Refactoring Podcast
Weekly interviews with world-class engineering leaders about writing great software and working well with humans.
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How Todoist is Built ✅ — with Gonçalo Silva
<p>Today's guest is Gonçalo Silva, CTO of Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist.</p><p><br></p><p>This interview is an incredible behind the scenes about one of the most peculiar companies in tech.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>S...
Career Sabbaticals and Self Discovery 🔍 — with Thiago Ghisi
<p>Today'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...
The State of AI Adoption 📊 — with Matt McClernan
<p>Today's guest is Matt McClernan, CEO of Augment Code!</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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...
How to Build Product Development Teams 🛠️ — with Rob Zuber
<p>Today'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 ti...
From Knowledge to Wisdom 🧠 — with Hywel Carver
<p>Today's guest is Hywel Carver! Hywel is co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, which provides live team coaching for software engineering teams. With Hywel, we got deep into what makes traditional developer training awful, what engineers truly learn and what they should learn. Then we explored how to measure the impact of learning and how AI may possibly change both how learning works and our own skills.(00:00) Preview(01:15) Introduction(02:22) Hywel's journey in tech(06:20) Spreading good learning(07:55) Training as a compliance(09:34) The effectiveness of learning(12:42) Training with an expert(18:02) Knowledge, Skill and Wisdom(24:16) How Skiller Whale works?(30:26) The outcomes(34:53) Finding...
The AI Transformation at Intercom 🤖 — with Darragh Curran
<p>Today's guest is Darragh Curran! </p><p><br></p><p>Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users.</p><p><br></p><p>With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team resources to it. </p><p>Then we discussed how AI is being adopted inside Intercom itself to achieve Darragh's ambitious goal of doubling the te...
Building Psychologically Safe Teams 🛡️ — with Meg Adams
<p>Today's guest is Meg Adams!Meg is Senior Director of Engineering for the New York Times. With Meg, we talked about her fantastic journey in tech, from management in sales and retail, to learning software development from scratch, to management again, but this time in technology. And then we especially talked about Neuro Leadership, what it is, how you can apply it in practice in your team processes, and how things are different for ICs versus managers, and how you scale all of this to your whole organization.(01:22) Introduction(01:38) Meg's journey in tech(06:03) Managing skills in individual contribution(09:32) What...
Navigating AI Development Workflows 🛠 — with Birgitta Böckeler
<p>Today's guest is Birgitta Böckeler!</p><p><br></p><p>Birgitta is is a distinguished engineer and global lead for AI-assisted software delivery at ThoughtWorks. Her full-time work is to figure out how engineering teams can make the most out of AI.</p><p><br></p><p>With Birgitta, we talked about her favorite workflows, how she uses AI in the IDE, in the terminal or in a genetic mode. We discussed AI impact on productivity and what the best teams are getting right, which others are not. And finally, we talked about how AI impacts both junior a...
Automating Team Processes Gracefully ⚡ — with Antonia Scheidel
<p>Today's guest is Antonia Scheidel!Antonia is Director of Engineering at Duolingo, where she made the whole career progression, starting as a simple intern 12 years ago. Antonia is an expert at designing good, automated processes for your team. We discuss how to create good automation to avoid people doing glue work, how not to become a bottleneck as a manager, and how to make the team own the process and repair it when needed.(01:25) Introduction(02:02) Antonia's journey into tech(03:34) Antonia's career in Duolingo(06:55) From engineering to management(10:19) Good processing and notes(14:18) Fixing the process and team alignment(18:06) The burden...
Technical Debt as Crime Scene 🔍 — with Adam Tornhill
<p>Today's guest is Adam Tornhill! Adam is the author of the popular book Your Code as a Crime Scene, and he's the founder of Code Scene. With Adam, we discussed his unique insights about technical debt and code quality, which come from his study of forensic psychology. We explored how static analysis is not enough to understand code health and why you need to look into version control history to understand hotspots, change distribution and bus factor. And finally, we inevitably talked about AI and how it changes, or maybe does not change, how we should write code.(01:23) Introduction(02:25...
