Thoughtworks Technology Podcast: Recent Episodes
Thoughtworks
The Thoughtworks podcast plunges deep into the latest tech topics that have captured our imagination. Join our panel of senior technologists to explore the most important trends in tech today, get frontline insights into our work developing cutting-edge tech and hear more about how today’s tech megatrends will impact you.
Harness engineering is still a new concept, but already we've noticed a challenge being consistently faced by technology leaders: how can a harness be used at scale across an organization to ensure consistency and controllability without undermining autonomy? To some extent it's a discussion that's reminiscent of platform engineering and, before that, DevOps, but, given the nature of AI agents, it's also unique to this particular moment.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by guests Thomas Squeo (Chief Technology Officer and Head of Advisory for the Americas) and Matt Kamelman (Innovation Choreographer) to explore why it's so important to scale harnesses effectively and the steps and processes that will allow you to do just that. Thomas and Matt recently wrote an article outlining how organizations should think about what they call 'enterprise harness engineering'; here, they unpack their ideas and explore what's required of engineering leaders and their teams.
Read Thomas' and Matt's article: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/operating-system-enterprise-ai
Cloud was one of the main drivers of the early waves of AI adoption. However, as AI has become more and more embedded in systems and devices — in both consumer and enterprise contexts — it's becoming a bottleneck. This isn't just about costs (although yes, that issue is certainly surging up the agenda), it's also about how we optimize our architectures and improve device performance.
This is why conversation is turning to hybrid AI: embracing a hybrid approach that combines proprietary cloud services with local or on-device AI can help organizations deliver better experiences for users, whether they're consumers, other businesses or internal teams.
One company exploring this space is electronics giant Lenovo. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Prem Chandrasekaran is joined by Girish Hoogar, Lenovo's Global Head of Technology for Cloud and Software, to discuss why the company is embracing hybrid AI, how it's approaching implementation and what the implications are for other technologists.
As industry attention turns to local AI, listen for a first-hand perspective on what the trend actually means for engineering teams and their organizations.
At the end of June, Thoughtworks and Martin Fowler convened an unconference-style event in Switzerland with a range of industry leaders. The aim was to reflect on the current challenges and learning around AI assisted and agentic software engineering and discuss the implications for the future — and, most importantly, what actions need to be taken today.
To review the event and dive into some of the topics that surfaced, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Thoughtworks colleagues Kief Morris (author of Infrastructure as Code) and Andrew Harmel-Law (author of Facilitating Software Architecture). They highlight some of the key ideas and issues that emerged from the event's conversations, ranging from developer identity to harness engineering.
Learn more about the European edition of the Future of Software Engineering Retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/events/the-future-of-software-development-europe-2026
Read Andrew's recent blog post that asks whether non-functional requirements could be a vital guardrail for AI-generated code: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/architecture/non-functional-requirements-missing-guardrail-ai-generated-code
What is code? It might sound obvious, but if you scratch the surface it becomes more difficult to articulate precisely what we mean. AI is complicating the picture further and changing the relationship developers have with code: when large amounts of executable code can be generated from high-level descriptions, what does it even mean to write code?
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Alexey Boas is joined by Thoughworks Distinguished Engineer Unmesh Joshi to discuss what code actually is and what it means to write, test, review and maintain code today. Building on Unmesh's recent article 'What is Code?' for martinfowler.com, this discussion dives into one of the fundamental building blocks of software while also thinking through the implications for 2026's engineering challenges.
Read Unmesh's article on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/what-is-code.html
Database branching has, for a long time, been a troublesome piece in the modern developer workflow puzzle: a good idea in principle but in practice a slow and often expensive challenge. Get it right and you can accelerate productivity and remove bottlenecks; get it wrong and you're potentially creating all sorts of trouble for yourself, from privacy risks to additional complexity.
However, things are changing. Thanks to the emergence of new platforms such as Neon, Supabase and Databricks Lakebase, branching a database can become as familiar to developers as managing code branches and multiple environments with, say, Git and Terraform.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by his Thoughtworks colleague Cam Casher and Databricks' Kevin Hartman to discuss the work Thoughtworks and Databricks have been doing together on Lakebase. They discuss the platform, their experience using it with Spotify's Backstage and the opportunities database branching can offer software engineering teams in an increasingly AI-assisted and agentic world.
Read Cam and Kevin's recent series on using Databricks Lakebase with Backstage: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/data-engineering/backstage-lakebase-databricks
Semantic diffusion, combined with the pace of technology change, makes talking about AI-adjacent practices and techniques incredibly diffficult. There are few better examples of this issue than the term 'spec-driven development'. Although it's not new — its coinage precedes our current AI moment — it has become ubiquitous over the last six months or so as software professionals attempt to develop a vocabulary for talking about how they're developing methods for working successfully with coding agents.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler is joined by Laura Tacho — Developer Experience at AWS — to discuss all things spec-driven development. From competing definitions to different interpretations, implementations and workflows, the discussion provides a frank and grounded look at one of the most discussed and debated terms in modern software engineering.
Learn more about Laura's work by visiting her website: https://lauratacho.com/
Read Birgitta's article on spec-driven development on Martin Fowler's website: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html
Learn more about The Future of Software Development Retreat discussed on this episode and explore some of the key insights: https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/events/the-future-of-software-development
'Harness engineering' is one of the most significant terms to emerge in software engineering in 2026. Broadly referring to the work done to control unpredictable AI agents and coding assistants, its use signals growing attention on what needs to be done to make agents reliable and consistent enough for production software in the real-world.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler joins hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Nate Schutta to explore what harness engineering actually is, how it should be done and why it should matter to software engineers working today. Having written a number of articles on harness engineering for martinfowler.com based on her experiences with AI-assistance, Birgitta is well-placed to explain the core concepts and implications.
Taking in everything from the practices and ideas that pre-date and inform harness engineering to integrating harness engineering into existing workflows, listen for a conversation that will provide much needed clarity on what's an essential topic in the industry.
Read Birgitta's article on harness engineering on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/harness-engineering.html
Watch Birgitta's video on harness engineering beyond skills on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLWOLmeHOSE
Anthropic Mythos garnered significant attention when it was launched in mid-April 2026. Yet despite it apparently presenting an unprecedented threat to global software, you don't have to look to closely to see that this was an effective product launch as much as a story about the grave security risks of today's AI models.
But this isn't to say there aren't important implications for software developers, security professionals and other technologists. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, one of our new hosts Nate Schutta is joined by Chris Kramer to discuss Anthropic Mythos and Project Glasswing, unpacking what's hype and what really matters.
A few links for this episode:
Some more information about Project Glasswing: https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
A story about how a small Discord group briefly had access to Mythos: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/23/discord-group-has-claude-mythos-access
How Mozilla used Mythos to discover Firefox bugs: https://www.wired.com/story/mozilla-used-anthropics-mythos-to-find-271-bugs-in-firefox/
In April 2026 we published a new edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar — volume 34. Like many recent volumes, this one was dominated by AI. However, while editions over the last couple of years have illustrated the dizzying proliferation of AI-related technologies, vol.34 indicates a degree of evolution in the field, demonstrated by a focus on consistency, reliability and mitigating the collaborative and individual challenges of working with AI. This is reflected in the four themes identified for this Radar: the challenge of evaluating technology in an agentic world; retaining principles, relinquishing patterns; securing permission-hungry agents; putting coding agents on a leash.
On this special Technology Radar episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Alessio Ferri and Jim Gumbley to discuss the key themes in Technology Radar Vol.34. Diving into topics ranging from cognitive debt, harness engineering and the lethal trifecta, listen to gain a deeper understanding not just of the latest Radar but, more importantly, what AI-assisted and agentic software engineering really look like today.
Read the latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
There's been a lot of discussion and debate in recent months about exactly how software engineering will be reshaped by AI. While it remains to be seen what the discipline will look like once things quieten down (if they ever do), one thing has been somewhat neglected: what does software engineering actually feel like in this AI-intensive environment? If we're no longer writing code, or even interfacing with it in the way we're used to, what does that mean for our professional experience?
