Podcast
Refactoring Podcast
Hosted by Luca Rossi · EN
Weekly interviews with world-class engineering leaders about writing great software and working well with humans.
18episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
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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The State of AI Adoption 📊 — with Matt McClernan
Dec 500:56:21Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Matt McClernan, CEO of Augment Code!With Matt, we went through the findings of our own research that we developed together with Augment, surveying more than 400 engineering teams about how they're using AI.And we went through many topics, from the differences between personal and team adoption, challenges, how documentation looks like a secret weapon, how to manage context in AI coding, and much more. And then we talked about the future, how the UX of AI coding is changing with IDEs, CLI tools and agents, and what the future might bring.(00:00) Preview(01:26) Introduction(02:16) Personal vs Team AI Adoption(09:25) The journey of AI adoption(13:06) The role of documentation(18:13) AI and Context: the Augment secret sauce(25:44) Helping AI with context(28:17) Quality control in AI coding(36:30) Companies and AI in the near future(45:54) The state of UX in writing code(51:54) The scope of Augment—This episode is brought to you by Snyk! Join a live session with Vandana Verma Sehgal, OWASP Leader and Staff Developer Advocate at Snyk, on Thursday, December 11, at 11am ETRegister at https://go.snyk.io/12-11-owasp-top-10-isc2.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=so-sp&utm_campaign=dm_im-refactoring_wbn_251211_owasp-top-10&utm_term=refactoring&utm_content=ad&ref=plug.dev—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 Build Product Development Teams 🛠️ — with Rob Zuber
Nov 2201:09:13Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI!With Rob, we talked about software delivery, the impact of AI, and how to build great product engineering teams. And next, we discuss trade-offs between standardization versus flexibility in software organizations, and lessons learned from our respective past mistakes.(00:00) Preview(01:22) Introduction(03:33) Industry Changes and AI's Impact on Development(08:59) The Bell Curve of Metrics and Team Performance(12:09) From Engineering Metrics to Business Outcomes(14:31) Building Effective Small Teams(25:35) Experience vs. Curiosity(37:18) Scaling Challenges and Technology Decisions(49:26) Organizational Standards and Leadership Philosophy—This episode is brought to you by Codacy! Codacy helps developers save time in code reviews, so developers can focus on other things.Start your free trial and get 20% off your first 3 months at codacy.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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The Future of Creative Organizations ✏️ — with Dan Shipper
Mar 6, 2025Tap to summarizeToday's guest is Dan Shipper!Dan is the CEO and founder of Every, which is one of the world's most popular publications, writing about AI and our relationship with technology. And Dan is one of my heroes. His newsletter was the first I ever paid for on Substack, and single-handedly inspired me to start Refactoring. But he doesn't know. I will tell him during the interview and you will see what he says. So with Dan, we'll talk about the boundaries blurring between product development and content creation, the role of generalists, entrepreneurs, and how his team builds software with AI. And spoiler alert, AI writes 90% of their code.03:08 Introduction06:42 Every and Dan's journey in tech12:56 From writer to CEO16:20 The importance of delegating18:01 What you want vs what people want21:06 Stick to yourself24:38 Playing the long game27:02 AI and content creation31:05 Approaching the use of AI36:29 Finding new workflows with AI39:03 More an AI generated code40:35 A new skillset for engineers42:44 More on the new engineering role44:45 The next AI assisted leaps—This episode is brought to you by https://workos.com—You can also find this at:- 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm- 📱 YouTube: https://youtu.be/HgKAg1rtQoE—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club
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