Hangar DX Podcast

Frances Coronel is a senior software engineer on the agentic SDLC team at Slack, where she builds AI-powered developer tooling and helps enable engineers and non-engineers alike in the agentic era. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast,, Ankit Jain, CEO of Aviator, talks to Frances about : How Slack is shifting from solo, one-to-one development to multiplayer collaboration with agents Why overi...

"A software factory is essentially a CNC machine. Without training, many people are going to cut off their hands." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Geoffrey Huntley, AI and software engineering practitioner, creator of Ralph Loop, and independent thinker on autonomous engineering, about: - Why most companies are cargo-culting AI adoption...

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Wayne Duso, VP of Platform and Infrastructure at 1Password, about: - How a security-first company approaches AI adoption without compromising on privacy and trust - Why the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to planning, architecture, and verification and what that means for how engineers work - How...

"Engineering teams need to be thinking about how they can get out of verifying every line of code, because otherwise they're going to be completely buried in that and will absolutely be the bottleneck." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Jade Rubick, engineering leadership advisor and coach, about:  - Why traditional engineering roles are b...

"I define cognitive debt as being that understanding of what the system is doing and why, and who knows what across the team."  In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair, about - Why AI is amplifying the problems of poor team understanding - How cognitive debt and in...

"You assemble a senior engineer out of hundreds of these skills. Each one is a little building block. We take the time and sweat the details on making sure they are great and almost near perfect at what they do." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, about how Intercom set a goal of doublin...

"We can be in a flow state running in the wrong direction. Unless you can tie all your actions back to your strategic imperative, you might look back in five years and think: That was fun, but could I have gotten further?" In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Steve Pereira, lead consultant at Visible Value Stream Consulting and co-founder of...

“Our internal target is to 2X our impact with AI over one year. Unlike some more outlandish mandates, that one is both aspirational and achievable,” says Emily Nakashima, SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Emily shares how Honeycomb approached AI adoption at scale and why they try not to focus on metrics that can be gamed but rely more on self-reporting by d...

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.", says Ryan J. Salva, Google and GitHub dev tools veteran. Ryan also shares: How OpenAI nearly took down GitHub's servers and how that incident seeded the creation of Copilot The five stages of autonomous engineering and why most teams are stuck between stage three and four Why DevOps and SRE are the next untouched frontier of AI The thr...

“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor.  Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that sh...

The way that AI is changing software engineering is a bigger shift than object-oriented programming, the internet, and Agile together.", says Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery and Modern Software Engineering. Dave also shares why programming languages were designed to help engineers decompose problems into smaller chunks, the three fundamental problems of AI coding, why verification becom...

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is equating platform engineering with a piece of software. Backstage is the most visible example. Teams adopt it and declare that they now “have a platform.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Ajay Chankramath, founder & CEO of Platformetrics, about what platform engineering really me...

“How much productivity is AI actually giving your engineering teams?” is the wrong question. In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Yegor Denisov-Blanch, researcher at Stanford University, about how engineering productivity is actually measured—and what the data says about AI’s impact on software teams. Yegor shares insights from large-scale...

What happens when a single engineer’s side project turns into a company-wide AI platform used by every department—engineering, product, marketing, finance, customer support, and sales? In this episode of the Hangar DX Podcast, Block’s VP of Engineering Angie Jones shares the inside story of how Block deployed AI agents across the entire organization in just eight weeks. She reveals how an internal...

"Measuring developer productivity is fundamental now that we're observing the largest change in software engineering in a decade. I'm happy we have our traditional productivity metrics in a good place so we can better observe the effect of AI."  Moritz Beller is a software engineering researcher at Meta, and in this episode of the Hangar DX podcast, he talks to Ankit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Av...

“Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Annie Vella about the software engineer’s identity crisis, why engine...

“We're seeing the rise of a new persona that uses our products, the autonomous agent. That means we need to design for them, too. Agent Experience (AX) is about creating products that agents can navigate, integrate with, and orchestrate effectively.” In this episode, Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, joins Ankit Jain, founder of Aviator, to unpack the next evolution in software: agent...

"Let’s not worry about how fast somebody can run. Let’s assume that they will be fast if they’re in a rocket." In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Shahab Malik, DevEx UX Researcher at JP Morgan Chase, discusses researching developers' needs and pain points in a 70,000-engineer organization and advocates for an enablement approach to developer productivity metrics.  Chapters 00:00 Introductio...

Patrick Debois—widely known as the “Godfather of DevOps” and co-author of The DevOps Handbook—joins Aviator CEO Ankit Jain on The Hangar DX Podcast to explore the parallels between the DevOps movement and today’s AI revolution. In this conversation, Patrick compares AI adoption to the early chaotic days of DevOps and shares his view on how developer roles are shifting from producers to supervisors...

"Metrics will not measure developer productivity and will not solve your engineering organization’s problems", say Adam Berry, Staff Engineer at Netflix. Adam sits with Ankit Jain, host of The Hangar DX podcast, to discuss one of the most debated topics in engineering: developer productivity metrics. Adam shares why metrics like the DORA4 were never meant to measure individual productivity, how tr...

"In the next 10-15 years, I'm either going to be a CTO cleaning up after AI, or maybe there won't be people like me anymore because we're just going to write the specs and generate the whole app from scratch every time" In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Meri Williams, CTO at  @pleo_io , about what the future looks like for engineering man...

“What’s your AI strategy’ is the wrong question for engineering leaders. A better one would be: “What are you doing to improve engineering efficiency by 15–20%?” You don’t have to chase AI just for AI’s sake. Instead, focus on the biggest pain point, on whatever is slowing your teams down. In most orgs, it has nothing to do with needing faster typers.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Anki...

What Actually Is Platform Engineering? Platform engineering is everywhere — but is it just DevOps with a new name? In this candid conversation, Ankit Jain sits down with Vilas Veeraghavan (ex-Walmart, ex-Netflix) and Bryan Finster (platform advocate and continuous delivery expert) to break down the truth behind the hype. 🔍 In this episode: 00:00 What is Platform Engineering 05:53 DevOps is alive...

"Augmenting engineers with AI wherever it makes sense so they can be more productive" is the mission of Daniel Doubrovkine and his Augmented Engineering team at Shopify. In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Daniel about AI’s impact on software engineering and developer productivity. He shares insights on Shopify’s AI-integrated workflows and...

Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist researching software teams, on what cycle time can and can't measure, why software metrics are hard, and why developers feel their work is invisible. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit podcast.aviator.co