Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

If we’ve learned anything at the Frontier, it’s that interesting technology stories can be found anywhere… even in that parking ticket you got last month that you’re still cursing over. Ever wonder how they know where your car was parked and for how long? Ledge being a collector of parking tickets himself had to find out. In this episode, Jim Suttles, IT Director at Republic Parking Systems shares...

Scaling an engineering organization is challenging enough when you’re colocated, and when your whole team is developers. What happens when you also introduce data science and 24/7 SRE? That’s three entirely different types of work. Now distribute those workers around the world and imagine the complexity. Ledge sits down with Alex Newman, serial founder, engineer, and management thinker about how h...

Communities are people who not only share common principles, but who also develop and share practices that help individuals in the group thrive. DevRel means building communities for technical audiences. If you want to know about DevRel and community building, you need to know about Mary Thengvall and her host of curated, authored, and spoken content covering these critical topics. Mary and Ledge...

APIs, microservices, connections to external systems, integration with legacy systems… the list of software complexities gets longer and longer. In this episode Ledge is joined by global enterprise IT leader Dipanjan Choudhury. With almost 20 years of experience in software development, platform, and consulting leadership roles, we wanted to get his perspectives on risk mitigation so smaller compa...

In this episode, Ledge sits down with Greg Starling, a full stack e-commerce and mobility expert with broad experience in the CTO seat. Ledge and Greg talk through his advice for staying on the right side of Apple’s review processes, and how to stand out in the crowd to potentially earn yourself a mobility partnership spot, based on his experience at Monscierge. We also discuss how to manage remot...

John Isdell is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures. You may not know of Red Ventures by name, but you’re virtually guaranteed to have been on one of their sites like BankRate.com, Reviews.com, and CreditCards.com. They’re a digital portfolio company with a huge consumer web footprint, and with that footprint comes challenges of scale, legacy code, constant iteration, and evolving...

Most of us have engaged with, and even built, products and platforms that make heavy use of messaging. But how does anyone know if those messages convert into sales or other actionable metrics? In this episode I sit down with David Galante, SVP of Marketing and Product Management at Mobivity to talk about how their vast point of sale data system does just that, specifically after having acquired a...

There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Management can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies. Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle tackles the challenges of engineering management--from...

Ubiquitous platform technologies like Wordpress open up a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs in every conceivable sector, yet even user-friendly tools usually require implementation and customization by qualified developers. In this episode with talk with Gun.io client, Arian Mirzarafie Ahi, a biologist and e-learning entrepreneur, about the difficulties of finding a great developer as...

Yoav Rubin is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI. Previous to that he was a Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM Research. He’s a published author and self described “software guy” with a lot of interesting perspectives on the state of the art in AI. Yoav talks with Ledge about how AI, like other technologies, is being democratized through services like Azure A...

Oksana Shmaliy, scientist turned technologist, currently leads IT Strategy and Architecture at Grange Insurance, where she led the DevOps transformation company-wide. In this episode, Oksana and Ledge chat systems thinking, organizational scale, and how creative, multi-dimensional employees make the difference in high performance companies. Oksana gets super-meta, showing us how fractal theory can...

One of the most difficult transitions an organization can make is moving from “how much will that cost?” and “how long with that take?” to “how quickly can we deliver first value?” That’s the essence of Agile transformation, so Ledge sat down with Jeff Despain, Sr. Director Engineering at CHG Healthcare to discuss the company’s relatively rapid and intensive transformation to Agile product teams -...

Facebook and Google pioneered lookalike audience marketing for B2C. Serial entrepreneur, and engineer-turned AI marketer, Olin Hyde, started Leadcrunch to do the same for B2B marketers, a group of buyers who behave in totally different patterns than consumers. Olin and Ledge discuss how engineers can learn about product-market fit for their ideas, and how SaaS subscription billing might not be the...

David “Gonzo” Gonzalez is the CEO and Co-founder of Ziff.ai, a deep learning as a service platform. Ziff’s goal: Reduce the complexity required to profit from AI in an enterprise setting. In this episode, Gonzo and Ledge discuss how to answer the question, “How do I know as a business person if my business model can be enhanced as an AI?” It comes down to prediction, forecasting, and two area...

How do you make application changes when you have 120 million active monthly users? Ledge sat down for an amazingly useful chat with James Colgan, Microsoft’s Sr. Product Manager for Outlook Mobile to literally answer that question.   For the last few years he’s been working with the largest, most complicated, and most sophisticated organizations with one goal: super-happy users at super...

“How does your software development team measure performance?” -- that’s the question Dan Lines and Ori Keren set out to answer with Linear B. Ledge sits down to talk with the duo, each veteran software engineering leaders with global teams and several high profile exits. While planning their solution, Dan and Ori reflected on their experiences working together, specifically targeting the incredib...

Liz Fong-Jones is a 15-year Site Reliability Engineer. She’s a former Google and current SRE and observability advocate for Honeycomb.io.   Liz evangelizes “Building Excellent Systems” that both look out for the people who use the system, and for the people who work on it.   In this fascinating episode, she talks with Ledge about wide ranging ethical issues in engineering, and about how...

Chris Overton is the VP of Cloud Engineering at open source leader, Elastic, a globally distributed company with engineers in more than 30 countries. Chris and Ledge discuss how supporting remote work is an unparalleled competitive advantage that allows for hiring the very best people, regardless of location. When the entire world is your candidate pool, you’re going to be hard to beat, and commer...

Ravi Sahu is the founder and CEO of Strayos, a VC-backed computer vision and deep learning company that’s improving the mining industry by using 3D aerial intelligence to reduce costs, and to improve safety by providing highly accurate data. In this episode Ledge and Ravi discuss the importance of creating a culture of customer empathy, and how that focus has allowed for better feedback and unders...

“Engineers want to win.” says Steve Prosser, VP of Software Development at Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the US, responsible for more than $20B in annual loan volume. Ever worked at a company that tries to hide engineering from executives? Not this one. Steve and Ledge discuss how their organization has gone all-in on engineer autonomy, where each and every dev man...

Ever had to parse through an absolutely awful contract? How about a 60-page MSA from one of those big company procurement departments? One of the promises of AI is that the happy robots will start taking away the drudgery of tasks like parsing our 4-page IP transfer clause. In this episode, Ledge sits down with Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer at LegalSifter. Spoiler alert: they already have AIs...

How will Chinese companies like Huawei affect the future of cyber security? How does our relationship with China affect the open source community and the future of AI? These are big questions for big thinkers like Chris Short. Chris runs the newsletter DevOpsish and is also a Principal Product Marketing Manager for Redhat. In this episode, Chris and Ledge discuss the fundamental differences betwee...

How can best practices from one industry change another industry? 25-year Technology Executive, Dave Ugan joins Ledge in the episode to deep dive into a real example: how he spent 6 years bringing UX, CX, and technology from the hospitality and attractions industry to the end-of-life (yes, funerals) industry. Dave talks about the importance of iterating, of targeting open-minded customers early so...

Unplanned work blows up estimates, kills team morale, and drives down productivity, which makes it no surprise that the best agile engineering leaders target operations improvements as a core value. Today’s guest Shawn Kuenzler takes that mission even deeper. Scaling engineering teams is what Shawn does, and he joins Ledge to discuss balancing efficiency with empathy for customers and team members...

You’re one of the largest exercise brands in the world. How do you get your DevOps in shape? Ledge sits down with Bob Chen, Senior Director of Technical Operations at Beachbody to chat DevOps, deployment, working with multiple distributed teams, and knocking off technical debt. See it turns out software teams often want to do their own thing… until they don’t. A good Ops team knows how to serve th...