Podcast
Refactoring Podcast
Hosted by Luca Rossi · EN
Weekly interviews with world-class engineering leaders about writing great software and working well with humans.
13episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The State of Product Development 🔍 — with Doug Peete
2w ago01:00:38Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Doug Peete, Chief Product Officer at Atono, with whom over the last few months we have developed a deep industry report about the state of product development.In this chat we'll go through the main findings of the report, match them to our respective experience and explore ideas about how teams can do better with product development and AI(00:00) Episode start(01:38) Introduction(02:39) Sponsor break(05:38) Frailty of planning process(10:58) Product(13:19) What needs to be done(20:38) Design reviews(26:33) How to improve requirements(27:41) Knowledge across teams(35:07) Capturing the history of a product(39:14) Enabling sharing process(47:17) New metrics in AI era(50:47) AI in product requirements and products specs-Today's episode is brought to you by Unblocked.Unblocked is the context layer for modern engineering teams.Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/refactoring-You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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How to Own Your Career 🦝 — with Jean Hsu and Cate Huston
4w ago00:56:31Tap to summarizeToday's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston.They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these complicated times, to say the least. So with Jean and Cate, we talked about exploring what you want from your career, how to be intentional about it, how to use feedback to assess how you're doing, and how AI is changing and not changing the picture.(01:51) Introduction(03:39) Dealing with adverse conditions(09:45) Sponsor break(10:42) DRI your career and coaching(13:07) Career's approach(18:52) Figuring out your goal: Luca's example(30:48) Coaching for EMs vs coaching for ICs(32:23) Moving forward in your daily job(36:06) Feedbacks and culture of appreciation(41:32) Does AI change how do you think about your career?(45:42) AI pressure and AI passion-You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305
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AI Coding meets Code Health 🪄 — with Stuart Caborn
Apr 1701:05:11Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Stuart Caborn, distinguished engineer at loveholidays, which is an online travel agency with millions of customers around the world.I'm talking with Stuart because his team is doing AI coding for real.They operate an extremely complex product and technology, with each engineer deploying to production more than 80 times a month, with more than 60% of production code being written with AI, all while maintaining an absolutely elite change failure rate under 1%, and with perfect code health.So, let's see how they pull this off.(01:29) Introduction(02:30) What it loveholidays?(06:04) Sponsor break(07:00) loveholidays' AI approach(10:16) Code quality(13:36) Making quality visible(14:52) AI, MCP and top use cases(22:19) Code health and engineers' happiness(29:35) How was AI implemented at loveholidays(37:01) Experimenting with AI and skills(42:30) How to spread AI into an org(47:31) Guardrails in dev process(56:40) Other process changes—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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Every Engineer Is a Manager Now 🤖 — with Chris Lattner
Apr 300:58:59Tap to summarizeToday’s guest is Chris Lattner, one of the most important engineers for modern computing. Chris invented key compiler infrastructure tech like LLVM and MLIR, but he’s also the inventor of the Swift language, a key contributor in bringing Google TPUs to market, and a lot more. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Modular, where he’s reinventing AI infrastructure to make software portable across GPUs and platforms.So with Chris, we talked about his vision for AI and computing. We talked about how Modular’s mission makes us closer to a future where AI is open and portable. And we talked about open source, how AI is both empowering and straining contributors, how it’s changing intellectual property, and what workflows we need to change as engineers.And finally, we discussed how AI is changing software craftsmanship, how he’s bullish about junior engineers, and a lot more.(00:00) Preview(02:11) Introduction(04:05) What is Modular?(06:13) Sponsor break(07:10) From CPU to GPU landscape(10:46) Objective-C Swift analogy(15:37) What is Modular for Chris?(17:37) The love for building(20:21) Chris' view on AI future(23:48) AI and open source(29:34) Figuring out new workflows(31:22) On licenses and copyright(33:42) High quality software(35:21) Coding faster with AI(41:27) The landscape of junior engineers(48:22) AI amplifies the good and the bad(52:21) Modular ceremonies(55:26) Tech debt—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9d• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast
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What Comes After the IDE 🖥 — with Amelia Wattenberger
Mar 2000:51:38Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Amelia Wattenberger, former principal research engineer at GitHub and now partner at Sutter Hill Ventures.But she's also a product lead at Augment Code, where she developed Intent, a developer workspace for orchestrating AI coding agents and delivering complex work. So this is a fascinating chat into the future and the present of software development with someone who has clearly been at the very frontier of this for many years.(00:00) Preview(01:11) Introduction(03:26) What is "Intent"?(09:56) Splitting agents for best performance(12:32) Spec and subtasks(17:46) Decision and generation(22:15) Features, opinion and abstractions(25:37) The note system(27:41) Attitude is reflected in approach(35:21) Engineers in the new era of crafting(37:14) Managing skills applied to an agent environment(39:46) Orchestrating agents(45:50) The future of deep specialists—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9d...• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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Leading Beyond the Framework 🧭 — with Richard Hughes-Jones
