This episode was originally broadcast in April 2024, and includes discussions that are still relevant to developers today, so we are publishing it again. 

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In this episode, SD Times Editor-in-Chief David Rubinstein discusses how cognitive fatigue is compounding the software productivity problem. 

His guest is Hans Dockter, CEO at Gradle Inc. and lead at Gradle Open Source Project. 

In this episode, Dave interviews Justin Moon, vice president of Core Product Engineering at BlackBerry QNX, providers of a real-time OS for embedded systems. 

They discuss:

• How QNX is working to close the development skills gap for SDVs
• How developers manage complexity in vehicle software designs
• The commercial challenges for autonomous vehicle hardware

In this episode, Dave interviews Mitchell Johnson, chief product development officer at Sonatype, about the notion of a Hippocratic Oath for developers, where you do no harm to the codebase, and how AI is impacting that.

They discuss:

• The responsibility a developer has to keeping their codebase healthy whenever they add a new feature
• How being able to output code faster with AI makes it harder to have visibility into how changes impact downstream systems
• How AI assisted coding may actually slow things down

In this episode, Dave interviews Angie Jones, VP of engineering for AI Tools & Enablement at the financial services company Block.

They discuss: 

• How AI is empowering a new wave of developers from non-traditional roles
• The importance of feeding AI models and agents important business context
• Block's coding agent Goose 

In this episode, Dave interviews Dave Protasowski, a member of the steering committee for Knative, about the project's recent graduation from the CNCF. 

They discuss: 

• An overview of what Knative does
• The history of the project at the CNCF
• What's in store for Knative in the future

In this episode, Jenna interviews Pia Nilsson, senior director of engineering at Spotify, about the company's decision to make its own AI tool to improve developer productivity.

They discuss:

• Why they built their own tool instead of using something that already exists
• How developers are using it day-to-day
• How AI is shaping developer culture at Spotify

Watch Spotify's webinar on October 22 to learn about the latest updates to Portal: https://info.backstage.spotify.com/webinar?utm_campaign=21639556-2025oct-webinar&utm_source=com-banner

In this episode, Jenna interviews Khachatur Virabyan, head of code quality at Aikido Security, about why code quality and security should be addressed together.

They discuss:

• The differences in definitions for code quality and security
• How clean code could still have vulnerabilities
• The impact AI coding will have on code quality and security

In this episode, Dave interviews Mark Lambert, chief product officer of ArmorCode, about how AI is influencing Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).

They discuss:

• How AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities than human-generated code
• The risks of slowing down innovation while trying to govern AI-assisted development
• Using AI agents for automated testing and security vulnerability detection

In this episode, Jenna interviews Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard, about the Shai-Hulud worm that has made its way through the npm ecosystem.

They discuss:

• What Shai-Hulud is and why it's so bad
• Security measures GitHub plans to implement in npm 
• Best practices to follow to mitigate risk

In this episode, Dave interviews Alan Manuel, group VP of product management for platform and AI at Planview.

They discuss: 

• Why AI requires a different mindset than other technology adoption
• Setting realistic expectations for AI
• Why it's important to focus on the outcome, not the features

In this episode, Dave interviews Neeraj Abhyankar, vice president and practice head of Data, Analytics, and Generative AI at R Systems.

They discuss: 

• The role of AI in modernization
• The evolution of AI throughout technology history
• The importance of "human in the loop" when working with AI