Refactoring Podcast

By Luca RossiBusiness Management

Refactoring Podcast episodes

September 06, 2024Merchants of Complexity 🏯 — with DHH
Today's guest is David Heinemeier Hansson!
David is the creator of Rails, co-founder & CTO of Basecamp, a NYT bestselling author, and professional racing driver for 10+ years!
In our chat, we explored many of David's strong opinions on software development, including today's excessive complexity in software and infrastructure, the role of AI, and the future of open source.
We also talked about his racing and how he approaches learning any topic from scratch.
Here is what we talked about:
(02:20) Introduction
(03:42) Merchants of Complexity
(13:19) Innovating the dev experience
(21:53) Complexity in small projects
(28:14) Incentives hurt open source
(32:49) Subscription vs ONCE
(35:24) David and AI
(47:27) Using AI as training wheels
(49:42) The art of learning
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1 hr
August 23, 2024Continuous Coordination 🔀 — with Henry Poydar
Today's guest is Henry Poydar!
Henry is CEO and founder at Steady, with more than 25 years of experience in tech leadership roles.
With Henry, we talked about continuous coordination, an open source framework he co-created, providing a set of principles and practices for running modern, effective engineering teams.
Here is what we talked about:
(01:25) Introduction
(02:25) Henry's Career
(13:23) Create async communication
(16:47) Keeping a steady beat
(23:02) Define a necessary meeting
(26:00) The proper alignment
(30:58) Applying continuous coordination
(37:06) Discovering how your team works
(38:38) Managing in the AI era
(44:27) How remote can improve working
(48:20) How AI is affecting team work
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53 min
August 09, 2024Dana’s Journey, Hiring Engineers & AI 🗺️ — with Dana Lawson
Today's guest is Dana Lawson!
Dana is CTO at Netlify and held leadership roles at incredible companies like GitHub, New Relic, InVision, and more.
With Dana, we talked about her journey, starting in the military, becoming a manager and major lessons she has learned. We also talked about how to hire engineers, how to create a diverse and inclusive team, and the impact of AI on engineering.
Here is what we talked about:
(01:25) Introduction
(02:07) Dana's tech journey
(08:43) Career's tipping points
(14:53) Balancing technical and managing skills
(19:32) Connecting is key
(22:11) Hiring in 2024
(28:04) How AI is affecting hiring
(32:54) Pursuing diversity in a team
(43:39) Pushing boundaries and growth
(45:47) Integrating AI in the workflow
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]
54 min
July 26, 2024The Power of Influence 📣 — with Irina Stanescu
Today's guest is Irina Stanescu!
Irina is a full-time engineering coach, course instructor, and former manager at Uber and Google.
With Irina, we talked about her journey through Silicon Valley, big tech, and high growth startups, balancing IC and management duties, and achieving impact through influence.
Here is what we talked about:
(01:21) Introduction
(02:02) Irina’s first steps
(06:10) Joining Google
(08:15) From Google to Uber
(10:16) Being a young TLM
(14:34) The restraints of a TLM
(18:14) Uber vs Google
(22:01) Impact through influence
(28:09) Training your influence skills
(35:42) Applying influence in specific roles
(38:04) How to be an helpful EM
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📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠⁠
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]
48 min
July 12, 2024 Code Reviews, AI, and Modern Engineering 🔍 — with Greg Foster
Today's guest is Greg Foster!
Greg is CTO at Graphite, a tool that helps teams doing better code reviews, and smaller and faster code changes.
With Greg, we talked about what good code reviews look like, how AI is changing the development process, and how the Graphite engineering team works.
Here is what we talked about:
(02:01) Introduction
(03:06) What is Graphite?
(05:05) Graphite's code reviewing
(09:58) Combining different workflows
(13:07) Monorepos vs polyrepos
(17:28) Conducting code reviews
(21:57) The landscape of automated review
(25:09) The hidden meaning behind skipping code reviews
(27:43) Common mistakes
(29:53) Integrating AI in code review
(34:36) AI - human balance
(38:27) Tech apprenticeship in the AI era
(41:14) Graphite's structure
(45:15) A dev tool from devs
(47:23) Delivery process at Graphite
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📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]
56 min
June 28, 2024How Vercel Works 🔍 — with Malte Ubl
Today's guest is Malte Ubl!
Malte is CTO at Vercel, the frontend cloud provider, and creator and maintainer of Next.js, the most popular React framework.
Malte has also been Engineer Director at Google, where he led Google Search for desktop computers.
With Malte, we deep dived into how Vercel works as a team, what could developer experience look like, and the future of AI-enabled applications.
Here is what we talked about:
(01:21) Introduction
(02:17) How Vercel works
(05:01) Vercel team strategy
(06:29) The journey of a new code
(13:45) Do we need engineering managers?
(16:59) Necessary and useless roles
(22:51) Vercel' developing strategy
(33:19) The ideal development process
(37:25) Finding and avoiding bottlenecks
(40:48) Thoughts on AI shift
(47:46) Adapting software to AI interaction
(53:01) AI and open source
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📬 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected] can also find this at:
- 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
- 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
- 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]
1 hr
June 21, 2024Good Tech Strategy / Bad Tech Strategy 🔮 — with Anna Shipman
Today's guest is Anna Shipman!
Anna is CTO at Kooth, former Technical Director at Financial Times, a Keynote speaker and accomplished author.
With Anna, we talked about her journey in tech and how to develop a good technical strategy, drawing from stories and examples from her 20 plus years of engineering experience.
Here is what we talked about:
(00:54) Introduction
(01:20) Anna's journey in Tech
(06:36) Going from public to private
(09:17) What does Kooth do?
(12:53) Technical strategy definition
(15:01) Applying the strategy
(24:53) Improving over time
(30:10) The strategy framework
(33:38) The pitfalls of setting up a strategy
(36:23) Converge team and strategy
(41:45) The strategist authority
Here are a few articles and resources that were mentioned throughout the interview:
A faster FT.com

