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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— For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

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 —

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

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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: luca@refactoring.club

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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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Today's guest is Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb and one of my absolute favorite writers. I believe I have recommended more articles from her blog than any other author on the newsletter. Today we talked about observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, developer experience and much more. Here is what we talked about: (00:49) Introduction (01:57) What is observability (07:00) Observability in microservices (12:51) From monitoring to observing (16:20) Start observing now (19:36) How to use observability (26:11) Observability costs (31:23) Testing in production (34:09) Continuous delivery (38:24) The greatest productivity offenders (43:04) Caring about the business (46:54) Generative tools add complexity (49:15) Junior engineers leverage —

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Today's guest is Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, engineering leadership coach, and speaker.

At DX, she works with hundreds of companies on improving their developer experience and engineering productivity.

Here is what we talked about:

(02:20) Introduction (03:36) Why measure engineering productivity (05:58) Finding the proper framework (13:33) Value metrics to find issues (15:00) Identify and ease the pressure (18:12) Reaching the proper execution (21:16) Measuring in different environments (25:25) The DevEx framework (27:58) Empowering DevEx in a business (31:56) Patterns for DevEx integration (41:03) Responsibilities ownership (47:48) The DevEx offenders —

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Today's guest is Daniel Vassallo, the creator of the Small Bets community, which counts more than 5 ,000 members and includes engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds. Daniel is also a former software engineer at AWS, the author of The Good Parts of AWS and created a successful Twitter course. With Daniel, we will talk about his unconventional journey in tech, the Small Bets philosophy, and advice for engineers about careers, site projects, technology and skills. Here is what we talked about: (01:11) Introduction & background (05:21) Small Bets' genesis & philosophy (14:36) Understanding the market (19:36) Taking care of the downsides (24:43) Improving your lifestyle first (29:05) The dangers of labelling yourself (32:10) Allocating your time (37:13) Self-managing your own work (45:34) Transitioning to a self-employed lifestyle (52:21) The selection criteria for your ideas

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