Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

By ThoughtWorks

What's Thoughtworks Technology Podcast about?

The Thoughtworks podcast plunges deep into the latest tech topics that have captured our imagination. Join our panel of senior technologists to explore the most important trends in tech today, get frontline insights into our work developing cutting-edge tech and hear more about how today’s tech megatrends will impact you.

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Thoughtworks Technology Podcast episodes:

04.18.2024
Refactoring with AI
Can AI improve the quality of our code? A recent white paper published by code analysis company CodeScene — "Refactoring vs. Refuctoring: Advancing the state of AI-automated code improvements" — highlighted some significant challenges: in tests, AI solutions only...
04.04.2024
How to measure your cloud carbon footprint
If you've ever wondered how to measure your cloud carbon footprint, you can — thanks to a tool that's called, somewhat unsurprisingly, Cloud Carbon Footprint. Launched in March 2021 by Thoughtworks as an open-source project, it allows users to to...
03.21.2024
Technology through the Looking Glass: Preparing for 2024 and beyond
Looking Glass isn't like most other technology trend reports. It doesn't just tell you what deserves your attention, it's designed to help you use it to focus on what really matters to you. Published once a year, Thoughtworks intends it...
03.07.2024
Diving head first into software architecture
A few years ago, Thoughtworker and (prolific) author Neal Ford published Fundamentals of Software Architecture with Mark Richards. They're now back with another book on software architecture — written with co-author Raju Gandhi — which offers readers a very different...
02.22.2024
Exploring the building blocks of distributed systems
Distributed systems are ubiquitous yet complex. They can be particularly demanding for software developers and architects tasked with dealing with the sometimes unpredictable nature of the interactions between their various parts. That's why Thoughtworker Unmesh Joshi wrote Patterns of Distributed...
02.08.2024
Software-defined vehicles: The future of the automotive industry?
A few decades ago, it would have probably seemed strange to put software and automobility together. However, today software is embedded in all kinds of modern vehicles, enabling capabilities in everything from driving to passenger entertainment. But what exactly does...
01.25.2024
Beyond the DORA metrics: Measuring engineering excellence
Is it really possible to measure the impact engineering teams have on a business' success? At a time when growth is challenging for many organizations and questions about productivity and effectiveness dominate industry conversations, getting it right is crucial. And...
01.11.2024
Asynchronous collaboration: Getting it right
Thanks to the pandemic, asynchronous working is, today, fairly common. However, it's often easily confused with simply working remotely — and while there are certainly neat synergies between the two, asynchronous working isn't just a description of your working arrangement:...
12.28.2023
Looking back at key themes across technology in 2023
With each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, we identify a number of key themes that we see as significant in the industry. In the most recent edition — volume 29, published in September — we picked out AI-assisted software...
12.14.2023
Leveraging generative AI at Bosch
Generative AI has, unsurprisingly, been a major topic of conversation within Thoughtworks in 2023. However, as enjoyable as it is to get sucked into discussions about the reality, the risks and the benefits of this new technology, what's really interesting...
11.30.2023
Jugalbandi: Building with AI for social impact
It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems...
11.16.2023
AI-assisted coding: Experiences and perspectives
Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in software development. In recent months, there's been a lot of talk in the...
11.02.2023
What's it like to maintain an award-winning open source tool?
Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool — especially one that thousands of other developers use and depend on? In this episode...
10.19.2023
Engineering platforms and golden paths: Building better developer experiences
The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling developers. But what does it mean to actually build and maintain a platform? How can you ensure...
10.03.2023
Managing cost efficiency at scale-ups
Many of the scale-ups we’ve partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we’ve seen are unexpected and dramatic rises in costs. In this episode we talk to members of our Digital Scale-up...
09.21.2023
Exploring SQL and ETL
The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the data space. But how do they work together exactly? And what challenges...
09.07.2023
Driving innovation in radio astronomy
Radio astronomy — a subfield of astronomy that studies the sky using radio frequencies — is data-intensive. That poses a challenge for radio astronomers: building and then communicating scientific insights requires significant processing and analytical work. Thoughtworks has been working...
08.24.2023
XR with impact: Building experiences that drive business value
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...
08.10.2023
Leadership styles in technology teams
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...
07.27.2023
Making design matter in technology organizations
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...
07.13.2023
Generative AI and the future of knowledge work
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...
06.29.2023
Scaling mobile delivery
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...
06.15.2023
Making privacy a first-class citizen in data science
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...
06.01.2023
Multi-cloud: Exploring the challenges and opportunities
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...
05.18.2023
Scaling up at Etsy
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...
05.04.2023
TinyML: Bringing machine learning to the edge
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...
04.20.2023
The weaponization of complexity
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...
04.06.2023
How we put together the Technology Radar
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,...
03.23.2023
Inside India's Drug Discovery Hackathon
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...
03.09.2023
Serverless in 2023
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...
02.23.2023
My Thoughtworks journey: Rebecca Parsons
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...
02.09.2023
How to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups
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....
01.26.2023
Six key technology trends for 2023
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...
01.12.2023
Tackling system complexity with domain-driven design
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...
12.29.2022
Shifting left on accessibility
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...
12.15.2022
Data Mesh revisited
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...
12.01.2022
Low-code/no-code platforms: The 10% trap and the limits of abstractions
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,...
11.24.2022
Welcome to the fediverse: Exploring Mastodon, ActivityPub and beyond [Special]
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...
11.17.2022
Rethinking software governance: Reflecting on the second edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures
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...
11.03.2022
Reckoning with the force of Conway's Law
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...
10.20.2022
Exploring the Basal Cost of software
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...
10.05.2022
Why full-stack testing matters
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...
09.22.2022
Acknowledging and addressing technical debt in startups and scale-ups
Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific, dependent on the challenges and goals of an organization. In this episode of the Technology Podcast,...
09.08.2022
XR in practice: the engineering challenges of extending reality
Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future can obscure the reality of what engineers and organizations are doing today....
08.25.2022
Agent-based modelling for epidemiology: EpiRust and BharatSim
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that epidemiology is incredibly complex: the millions of edge cases, what-ifs, and counterfactuals make modelling exceptionally difficult. One way of tackling this complexity is through agent-based modelling. In this episode, Rebecca Parsons...
08.12.2022
Mastering architectural metrics
Given the variety of architectural styles — and the unique technology landscapes at every organization — how can you develop a set of metrics that can reliably guide your organization to improve? Andrew Harmel-Law has been grappling with this question...
07.28.2022
Building a culture of innovation
Thoughtworks regularly emphasises the importance of culture in building and maintaining high-quality software when working with clients. So, for episode 100 of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, we wanted to reflect on how the organization — and its leaders — has...
07.14.2022
Starting out with sensible default practices
The idea of best practices is becoming an anachronism — given today’s complex technology landscape, the notion that there can be a single best way of doing anything seems fanciful. Our crew explore the thinking behind sensible defaults: that there...
06.30.2022
Better testing through mutations
Mutation testing has long been a proven method for driving software quality in a way unit testing can't. But it can be a long, expensive and computationally intensive process. Our podcasters explore effective strategies for mutation testing and how to...
06.16.2022
Patterns of legacy displacement — Part two
In the second part of our exploration of legacy displacement, we look at the practicalities of making upgrades work, from strategies for decomposing huge monoliths into manageable chunks as well as the methods for delivering those parts now that you've...