No next next

Building Kooth

Anna’s website
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]
49 min
June 14, 2024Elements of an Effective Software Organization 🔧 — with Rebecca Murphey
Today's guest is Rebecca Murphey.

Rebecca is field CTO at Swarmia, former manager at Stripe and Indeed, and the author of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization.
With Rebecca, we talked about her journey through Indeed, Stripe and Swarmia and the three pillars of her book, business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience.
Here is what we talked about:
(00:58) Introduction
(02:15) Rebecca's Journey
(08:24) Joining Swarmia
(15:02) 1st Pillar: Business outcomes
(23:08) Team structure & Company architecture
(29:18) Keeping the lights on
(33:56) 2nd Pillar: Developer productivity
(38:44) Using numbers in the right way
(43:25) The best way of working
(51:07) 3rd Pillar: Developer experience
(56:52) The effects of "Build" on Swarmia
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

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📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠
1 hr 1 min
June 07, 2024Scaling Teams at Sanity, Github, and Google 🏢 — with Rachel Potvin
Today's guest is Rachel Potvin.
Rachel is SVP of Engineering at Sanity, ex-VP of Engineering at Github, and previously worked at Google and Ubisoft. She has had an incredible career journey and is a world renowned speaker.
With Rachel we talked about her journey across what feels like different generations of companies. We talked about scaling teams, challenges, lessons learned and the great work she's doing at Sanity right now.
Here is what we talked about:
(01:37) Introduction
(02:39) Rachel's journey at Google
(08:06) From Google to GitHub
(14:29) Building healthy engineering culture
(18:56) GitHub growth & hiring
(21:44) Rachel's career at Sanity
(26:21) Being a VP in Big tech
(29:36) The road to "Sanity"
(28:17) Startup planning
(39:22) The fun factor
(40:51) Adapting your experience to a new journey
(47:13) Startup focus vs Big tech focus
(49:13) Top-down strategy is good
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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

—
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📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠
58 min
May 31, 2024How Perplexity Works — with Denis Yarats 🤖
Today's guest is Denis Yarats.
Denis is co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, one of my favorite products and one of the most successful AI startups today. Perplexity was founded less than two years ago and has just raised $250M in venture capital, at a $2B+ evaluation.
With Denis, we talked about the state of AI products and his vision of where they're going. Then we talked about Perplexity as a company, how the team is organized, how engineers work, and how they use AI themselves.
——
I am sorry for the bad audio quality on my side 🙏 the recording picked up the wrong mic and we realized it only during editing 🙏
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Here is what we talked about:
(02:04) Introduction
(03:08) The History of Perplexity
(09:35) Startup and AI costs
(12:14) The proper AI model
(14:47) Open vs Proprietary Source
(15:51) Is AI evolution saturated?
(17:07) How Perplexity uses AI
(18:49) Perplexity Engineering team
(21:48) Trials, teams and management
(28:17) Startup planning
(31:53) Team structure
(33:33) Developing procedures
(37:35) Perplexity's "secret sauce"
(40:31) Metrics in Perplexity
(44:38) Perplexity's future
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You can also find this at:
📬 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠
50 min