• 47 minutes 23 seconds
    The Engineering Scoreboard and an Addiction to Speed

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    We sit down with veteran Principal Engineer Justin Abrahms to discuss why having a clear engineering scoreboard is critical to winning the software delivery game. Drawing on his experience scaling deployment pipelines for payment engineers, platform engineering teams, and globocorps, Justin explains the simple truth: when you deliberately do the right things—embracing continuous delivery, small batch sizes, and tight feedback loops—you get the right outcomes. Yet despite these battle-tested practices existing for decades, our industry suffers from an "Eternal September" fueled by terrible onramps.

             

    We dissect the performative theater of modern engineering, taking aim at the severe lack of intentionality in code reviews. Too many peer reviews devolve into superficial nitpicking rather than educational, inquisitive assessments of long-term maintainability. Justin shares lessons learned from working alongside Trevor Foucher (author of The Art of Readable Code) at Google, demonstrating how high-signal code reviews should actively educate developers and de-risk downstream systems before code ever hits production.

             

    Finally, we confront the reality that raw development speed is profoundly addictive. Teams chase the immediate dopamine hit of generating code faster with LLMs, ignoring what happens when they look just one week or one month out and realize unmaintainable prototypes instantly collapse under the weight of real customer changes

             
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    23 October 2026, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 5 minutes
    How can browser and mobile app testing be so difficult?

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    We welcome David Burns, Head of Open Source at BrowserStack and previously Mozilla, this week to help explain how can browser and mobile app testing be so bad still in 2026. "Even if we had to do it all over again, we probably still wouldn't have gotten it right", might just be the biggest learning. We review some of the core challenges that cause even the most experienced web engineers pain and how some companies are attempting to avoid them.

             

    We also review shares lessons from Mozilla’s 'War on Orange,' demonstrating why chasing a 100% green CI suite at scale is a fool's errand, and why engineering teams must instead manage delta tolerances and adhere to a strict testing pyramid. Additionally, we investigate the physical hardware nightmares of running 30,000 real phones in data centers; from battery swelling and custom Faraday cages to complying with Apple EULA requirements using racks of Mac Minis. And finally, we discuss WebMCP, Project Fugu, and why LLM browser agents still struggle against edge-case browser behaviors like the Back-Forward Cache (BF Cache).

             
    9 October 2026, 12:00 am
  • 38 minutes 21 seconds
    SQL is the worst DSL, except for all the other ones

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    From your feedback, we know that on-call issues, especially those that arise at the database layer are always the most challenging to solve. This episode builds on our Grafana Observability episode as we go deeper into the challenge of data ownership in data lakes. Apache Druid creator, previous Yahoo Distinguished Engineer, Fellow at Splunk, and currently the Chief Architect as Imply, Eric Tschetter joins us to confirm that there are unsolved problems in data platforms, and it doesn't get better when we throw agents into the mix.

             

    In the true DevOps mindset aligment, Eric reminds us that whoever is operating the system, knows what is going on, they know their service boundaries, and so it's their choice to make. And the sad reality is that at large enough companies, you will always have independent teams making independent decisions, it's never possible to fully align them, and realistically we get down to why it is even a mistake to try.

             
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    18 September 2026, 12:00 am
  • 37 minutes 22 seconds
    The excitement and value of quality

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    Sauce Labs CTO Anoop Tripathi addresses the root causes of broken test suites and why teams frequently become numb to intermittent test failures. Anoop shares concrete lessons from his career, detailing how bad practices like embedding fixed sleep routines instead of signal-based waiting ruin test reliability. We discuss the necessity of designing products for testability from day one—such as using pair programming where one developer writes the implementation while the other writes the test suite, or building dedicated test interfaces directly into the application architecture. We also analyze the hidden business costs of poor quality, where engineering debt forces sales teams to spend their time managing upset clients instead of acquiring new revenue.

