Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Code visualization tools can be a great way to understand the intricacies of large code bases but they can be problematic when dealing with very old or very new code sets. Our co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Erik Dörnenburg and Korny Sietsma to look at the benefits and challenges of code visualization, especially when dealing with multiple programming languages.

Astronomers are increasingly turning to machine learning as a means to understand more about our universe — whether that’s the formation of galaxies or the Sun’s activity. Here, our co-hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons catch up with our special guest from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, along with a couple of ThoughtWorkers to hear more about this intersection of data science and astrophysics.

Programming languages are simultaneously a creative and an engineering medium. So how do you find the programming language that most facilitates you being creative, while enabling you to produce code that others can read? In this episode, two of our regular co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford, take a deep dive into the world of programming languages.

When working with modern distributed systems, complexity is a given. But how can you make observability a characteristic of your systems, such that your operators get feedback in the event of an outage? In this podcast our co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford talk to Bharani Subramaniam and Prasanna Pendse about the monitoring and observability in cloud-based systems.

The evolution of modern applications has seen more and more code that runs in the browser, rather than on servers or backend systems. What are the implications of this shift? Are there any lessons to be learned from the past?

Our hosts Mike Mason and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Erik Dörnenburg to explore the implications of having more than 50% of code in the browser.

To get the full benefit of continuous delivery, it pays not to just think about delivering software into deployment, but thinking about the value that’s being delivered. In this episode, our co-hosts Alexey Boas and Rebecca Parsons are joined by ThoughtWorkers, Ken Mugrage, Arvind SV and Scott Davis, to explore continuous delivery in terms of business value — not just the number of builds that have run or pipeline instances.

Great web development isn’t just about the front and backends: the experience the user has is critical to success. In this episode, our hosts Alexey Boas and Subramanian talk to Scott Davis and Zabil Cheriya Maliackal about the principles of user journey testing and the tools such as Gauge and Taiko that can help.

Often, discussions around continuous delivery focus on things that cutting edge companies are doing — at the cost of ignoring those companies that are quietly succeeding with CD. Our hosts, Mike Mason and Alexey Boas caught up with software consultant Pete Hogdson to hear about his new book that explores the practices continuous delivery. The book looks at those companies succeeding with CD, and the common principles they share — such as reducing batch sizes — even while the way they apply those principles varies wildly.

The COVID-19 pandemic meant that for the first time in 10 years, the next volume of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar had to be created via a virtual meeting, instead of face-to-face. Our podcast team share their experiences of working on this complex and highly interactive project. They discuss how the tech held up, what was missing and what worked well.

The increased emphasis on machine learning in the enterprise also seen resurgent interest in Python. What makes Python different from other languages? What are the main features that make it unique? And where will Python go from here? In this episode, our podcasts chat to Luciano Ramalho, from ThoughtWorks Brazil — a renowned author of books on Python — about dunder methods, fast fails and what’s new in the upcoming second edition of Fluent Python.