Chats with Kent C. Dodds

Kent closes Chats with Kent season 7 and explains what changes on this feed: Become a Product Engineer is now its own podcast, with season 7 episodes and upcoming releases on that RSS feed. He previews guests still in the pipeline and introduces Better with Kent , a new solo series on durable skills for software engineers. Season 7 of Chats with Kent is over. The interview series you have been fol...

Rhys has an unusually current perspective on product engineering because he is working right at the edge of the agent tooling shift. The conversation starts with his recent work on Vercel Domains and then moves into Executor , where the challenge is no longer just implementing integrations, but choosing the abstractions that make a system composable, safe, and pleasant to use over time. What makes...

Alex brings a product and marketing lens that fits this season perfectly: great products do not just solve technical problems, they help the right people recognize that you understand their world. The conversation starts with finding an audience and quickly turns into a practical way to build product sense inside a company: learn how customers describe themselves, observe where they gather, listen...

Julius is building right in the middle of one of the fastest-moving product categories in software, and that gives this episode a useful tension: everything feels possible, but that does not mean everything belongs in the product. The conversation covers the shift from one-agent-at-a-time coding to orchestration, why T3 Code focuses so much on a fast app layer, and how Julius thinks about what sho...

Jamon brings a useful mix to this conversation: founder of Infinite Red , longtime consultant, React Native specialist, and now indie game developer. That perspective makes the episode unusually practical. He has spent years watching where projects go wrong when product thinking is weak: bad requirements, unclear stakeholder alignment, UX details nobody owned, and engineers optimizing the wrong th...

Don's career makes this episode unusually wide-ranging: early computing, human error, aviation safety, Unix, Apple product decisions, digital cameras, color TV, and the long arc from usable products to systems that shape society. The through-line is straightforward but demanding: if you want better products, watch what people actually do , notice the workarounds they no longer complain about, and...

Will's path runs from designing bucket trucks to self-taught software engineering, education products, and database tooling, and that background gives this episode a distinctive lens: software is still a product people use with bodies, habits, emotions, and mental models. The conversation makes product sense concrete through examples like onboarding timing, course complexity, support workflows, an...

Aaron builds in public—Laravel roots, education, and now Solo , a terminal multiplexer–style desktop app for organizing agents and dev stacks. This episode is a practical tour of product sense for developers: watching people work, reading support email with empathy, cow paths vs. fences, and why the “right” architecture can still lose if humans go home furious. You’ll hear how Aaron reasons from p...

Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user , get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations , scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and...

Wayne blends delivery and product leadership—his stories range from a flagship-adjacent launch that nobody used to the everyday discipline of listening to customers without waiting two weeks for a meeting. This episode connects feedback-loop thinking (familiar from CI) to product discovery, yes-and conversations when someone is married to a feature idea, and the difference between hygiene features...

Dax has spent years building tools developers actually use; on OpenCode he's thinking hard about product process while the space moves at breakneck speed. This episode is a practical look at product deterioration (not just code rot), bottom-up adoption for dev tools, and how coding agents change who decides what gets built—without replacing the need for taste, restraint, and clarity about what pro...

Software keeps changing, and a lot of the spotlight is on AI—but the shift Kent cares about is bigger than models and agents. Implementation is increasingly delegated to tools that will keep improving; quality, review, and craft still matter, but the gap that won’t go away is product : understanding users, clarifying problems, and shipping what actually helps. This season is a deliberate tour of p...

Kent says goodbye at the end of another season of the "Chats with Kent" podcast, which featured interviews with speakers for the upcoming Epic Web Comp 2025 conference in Salt Lake City. The host, Kent C. Dodds, expresses excitement about the lineup of speakers and encourages listeners to attend the conference in March 2025. He also mentions that the talks will be available on the EpicWeb.dev plat...