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Nate Schutta to discuss the software engineering experience today and to dig deep into what the work feels like when AI agents change our relationship with code. Nate is one of the authors of Fundamentals of Software Engineering (alongside Dan Vega) and appeared on the podcast in May 2025 to discuss the book; with so much change having taken place since then, Nate is perfectly placed to offer a perspective on what software engineering means today for an industry navigating significant change.
Learn more about The Fundamentals of Software Engineering: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/fundamentals-software-engineering-book
Listen to Nate discuss the book on an earlier episode of the Technology Podcast: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/exploring-fundamentals-software-engineering
The Thoughtworks 2026 Looking Glass report was published in January. Designed to provide business and technology leaders with the tools to better understand and navigate future trends, this edition paid particularly close attention to what organizations need to do to reach a level of AI maturity that will effectively unlock an operational and commercial edge. Taking in everything from AI-assisted software delivery to AI-ready data, it bridges the gaps between what the world is doing today, what will be possible in the months to come and what may be coming on the horizon in the long-term.
To discuss this year's Looking Glass, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Rickey Zachary and Thomas Squeo. Together, Rickey and Thomas provide both a technology and business perspective on the main insights from the report, exploring some of the key throughlines and issues Thoughtworks believes businesses need to contend with. With a complex and rapidly changing industry and economic picture, one thing emerges as critical: being brilliant at the basics.
Read the 2026 Looking Glass: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/looking-glass
Managing distributed systems and complex workflows can be challenging. What happens when something fails? If a task isn't executed to completion, that can lead to serious problems. From transaction and billing failures to deploying software, even small issues can have significant consequences.
This is one of the reasons for durable computing. Designed to isolate code from crashes, it preserves state so a task is completed even when something fails.
To discuss durable computing, explore why it matters today and how we've been using it at Thoughtworks, Brandon Cook and John Coleman join host Alexey Boas on the Technology Podcast. They dive into the current platform ecosystem and what it means for developers — and requires of them. They also talk about the value of durable computing for AI, explaining why the concept of 'durable agents' offers an important of avenue of investigation in a world eager to embrace agentic systems.
Learn more about durable computing in this blog post from July 2025: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/cloud/durable-computing-making-easier-resilience-distributed-systems
In January 2026, Thoughtworks launched AI/works™, an agentic development platform. It promises to make the capabilities of AI agents a reality for the enterprise, helping in areas including understanding complex legacy code, forward engineering new software solutions and agent governance.
How, though, does it actually work in practice? And what does it mean for the organizations and teams Thoughtworks works with?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, new host Rickey Zachary is joined by Bharani Subramaniam (CTO for Thoughtworks India and the Middle East) and Shodhan Sheth (Head of Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud) to discuss AI/works™, taking in how the platform emerged from a number of recent Thoughtworks projects to how it's delivering value to businesses today.
As well as an inside perspective on Thoughtworks' new platform, the episode also offers a deep and timely exploration of questions and challenges the rapid rise of AI agents in software engineering has surfaced across every part across industry.
Learn more about AI/works™: https://www.thoughtworks.com/ai/works
In a world that's being transformed by AI agents and agentic systems, how do software developers unlearn what they know while also maintaining engineering rigor?
In an in-person conversation with Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer at Google Cloud, and Patrick Debois, Developer Relations at Tessl, host Ken Mugrage dives into the ways individuals, teams and organizations are walking the line between experimentation and well-established engineering practices as they seek to innovate while ensuring resilience, reliability and security.
Thoughtworks is a platinum sponsor of the 2025 DORA report: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/reports/the-2025-dora-report
If AI agents really are the future of how work will be done — in software engineering and beyond — the platforms on which they are built, run and maintained will be crucial. This is a topic two Thoughtworkers, Ben O'Mahony and Fabian Nonnenmacher, are currently writing about.
Although not due to be published until early 2027, the first two chapters of Building AI Agent Platforms are now available as part of O'Reilly's Early Release scheme. Its goal is to provide readers with a complete roadmap for developing AI agent platforms, from agent development to architectural principles to observability and governance.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, the authors speak to regular host Ken Mugrage about the book, why agent platforms are a critical part of any AI strategy and some of the challenges of developing and maintaining them. Listen for an early look at what looks set to be a valuable book in the world of AI development and to gain a clearer perspective on what agentic AI really means at the start of 2026.
Learn more about Building AI Agent Platforms: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-ai-agent/0642572243906/
You can grasp the basics of software architecture by learning design patterns, but you probably won't master it — to do that you have to get to grips with antipatterns too. Often these lessons are hard-won through experience, derived from seeing what happens when architectural decisions (or the lack of them) collide with the messy reality of the real world.
While there's obviously no replacement for practical experience, Neal Ford, Mark Richards and Raju Gandhi want to share theirs to give architects the opportunity to avoid common antipatterns and pitfalls and make smarter decisions. That's what they're doing with their forthcoming book (due September 2026) Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns and Pitfalls.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Neal is joined by his co-authors and their editor from O'Reilly, Sarah Grey, to discuss the book and to explore why getting to know on antipatterns and pitfalls matters as much as learning design patterns.
Learn more about Software Architecture Patterns, Antipatterns and Pitfalls: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-architecture-patterns/0642572221119/
Listen to Neal and Mark discuss the various intersections of software architecture on an episode of the Technology Podcast from 2025: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/exploring-intersections-software-architecture
The 'age of intent' is a phrase that's been around for a number of years. However, with the rise of AI agents in 2025 it has the potential to become a key trend for 2026. It describes a new way of thinking about digital interaction in which the gap between human intention and output are reduced even further through AI assistance.
Thoughtworks' APAC CTO Sarah Taraporewalla has been exploring the age of intent in recent months; she's written a series of blog posts that tackle what this new phase of digital interaction means for businesses and how they can prepare themselves.
On the latest episode of the Technology Podcast, Sarah joins host Lilly Ryan to discuss the concept the age of intent and its implications for the future of digital experiences.
Read Sara Taraporewalla's series on the age of intent:
The interface is dead. Time for the age of intent: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/the-interface-is-dead-time-for-the-age-of-intent
From prototype to transformation: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/the-age-of-intent-from-prototype-to-transformation
What it takes to become an intent-ready organization: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/the-age-of-intent-from-prototype-to-transformation
Rethinking value in the AI economy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/the-age-of-intent-rethinking-value-in-AI-economy
This year's DORA report focuses on AI-assisted software development. While one of the key themes is just how ubiquitous AI is today in software engineering, that's only part of the picture. In fact, the report outlines many of the challenges the adoption of these technologies are posing and explores the barriers and obstacles that need to be addressed to ensure AI-assistance leads to long-term success.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Chris Westerhold — Global Practice Director for Engineering Excellence at Thoughtworks — to discuss this year's DORA report (for which Thoughtworks is a Platinum sponsor). They dive into some of the reports findings, and explore the risks of increasing throughput, the changing demands on software developers, the importance of developer experience and how organizations can go about successfully measuring AI impact.
You can find the 2025 DORA report here: https://cloud.google.com/resources/content/2025-dora-ai-assisted-software-development-report
Read Chris Westerhold's article on this year's findings: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/the-dora-report-2025--a-thoughtworks-perspective
Vibe coding was, remarkably, named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary at the start of November 2025 — pretty good going for a term that was only coined in February. We first discussed it on the Technology Podcast back in April, and, given its prominence in the collective lexicon this year, thought we should revisit and reflect on the topic as 2025 draws to a close.
Lots has happened in the intervening months: MCP adoption, the evolution of agentic coding tools and practices like context engineering have had a significant impact on the way the world is thinking about and using AI.
To talk about it all and reflect on the implications, Thoughtworkers and regular podcast hosts Prem Chandrasekaran, Lilly Ryan and Neal Ford reconvened for a follow up to our April conversation. Taking in everything from the term's semantic slipperiness, its security risks and the challenges of maintaining AI-generated code, this is a discussion that, despite going deep into vibe coding, also touches on a huge range of issues in the technology industry today.
Before we enter 2026, looking back on the good, the bad and the ugly of the last 12 months of experimentation is essential if we're to build better software for the world in the future. This episode aims to be a guide through that process.
