of ☁️☁️ NextCloud ☁️☁️ the open alternative to Google Cloud and Microsofts Office 365 (!) does it for years and tells us where to start. He knows the game! **Other topics we touch?** - The 3 Ultimate tipps for open source developers/publishers How he leads his team of 50+ FTE almost fully remote - How GDPR can be seen as a...

In this episode I talk to Jason Warner, Github CTO aka "the PaaS Guru". He used to work for Heroku before and explained what he's planning and executing at Github and how Github uses it's massive amount of data to go away from pure repo-hosting. Topics that stand out: * How microsoft is working out quite well for them (Careful: contains Steve Balmer rants) * How Github will revolutionize the Platf...

This time I spoke to John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of 🌩 Cloudflare🌩, a publicly listed CDN and Edge Computing platform. Topics we touched: * His GNU Make book ;-) * How they grew to 25 BN marketcap 📈 * What he thinks about edge computing and concrete usecases for it * How COVID changed the 🥷 security world 🥷 * How they operate and maintain a global network with millions of servers Thanks a lot J...

This time I'm talking to an absolute legend: Mitchell Hashimoto, the CTO of HashiCorp the company behind a series of brilliant open source products (Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant) that are highly successfully both business wise and community wise. I would even argue that HashiCorp is the only company that manages to do that. We talk about: * The path from 7 to 1000+ employees in the last 10 yea...

Podcast time! In this episode I'm chatting with Jean-Denis Greze, the Head of Engineering @ Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Plaid is a fintech Unicorn from the US that just turned down an acquisition by Visa. We spoke about: * The upcoming topic 🔒 Privacy Engineering 🔒 and how it will change our thinking * How plaid handles 1000s of connections to banks and integrates with a...

This time in the podcast I have a very bright guest I admire for years: Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering at TomTom, Former VP Engineering at Zalando AND one of the developers behind the game "The Sims" 🧍‍♂️ He is a brilliant mind when it comes to tech leadership and has strong opinions on autonomy and empowerment. Topics we touched: * How 90s gaming development compares to 20s large scale tech teams...