What's Thoughtworks Technology Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast episodes:

Refactoring with AI

How to measure your cloud carbon footprint

Technology through the Looking Glass: Preparing for 2024 and beyond

Diving head first into software architecture

Exploring the building blocks of distributed systems

Software-defined vehicles: The future of the automotive industry?

Beyond the DORA metrics: Measuring engineering excellence

Asynchronous collaboration: Getting it right

Looking back at key themes across technology in 2023

Leveraging generative AI at Bosch

Jugalbandi: Building with AI for social impact

AI-assisted coding: Experiences and perspectives

What's it like to maintain an award-winning open source tool?

Engineering platforms and golden paths: Building better developer experiences

Managing cost efficiency at scale-ups

Exploring SQL and ETL

Driving innovation in radio astronomy

XR with impact: Building experiences that drive business value

Leadership styles in technology teams

Making design matter in technology organizations

Generative AI and the future of knowledge work

Scaling mobile delivery

Making privacy a first-class citizen in data science

Multi-cloud: Exploring the challenges and opportunities

Scaling up at Etsy

TinyML: Bringing machine learning to the edge

The weaponization of complexity

How we put together the Technology Radar

Inside India's Drug Discovery Hackathon

Serverless in 2023

My Thoughtworks journey: Rebecca Parsons

How to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups

Six key technology trends for 2023

Tackling system complexity with domain-driven design

Shifting left on accessibility

Data Mesh revisited

Low-code/no-code platforms: The 10% trap and the limits of abstractions

Welcome to the fediverse: Exploring Mastodon, ActivityPub and beyond [Special]

Rethinking software governance: Reflecting on the second edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures

Reckoning with the force of Conway's Law

Exploring the Basal Cost of software

Why full-stack testing matters

Acknowledging and addressing technical debt in startups and scale-ups

XR in practice: the engineering challenges of extending reality

Agent-based modelling for epidemiology: EpiRust and BharatSim

Mastering architectural metrics

Building a culture of innovation

Starting out with sensible default practices

Better testing through mutations

Patterns of legacy displacement — Part two