Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

XR is a potentially transformative technology, but it needs to be leveraged in a way that drives value. That isn't straightforward — given effective XR initiatives often require significant experimentation and exploration, simply aligning XR with strict organizational goals and aims will often make it harder to achieve success. How can technologists and product leaders get the balance right? In th...

Leadership is an important if often-overlooked quality in the technology industry. However, it is also a complex and multi-faceted thing: it isn't a discrete set of skills, but rather an ability to respond and adapt to the needs of a situation, team or individual. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ricardo Cavalcanti (Caval) and Arturo Santos from Thoughtworks Brazil join hosts Alexey Boas...

Design leader and Thoughtworks alumnus Emma Carter recently published her second book, DesignedUp . In it, she explains how designers can win a seat at the leadership table inside technolology organizations and become effective evangelists and advocates for good design principles and practices. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Emma joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss he...

Thoughtworks recently established a new role — Chief AI Officer. Taking up the position is Mike Mason, a veteran of Thoughtworks with over 20 years at the company, in technology roles spanning developer to technology strategist and author (and occasional Technology Podcast host). Mike will help guide Thoughtworks AI strategy and ensure that we're equipped to support clients trying to leverage AI. ...

It seems obvious to say that mobile usage has grown dramatically over the last decade, but for businesses that have to move to accomodate this type of user behavior, it presents many challenges. While some have successfully gone all-in on mobile experiences, for others, trying to build effectively for multiple channels is as much an organizational challenge as it is a product one. In this episode...

A changing regulatory environment has made it more important than ever for organizations to embed privacy in their data infrastructure. Doing so, however, can be complicated — that means data scientists have an vital role to play in ensuring privacy is a key concern from both a technical and commercial perspective.  Thoughtworker and data scientist Katharine Jarmul is eager to help fellow data sci...

When cloud first hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, its attraction was rooted, in part, in its apparent elegance and simplicity. As it has become an established norm in the industry, such simplicity has given way to more fragmentation and complexity. The growth of "multi-cloud" and adjacent terms such as "hybrid cloud" and "poly cloud" mean that cloud is a field that needs to be sensitivel...

Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabled by a significant technology modernization project which, amazingly, was completed just weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic erupted in March 2020, the start of a period in which millions of people took to Etsy to purchase cloth face masks. Withou...

When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most interesting innovations in machine learning right now is actually happening on a really small  scale. Thanks to TinyML, models can now be run on small devices at the edge of a network. This has significant imp...

We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverly deployed as a means of duping or manipulating us. However, trends like NFTs have brought this into clearer view. This is not to say it's a novel phenomenon — from dark patterns in UX design to pages and pages of end-user license agreements (EULAs),...

The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on the actual experiences of Thoughtworkers working with clients. With its first edition launched in January 2010, it is now a fixture of the Thoughtworks calendar, released twice a year in the spring and fall. Although it has been around for more than...

Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery Hackathon, an initiative designed to bring together expertise in fields ranging from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, machine learning and virology to discover new drugs that could help thwart the pandemic.  One team that took part was from Thoughtwo...

Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is today used in a diverse range of scenarios and architectures, it nevertheless remains a topic that causes considerable confusion and debate:  where should we use it? How should we use it? Sometimes, what even is it, exactly? In this episode of the Techno...

Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and taught at the University of Central Florida. Becoming CTO in 2007, she has seen Thoughtworks — and the wider tech industry — evolve through a period in which the business mainstream has b...

As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and make delivering at speed much more challenging than it was previously. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons is joined by colleagues Rick Kick (Head of Application...

It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends — and understanding what they mean — matters. At Thoughtworks we do that with our Looking Glass report . Our most recent edition was published at the end of 2022; it provides a useful framework for thinking through the major shifts that look set to...

Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering, thanks to the rise of cloud and highly complex distributed systems. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Alexey Boas and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Prem Chandrasekaran and  Karthik Krishnan — authors of the new book Domain-Driven Design w...

The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's important, it nevertheless remains something that is all too often overlooked or viewed as a luxury when it comes to actually building products. This is unfortunate: taking accessibility seriously throughout the process of development and design will...

Data Mesh is one of the most powerful and widely-discussed concepts to emerge from Thoughtworks in recent years. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the risks and challenges data can pose — from the perspective of both privacy and organizational effectiveness — it has only become more relevant. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Zhamak Dehghani (Thoughtworks alumnus and author of O'...

Low-code and no-code development platforms have been heralded in recent years as a solution to engineering talent gaps and as a trend that will properly democratize technology, allowing even non-coders to build applications from scratch. However, despite the marketing rhetoric, such platforms pose considerable challenges: how do they fit alongside existing development projects? To what extent do t...

For many who have been part of the recent migration of users from Twitter to Mastodon, their first encounters with the "fediverse" have been puzzling, even disorienting. Given a decade in which we've all grown accustomed to the affordances of corporate social media, it's not surprising people have questions: How does it work, exactly? How am I supposed to use it?  With so much current interest in...

Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the concept of " evolutionary architecture " and demonstrated how it can help organizations manage change effectively in fast-moving business contexts and an ever-shifting technology landscape. The book has now been updated, with its second edition due to...

While putting together this year's Technology Radar, Conway's Law — the idea that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their communication structures — was the subject of a lot of discussion. Should we fight it — by deploying the inverse conway maneuver ? Or do we need to adopt a more nuanced approach and consider how we can leverage it? In this episode of the Technology Po...

The "Basal Cost" of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama . The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to maintain normal functioning. Applied to software development, the concept is intended to help us pay much more attention to the long term costs — like additional complexity and maintenance — of building a...

Although many books have been written on software testing over the years, Gayathri Mohan's Full-Stack Testing , released earlier this year with O'Reilly, is unique: by taking a comprehensive look at many different aspects of testing across the development lifecycle, it emphasizes the importance of a truly holistic approach.  In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Gayathri joins hosts Rebecca P...