Mar 600:51:25Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Richard Hughes-Jones, a professional executive coach with more than 20 years of experience. With Richard, we talked about how to coach tech leaders through uncertainty and everything that's going on with AI, how to navigate it, how we should think about our role, and what it means to step outside of the framework.We also explored how to leverage AI for coaching, how to blend human and AI advice to get the best of both worlds.(00:00) Preview(01:08) Introduction(02:26) Richard's journey into coaching(04:23) Sponsor break(05:19) Coaching without engineering background(07:27) Most common challenges(11:39) Helping people in uncertainty(19:10) Good for the team Vs Good for the business(22:13) Are frameworks limiting?(27:10) Creating a personal framework(31:49) Am I trying to be the hero?(34:35) Usual questions(39:07) AI and coachingLink to article mentioned in the interview: https://richardhughesjones.substack.com/p/052-special-edition-what-i-learned—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9d...• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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How to Master Behavioral Interviews 🎤 — with Austen McDonald
Feb 2000:55:11Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Austen McDonald, former hiring committee chair at Meta, and author of the book, "Mastering Behavioral Interviews." Austen, in his career, conducted more than 1,000 interviews and coached more than 200 engineers, and is here today to tell us everything about why behavioral interviews are more important than ever and how to run them right, as a candidate and as a recruiter.(00:00) Preview(01:02) Introduction(01:37) Austen' interest in behavioral interviews(06:25) Sponsor break(07:31) Behavioral interviews as a senior or a junior engineer(09:55) The question behind a question: signal areas(13:09) Fails in behavioral interviews(16:38) Decode, select, deliver(17:15) The eight areas(19:02) How company culture reflects in hiring(21:59) Assessing company's culture as a candidate(23:49) The big three questions(29:26) Preparing for the big three questions(37:37) Deliver a story(40:28) Good preparation process(43:15) Do not lie(46:14) Recruiter side: biases(51:42) Candidate experience with AI: value questions—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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Building Apps with Your Voice 🎤— with Paige Bailey
Feb 600:40:15Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Paige Bailey, Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind. And before that, Principal Product Manager at GitHub, where she launched Copilot and several other AI products.With Paige, we went through a quick demo of how to build and deploy a fully functioning application just with your voice, one that includes accessing your camera, manipulating pictures, and having AI doing a live interview with you to fill out your profile. So this is a bit different episode than usual, so I encourage you to check out the full video, where Paige shares her screen and goes through all the steps.And we also talked about what's coming about AI, how engineers should think about their work, and how the Google DeepMind team is changing with all roles, basically converging to one. So let's dive right into the action.(00:00) Preview(01:32) Introduction(02:12) The best era for software engineers(05:36) Navigating AI tools(06:22) AI Studio Build demo(13:53) Choosing the right AI model(17:34) Prompts and intuition(19:13) Antigravity demo(23:43) Delegating and working with AI(26:00) AI at team level(28:38) Changes in product development teams(30:45) Next stages in working with AI(37:54) Rethink software engineering—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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How Todoist is Built ✅ — with Gonçalo Silva
Jan 2300:52:29Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Gonçalo Silva, CTO of Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist.This interview is an incredible behind the scenes about one of the most peculiar companies in tech.Because Doist is bootstrapped, profitable, has no office and has about 100 employees that are spread across about 40 countries. Yet, or maybe for this reason, they created one of the world's most beloved productivity tools, used by more than 25 million users and they're up against billion-dollar companies with hundreds of millions of funding.So how do they pull this off? Let's find out.(00:00) Preview(01:15) Introduction(04:26) What does Doist looks like?(06:48) The perfect number of people(09:44) Remote and async-first(15:59) Asynchronous threats(18:34) Todoist engineering teams(21:06) Continuity or chaos(28:18) A team for every platform(29:21) Product management(31:37) Product development process(34:03) Merging top-down strategies and bottom-up feedbacks(38:16) AI in product engineering(46:34) Team level AI practices—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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Career Sabbaticals and Self Discovery 🔍 — with Thiago Ghisi
Jan 900:56:20Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Thiago Ghisi!Thiago is former director of engineering at Nubank and with a long and successful tech career in companies like ThoughtWorks, Apple and more. But right now, he's on a sabbatical and he's been for more than six months.So get ready for an incredible chat where we talked about your identity as an engineering leader, psychology, Claude Code and more.(00:00) Preview(01:01) Introduction(03:25) Quitting the job(10:32) Planning during a sabbatical(14:03) Detaching from your work identity(20:31) Measuring progress(26:03) Finding yourself: Claude Code and second brain(33:34) The biggest revelations(45:22) Thiago's next chapter—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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