Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Marco Trombetti!Marco is the CEO and founder of Translated, one of the largest translation companies in the world, powering translations for the likes of Airbnb, Uber, Skyscanner, and more.Translated is also an AI pioneer. It has developed its own models for more than 20 years and has recently released the most advanced translation LLM in the world.With Marco, we talked about the future of AI, combining AI and human work and the role of regulation. This is also the first interview we ever did in person. But as you will see and hear, I was recovering from a bad cough and had a bit of a low voice, hope you don't mind.(00:03:26) Introduction(00:05:45) The history of Translated(00:09:51) The use of transformers(00:12:47) Lara: the most advanced translation AI(00:17:51) The next step in AI models(00:24:01) The "Lara gap"(00:28:50) The real cost of training Lara(00:32:39) AI impact on human work in translation(00:41:16) Applying the Translated model in other fields(00:45:21) Concerns in AI applications(00:53:51) More on AI regulation(00:56:15) The state of AI startups(00:59:25) Understanding the AI game(01:03:31) AI and regular jobs—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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Adam Wiggins! Adam is the General Manager of Platform at The Browser Company and co-founder of Heroku. With Adam, we talked about innovating user experience in software and AI, we discussed what Local-first software means and we explored the future of developer tools. (02:49) Introduction (04:01) Adam's journey in tech (06:15) The rise of developer experience (10:03) The constant drive of improving UX (12:07) Dia & The Browser Company (14:49) Using AI to improve UX (20:38) Unlocking potentials through UX (25:18) Local-first software (32:34) Data ownership (34:31) Web development and complexity (38:03) AI and the future of development (40:25) The iteration loop — This episode is brought to you by https://workos.com — 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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Martin Fowler! Martin is chief scientist at ThoughtWorks. He is one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto and author of several legendary books, among which there is Refactoring, which shares the name with this podcast and this newsletter. With Martin, we talked about the impact of AI on software development, from the development process to how human learning and understanding changes up to the future of software engineering jobs. Then we explored the technical debt metaphor, why it has been so successful, and Martin's own advice on dealing with it. And finally, we talked about the state of Agile, the resistance that still exists today towards many Agile practices and how to measure engineering effectiveness. (03:29) Introduction (05:20) Development cycle with AI (08:36) Less control and reduced learning (13:11) Splitting task between Human and AI (14:48) The skills shift (20:17) Betting on new technologies (27:22) Martin's Refactoring and technical debt (29:24) Accumulating "cruft" (33:14) Dealing with "cruft" (37:24) The financial value of refactoring (42:04) Measuring performances (46:19) Why the "forest" didn't spread (56:11) Make the forest appealing — This episode is brought to you by https://workos.com — 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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Aviv Ben Josef! Aviv has more than 20 years of experience in tech. He is an executive coach working with hundreds of engineering teams and leaders. With Aviv, we talked about profitable engineering, what makes engineering valuable, why impact is hard to measure,and what are the cultural and organizational traits that make engineering teams successful. (01:43) Introduction (02:20) Aviv’s journey into tech (05:57) From tech to consulting (08:12) Less coding, more coaching (11:42) Profitable engineering (15:11) What unprofitable engineering looks like (17:33) Other engineering dysfunctions (20:49) Why is engineering still perceived as a cost (27:23) Switch your approach (32:48) Intentional learning (38:29) Meta retros: connecting engineers and product (45:31) Set your goals (48:27) Product engineering in today’s framework (53:28) The AI influence on teamwork — This episode is brought to you by https://sleuth.io —

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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Pat Kua! Pat is a professional engineering and leadership coach with more than 20 years of experience in tech. He was CTO of N26 and principal consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is an accomplished speaker and writes an awesome newsletter for tech leaders called Level Up. With Pat, we talked about his journey in tech, from Australia to London to Berlin. We talked about the future of engineering management and technical leadership and the ever controversial founder mode. Here is what we talked about: (02:17) Introduction (03:05) Pat's journey in tech (12:17) Engineering management evolution (18:27) Balancing people and tech management (21:55) The paybacks of a good management (25:25) System thinking in people's management (28:39) Finding the balance in hybrid roles (31:52) The foundation skill (37:42) About Paul Graham's essay (45:22) The maker vs multiplier framework (48:15) The evolution of practices in tech — This episode is brought to you by https://sleuth.io — 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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Francesco Dominidiato!