             

    We explore organizational anti-patterns—such as teams claiming to be 'Agile' with one-year sprint cycles, or shipping debug builds to production because release builds continuously crash, highlighting a pair-programming model where one developer writes the code while another writes the corresponding tests

             

    Finally, we tackle the dangers of chasing vanity metrics, from engineers writing automated assert pass statements to claim fake coverage, to organizations bragging about more code. Anoop distinguishes between output gain and outcome gain, warning that LLMs are creating a massive testing and review crisis by generating 20-page documentation files for minor features.

             
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    11 September 2026, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 2 minutes
    How to land a software job in the age of LLMs

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    In this episode, we sit down with Nikhil Mungel, Head of AI R&D at Cribl, to discuss how LLMs have dramatically transformed the tech hiring landscape. The conversation opens with an honest look at the flood of AI-generated, low-quality resumes and remote interview cheating tactics, which have pushed many organizations toward in-person whiteboard interviews or closed-network referrals.

             

    We explore how software development has evolved from character-by-character coding into "judgment work," where an engineer's value relies on holistic decision-making, taste, and business alignment rather than raw syntax memorization. Nikhil emphasizes the importance of an "ownership mindset," urging developers to move beyond acting as mere specification-translators and instead evaluate technical trade-offs through a business-focused lens. We also pull back the curtain on modern technical interviews, highlighting why expressing strong convictions, asking intentional career questions, and proving human reasoning without LLM assistance remain essential for standing out.

             
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    28 August 2026, 12:00 am
  • 42 minutes 25 seconds
    Why does anyone use Crossplane?

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    Pushkar Gopalakrishna, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Snap, previously Cruise and AWS, joins to explore why engineering organizations pivot away from Terraform and HCL toward Kubernetes-native tools even when they might not be better. We unpack how developer friction, copy-pasted control structures, and misaligned organizational incentives create massive tech debt—often forcing SREs to manually update infrastructure repositories for compliance, resulting in broken pipelines and severe operational friction.

             

    We debate over the mechanics of Crossplane, detailing how its continuous reconciliation loop and Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) allow teams to express cloud infrastructure as YAML alongside their application manifests at potentially the cost of async validation. Pushkar pulls back the curtain on how Cruise managed infrastructure at scale using a custom internal platform called 'Juno' to bootstrap GCP projects, repositories, and permissions, while leveraging Crossplane for application-level resources. We also dive into the dangers of using CI tools for continuous deployment, detailing a terrifying incident where a pipeline bug accidentally marked three production Kubernetes namespaces for deletion, and how moving to ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts helped prevent future outages for autonomous vehicles.

             

    Finally, we touch on the realities of non-production environment isolation, testing against live APIs, and why platform teams must balance providing a seamless developer experience without stripping away developer accountability.

             
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    7 August 2026, 12:00 am
  • 41 minutes 58 seconds
    Building Observability for the Innovators

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    Co-Founder of Grafana Labs, Anthony Woods, joins to share his perspective on how open source solutions are thriving despite the deluge of pull requests being thrown at them through their open source repositories.

             

    Most importantly, he outlines how observability is no longer being done by users looking directly at dashboards. The data rarely makes to LLMs or automation, it rarely makes sense even to humans looking at them, without the context. The context is critical component, and having a model that was built on the semantic concepts relevant to your use cases.

             

    And of course we can't stay away from asking on the record the current state of security of open source repositories from a vendor side. Given how their was an inevitable incident with some of the Grafana open source repos, we dig in to figure out how they are dealing with the real world impacts of malware being spread throughout the ecosystem.