Listen to our April episode on vibe coding: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/vibe-coding
Read Ken Mugrage's blog post exploring the shift from vibe coding to context engineering in 2025: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/vibe-coding-context-engineering-2025-software-development
One of the biggest stories in software engineering in 2025 is the impact of generative AI on the software development lifecycle. From advances in coding assistance to the emergence of so-called agentic coding, there's undoubtedly a lot for software developers to process, learn and experiment with — not to mention rapid change to contend with.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Brandon Cook to discuss not only how AI has been shaping the way software developers work but how developers can play an active role in ensuring the technology is leveraged safely and successfully. Taking in everything from sensible defaults and best practices to evaluating how much autonomy you should give up to an agent in any given problem, this episode offers both a snapshot of where we are today and the role we all have to play in deciding what the future will look like.
Explore the Thoughtworks Technology Radar: thoughtworks.com/radar
Listen to Brandon's last appearance on the Technology Podcast from July 2024: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/sensible-defaults-way-think-technology-practices
In every Thoughtworks Technology Radar we feature three to five themes that represent the core issues and topics that emerged from the conversations we had when putting the publication together. This time (Fall 2025) they're all united by AI. They are: infrastructure automation arriving for AI, the rise of agents elevated by MCP, AI coding workflows and emerging AI antipatterns.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Bryan Oliver joins Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to discuss all four of volume 33's themes. They dive into what they mean, how the team arrived at them and what they tell us about the state of software engineering and AI in 2025.
Read the latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar: thoughtworks.com/radar
Volume 33 will be published November 5, 2025.
Everyone knows an AI strategy is important — but how do you build one with humans at the center? That's a question Tiankai Feng, Thoughtworks Global Director for Data and AI Strategy, has been pondering ever since the publication of his 2024 book Humanizing Data Strategy. Now, just over a year later, he's outlined his thinking in a follow-up, Humanizing AI Strategy. With the subtitle "leading AI with sense and soul," it's a practical and thoughtful guide aimed at helping the industry rethink the way AI is embedded and leveraged across organizations.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Tiankai joins host Prem Chandrasekaran to discuss his new book. He explains why he wrote it, how it compares to his first book and discusses the framework it puts forward. Listen for a fresh perspective on AI in business and some practical strategies for leaders to bring purpose and conscience to AI initiatives.
Learn more about Humanizing AI Strategy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/humanizing-ai-strategy
Read a Q&A with Tiankai: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/data-strategy/how-put-human-center-ai
Everyone seems to be talking about context engineering. That was certainly the case in our recent discussions for the upcoming edition of the Technology Radar (volume 33, due early November 2025). And although we ran into the term on the Technology Podcast just a few weeks ago, we thought it would be useful to try and tackle exactly what people are talking about when they talk about context engineering. We know context is important when it comes to AI, but what does it mean to engineer it?
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host and Thoughtworks CTO Rachel Laycock is joined by Thoughtworkers Alessio Ferri (Lead Software Engineer) and Bharani Subramaniam (CTO for India and the Middle East) to discuss what context engineering is, how it's being done and what it tells us about the evolution of AI. This certainly won't be the last word — ours or anyone else's — on context engineering, but it might help clarify and cement your understanding as the term comes to dominate technology conversations.
Although the concept of the 'citizen developer' isn't new, with the rise of AI the relationship between those building software without much technical experience and seasoned software developers is becoming more significant. That's not to say there's conflict exactly, but there are often competing interests and demands — which can lead to tension, organizational friction and governance challenges.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage facilitates a debate (of sorts) between Christopher Hastings, Global Tech Product Lead at Thoughtworks (and citizen developer) and Scott Davies, Head of Technology for Thoughtworks Europe (very much in the developer camp). They discuss the needs and interests of both sides, how to avoid regressing to the dark ages of shadow IT and how citizen developers can be properly empowered by engineering teams.
Managing technological change in an organization — particularly a large and complex one — has always been challenging. But thanks to the rapid adoption of AI in all kinds of spheres, from knowledge management to software development to content creation, it's becoming more difficult than ever. How do you strike a balance between governance and safety and autonomy and empowerment? How should teams be structured and how should they work together?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais — authors of the influential Team Topologies book — join hosts Birgitta Böckeler and Ken Mugrage to discuss what AI means for organizational design. They discuss how AI is changing team capabilities, what it means for cognitive load and knowledge sharing and how to ensure there's structure and control without constraining experimentation and creativity.
With the second edition of Team Topologies set to be published in September 2025, Matthew and Manuel used the conversation to explore the evolution of their ideas and what they've learned from working with and listening to the stories of many different organizations around the world.
Learn more about Team Topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/
Generative AI can be incredibly powerful when it comes to legacy modernization. Not only can it help us better understand a large, aging codebase, it can even help us reverse engineer a legacy system when we don't have access to the complete source code. Doing it, though, requires a specific approach that's being described as 'context engineering'.
This is something we've been exploring a lot in recent months at Thoughtworks. On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks' lead for AI-enabled software engineering, Birgitta Böckeler, and tech principal Chandirasekar Thiagarajan join hosts Ken Mugrage and Neal Ford to discuss how it works.
They explain the process, the tools and what the work is teaching them about both generative AI and legacy modernization.
Read Birgitta's blog post on reverse engineering with AI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/blackbox-reverse-engineering-ai-rebuild-application-without-accessing-code
How should businesses go about actually navigating AI? It's one thing to strategize and generate new ideas, but what needs to be done to put it into practice in a way that's effective and commercially impactful?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, new host Nigel Dalton is joined by his Thoughtworks colleague May Xu — Head of Tech for Thoughtworks APAC — and Simon Noonan, CTO at Australian business software company MYOB.
Thoughtworks has been working closely with MYOB for a number of years now; May and Simon explain how they collaborate and offer their perspectives on everything from leadership to architecture in a world where AI has become imperative.
Learn more about Thoughtworks' partnership with MYOB: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/myob
In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we could just be shipping code? Of course we do; particularly if we want to communicate and share software with other humans.
To discuss documentation in 2025, Technology Podcast host Lilly Ryan is joined by Heidi Waterhouse, a very special guest with an esteemed and varied career in technical communcation.
In this episode, Lilly and Heidi tackle the challenges of documentation in a world increasingly infused with AI-generated code and text, explore whether prompt engineering is really just technical writing in disguise and examine the difficulties of writing for highly specific audiences.
They also cover Heidi's Progressive Delivery, an upcoming book aboutbridging the gap between software delivery and business value. It's due to be released in the latter part of 2025 and written alongside James Governor, Kim Harrison and Adam Zimman.
Find out more about Heidi Waterhouse by visiting her website: https://heidiwaterhouse.com/
Learn more about Progressive Delivery: https://itrevolution.com/product/progressive-delivery/
The technology industry has embraced specialisms — not just in different fields or job roles, like web development or security, but even in terms of particular platforms or stacks. But are we losing something as every tech professional is forced to push themselves into increasingly smaller niches?
Martin Fowler and Unmesh Joshi think so. They've been thinking a lot about the importance of what they call "Expert Generalists" — professionals who "can dissect unfamiliar challenges, spot first-principles patterns and make confident design decisions with the assurance of a specialist."
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Martin and Unmesh join hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Lilly Ryan to discuss how they came to identify the importance of expert generalists and why it was important to not just talk about the issue, but to explicitly name it. They also explore how they believe the industry can cultivate and encourage expert generalists, despite an entrenched tendency to overlook their value.
Read Martin and Unmesh's article, written with Gitanjali Venkatraman: https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist
Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" — flawed assumptions that often get made when teams move from monolithic to distributed software architectures. In recent years, software architecture experts and regular writing partners Neal Ford and Mark Richards have identified a further three new fallacies of distributed computing: versioning is easy; compensating updates always work; and observability is optional.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal and Mark join host Prem Chandrasekaran to talk through these three new fallacies, before digging deeper into other important issues in software architecture, including modular monoliths and governing architectural characteristics. Listen for a fresh perspective on software architecture and to explore key ideas shaping the discipline in 2025.
Learn more about the second edition of Neal and Mark's Fundamentals of Software Architecture: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098175504/
What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools?
In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a powerful new way to give AI agents deeper awareness of the tools, information and history they need to work effectively in the operations space. Unlike traditional APIs that just trigger functions, MCP adds a semantic layer of context that helps AI understand what to do, why it matters and how to do it better.
Whether you’re deep in site reliability engineering (SRE) or just curious about the next leap in AIOps, this episode unpacks how MCP could be the missing layer between today’s tools and tomorrow’s autonomous systems. If you want to find out more, check out this piece by Zichuan at al, https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/mcp-critical-ai-driven-sre
Google I/O 2025 took place in May. It's always a great opportunity to find out how Google is trying to shape the industry agenda, but this year the predominance of Gemini meant the event was a chance to get a better look at how Google will play its hand in the AI market in the months to come.
To dissect the headlines from this year's Google I/O and explore what we can learn about Google's strategic focus — and how the company is thinking about AI — host Ken Mugrage is joined by Andy Yates on the Technology Podcast. As Head of Ecosystems Development at Thoughtworks, Andy plays an important role in helping the organization and its clients undertstand, analyze and engage with the major platforms and vendors.
This edition of Google I/O, he explains, was significant and particularly useful for helping us understand how the world is going to be consuming AI products and services as the technology becomes more and more embedded in the mainstream.
Read more of Andy's perspective on Google I/O 2025 on the Thoughtworks blog: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/technology-strategy/google-io-2025-key-takeaways
Mainframe modernization is hard: there's a huge amount of complexity that needs to be understood before it can be effectively addressed. Generative AI, however, can be a particularly powerful tool for understanding mainframe legacy codebases, something we've been exploring with Mechanical Orchard while working together on its Imogen modernization platform.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Alexey Boas are joined by Thoughtworks CTO Rachel Laycock and Mechanical Orchard CEO and Founder Rob Mee to discuss the partnership between the two organizations. They discuss how the collaboration began, the challenges of leveraging generative AI tools for such risky projects and what the wider implications are for AI in software engineering. Listen for a fresh perspective on both legacy modernization and generative AI.
Learn more about Thoughtworks' partnership with Mechanical Orchard: https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/partnerships/technology/mechanical-orchard Read more about our work on mainframe modernization: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/rewriting-the-outcomes--how-thoughtworks-and-mechanical-orchard-
You might think you know software engineering, but what are the really fundamental elements? What are the concepts, ideas and practices that are completely essential? What makes software engineering what it is?
Thoughtworker Nate Schutta and Dan Vega are attempting to address those questions in their upcoming book with O'Reilly, The Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Covering topics ranging from reading code through to the importance of learning to learn, it promises to offer a fresh insight into the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful software engineer.
In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, Nate and Dan join hosts Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to discuss the book and to dive into what really are the fundamental elements of software engineering. Listen for a fresh perspective on the discipline and a deep dive that shows it's about far more than just writing code.
Learn more about The Fundamentals of Software Engineering: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098143220/
Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.32 was published at the start of April 2025. Featuring 105 blips, it offered a timely snapshot of what's interesting and important in the industry. Through the process of putting it together, we also identify a collection of key themes that speak to the things that shaped our conversations.
This time, there were four: supervised agents in coding assistants, evolving observability, the R in RAG and taming the data frontier. We think they point to some of the key challenges and issues that industry as a whole is currently grappling with.
To dig deeper and explore what they tell us about software in 2025, regular host Neal Ford takes the guest seat alongside Birgitta Böckeler to talk to Lilly Ryan and Prem Chandrasekaran. They explain how the themes are identified and discuss their wider implications.
Read the latest volume of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
The term 'vibe coding' — which first appeared in a post on X by Andrej Karpathy in early February 2025 — has set the software development world abuzz: everyone seems to have their own take on what it is, how it's done and whether it's a bold new chapter in the history of programming or an insult to anyone that's ever written a line of code.
Clearly, then, we need to talk about vibe coding — and that's precisely what we do on this episode of the Technology Podcast. Featuring Thoughtworkers Birgitta Böckeler (AI for Software Delivery Lead) and Lilly Ryan (Cybersecurity Principal), who join hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran, we dive into the different understandings and applications of the concept, and discuss what happens when a meme collides with reality.
Nearly ten years after the first edition of Infrastructure as Code was published by O'Reilly, Kief Morris is publishing a third edition of the book. But why a new edition now? What's changed in technology and business over the last decade?
Quite a lot, as it happens. To talk about what's new — both in the infrastructure world and in the book itself — Kief Morris joins host Ken Mugrage on the Technology Podcast. They discuss each edition and what's new in this one, and dive into the infrastructure challenges and issues that need to be tackled in 2025, from tooling and deployment to maintenance and infrastructure evolution.
Learn more about Infrastructure as Code, Third Edition: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-gb/insights/books/infrastructure-as-code-3rd-ed
AI is inherently dynamic: that's true in terms of the field itself, and at a much lower level too — models are trained on new data and algorithms adapt and change to new circumstances and information. That's part of its power and what makes it so exciting, but from a business and organizational perspective, that can make governance and measurement exceptionally difficult. How can we know that our AI is optimized for the right thing? How can we be sure it's oriented towards what we want it to be?
This is where the concept of fitness functions can help. Broadly speaking, fitness functions are ways of measuring the extent to which a given solution is fulfilling its goals — so, in the context of AI, they can help teams ensure that AI systems are serving their intended purpose.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford — authors (alongside Pat Kua and Pramod Sadalage) of Building Evolutionary Architectures, the book which brought fitness functions into the software architecture space — join host Ken Mugrage to explore how the fitness function concept can help us better manage the dynamism of AI and, in doing so, overcome the challenge of bringing such systems into production.
Learn more about Building Evolutionary Architectures: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/building-evolutionaryarchitectures-second-edition
How can we better define and clarify architectures to ensure consistency and control? If, as Neal Ford and Mark Richards discussed on a recent episode of the Technology Podcast, software architecture intersects with many different facets of software development and delivery, what can we do to better manage architectures in a way that is adaptable and dynamic?
Neal and Mark return to the guest seats to speak again to host Prem Chandrasekaran about fitness functions and architecture as code, and explain why rethinking our approach to software architecture can help ensure greater alignment with organizational needs and objectives.
The release of DeepSeek's AI models at the end of January 2025 sent shockwaves around the world. The weeks that followed have been rife with hype and rumor, ranging from suggestions that DeepSeek has completely upended the tech industry to claims the efficiency gains ostensibly unlocked by DeepSeek are exagerrated. So, what's the reality? And what does it all really mean for the tech industry?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two of Thoughtworks' AI leaders — Prasanna Pendse (Global Director of AI Strategy) and Shayan Mohanty (Head of AI Research) — join hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Ken Mugrage to provide a much-needed clear and sober perspective on DeepSeek. They dig into some of the technical details and discuss how the DeepSeek team was able to optimize the limited hardware at their disposal, and think through what the implications might be for the industry in the months to come.
Read Prasanna's take on DeepSeek on the Thoughtworks blog: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/demystifying-deepseek
Generative AI's popularity has led to a renewed interest in quality assurance — perhaps unsurprising given the inherent unpredictability of the technology. This is why, over the last year, the field has seen a number of techniques and approaches emerge, including evals, benchmarking and guardrails. While these terms all refer to different things, grouped together they all aim to improve the reliability and accuracy of generative AI.
To discuss these techniques and the renewed enthusiasm for testing across the industry, host Lilly Ryan is joined by Shayan Mohanty, Head of AI Research at Thoughtworks, and John Singleton, Program Manager for Thoughtworks' AI Lab. They discuss the differences between evals, benchmarking and testing and explore both what they mean for businesses venturing into generative AI and how they can be implemented effectively.
Learn more about evals, benchmarks and testing in this blog post by Shayan and John (written with Parag Mahajani): https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/LLM-benchmarks,-evals,-and-tests
Software architecture necessarily intersects with a diverse range of critical things, including implementation, infrastructure, data and engineering practices. All these elements require serious consideration and reflection if you're to architect effectively.
To discuss these various intersections, Thoughtworks' Neal Ford and his long-time collaborator Mark Richards join host Prem Chandrasekaran on the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast. They dive into why these intersections matter, what they mean for software architects and how individuals and teams can go about addressing them.
Who should be involved in the process of making decisions about software architecture? That's a question that's been puzzling Thoughtworker Andrew Harmel-Law for some time — so much so that he decided to write a book about it. The result is Facilitating Software Architecture. Published by O'Reilly in December 2024, it's both an argument for and a guide to involving more people in the architecture decision process.
