Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

One of the themes we highlighted in the April 2016 edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar was “open source as a virtuous byproduct.” That’s a fairly high-minded phrase. In this 30-minute podcast, ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board Members Badri Janakiraman, Martin Fowler, Mike Mason and Rebecca Parsons discuss this theme and the general state of open source in the industry. The lively roundtable discussion touches on product development, security, technical culture, and machine learning as they relate to open source. The podcast ends with a gentle reminder from Badri: "The availability of tools and source code out there does not mean that we take away the responsibility of development teams in organizations to have discipline and rigor in their development processes." Check out the Technology Radar for more on the trends and technology that is shaping our future: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

With the recent rise of the Zika epidemic across countries around the world, we interviewed ThoughtWorks' Director of Global Health Dr. David Walton to understand more about the Zika virus— its origin, its various symptoms and manifestations, possible remedial measures that we can take as citizens of the world and also the limited role that technology can play in containing this deadly virus.

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, Software Architect Neal Ford, Prasanna Pendse, Tech Principal, and Jonny LeRoy, Head of Technology, North America, discuss blockchain, how it differs from Bitcoin and what the future holds for the technology. [Disclaimer: This podcast isn't an introduction to blockchain. To the get the most out of it, you should have some knowledge of the technology.] During the conversation, Neal cautions that the current problems with Bitcoin have nothing to do with the viability of blockchain as a technology, “but has everything to do with all the non-technical aspects of currency and how messy that is in the real world.” The podcast closes with advice from Jonny on peeling back some of the underlying technologies to answer some key questions for technologists. How might you use blockchain? What types of problems could be solved with blockchain? These are really good questions to ask. The answer isn't always blockchain. Enjoy this episode of the ThoughtWorks podcast and, as always, please share your feedback and ideas with us @thoughtworks.

In this episode, Johannes Thönes, a ThoughtWorks developer based in Hamburg, interviews Lukasz Plotnicki, also a developer and ThoughtWorker, on the Backend for Frontend microservices pattern. Lukasz is the author of BFF @ SoundCloud, an article about the backend for frontends pattern which he looked into with Sam Newman at SoundCloud. This pattern describes the creation of one specific backend to provide functionality specifically to the need of a single client. Johannes talks with Lukasz about the BFF pattern rooted in a Microservices environment. First, they explain the difference between UI fragment composition and the backend for frontends approach as two alternatives. Then they discuss how backend for frontends fit into a microservices architecture and how it can be structured organizationally. We close the episode by discussing how many backend for frontends are already out there.

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Tech Leaders Podcast, ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Author and Software Architect Neal Ford discuss the meaning of evolutionary architecture and how organizations can use it as a business advantage. Neal explains, "When you introduce things like DevOps and continuous delivery, all of a sudden you change the level of granularity in which you can make changes in your architecture and that becomes a really huge enabler for being able to make decisions at a higher level..." Rebecca adds, "What you need to do on Day One is think about what are the critical success factors for your architecture? Does it need to be highly available? Does it need to be highly scalable? Is security your major driving concern? Is it data loss? Those are all possible outcomes for architectures and all systems don't display the same kind of characteristics. That's what we mean when we're talking about evolutionary architecture."

Companies of all sizes, and across all industries, are struggling with digital transformation. A data-driven architecture that enables getting the right data, to the right place, at the right time positions an organization to create and deliver exceptional digital experiences. This podcast, a conversation between Scott Shaw, director of technology, Australia and Evan Bottcher, technical principal, provides insight into the challenges companies face when embarking on the digital journey.

In this interview with ThoughtWorkers Tom Duckering and Pat Downey, we first introduce the threats coming out of the pipeline. We establish the continuous delivery pipeline as a production system because it will create what is in production. We also give an example on how easy it can be to get root access with an anonymous user - and of course we discuss strategies to make a pipeline secure enough for the attack trees a customer might face.

Our newest ThoughtWorks podcast is a thought provoking discussion between Sam Newman, consultant, and Erik Doernenburg, head of technology, ThoughtWorks Europe, in which they contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of microservices and cloud computing. During the conversation, Erik advises listeners that the focus should be on the implementation of the actual services and not on the "glue" in between the services. Sam offers up an analogy, saying implementing an architecture based on microservices is like working with marble. You must chip away gradually. “It’s an incremental thing, not an upfront exercise,” he says.

Functional programming has a lot of concepts which have to be yet discovered by mainstream programming. One, known especially from the Haskell programming language, are Lenses. Johannes Thönes met Chris Ford, Software Developer and ThoughtWorker from London, during XConf in Hamburg where he gave a talk on implementing Lenses in Clojure. In this 23 minute interview, Johannes talks with Chris about his experience with Lenses in Clojure. First they define what a Lense is and what you would want to do with it. Then they talk about the specifics of implementing Lenses in a programming language introducing the terms Functor and Function. We close the episode by talking about the possibility to implement lenses in other programming languages such as Java 8 or JavaScript.

In this episode of the Tech Leaders Podcast, Vinod Sankaranarayanan, a program manager with ThoughtWorks, interviews colleague Sriram Narayan, who is an IT Management consultant and the author of a new book, Agile IT Organization Design. Sriram's book provides a basis for reviewing and reshaping the IT organization to equip it better for the digital age. Over the next 18 minutes, they explore IT reorganization from a structural angle. They discuss how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT.