As the infamous SolarWinds attack showed, it’s no longer sufficient to just write secure code, you need to ensure that you understand the security risks throughout your entire software supply chain: whether that’s compilers, containers or the tools used to manage deployment pipelines. 

Retrospectives can play a vital role in enabling teams to improve continuously. Here, our podcast team is joined by Paulo Caroli, author of Fun Retrospectives to get insights into delivering sessions that energize and inform the whole team — while ensuring they become increasingly effective at meeting their goals.

In today’s cloud-first world, distributed systems are everywhere. Unmesh Joshi gives an insight into his work looking at distributed systems — from distributed databases such as Cassandra to messaging brokers such as Kafka or infrastructure components such as Docker — the common problems that arise and the approaches to solving these problems, which he categorizes as patterns.

Pramod Sadalage co-authored the book Refactoring Databases 15 years ago. The concepts remain hugely relevant today for those exploring microservices. We caught up with Pramod and Martin Fowler to hear about the genesis of the book and explore how the principles of refactoring work in a world of NoSQL databases.

There’s often lots of talk about how companies can make their developers more productive. But it may be more useful to think about developer effectiveness: how to ensure they’re building the most useful products for their customers. This isn’t about working longer or harder or hiring smarter people, it's just working smarter, using your time better and making sure that the company is providing that environment that allows developers to be effective. Our special guests from Spotify and Etsy give us their unique perspectives.

We catch up with the two co-authors of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow to hear about their ideas on enabling enterprises to become more effective at software delivery — and the influence of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load and responsive organization evolution.

Following on from our Earth Day episode on green software engineering, we turn to the concept of Green Cloud. Reducing your IT operations’ carbon footprint is more complex than simply moving to the cloud. We explore how developers can gain insights into the energy usage of their cloud operations and the tools and techniques they can deploy to minimize their cloud-related emissions.

There’s increasing awareness of tech’s carbon footprint but to what extent can software developers help? Is it possible to measure the energy efficiency of your code? Can you write code that saves energy? Our podcast team unpick the art of the possible when it comes to green software engineering.

We talk to two of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto for Software Development — Jim Highsmith and Martin Fowler — to get their perspective on how the agile movement has evolved over the past two decades.

The skill set needed to effectively step up to a tech lead role can be markedly different from the ones you gain as an engineer. That realization is what prompted our former colleague Pat Kua to write his book Talking with Tech Leads. Here, he shares his experiences of how to successfully navigate the journey towards becoming a tech lead.