To discuss the topic and the book, Andrew joined hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran on the Technology Podcast. They explore why including more roles in software architecture matters today, some of the common objections to and risks of such an approach, alongside techniques and practices that can make doing it in fast-paced and dynamic organizations easier.
"It's quite magical when you see this blossoming of understanding of what it is that architects do... It's not less architecture, it's more. It's just happening in a broader sphere." — Andrew Harmel-Law
You can find Andrew's book on the O'Reilly website: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/facilitating-software-architecture/9781098151850/
With the rise of generative AI, the concept of the uncanny valley — where human resemblance unsettles, disturbs or disgusts — is more relevant than ever. But is it a problem that technologists need to tackle? Or does it offer an opportunity for greater thoughtfulness about the ways generative AI is being built, deployed and used?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Lilly Ryan is joined by Srinivasan Raguraman to discuss generative AI's uncanny valley and explore how it might offer a model for thinking through our expectations about generative AI outputs and effects. Taking in everything from the experiences of end users to the mental models engineers bring to AI development, listen for a wide-ranging dive into the implications of the uncanny valley in our experience of generative AI today.
Read Srinivasan's recent article (written with Ken Mugrage): https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/24/1106110/reckoning-with-generative-ais-uncanny-valley/
Legacy modernization is an enduring challenge — and as systems become more complex, the difficulty of understanding and modelling a system so it can be modernized only becomes more difficult. However, at Thoughtworks we've seen some recent success bringing generative AI into the legacy modernization process.
To discuss what this means in practice and the benefits it can deliver, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Thoughtworks colleagues Shodhan Sheth and Tom Coggrave. Shodhan and Tom have been working together in this space in recent months and, in this episode of the Technology Podcast, offer their insights into finding success with this novel combination. They explain how it can be implemented, the challenges and experiments they did on their way to positive results and what it means for how teams and organizations think about modernization in the future.
Read Shodhan and Tom's article on legacy modernization and generative AI (written with Alessio Ferri): https://martinfowler.com/articles/legacy-modernization-gen-ai.html
Data contracts are a bit like APIs for data — they make it possible to interface with data in a way that ensures the transfer of data from one place to another is stable and reliable. This is particularly important for building more reliable data-driven applications.
To discuss data contracts, host Lilly Ryan is joined on the Technology Podcast by Andrew Jones, the creator of the data contract concept (in 2021) and author of Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts (2023), and Thoughtworker Ryan Collingwood who is currently writing their own book on data contracts due to be published in 2025. Andrew and Ryan offer their perspectives on the topic, explaining the origins and motivation for the idea and outlining how they can be used in practice.
You can find Andrew’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Driving-Data-Quality-Contracts-comprehensive/dp/1837635005
What does it mean to be a technology leader today? What kind of challenges must you address? What questions do you need to answer? To explore all that — and dive into what it looks like from a Thoughtworks perspective — host Ken Mugrage spoke to Thomas Squeo, the CTO for Thoughtworks in the Americas.
They discuss everything from keeping track of emerging technologies and wider industry shifts, to product thinking, AI and career development. Listen to get to know a Thoughtworks leader and discover fresh perspectives on some of the big questions and debates all of us in tech keep finding ourselves returning to.
Find Thomas on X: @squeot
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomassqueo/
Volume 31 of the Technology Radar will be released on October 23, 2024. As always, it will feature 100+ technologies and techniques that we've been using with clients around the world. Alongside them will be a set of key themes that emerged during the process of putting it together. We think they offer another way into the Radar and give a unique insight on some of the most interesting issues impacting the software industry.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast we discuss them: coding assistance antipatterns, Rust being anything but rusty, the rise of WebAssembly and what we describe as the "cambrian explosion of generative AI tools." To do so, Alexey Boas is joined by guests and podcast regulars Ken Mugrage and Neal Ford. Ken and Neal provide an insight into the conversations that happened during the process, and offer their perspective on the implications of these themes for the wider tech industry.
The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is, first and foremost, a publication. It's a document that anyone in the tech industry can read twice a year to learn about our experiences and perspectives on technology. However, it's also more than that: it's built on top of a process of deliberation, discussion and curation. We think that's particularly important — it's something we encourage technology teams and organizations to do and which we support with our Build Your Own Radar tool.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage join Prem Chandrasekaran to discuss Build Your Own Radar. They outline why the Radar process is just as important as the artifact that gets created at the end, and explain how organizations can use it to facilitate conversations about how and what technology they use and want to use in the future.
Learn more about Build Your Own Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/byor
There are no shortage of options when it comes to relational databases. While the likes of PostgreSQL have proven enduring, even as the market has evolved, for data scientists and data engineers that need to manage and query particularly complex or large data sets, the most popular databases aren't always right for the job. Thankfully, this is where projects like DuckDB can help. Built for what's called 'vectorized query execution', it's well-suited to the demands of online analytical processing (OLAP).
To get a deeper understanding of DuckDB and how the product has developed, on this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Lilly Ryan are joined by Thoughtworker Ned Letcher and Thoughtworks alumnus Simon Aubury. Ned and Simon explain the thinking behind DuckDB, the design decisions made by the project and how its being used by data practitioners in the wild.
Learn more about DuckDB: https://duckdb.org/why_duckdb.html
Explore Ned and Simon's book Getting Started with DuckDB: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-DuckDB-practical-efficiently/dp/1803241004
It's widely accepted that, in most cases at least, software systems should be modular, consisting of separate, discrete services. But what about the size of those services? How big or small should they be? This is where the question of service granularity comes in: too small and your system will become needlessly complicated; too big and you lose all the benefits of modularity we were seeking in the first place.
In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Neal Ford and Mark Richards — authors of multiple books on software architecture — to discuss service granularity. They explain why it matters and how software architects can go about getting it right, through the lens of granularity integrators and disintegrators.
Learn more about Neal and Mark's 2021 book Software Architecture: The Hard Parts (co-authored with Zhamak Dehghaniand Pramod Sadalage): https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/software-architecture-hard-parts
Find out more about Neal and Mark's second edition of The Fundamentals of Software Architecture, set to be released in early 2025: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098175504/
Trying to measure developer effectiveness or productivity isn't a new problem. However, with the rise of fields like platform engineering and a new wave of potential opportunities from generative AI, the issue has come into greater focus in recent years.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Prem Chandrasekaran speak to Abi Noda, CEO of software engineering intelligence platform DX, about measuring developer experience using the DevEx Framework — which Abi developed alongside Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey and Michaela Greiler.
Taking in everything from the origins of the DevEx framework in SPACE metrics, to how technologists can better 'sell' the importance of developer experience to business stakeholders, listen for a fresh perspective on a topic that's likely to remain at the top of the industry's agenda for the forseeable future.
Read the DevEx Framework paper: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878
Read Abi's article (co-authored with Tim Cochran) on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/measuring-developer-productivity-humans.html
Artificial intelligence has been presented as a technology with the potential to transform many different fields and professions. One of the most notable is design — but if we want to design in a way that is truly human-centric and inclusive, to what extent can artificial intelligence really help us do better work?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Rebecca Parsons and Lilly Ryan speak to Thoughtworks design leaders Kate Linton and Esther Tham to get their perspective on how AI might be able to support designers. They discuss what AI tools could help the design process, how these tools could fit neatly into current practices, and what the emergence of this technology could mean for design practices more broadly.
If you work in technology, you're constantly making decisions: not just what you should do, but also how you should do it. That's why we developed the concept of "sensible defaults" — practices and technology decisions that we generally see — in most scenarios — as the right way to do things.
Although we've been talking about sensible defaults internally for a few years now, we recently decided to share them publicly on our website. We did so because we believe it can help organizations think through their own approach to technology decision-making, something which is becoming increasingly challenging in a rapidly changing and complex world.
So, to discuss sensible defaults and explain precisely why we want to share them with the world, hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage are joined by Brandon Cook and Kief Morris, two Thoughtworkers that played an important role in putting our sensible defaults together. They discuss the origins of the sensible default idea, some examples, as well as the challenges of putting them into practice.
