Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we could just be shipping code? Of course we do; particularly if we want to communicate and share software with other humans.  To discuss documentation in 2025, Technology Podcast host Lilly Ryan is joined by Heidi Waterhouse, a very special guest with an e...

The technology industry has embraced specialisms — not just in different fields or job roles, like web development or security, but even in terms of particular platforms or stacks. But are we losing something as every tech professional is forced to push themselves into increasingly smaller niches? Martin Fowler and Unmesh Joshi think so. They've been thinking a lot about the importance of what the...

Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" — flawed assumptions that often get made when teams move from monolithic to distributed software architectures. In recent years, software architecture experts and regular writing partners Neal Ford and Mark Richards have identified a further three new...

What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools? In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a powerful new way to give AI agents deeper awareness of the tools, information and history they need to work effectively in the operations space. Unlike traditional APIs that just trigger functions, MCP adds a semant...

Google I/O 2025 took place in May. It's always a great opportunity to find out how Google is trying to shape the industry agenda, but this year the predominance of Gemini meant the event was a chance to get a better look at how Google will play its hand in the AI market in the months to come. To dissect the headlines from this year's Google I/O and explore what we can learn about Google's strategi...

Mainframe modernization is hard : there's a huge amount of complexity that needs to be understood before it can be effectively addressed. Generative AI, however, can be a particularly powerful tool for understanding mainframe legacy codebases, something we've been exploring with Mechanical Orchard while working together on its Imogen modernization platform. In this episode of the Technology Podcas...

You might think you know software engineering, but what are the really fundamental elements? What are the concepts, ideas and practices that are completely essential? What makes software engineering what it is? Thoughtworker Nate Schutta and Dan Vega are attempting to address those questions in their upcoming book with O'Reilly, The Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Covering topics ranging fro...

Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.32 was published at the start of April 2025. Featuring 105 blips, it offered a timely snapshot of what's interesting and important in the industry. Through the process of putting it together, we also identify a collection of key themes that speak to the things that shaped our conversations. This time, there were four: supervised agents in coding assistants, evolvi...

The term 'vibe coding' — which first appeared in a post on X by Andrej Karpathy in early February 2025 — has set the software development world abuzz: everyone seems to have their own take on what it is, how it's done and whether it's a bold new chapter in the history of programming or an insult to anyone that's ever written a line of code. Clearly, then, we need to talk about vibe coding — and th...

Nearly ten years after the first edition of Infrastructure as Code was published by O'Reilly, Kief Morris is publishing a third edition of the book. But why a new edition now? What's changed in technology and business over the last decade? Quite a lot, as it happens. To talk about what's new — both in the infrastructure world and in the book itself — Kief Morris joins host Ken Mugrage on the Techn...

AI is inherently dynamic: that's true in terms of the field itself, and at a much lower level too — models are trained on new data and algorithms adapt and change to new circumstances and information. That's part of its power and what makes it so exciting, but from a business and organizational perspective, that can make governance and measurement exceptionally difficult. How can we know that our...

How can we better define and clarify architectures to ensure consistency and control? If, as Neal Ford and Mark Richards discussed on a recent episode of the Technology Podcast , software architecture intersects with many different facets of software development and delivery, what can we do to better manage architectures in a way that is adaptable and dynamic? Neal and Mark return to the guest sea...

The release of DeepSeek's AI models at the end of January 2025 sent shockwaves around the world. The weeks that followed have been rife with hype and rumor, ranging from suggestions that DeepSeek has completely upended the tech industry to claims the efficiency gains ostensibly unlocked by DeepSeek are exagerrated. So, what's the reality? And what does it all really mean for the tech industry? In...

Generative AI's popularity has led to a renewed interest in quality assurance — perhaps unsurprising given the inherent unpredictability of the technology. This is why, over the last year, the field has seen a number of techniques and approaches emerge, including evals, benchmarking and guardrails. While these terms all refer to different things, grouped together they all aim to improve the reliab...

Software architecture necessarily intersects with a diverse range of critical things, including implementation, infrastructure, data and engineering practices. All these elements require serious consideration and reflection if you're to architect effectively.  To discuss these various intersections, Thoughtworks' Neal Ford and his long-time collaborator Mark Richards join host Prem Chandrasekaran...

Who should be involved in the process of making decisions about software architecture? That's a question that's been puzzling Thoughtworker Andrew Harmel-Law for some time — so much so that he decided to write a book about it. The result is Facilitating Software Architecture . Published by O'Reilly in December 2024, it's both an argument for and a guide to involving more people in the architecture...

With the rise of generative AI, the concept of the uncanny valley — where human resemblance unsettles, disturbs or disgusts — is more relevant than ever. But is it a problem that technologists need to tackle? Or does it offer an opportunity for greater thoughtfulness about the ways generative AI is being built, deployed and used? In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Lilly Ryan is joined...

Legacy modernization is an enduring challenge — and as systems become more complex, the difficulty of understanding and modelling a system so it can be modernized only becomes more difficult. However, at Thoughtworks we've seen some recent success bringing generative AI into the legacy modernization process. To discuss what this means in practice and the benefits it can deliver, host Ken Mugrage i...

Data contracts are a bit like APIs for data — they make it possible to interface with data in a way that ensures the transfer of data from one place to another is stable and reliable. This is particularly important for building more reliable data-driven applications. To discuss data contracts, host Lilly Ryan is joined on the Technology Podcast by Andrew Jones, the creator of the data contract con...

What does it mean to be a technology leader today? What kind of challenges must you address? What questions do you need to answer? To explore all that — and dive into what it looks like from a Thoughtworks perspective — host Ken Mugrage spoke to Thomas Squeo, the CTO for Thoughtworks in the Americas. They discuss everything from keeping track of emerging technologies and wider industry shifts, to...

Volume 31 of the Technology Radar will be released on October 23, 2024. As always, it will feature 100+ technologies and techniques that we've been using with clients around the world. Alongside them will be a set of key themes that emerged during the process of putting it together. We think they offer another way into the Radar and give a unique insight on some of the most interesting issues impa...

The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is, first and foremost, a publication. It's a document that anyone in the tech industry can read twice a year to learn about our experiences and perspectives on technology. However, it's also more than that: it's built on top of a process of deliberation, discussion and curation. We think that's particularly important — it's something we encourage technology teams...

There are no shortage of options when it comes to relational databases. While the likes of PostgreSQL have proven enduring, even as the market has evolved, for data scientists and data engineers that need to manage and query particularly complex or large data sets, the most popular databases aren't always right for the job. Thankfully, this is where projects like DuckDB can help. Built for what's...

It's widely accepted that, in most cases at least, software systems should be modular, consisting of separate, discrete services. But what about the size of those services? How big or small should they be? This is where the question of service granularity comes in: too small and your system will become needlessly complicated; too big and you lose all the benefits of modularity you were seeking in...

Trying to measure developer effectiveness or productivity isn't a new problem. However, with the rise of fields like platform engineering and a new wave of potential opportunities from generative AI, the issue has come into greater focus in recent years.  In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Prem Chandrasekaran speak to Abi Noda, CEO of software engineering intelligence...