Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

By ThoughtWorks

Technology Business Careers

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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AI-assisted coding: Experie...

11.16.2023

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 ...

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast episodes:

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, it ...
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 ...
06.02.2022 Patterns of legacy displacement — Part one Updating legacy systems has been a common feature of enterprise IT. But — strangler-fig pattern aside — there’s little written about how to do it effectively. We explore the ideas of legacy replacement — and even legacy displacement — with ...
05.19.2022 Mitigating cognitive bias when coding We’re all subject to cognitive biases. And whether we’re aware of them or not, they can have a profound impact on the code we write — especially when working in an agile environment, where we have to constantly deal with ...
05.05.2022 Following an unusual career path: from dev to CEO From extreme programming to pairing with Ward Cunningham and the earliest days of .Net to building communities in a remote-first world, Thoughtworks’ CEO Guo Xiao has seen huge changes in the tech industry. We hear how he went from being ...
04.21.2022 Software engineering with Dave Farley We catch up with Dave Farley to hear about the genesis of his blockbuster book, Continuous Delivery — which he authored with Jez Humble — as well as his latest tome, Modern Software Engineering. He shares his ideas about the ...
04.07.2022 Tackling bottlenecks at scale-ups There are a handful of common problems organizations encounter on their journey as a scale-up, where some of the practices that enabled them to flourish as a start-up produce a level of technical debt that threatens to impede future growth. ...
03.23.2022 Coding lessons from the pandemic From pair programming to the daily standup, the global pandemic challenged how we think about the practices and rituals that were a daily part of developers’ lives. Our podcasters explore what changes were enforced, how it impacted teams — and ...
03.10.2022 Is there ever a good time for a code freeze? Many organizations regard code freezes as a way of reducing the risk of downtime during periods of peak demands. But associating outages with changes often masks a wider lack of faith in the deployment process — which is potentially where ...
02.25.2022 Navigating the perils of multicloud A multicloud strategy, where you have a business-critical application that’s engineered to run across multiple cloud platforms, can be appealing for a number of reasons, including reliability, regulatory and risk. But, like most architectural decisions, there are trade offs. Here ...
02.10.2022 Compliance as a product Through the adoption of DevOp practices, we’ve all become accustomed to product teams having full control over their continuous delivery pipelines right the way through to production. When organizations start out with homogenous sets of product teams, all doing similar ...
01.27.2022 The big five tech trends for 2022 Each year, Thoughtworks's Looking Glass report explores the technology trends we think will have far-reaching consequences. We catch up with one of the report's authors, to hear more about what the future holds for enterprise technology.
01.13.2022 Fluent Python revisited Ahead of the release of the second edition of his landmark book, Fluent Python, our team catch up with author Luciano Ramalho to hear about what’s happening in the world of Python — and why it’s popularity continues to endure.

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