             
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    31 July 2026, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 9 minutes
    When knowledge is free but the infrastructure isn't

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    As it turns out, the entire artificial intelligence boom is essentially running on Wikipedia's free labor, but while knowledge is free, physical server infrastructure definitely is not. We sit down with Moriel Schottlender, Principal Systems Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, to dissect how public systems survive an endless onslaught of high-volume AI scrapers and aggressive crawlers. Because 65% of the resource-heavy requests originate from automated bots, we explore how Wikimedia navigates this traffic without blocking legitimate users. We skip the approaches of IP-banning which doesn't work in practice and discuss actual mature architectural strategies, by focusing on the users' needs. From structured database dumps and high-volume enterprise APIs to rate-limiting and CDN caching trade-offs.

             

    It's a mind-bogglingly complex ecosystem ­of open-source, a 25-year-old PHP monolith supporting over 900 distinct site instances across 300 languages and 11 unique projects. It's an immense engineering challenge to modernize infrastructure while serving 250,000 active volunteer editors who build custom workflows via Toolforge—Wikimedia's internal, open-source mini-AWS.

             

    Finally, we have to tackle the philosophical divide between artificial statistical models and human creativity. Because LLMs are trained to predict the statistical mean, they inherently miss the edge cases where real human value, internationalization, and accessibility actually reside. And even if they did, we managed to squeeze out every last bit of AI creativity that early models had until what we are actually left with is the most boring result. We also commiserate over the gratuitous low-quality AI pull requests flooding open-source repositories, drawing parallels to the chaotic Hacktoberfest spam of years past.

             
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    24 July 2026, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 28 seconds
    Technically We Have Code Reviews and the LLM Semantic Layer

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    We are joined this week by Mark Hay, CTO and co-founder of TextQL and former lead of Text Classification Infrastructure at Meta, to uncover the hidden complexities behind massive-scale machine learning. Mark explains why the most crucial features for identifying abusive behavior, like drug dealers or scammers on Facebook and Instagram, rarely rely on the content itself but instead analyze the underlying behavioral graphs, such as abnormal friend requests or messaging patterns.

             

    Of course we review the adversarial nature of spam detection, where bad actors constantly evolve from simple regex evasion to embedding messages inside images or even utilizing pure symbolic communication, like comparing different sized cucumber emojis to evade text filters. That requires diving into the evolution of database querying and the rise of the semantic layer. Mark unpacks why relying on raw LLMs to write complex SQL is a recipe for hallucinations, and how implementing a "correct by construction" semantic layer guarantees structurally sound queries by restricting outputs to a strictly defined configuration. However, this rigid structure fundamentally stifles the creative flexibility of LLMs.

             

    Lastly, we can't avoid exploring the tension between these approaches and how new tools aim to bridge the gap by dynamically balancing raw SQL generation with structured ontological constraints, providing rapid time-to-value for analytical workflows. Finally, we discuss the controversial philosophical shift occurring within software engineering, particularly the tension between the "Don't Repeat Yourself" principle and "Locality of Behavior".

             
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    10 July 2026, 12:00 am
  • 54 minutes 36 seconds
    Who Needs Testers Anyway?

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    26 June 2026, 12:00 am
  • 52 minutes 52 seconds
    You Wouldn't Implement A Database

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    We talk with Ragic CEO Jeff Kuo about Semantic Web origins, dodging DDoS attacks, and the absolute horror of a database that randomly deletes its own files. He revisits how a 25-year-old master's thesis on the Semantic Web evolved into a massive spreadsheet-driven database builder. It's the one better Airtable alternative.

             

    Rather than forcing non-technical users into complex two-layer SQL architectures, Ragic utilizes a highly flexible, graph-based data model. Achieving this performance meant abandoning traditional ORMs to build a custom graph indexing engine on top of Berkeley DB, a key-value store. This custom implementation came with brutal growing pains, including a terrifying bug that would randomly delete the wrong data files. To survive, Ragic's team shares with us just exactly how they had to hijack the internal implementation to avoid these sorts of problems.

             

    When we get down to it, we review how they dealt with critical DDoS against their cloud providers, how they performed a cloud migration in just one weekend, and how they manage thousands of tenants on shared infrastructure.

             
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    19 June 2026, 12:00 am
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