Francesco Dominidiato is CTO at Moneyfarm, one of the largest wealth management companies in Europe, and former CTO at high-growth startups like Casavo and Docebo. During his career he scaled organizations from zero to hundreds of employees, and has incredible experience at all levels: from leading small teams to NASDAQ-listed companies.

With Francesco, we talked about career frameworks, how to create a path that creates opportunities for both individual contributors and managers, how to address career development issues, organizational debt and more.

Here is what we talked about:

(02:09) Introduction

(03:07) Francesco's journey in tech

(06:57) Today's industry direction

(18:17) A path for all careers

(23:36) Salary range & defining roles

(34:24) The cost of organizational debt

(41:10) Evolving the career framework

(53:35) Scaling the ladders

(57:02) Tricky roles

(01:04:21) The path of engineering career

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Today's guest is Stephanie Wong! Stephanie is the Head of Technical Marketing at Google Cloud, where she blends storytelling and technology to inspire developers and build customer growth. She’s an award-winning host, global keynote speaker, and creator of viral tech content. With Stephanie, we talked about her journey from sales to content creation to product management and generative AI. We talked about technical storytelling, how to craft great stories around technical products. And finally we discussed product management for generative AI and the challenges of driving adoption for AI products. Here is what we talked about: (01:58) Introduction (02:52) Stephanie's journey into tech (07:31) Pioneering content creation for tech (10:05) Learning through experience (13:17) How to tell a tech story (16:47) Branding and content creation (23:12) How to improve your storytelling (28:28) Finding the way to grow (34:11) "Get the ball rolling!" (41:40) Content creation and product management (44:20) AI's role in today's tech

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Today's guest is Pramoda Vyasarao! Pramoda is a leadership and communication coach, he has 20+ years of experience in big tech, wrote the book “Beyond Your Limits”, and runs a course called Communication Engineering With Pramoda, we will talk about what good communication looks like, especially for engineers and managers, how it impacted his career and the career of the leaders he helps. Here is what we talked about: (02:05) Introduction (02:51) The Toastmasters Club (07:12) Engineering Communication issues (10:18) Communication through Pramoda's career (13:28) The TALL framework (19:11) Evaluation vs Information (20:44) The TALL framework: Asking (34:19) The GROW model (36:18) The TALL framework: Listening (38:05) The Path to action (46:04) From feelings to facts (50:38) The TALL framework: Leadership (53:51) Get a coach! (55:28) Mentoring vs Coaching (58:39) Beyond your Limits: a look on Pramoda's work Learn more about Pramoda's work:

• Communication Engineering course: https://www.changesmith.me/communication
• Beyond Your Limits book: Amazon

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Today's guest is Camille Fournier! Camille is an accomplished CTO and executive with 20+ years of experience in tech, and author of the timeless The Manager’s Path, possibly the most influential book ever about engineering management. With Camille we talked about good vs bad management, the controversial new founder mode, career advice for managers and her next book about platform engineering. Here is what we talked about: (02:01) Introduction (03:51) About the founder mode (11:46) Good weed, bad weeds (17:49) Finding "the formula" (21:24) Managing at different levels (28:03) The identity war (32:55) The staples of management (39:53) Having a strong opinion (43:21) Staying valuable (49:53) Keep your skills valuable (55:15) Platform engineering — This episode is brought to you by sleuth.io

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Today's guest is David Heinemeier Hansson! David is the creator of Rails, co-founder & CTO of Basecamp, a NYT bestselling author, and professional racing driver for 10+ years! In our chat, we explored many of David's strong opinions on software development, including today's excessive complexity in software and infrastructure, the role of AI, and the future of open source. We also talked about his racing and how he approaches learning any topic from scratch. Here is what we talked about: (02:20) Introduction (03:42) Merchants of Complexity (13:19) Innovating the dev experience (21:53) Complexity in small projects (28:14) Incentives hurt open source (32:49) Subscription vs ONCE (35:24) David and AI (47:27) Using AI as training wheels (49:42) The art of learning — This episode is brought to you by sleuth.io

