In this episode, Matt and Liam unpack a familiar argument dressed up in new AI hype: should we loosen standards and ship faster, or is that missing the point entirely? What starts as a debate about “AI slop” quickly turns into a deeper conversation about where AI actually creates value — and why that value shows up most clearly when it’s in the hands of people, not platforms.

Sparked by a rage-baity take on AI, perfection, and velocity, the conversation quickly widens into something more fundamental. What actually matters in software? Who is this advice really for? And why does it feel like we keep having the same argument every few years?

Along the way, they dig into how AI is actually being used by experienced developers, why regulated and enterprise environments can’t play by startup rules, and where the “10× developer” narrative quietly turns toxic.

They discuss:

It’s a wide-ranging, late-night conversation about tools, pressure, values, and what we actually want our work to mean — with a few familiar rants along the way.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

🔗 Links from the Episode

Any 👍 Likes, 📣 Shares, 🔔 Subscriptions, and ❤️ Love go a long way to helping us keep doing this for fun.

Cheers! 🍻

Thumbnail Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

In this Christmas Eve episode, Matt and Liam slow things down.

Recorded in a heavy week, the conversation starts with a simple question:

Rather than big gestures or grandstanding, this turns into a thoughtful (and occasionally sweary) discussion about everyday responsibility — at work, in leadership, and in how we treat the people around us.

We talk about:

There’s no manifesto here, no hot takes, and no tidy answers. Just a candid end-of-year reflection on work, responsibility, and how easy it is to underestimate the impact of everyday choices.

If nothing else, consider it a reminder that “doing the right thing” is often quieter — and harder — than it looks.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks 🍻

Matt – Wild Yak Pale Ale

As always, any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ go a long way to helping us keep this podcast going.

Cheers! 🍻

Thumbnail Photo by Erik Mclean

After a short break between recordings, Matt and Liam are back — slightly croaky voices, slightly sleep-deprived, and very ready to debrief on their trip to Melbourne for ADAConf 2025.

This episode is a full recap of the conference: the talks that surprised them, the ones that hit hard, the ones they’re still processing, and the moments that tied unexpectedly into the conversations we’ve been having on the show for two years.

They cover:

✔️ Linda McIver’s keynote on being difficult — and why the industry needs more of it

Plus, the two finally reveal something they’ve been cooking up behind the scenes: BDD Live — a possible live panel event exploring the future of development in an AI-saturated world. Maybe. If people want it. (Please want it.)

And yes, Matt gets one more quiet dig in at JavaScript. As is tradition.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔 and ❤️ Love go a long way to helping us continue this podcast.

Cheers! 🍻

This week we dig into a persistent industry trope: the idea that specialists — especially technical ones — can’t communicate, can’t lead, and can only see the world through technical solutions. From TV archetypes to consultant bias to leadership taxonomies, we explore where this stereotype comes from, how it survived, and why it quietly influences hiring, sales, and trust even today.

Along the way we talk about leadership as a learned skill, not an innate trait; why caring about the craft is essential if you want to lead specialists; and how unconscious bias subtly shapes who gets listened to in a room. We also dip into Matt’s four leadership styles, Maxwell’s levels, the idea of leadership capital, and what sales culture taught us about credibility and communication. The usual tangents are present too — jiu-jitsu, military leadership, consulting culture, and a couple of war stories about “selling what’s on the truck.”

For all the myth-busting, the episode lands on a simple truth: leadership and expertise are independent skills. If you want to lead, you need to care — about the people, the domain, and the work. And if you want to lead specialists, you have to learn enough of their world to respect it.

What we cover:

Properly beer-driven this week — both of us on home brews.

In this episode, Matt walks Liam through his latest side project: Cabinet, an encrypted offline-first data store for .NET developers.

We dive into the motivation behind building yet another data layer, the problems it solves that existing libraries don’t, and what makes it so lightweight and developer-friendly.

We discuss:

Along the way, Matt reflects on the design journey and explains how feedback loops (including from AI tools) shaped key architecture choices. Liam weighs in with questions about use cases, trade-offs, and where Cabinet might fit in real-world projects.

💡 Whether you build apps that need to work offline, or just appreciate simple, elegant engineering, this episode is a deep dive into the art of making complexity optional.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Links from the Episode:

🐛 Update: A couple of days after recording, Matt discovered the bug that inspired Cabinet wasn’t in LiteDB after all — it was in his own app. Once fixed, LiteDB worked perfectly too. So technically, Cabinet was born out of a false alarm… but as Matt says, “no good debugging session goes to waste.” And hey, he’s already found another use for it.

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ help us keep the mics on.

Cheers! 🍻

This week, Matt and Liam crack open a couple of their favourites and dive into how AI is changing the way we build, learn, and work.

The discussion starts with a quick aside on .NET MAUI’s comeback story before veering into a full-blown chat about AI: where it’s thriving, where it’s floundering, and what it means for developers today.

They cover:

Along the way, Matt shows off his AI-assisted DIY handheld gaming PC project (which may or may not have exploded 💥), Liam reflects on using AI to co-write fiction, and both share candid takes on where AI genuinely helps versus where it just gets in the way.

The conversation wraps with a philosophical note: maybe AI won’t take our jobs, maybe it’ll just give us new ones we can’t yet imagine.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and ❤️ Love go a long way to helping us keep this podcast going.

Cheers! 🍻

This week we go full data modelling nerd and ask a simple question with messy consequences:

Are you designing your domain model, or are you letting your database (and ORM defaults) design it for you?

We cover:

It’s opinionated, occasionally ranty, and very much a “save future you from your schema” kind of episode.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

Matt: Nothing this evening

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ help us keep this purely-for-fun thing rolling.

Cheers! 🍻

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

In software and beyond, we throw around words like agile, risk, governance, and contracts as if everyone agrees on what they mean. Spoiler: they don’t.

In this episode, Matt and Liam explore how mismatched definitions create friction - from software teams trying to be “agile,” to companies drafting contracts, to lawmakers writing privacy rules. It turns out the hardest part isn’t always the code or the compliance; it’s making sure we’re actually talking about the same thing.

We discuss:

It’s a mix of humour, reflection, and a reminder that sometimes the biggest risk isn’t technical at all—it’s assuming everyone means the same thing when they don’t.

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ help us keep the mics on.

Cheers! 🍻

In this episode, Matt and Liam dig into the messy reality of software supply-chain attacks, how a seemingly harmless pull request can turn into a compromised release, and why those ✅ green CI badges can lull us into a false sense of security.

We unpack a recent incident involving an NPM package publish that was hijacked via a poisoned PR and stolen publishing token, then zoom out to the wider tactics attackers use (from secrets exfil via build logs to cheeky action scripts). We also talk about what small teams can do today to reduce blast radius without grinding delivery to a halt.

We discuss:

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ help us keep the mics on.

Cheers! 🍻

This time it was Liam’s turn with the plague, but like a trooper he showed up anyway.

In this episode, Matt and Liam are joined by Jimmy Bogard (MediatR, AutoMapper) for a candid conversation about the realities of open source in the .NET world.

We explore:

Along the way Jimmy shares hard-won lessons from solving the same problems over and over again—until the solution itself became the library. It’s a perspective that’s easy to underestimate if you’ve never maintained widely used open source.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

Any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ go a long way to helping us continue this podcast.

Cheers! 🍻

🔗 Links from the Episode: