Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Geoffrey Litt , Design Engineer at Notion . With Geoffrey, we talked about malleable software, a type of platform that kind of always existed, but is now getting new meaning and opportunity thanks to AI. And then we talked about how Notion itself changed its place in the ecosystem, with the AI agents first, and now with the new developer platform, where you can ship code direc...

Today's guest is Michael Lopp , better known as Rands , who is writer of several popular books about engineering management, including "Managing Humans", which is a personal favorite of mine. Live at LDX3, we discussed his lifelong writing habit, the importance of giving feedback through stories and the leverage of leadership experience in the AI era. (00:00) Episode start (00:40) A...

Today's guest is Lara Hogan , an author, public speaker and coach for managers and leaders across the whole tech industry. And she's had a long career as VP of engineering at FLY, Kickstarter, Director Etsy and more.  So with Lara we talked about her journey in tech, which started with a philosophy degree. And then, taking from her work as a coach, we talked more about how successful teams...

Today's guest is James Stanier , CTO at Nordhealth, former director at Shopify, an author of several books about engineering management, remote work, and more. With James, we talked about what senior engineers will look like in the future, taking from a great article he wrote just recently, and then regarding how engineering management is changing, what's expected of managers today, and wh...

Today's guest is Doug Peete , Chief Product Officer at Atono, with whom over the last few months we have developed a deep industry report about the state of product development. In this chat we'll go through the main findings of the report, match them to our respective experience and explore ideas about how teams can do better with product development and AI( 00:00 ) Episode start( 01:38 )...

Today's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston .They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these comp...

Today's guest is Stuart Caborn, distinguished engineer at loveholidays, which is an online travel agency with millions of customers around the world. I'm talking with Stuart because his team is doing AI coding for real. They operate an extremely complex product and technology, with each engineer deploying to production more than 80 times a month, with more than 60% of production code being...

Today’s guest is Chris Lattner , one of the most important engineers for modern computing. Chris invented key compiler infrastructure tech like LLVM and MLIR, but he’s also the inventor of the Swift language, a key contributor in bringing Google TPUs to market, and a lot more. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Modular, where he’s reinventing AI infrastructure to make software portable across GPUs...

Today's guest is Amelia Wattenberger, former principal research engineer at GitHub and now partner at Sutter Hill Ventures. But she's also a product lead at Augment Code, where she developed Intent, a developer workspace for orchestrating AI coding agents and delivering complex work.  So this is a fascinating chat into the future and the present of software development with someone who has...

Today's guest is Richard Hughes - Jones , a professional executive coach with more than 20 years of experience.  With Richard, we talked about how to coach tech leaders through uncertainty and everything that's going on with AI, how to navigate it, how we should think about our role, and what it means to step outside of the framework. We also explored how to leverage AI for coaching, how t...

Today's guest is Austen McDonald , former hiring committee chair at Meta, and author of the book, "Mastering Behavioral Interviews."  Austen, in his career, conducted more than 1,000 interviews and coached more than 200 engineers, and is here today to tell us everything about why behavioral interviews are more important than ever and how to run them right, as a candidate and as a rec...

Today's guest is Paige Bailey , Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind. And before that, Principal Product Manager at GitHub, where she launched Copilot and several other AI products. With Paige, we went through a quick demo of how to build and deploy a fully functioning application just with your voice, one that includes accessing your camera, manipulating pictures, and having AI doing a...

Today's guest is Gonçalo Silva , CTO of Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist. This interview is an incredible behind the scenes about one of the most peculiar companies in tech. Because Doist is bootstrapped, profitable, has no office and has about 100 employees that are spread across about 40 countries. Yet, or maybe for this reason, they created one of the world's most beloved pro...

Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi! Thiago is former director of engineering at Nubank and with a long and successful tech career in companies like ThoughtWorks, Apple and more. But right now, he's on a sabbatical and he's been for more than six months. So get ready for an incredible chat where we talked about your identity as an engineering leader, psychology, Claude Code and more.(00:00)...

Today's guest is Matt McClernan , CEO of Augment Code! With Matt, we went through the findings of our own research that we developed together with Augment, surveying more than 400 engineering teams about how they're using AI. And we went through many topics, from the differences between personal and team adoption, challenges, how documentation looks like a secret weapon, how to manage cont...

Today's guest is Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI!With Rob, we talked about software delivery, the impact of AI, and how to build great product engineering teams. And next, we discuss trade-offs between standardization versus flexibility in software organizations, and lessons learned from our respective past mistakes.(00:00) Preview(01:22) Introduction(03:33) Industry Changes and AI's Impact on...

Today's guest is Hywel Carver ! Hywel is co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, which provides live team coaching for software engineering teams. With Hywel, we got deep into what makes traditional developer training awful, what engineers truly learn and what they should learn. Then we explored how to measure the impact of learning and how AI may possibly change both how learning works and our o...

Today's guest is Darragh Curran !  Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users. With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team res...

Today's guest is Meg Adams !Meg is Senior Director of Engineering for the New York Times. With Meg, we talked about her fantastic journey in tech, from management in sales and retail, to learning software development from scratch, to management again, but this time in technology. And then we especially talked about Neuro Leadership, what it is, how you can apply it in practice in your team pro...

Today's guest is Birgitta Böckeler ! Birgitta is is a distinguished engineer and global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at ThoughtWorks. Her full-time work is to figure out how engineering teams can make the most out of AI. With Birgitta, we talked about her favorite workflows, how she uses AI in the IDE, in the terminal or in a genetic mode. We discussed AI impact on productivity and w...

Today's guest is Antonia Scheidel !Antonia is Director of Engineering at Duolingo, where she made the whole career progression, starting as a simple intern 12 years ago. Antonia is an expert at designing good, automated processes for your team. We discuss how to create good automation to avoid people doing glue work, how not to become a bottleneck as a manager, and how to make the team own the...

Today's guest is Adam Tornhill ! Adam is the author of the popular book Your Code as a Crime Scene, and he's the founder of Code Scene. With Adam, we discussed his unique insights about technical debt and code quality, which come from his study of forensic psychology. We explored how static analysis is not enough to understand code health and why you need to look into version control histo...

Today's guest is Meri Williams , who is the CTO of Pleo and the host of LeadDev conferences for more than 10 years. With Meri, we started by talking about diversity, why it is such a controversial topic, why diverse teams make for stronger teams, and what are the mistakes engineering leaders should avoid. Then we took from her experience with Lead Dev to explore what makes for a good talk, and...

Today's guest is Annie Duke , who is a former world-class professional poker player and one of the world's top experts on decision-making. She's a bestseller author and coach of many tech founders and teams. With Annie we talked about her journey from studying decision science to becoming a top poker player and back to decision-making. We explored how to make good decisions under uncer...

Today's guest is Maude Lemaire , who is a principal engineer at GitHub and author of the book, "Refactoring at Scale."With Maude, we talked about her journey in tech, from Rent the Runway to joining Slack and leading its performance engineering team to joining GitHub as a principal engineer. And then we discussed what it means to do refactoring at scale, how to do it right, how to br...