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Today's guest is Henry Poydar! Henry is CEO and founder at Steady, with more than 25 years of experience in tech leadership roles. With Henry, we talked about continuous coordination, an open source framework he co-created, providing a set of principles and practices for running modern, effective engineering teams. Here is what we talked about: (01:25) Introduction (02:25) Henry's Career (13:23) Create async communication (16:47) Keeping a steady beat (23:02) Define a necessary meeting (26:00) The proper alignment (30:58) Applying continuous coordination (37:06) Discovering how your team works (38:38) Managing in the AI era (44:27) How remote can improve working (48:20) How AI is affecting team work — This episode is brought to you by sleuth.io

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Today's guest is Dana Lawson! Dana is CTO at Netlify and held leadership roles at incredible companies like GitHub, New Relic, InVision, and more. With Dana, we talked about her journey, starting in the military, becoming a manager and major lessons she has learned. We also talked about how to hire engineers, how to create a diverse and inclusive team, and the impact of AI on engineering. Here is what we talked about: (01:25) Introduction (02:07) Dana's tech journey (08:43) Career's tipping points (14:53) Balancing technical and managing skills (19:32) Connecting is key (22:11) Hiring in 2024 (28:04) How AI is affecting hiring (32:54) Pursuing diversity in a team (43:39) Pushing boundaries and growth (45:47) Integrating AI in the workflow

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Today's guest is Irina Stanescu! Irina is a full-time engineering coach, course instructor, and former manager at Uber and Google. With Irina, we talked about her journey through Silicon Valley, big tech, and high growth startups, balancing IC and management duties, and achieving impact through influence. Here is what we talked about: (01:21) Introduction (02:02) Irina’s first steps (06:10) Joining Google (08:15) From Google to Uber (10:16) Being a young TLM (14:34) The restraints of a TLM (18:14) Uber vs Google (22:01) Impact through influence (28:09) Training your influence skills (35:42) Applying influence in specific roles (38:04) How to be an helpful EM —

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Today's guest is Greg Foster! Greg is CTO at Graphite, a tool that helps teams doing better code reviews, and smaller and faster code changes. With Greg, we talked about what good code reviews look like, how AI is changing the development process, and how the Graphite engineering team works. Here is what we talked about: (02:01) Introduction (03:06) What is Graphite? (05:05) Graphite's code reviewing (09:58) Combining different workflows (13:07) Monorepos vs polyrepos (17:28) Conducting code reviews (21:57) The landscape of automated review (25:09) The hidden meaning behind skipping code reviews (27:43) Common mistakes (29:53) Integrating AI in code review (34:36) AI - human balance (38:27) Tech apprenticeship in the AI era (41:14) Graphite's structure (45:15) A dev tool from devs (47:23) Delivery process at Graphite —

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Today's guest is Malte Ubl! Malte is CTO at Vercel, the frontend cloud provider, and creator and maintainer of Next.js, the most popular React framework. Malte has also been Engineer Director at Google, where he led Google Search for desktop computers. With Malte, we deep dived into how Vercel works as a team, what could developer experience look like, and the future of AI-enabled applications. Here is what we talked about: (01:21) Introduction (02:17) How Vercel works (05:01) Vercel team strategy (06:29) The journey of a new code (13:45) Do we need engineering managers? (16:59) Necessary and useless roles (22:51) Vercel' developing strategy (33:19) The ideal development process (37:25) Finding and avoiding bottlenecks (40:48) Thoughts on AI shift (47:46) Adapting software to AI interaction (53:01) AI and open source —

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— For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected] 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: [email protected]