Explore Thoughtworks' sensible defaults: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/topic/sensible-defaults
Understanding your technology estate and how it's being leveraged is critical for organizations; it impacts everything from financial planning to capability development. But given the rapid pace of change — even inside a single organization, let alone the wider industry — how can this be done effectively? One approach we've landed on at Thoughtworks is something called a Tech Dash: it's a method of internal research that surfaces information about an organization's technology use, and even software developers' experience of it.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Camilla Crispim and Renan Martins talk to hosts Alexey Boas and Ken Mugrage about the value of a Tech Dash and explain how it can help track technology use across an organization. They also discuss where the idea came from and how they put it into practice across Thoughtworks Brazil.
Bahmni started life as an open-source hospital information management system and electronic medical record for a single hospital in rural India. Today, it has more than 500 implementations in 50 countries across Africa and Asia, and is recognized as one of only 165 digital public goods by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
Thoughtworks played a key part in bringing Bahmni into the world back in 2012. And although today it’s run and supported by a coalition of organizations, Thoughtworks continues to have a leading role in the project as a member of its Governing Committee.
To tell Bahmni’s unique story, Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage speak with Satish Viswanathan and Angshuman Sarkar, two Thoughtworkers actively participating and contributing to the project. They discuss Bahmni’s origins and how it grew from a small, local tool to become a vital component in healthcare infrastructure in parts of the world that have long faced resource challenges.
Learn more about Bahmni: https://www.bahmni.org/
One of the fundamentals of security is self-awareness: knowing where you may be vulnerable, the practices and processes that aren't yet quite in place and what actions you need to prioritize are essential if your organization is to excel at security. But how can that be done? In complex and distributed teams, surfacing such knowledge can be incredibly difficult. One solution, though, is something called a security maturity model.
In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, three Thoughtworkers — Diana Adorno, Lisa Junger and Robin Doherty — speak to host Alexey Boas about a security maturity model they've developed that was recognized by the prestigious CSO50 Awards. They explain the purpose of developing and using one, how theirs works and why it should matter to any organization that wants to get serious about the way it does security.
Despite occasional confusion, the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is simple: should deploying to production be on demand or every good build? Answering which approach is 'best' is difficult; any attempt at dogmatism is likely to just look foolish, given it is, like many other debates in software development, context-dependent. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and unpick the issues at the heart of the discussion. It's all well and good saying the debate is context-dependent, but what does that actually mean in practice?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ken Mugrage and Valentina Servile debate the merits of both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Talking with hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Birgitta Böckeler, they offer their perspectives on when and where both should be used — in making the case for their chosen approaches, they shed some much needed light on a discussion that every software engineering teams should have.
Learn more about Valentina Servile's book Continuous Deployment: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/continuous-deployment
Volume 30 of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar was published in April 2024. Alongside 105 blips, the edition also featured four themes selected by the team of technologists that puts the Radar together. They were: open-ish source licenses, AI-assisted software development teams, emerging architecture patterns for LLMs and dragging pull requests closer to continuous integration. Each one cuts across the technologies and techniques included on the Radar and highlights a key issue or challenge for software developers — and other technologists — working today.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler and Erik Dörnenberg join Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to discuss the themes for Technology Radar Vol.30. They explain what they mean, why they were picked and what their implications are for the wider industry.
Explore volume 30 of the Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
Bringing machine learning models into production is challenging. This is why, as demand for machine learning capabilities in products and services increases, new kinds of teams and new ways of working are emerging to bridge the gap between data science and software engineering. Effective Machine Learning Teams — written by Thoughtworkers David Tan, Ada Leung and Dave Colls — was written to help practitioners get to grips with these challenges and master everything needed to deliver exceptional machine learning-backed products.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, the authors join Scott Shaw and Ken Mugrage to discuss their book. They explain how it addresses current issues in this space, taking in everything from the technical challenges of testing and deployment to the cultural work of building teams that span different disciplines and areas of expertise.
Learn more about Effective Machine Learning Teams: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/effective-machine-learning-teams
Read a Q&A with the authors: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/machine-learning-and-ai/author-q-and-a-effective-machine-learning-teams
Can AI improve the quality of our code? A recent white paper published by code analysis company CodeScene — "Refactoring vs. Refuctoring: Advancing the state of AI-automated code improvements" — highlighted some significant challenges: in tests, AI solutions only delivered functionally correct refactorings 37% of the time. However, there are nevertheless opportunities. The white paper suggests it might be possible to dramatically boost the success rate of AI refactoring to 90%.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Adam Tornhill, CTO and Founder of CodeScene, joins Thoughtworks' Rebecca Parsons (CTO Emerita), Birgitta Böckeler (Global Lead for AI-assisted software delivery) and Martin Fowler (Chief Scientist and author of the influential Refactoring book) to discuss all things AI and code. From refactoring and code quality to the benefits and limitations of coding assistants, this is an essential conversation for anyone that wants to understand how AI is going to shape the way we build software.
Read CodeScene's Refactoring vs. Refuctoring white paper, which explores AI's role in improving code: https://codescene.com/hubfs/whitepapers/Refactoring-vs-Refuctoring-Advancing-the-state-of-AI-automated-code-improvements.pdf
Read CodeScene's Code Red white paper to learn how code quality impacts time-to-market and product experience: https://codescene.com/hubfs/web_docs/Business-impact-of-code-quality.pdf
CodeScene's new automated refactoring tool is now in beta. Learn more: https://codescene.com/campaigns/ai
Listen to our podcast discussion about AI-assisted coding from November 2023: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/technology-podcasts/ai-assisted-coding-experiences-perspectives
If you've ever wondered how to measure your cloud carbon footprint, you can — thanks to a tool that's called, somewhat unsurprisingly, Cloud Carbon Footprint. Launched in March 2021 by Thoughtworks as an open-source project, it allows users to to monitor and measure carbon emissions and energy use from cloud services.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, senior software engineers Cameron Casher and Arik Smith join Alexey Boas and Ken Mugrage to talk about Cloud Carbon Footprint in depth. They explain why CCF is different from the measurement tools offered by established cloud vendors, how it actually works and how you can get started with it yourself.
CCF on GitHub: https://github.com/cloud-carbon-footprint
Learn more: https://www.cloudcarbonfootprint.org/
Looking Glass isn't like most other technology trend reports. It doesn't just tell you what deserves your attention, it's designed to help you use it to focus on what really matters to you. Published once a year, Thoughtworks intends it to be a tool that helps readers make sense of the emerging technologies that are going to shape the industry in the months and years to come.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, lead Looking Glass contributors Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage trade hosting duties for the guest seats, as they talk to Neal Ford about the most recent edition of the Looking Glass (published in January 2024). They explain what the Looking Glass is and outline some of the key 'lenses' that act as a framework readers can use to monitor and evaluate what's on the horizon.
Covering everything from AI to augmented reality, this conversation offers a new perspective on emerging technology to help prepare you for 2024.
Explore Looking Glass 2024: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/looking-glass
A few years ago, Thoughtworker and (prolific) author Neal Ford published Fundamentals of Software Architecture with Mark Richards. They're now back with another book on software architecture — written with co-author Raju Gandhi — which offers readers a very different learning experience. Described as a combination of technical book and graphic novel, Head First Software Architecture dispenses with dense prose to present and explain software architecture concepts and ideas in some highly innovative and novel ways.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, the authors — alongside their editor, Sarah Grey — join Rebecca Parsons to discuss their new book. They explain the thinking behind the approach, how it diverges from Fundamentals of Software Architecture and detail some of the challenges of writing in a new format.
Whether you're interested in getting started with software architecture or simply curious about technical communication and learning, listen to find out more.
Learn more about Head First Software Architecture: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/head-first-software/9781098134341/
Distributed systems are ubiquitous yet complex. They can be particularly demanding for software developers and architects tasked with dealing with the sometimes unpredictable nature of the interactions between their various parts.
That's why Thoughtworker Unmesh Joshi wrote Patterns of Distributed Systems. Published at the end of 2023, the book explores a number of patterns that characterize distributed systems, and uses them to not only help readers better understand how such systems work but also to solve problems and challenges that often arise.
On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Unmesh joins hosts Scott Shaw and Rebecca Parsons to talk about his book, explaining where the idea came from, how he put it together and why it's important to get beneath neat abstractions to really get to grips with the inner workings of distributed systems.