Kent C. Dodds sits down with Jason Lengstorf to discuss his talk at Epic Web Conf, Of Things Epic , where he dives into the principles behind effective decision-making in web development. Rather than focusing on which tools to pick, Kent emphasizes the need for a framework that enables developers to make confident decisions that scale. He draws from his experience with the Epic Stack, highlighting...

Andre Landgraf joins Kent to discuss his talk at Epic Web Conf, Epic Image Optimization. In this conversation, they explore the challenges and trade-offs of optimizing images for the web, particularly when handling large numbers of event photos or user-generated content. Andre shares how building his own image optimization pipeline gave him a deeper understanding of the process, allowing him to ma...

In this conversation, Jason Lengstorf, creator of CodeTV and the Web Dev Challenge, joins Kent to discuss: His background in engineering, developer relations, and open-source at companies like IBM, Gatsby, and Netlify. The Web Dev Challenge, a fast-paced, team-based competition that brings developers together to solve unique coding challenges in just four hours. The free Epic Web Conf hackathon ha...

In this conversation, Ryan Florence, co-creator of Remix and React Router, joins Kent to talk about the evolving landscape of web development. He shares insights on: The motivation behind moving core Remix features into React Router. The rising importance of AI-driven development and how it affects frameworks. Betting on the web platform as a long-term strategy for performance, portability, and fu...

Annie Sexton joins Kent to talk about her upcoming talk at Epic Web Conf, JavaScript: The Origin Story. In this discussion, she shares her love for history and why documenting the evolution of programming languages is so important. They dive into: The rushed creation of JavaScript and how it shaped the language. Competing languages of the era and how JavaScript won out. The unexpected ways JavaScr...

Zackary Jackson joins Kent to discuss his upcoming talk at Epic Web Conf, Epic Federation: Scaling Web Infrastructure. As an expert in large-scale web architecture, Zack has helped build critical tools like Module Federation and RSPack, both of which power ByteDance’s global infrastructure. In this conversation, Kent and Zack cover: The challenges of managing thousands of developers and repos acro...

Aaron Francis joins Kent to discuss his talk at Epic Web Conf, Epic Bets: Practical Tips for Betting on Yourself. In this conversation, Aaron reflects on his non-traditional path into tech, his experience being laid off, and how he prepared himself to be resilient in the face of career uncertainty. He shares insights on why developers should focus on skill stacking, personal branding, and long-ter...

Fran Zekan, an engineer from Croatia with experience in hardware, robotics, and web development, joins Kent to discuss his talk, Shipping Reusable Full-Stack Components . Fran explains how React Server Components (RSCs) allow developers to build truly self-contained, reusable full-stack features—something that has long been a staple in the Rails ecosystem with Rails Engines. In this conversation,...

Josh Cirre, a developer advocate and content creator, joins Kent to discuss his talk at Epic Web Conf: "Learning-Driven Development." Josh shares his philosophy on learning by doing—where the best way to master new technologies is by applying them to real-world projects rather than passively consuming tutorials. Josh and Kent discuss: The importance of curiosity in learning and how small observati...

In this episode, Kent is joined by Kira Corbett, an AI-focused developer educator with deep experience in robotics, simulation, and human-computer interaction. Kira discusses her background in building real-world systems and how her transition to web development has shaped her approach to optimizing user experiences. Her talk at Epic WebConf, "Building an AI Assistant to Deliver Your Best Presenta...

Taylor Desseyn, VP of Global Development at Torque.dev and host of the Guidance Counselor 2.0 podcast, joins Kent to discuss his role as an emcee at Epic WebConf and the importance of networking in tech. Taylor shares insights on how developers can maximize their time at conferences, from preparing in advance to actively building meaningful connections. Taylor emphasizes the value of in-person eve...

Mark Techson, a developer advocate at Google working on Angular, joins Kent to discuss the intersection of AI and developer productivity. His Epic WebConf talk, "Beyond Code Assist: Driving Impact as a Next-Gen Developer," explores how developers can go beyond using AI for simple code assistance and instead integrate AI into their workflows to accomplish more. Mark emphasizes that the world of sof...