Software Engineering Unlocked

In this episode, I talk to Charity Majors, founder, and CTO of honeycomb. Honeycomb is a tool for introspecting and interrogating your production systems. It represents the new generation of monitoring systems that can handle highly distributed and complex systems. Charity shares with me what observability means and how we can make systems more reliable and maintainable.

We talk about:

- the new generation of DevOps,

- how and why we should assess systems in production,

- the flaws of staging areas,

- what it takes to make on-call a good experience,

- how to assess engineering excellence,

- and how and why she founded honeycomb.

In this episode, I talk to Derrick Stolee, a principal software engineer at Microsoft who makes sure the Git version control system is lightning fast.

We talk about:

- his career switch from being a professor to become a software engineer at Microsoft, 

- what it means to contribute to open-source during your worktime for Microsoft,

- how he improves the speed and performance of such a widely-used and mature software system as Git,

- how to do code reviews via mailing lists,

- and what it takes to become an open-source maintainer.

In this episode, I talk to Alper Kemal Koç, who was the first engineer building a low code platform called Kuika, that helps users develop mobile applications. Alper shares with me how he build this startup from idea to serving over 15 customers, and which cultural differences he observed when building software in Turkey, the Netherlands and the rest of the world.

We talk about:

- why and how he joined this startup, 

- how he decided on the right tech stack,

- how customer feedback influenced their direction,

- which engineering practices he values at this startup,

- and which relationship they have with their investors.

In this episode, I talk to Leif Singer, an engineer at the fully remote company Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress, a famous and powerful content management system with an estimated 75 Million user base. 

We talk about:

- why he switched from academia to industry,

- how he got hired without knowing the company's tech stack,

- why he worked for several months at Automattic before being hired,

- how the Automattic creed, influences, and guides company values and mindset,

- Automattic's software engineering practices,

- and how they fight technical debt during quarterly scheduled clean-up weeks.

In this episode, I talk to Sandeep Panda, CEO and Founder of Hashnoce, a friendly and inclusive developer community. Sandeep shares with me his entrepreneurial journey and all the lessons he learned along his way.

We talk about:

- building a developer community from scratch,

- getting investors to fund your projects,

- the ups and downs of entrepreneurship,

- transitioning to remote work,

- software engineering practices in a startup,

- code reviews, testing, deployment, and keeping technical debt at bay.

In this episode, I talk to Scott Hanselman, a partner product manager at Microsoft. Since years, Scott is one of the most successful tech bloggers, he has three podcasts and actively works on making tech a more diverse place.

We talk about:

- how it is to work remotely for Microsoft,

- how to get such a remote position at Microsoft,

- making tech a more diverse place,

- starting with open source,

- and productivity.

In this episode, I talk with Cassidy Williams, a senior software engineer that works for the fully-remote company CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers.

We talk about:

- working remote for a small startup

- how to find fulfillment in your career and through side projects

- how to port an application from one technology to another

- how humor can make tech a more welcoming place

- and how she interviewed for CodePen.

Hello and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. The show in which I talk to experienced developers from different companies about how they develop maintainable, scalable and reliable software people love.