Learn more about Patterns of Distributed Systems: https://www.pearson.com/subject-catalog/p/patterns-of-distributed-systems/P200000011305/9780138221980
A few decades ago, it would have probably seemed strange to put software and automobility together. However, today software is embedded in all kinds of modern vehicles, enabling capabilities in everything from driving to passenger entertainment. But what exactly does this all mean for the automotive industry? And what demands does it place on design and manufacturing processes?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two Thoughtworks experts on software-defined vehicles — Michael Fait and Sriram J. — speak to Ashok Subramanian and Ken Mugrage about how the automotive industry has been changed by software. They cover everything from the implications software has for the way we think about design, manufacturing and regulation across the industry to the skills and practices developers need to work in this exciting space.
Is it really possible to measure the impact engineering teams have on a business' success? At a time when growth is challenging for many organizations and questions about productivity and effectiveness dominate industry conversations, getting it right is crucial. And although the DORA metrics are today well-established and extremely useful is it really enough? Do they actually help us tie the work we do to tangible business results?
In attempting to answer these questions, a group of Thoughtworkers have developed what they call EEBO metrics. These are designed to measure engineering excellence to business outcomes.
To discuss EEBO metrics, hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Scott Shaw (CTO, Thoughtworks APAC) are joined by Dinker Charak (Principal Product Strategist) and Sachin Dharmapurikar (Global Product Manager). Charak and Dharmapurikar helped to develop EEBO metrics; they believe it can be a valuable tool in aligning often complex engineering projects and activities with high-level business goals and objectives. Listen as they explain what EEBO metrics are (and aren't) and how businesses should think about using them.
Thanks to the pandemic, asynchronous working is, today, fairly common. However, it's often easily confused with simply working remotely — and while there are certainly neat synergies between the two, asynchronous working isn't just a description of your working arrangement: it's a set of intentional practices and artifacts that allow people to work together without having to physically be together.
On this episode of ther Technology Podcast, Thoughtworkers Sumeet Gayathri Moghe — author of The Async-First Playbook — and Maya Ormaza join hosts Neal Ford and Ken Mugrage to offer their perspectives on asynchronous working. Taking in everything from the value of written communication, work that demands synchronicity and the importance of leadership to async working, listen to gain a fresh perspective on the way we work together in 2024.
Learn more about Sumeet's Async-First Playbook: https://www.asyncagile.org/the-book
Read Sumeet's guide to writing for async workers: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-writing
A guide to reading for asynchronous workers: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-reading
A guide to audio and visual content when working asynchronously: https://www.asyncagile.org/blog/the-async-workers-guide-to-reading
With each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, we identify a number of key themes that we see as significant in the industry. In the most recent edition — volume 29, published in September — we picked out AI-assisted software development, the challenges of measuring productivity, the rapid growth of LLMs and remote delivery workarounds beginning to mature in a post-pandemic world.
For this, the final Technology Podcast episode of 2023, a few members of the team involved in putting the Technology Radar together — Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Scott Shaw and Erik Doernenberg — got together to discuss these themes in more detail and offer their perspectives. As we leave the year behind, it's a great way to review some of the key issues and stories that shaped the way the world builds software.
Generative AI has, unsurprisingly, been a major topic of conversation within Thoughtworks in 2023. However, as enjoyable as it is to get sucked into discussions about the reality, the risks and the benefits of this new technology, what's really interesting — and most important — is understanding how organizations can actually leverage generative AI in a way that's both safe and effective.
For this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler spoke to Andreas Nauerz, CTO and Executive Vice President of Bosch Digital, who explained how he and his team have been thinking about generative AI and exploring the ways it can be leveraged across a huge multinational organization. He discusses where generative AI has already been effective, managing risk and the challenges of bring a large organization with you as you seek to implement something new.
It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems and tools for civil society initiatives, such as a chatbot that helps Indian citizens find information about government programs and schemes in their native language. Earlier this year, Jugalbandi caught the attention of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who saw it as evidence of AI's power to drive transformative change to every single part of the world.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Jugalbandi team members Vinod Sankaranarayanan and Prathamesh Kalamkar offer an inside look at the project, talking in detail about the work they've done, some of the challenges they've faced and how they're looking to expand and increase its impact in the months and years to come.
Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in software development.
In recent months, there's been a lot of talk in the industry around issues like whether AI might boost developer productivity and if it can be used for pair programming, but in this episode of the Technology Podcast we try to get beneath the hype to explore the reality of generative AI and software development — how is it actually being used today? What works? And what doesn't?
To dive deeper into all this, Chief of AI Mike Mason and Global Lead for AI-Assisted Software Delivery Birgitta Böckeler join hosts Prem Chandrasekaran and Neal Ford, discussing everything from the current tooling to the way GenAI is shaping developer practices and workflows.
Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool — especially one that thousands of other developers use and depend on?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss their work on AppiumTestDistribution, an open source tool that supports test automation framework Appium. AppiumTestDistribution won a LambdaTest Delta Award at the August 2023 Testμ Conference.
Listen to Sekar and Krishna explain how the project emerged, how they approach maintaining and evolving the tool and what it takes to be a part of an award-winning open source project.
The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling developers. But what does it mean to actually build and maintain a platform? How can you ensure it actually supports the people that need it?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Chris Ford of Thoughtworks Spain and Aidan Donnelly, Director of Technology Platform at Personio, to discuss the importance of engineering platforms in organizations today.
Read Aidan's writing on Medium: https://medium.com/@aidan.donnelly
Many of the scale-ups we’ve partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we’ve seen are unexpected and dramatic rises in costs. In this episode we talk to members of our Digital Scale-up Studio, to hear their experience of gaining better visibility, improving operational efficiency at scale-ups, while the business maintains growth and gains greater knowledge of customer requirements.
Podcast hosts: Rebecca Parsons, Premanand Chandrasekaran,
Podcast guests: Stefania Stefansdottir, Sofia Tania
The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the data space. But how do they work together exactly? And what challenges can it pose?
Bharani Subramaniam and Madhu Podila discuss these issues and much more with hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons on the latest episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast.
Radio astronomy — a subfield of astronomy that studies the sky using radio frequencies — is data-intensive. That poses a challenge for radio astronomers: building and then communicating scientific insights requires significant processing and analytical work. Thoughtworks has been working with Dr. Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in India to develop solutions to these challenges, including a data processing pipeline, a collaborative platform for analysis and a digital catalog for publishing and communicating research.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast Dr. Gupta joins Justin Jose of Thoughtworks India's Engineering for Research (E4R) team as they speak to hosts Rebecca Parsons and Prem Chandrasekaran about their work together. Dr. Gupta explains the benefits of Thoughtworks work from an astronomer perspective, while Justin highlights the challenges of building software solutions in a highly specialized domain.
XR is a potentially transformative technology, but it needs to be leveraged in a way that drives value. That isn't straightforward — given effective XR initiatives often require significant experimentation and exploration, simply aligning XR with strict organizational goals and aims will often make it harder to achieve success. How can technologists and product leaders get the balance right?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Vaibhav Tikekar and Shea Clark-Tieche join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage to discuss how to use XR effectively, talking through their experience working with clients in recent years and providing their perspectives on how experimentation and innovation can be brought in alignment with organizational goals and objectives.
Leadership is an important if often-overlooked quality in the technology industry. However, it is also a complex and multi-faceted thing: it isn't a discrete set of skills, but rather an ability to respond and adapt to the needs of a situation, team or individual.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ricardo Cavalcanti (Caval) and Arturo Santos from Thoughtworks Brazil join hosts Alexey Boas and Scott Shaw to discuss their experiences and leadership and offer their perspective on the value of building a repertoire of leadership styles.
Design leader and Thoughtworks alumnus Emma Carter recently published her second book, DesignedUp. In it, she explains how designers can win a seat at the leadership table inside technolology organizations and become effective evangelists and advocates for good design principles and practices.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Emma joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss her new book and talks through some of the challenges designers face in even the most forward-thinking technology companies. She highlights that design is, today, far more than just UI design — it can, and should, touch many parts of an organization, ensuring that products and services are properly aligned with the aims, goals and needs of users.