Today's guest is Anna Shipman! Anna is CTO at Kooth, former Technical Director at Financial Times, a Keynote speaker and accomplished author. With Anna, we talked about her journey in tech and how to develop a good technical strategy, drawing from stories and examples from her 20 plus years of engineering experience. Here is what we talked about: (00:54) Introduction (01:20) Anna's journey in Tech (06:36) Going from public to private (09:17) What does Kooth do? (12:53) Technical strategy definition (15:01) Applying the strategy (24:53) Improving over time (30:10) The strategy framework (33:38) The pitfalls of setting up a strategy (36:23) Converge team and strategy (41:45) The strategist authority

Here are a few articles and resources that were mentioned throughout the interview:

• A faster FT.com
• No next next
• Building Kooth
• Anna’s website

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Today's guest is Rebecca Murphey.

Rebecca is field CTO at Swarmia, former manager at Stripe and Indeed, and the author of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization. With Rebecca, we talked about her journey through Indeed, Stripe and Swarmia and the three pillars of her book, business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience. Here is what we talked about: (00:58) Introduction (02:15) Rebecca's Journey (08:24) Joining Swarmia (15:02) 1st Pillar: Business outcomes (23:08) Team structure & Company architecture (29:18) Keeping the lights on (33:56) 2nd Pillar: Developer productivity (38:44) Using numbers in the right way (43:25) The best way of working (51:07) 3rd Pillar: Developer experience (56:52) The effects of "Build" on Swarmia —

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Today's guest is Rachel Potvin. Rachel is SVP of Engineering at Sanity, ex-VP of Engineering at Github, and previously worked at Google and Ubisoft. She has had an incredible career journey and is a world renowned speaker. With Rachel we talked about her journey across what feels like different generations of companies. We talked about scaling teams, challenges, lessons learned and the great work she's doing at Sanity right now. Here is what we talked about: (01:37) Introduction (02:39) Rachel's journey at Google (08:06) From Google to GitHub (14:29) Building healthy engineering culture (18:56) GitHub growth & hiring (21:44) Rachel's career at Sanity (26:21) Being a VP in Big tech (29:36) The road to "Sanity" (28:17) Startup planning (39:22) The fun factor (40:51) Adapting your experience to a new journey (47:13) Startup focus vs Big tech focus (49:13) Top-down strategy is good — For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

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Today's guest is Denis Yarats. Denis is co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, one of my favorite products and one of the most successful AI startups today. Perplexity was founded less than two years ago and has just raised $250M in venture capital, at a $2B+ evaluation. With Denis, we talked about the state of AI products and his vision of where they're going. Then we talked about Perplexity as a company, how the team is organized, how engineers work, and how they use AI themselves. —— I am sorry for the bad audio quality on my side 🙏 the recording picked up the wrong mic and we realized it only during editing 🙏 —— Here is what we talked about: (02:04) Introduction (03:08) The History of Perplexity (09:35) Startup and AI costs (12:14) The proper AI model (14:47) Open vs Proprietary Source (15:51) Is AI evolution saturated? (17:07) How Perplexity uses AI (18:49) Perplexity Engineering team (21:48) Trials, teams and management (28:17) Startup planning (31:53) Team structure (33:33) Developing procedures (37:35) Perplexity's "secret sauce" (40:31) Metrics in Perplexity (44:38) Perplexity's future —

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Today's guest is Aditya Agarwal.

Aditya is a legend: he joined Facebook as employee #10 and, years later, joined Dropbox as CTO when there were ~20 engineers. Today, he is partner at South Park Commons, through which he invested in more than 300 companies. Today we talked about early stage Facebook, differences and similarities with Dropbox, engineering teams in hyper growth and the future of engineering management. Here is what we talked about: (02:17) Introduction (03:10) Facebook Employee n 10 (09:57) The value of being a "generalist" (12:46) Moving fast and breaking things (19:24) From Cove to Dropbox (22:10) Dropbox vs Facebook (25:56) Finding company's culture (29:23) The challenges of hyper growth (34:42) The hyper growth in the next era (39:35) Engineering managers are more technical (42:42) Being a technical CTO (45:33) South Park Commons —

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