You can find Emma's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/DesignedUp-Emma-Carter/dp/1032202017/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Thoughtworks recently established a new role — Chief AI Officer. Taking up the position is Mike Mason, a veteran of Thoughtworks with over 20 years at the company, in technology roles spanning developer to technology strategist and author (and occasional Technology Podcast host). Mike will help guide Thoughtworks AI strategy and ensure that we're equipped to support clients trying to leverage AI.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike talks with hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran about his new role and explains why it's important that the company has someone leading on AI. He also discusses the hype, opportunities and risks of generative AI that — high on everyone's agenda at the moment — and explores how it might change knowledge work in general and software engineering more specifically. Listen as Mike talks through some of his own experiments with ChatGPT and offers his perspective on its likely impact on jobs in the months and years to come.
It seems obvious to say that mobile usage has grown dramatically over the last decade, but for businesses that have to move to accomodate this type of user behavior, it presents many challenges. While some have successfully gone all-in on mobile experiences, for others, trying to build effectively for multiple channels is as much an organizational challenge as it is a product one.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Birgitta Böckeler are joined by Head of Technology and Alexandra Lovin and Principal Mobile Consultant Andres Kievsky to discuss the current state of play in mobile development. They discuss the challenges of scaling mobile delivery, taking in everything from addressing privacy issues to application architecture.
A changing regulatory environment has made it more important than ever for organizations to embed privacy in their data infrastructure. Doing so, however, can be complicated — that means data scientists have an vital role to play in ensuring privacy is a key concern from both a technical and commercial perspective.
Thoughtworker and data scientist Katharine Jarmul is eager to help fellow data scientists master privacy principles and techniques. Her new book, Practical Data Privacy, covers everything from the fundamentals of governance and anonymization through to advanced approaches to data privacy like federated learning and encrypted computation.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Katharine joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss the book and explain why data scientists need to be on the frontline in the fight for privacy.
Find Practical Data Privacy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Data-Privacy-Enhancing-Security/dp/1098129466
When cloud first hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, its attraction was rooted, in part, in its apparent elegance and simplicity. As it has become an established norm in the industry, such simplicity has given way to more fragmentation and complexity. The growth of "multi-cloud" and adjacent terms such as "hybrid cloud" and "poly cloud" mean that cloud is a field that needs to be sensitively navigated by technology leaders and their organizations.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Neal Ford and Prem Chandrasekaran discuss multi-cloud with Thoughtworks colleagues Rashmi Tambe and Sunit Parekh, who co-lead the Enterprise Modernization, Platforms and Cloud service line. In the episode they discuss terminology, the challenges of migrating to multiple cloud platforms, governance issues and some common antipatterns. They also offer advice for teams considering exploring the potential of multi-cloud.
Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabled by a significant technology modernization project which, amazingly, was completed just weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic erupted in March 2020, the start of a period in which millions of people took to Etsy to purchase cloth face masks. Without the modernized systems and infrastructure, Etsy would have struggled to cope with consumer demand.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason is joined by Etsy's Chief Architect Keyur Govande, the company's former CTO Mike Fisher and Thoughtworks North America Technical Director Tim Cochran to discuss how Etsy tackled the challenge of scaling to meet the needs of its expanding market. They talk through the technical challenges and the organizational focus required to scale in a way that was sustainable for the business yet impactful for Etsy's users.
Read Tim Cochran's article about evolving Etsy's culture on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-product-delivery-culture.html
...And his piece on using the cloud to scale: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-cloud-scale.html
Learn more about Thoughtworks partnership with Etsy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/retail-ecommerce/etsy-scaling
When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most interesting innovations in machine learning right now is actually happening on a really small scale.
Thanks to TinyML, models can now be run on small devices at the edge of a network. This has significant implications for the future of many different fields, from automated vehicles to security and privacy.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Andy Nolan, Director of Emerging Technology at Thoughtworks Australia, and Matt Kelcey of Edge Impulse, to discuss what TinyML means for our understanding of machine learning as a discipline and how it could help drive innovation in the years to come.
We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverly deployed as a means of duping or manipulating us. However, trends like NFTs have brought this into clearer view. This is not to say it's a novel phenomenon — from dark patterns in UX design to pages and pages of end-user license agreements (EULAs), leveraging complexity for nefarious ends has long been an unsavory aspect of the technology industry.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Neal Ford are joined by Thoughtworks designer Kate Linton and Thoughtworks North America Head of Legal Jeremy Gordon to discuss what they describe as "the weaponization of complexity." Together they grapple with cynicism at the center of such activities and discuss some of the ways we can tackle it.
The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on the actual experiences of Thoughtworkers working with clients. With its first edition launched in January 2010, it is now a fixture of the Thoughtworks calendar, released twice a year in the spring and fall.
Although it has been around for more than a decade, we're well aware that people have lots of questions about it. One comes up more than others: how do you actually put it together? Giving a good, short answer is difficult — for those involved, it's a long process involving various stages of writing, debate and deliberation.
However, with the next edition of the Radar — volume 28 — just weeks away, we wanted to give the world an insight into how we put Technology Radar together. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Marisa Hoenig, Perla Villareal and Camilla Crispim join host Neal Ford to discuss the work that goes into producing it and what the experience is like.
Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery Hackathon, an initiative designed to bring together expertise in fields ranging from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, machine learning and virology to discover new drugs that could help thwart the pandemic.
One team that took part was from Thoughtworks India. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two of the members — Pooja Arora and Justin Jose — talk to Rebecca Parsons and Ashok Subramanian about a number of projects they worked on during the hackathon. Among other things, they explain how they used reinforcement learning to improve the efficacy of potential drugs in tackling what was, at the time, a virus that was only partially understood.
Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is today used in a diverse range of scenarios and architectures, it nevertheless remains a topic that causes considerable confusion and debate: where should we use it? How should we use it? Sometimes, what even is it, exactly?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by former Thoughtworker Mike Roberts — author of "the canonical book on serverless," Programming AWS Lambda —to discuss the current state of serverless. They examine the ways that serverless is understood today and explore the impacts and challenges it has for both businesses and software developers.
- Read Mike Roberts' book Programming AWS Lambda: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-aws-lambda/9781492041047/
- Read Mike's long-read on serverless on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and taught at the University of Central Florida. Becoming CTO in 2007, she has seen Thoughtworks — and the wider tech industry — evolve through a period in which the business mainstream has become increasingly comfortable with cutting-edge innovation.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler talk to Rebecca about her career, starting from Caterpillar warehouses in Peoria, Illinois, to being awarded the Technical Leadership Abie Award by AnitaB.org. It's the latest episode in our ongoing mini-series of Thoughtworker Journeys, offering an insight into the diverse and sometimes surprising experiences of technologists at Thoughtworks.
Learn more about AnitaB.org: https://anitab.org/
Read the new edition of Rebecca's book, Building Evolutionary Architectures: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/building-evolutionaryarchitectures-second-edition
As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and make delivering at speed much more challenging than it was previously.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons is joined by colleagues Rick Kick (Head of Application and Platform Transformation in the Enterprise Modernization team for Thoughtworks North America) and Kennedy Collins (Head of Product and Design for the North America Central Market), alongside Anthony Maitz of Pariveda, to discuss how to manage the various frictions and tensions that can emerge as organizations scale. They cover a wide range of tactics and strategies to improve alignment between product and engineering, and offer an insight into what can actually be done to address a common scale-up growing pain.
It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends — and understanding what they mean — matters. At Thoughtworks we do that with our Looking Glass report. Our most recent edition was published at the end of 2022; it provides a useful framework for thinking through the major shifts that look set to happen across the industry in 2023.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, regular hosts Mike Mason and Ken Mugrage take the guest seats to talk to Neal Ford about the six key trends in the latest Looking Glass. They explain why they were chosen before diving deeper into a selection of some of the most hotly debated trends that feature in the report, such as metaverse and Web3.
- Explore the latest Looking Glass: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/looking-glass
- Read Mike Mason's metaverse article (co-written with Barton Friedland) https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/metaverse-practical-review
Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering, thanks to the rise of cloud and highly complex distributed systems.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Alexey Boas and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Prem Chandrasekaran and Karthik Krishnan — authors of the new book Domain-Driven Design with Java — to discuss DDD and how it has developed over the last 20 years. They explore how DDD can help us respond to complexity and talk about the perspectives they put forward in their book.
The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's important, it nevertheless remains something that is all too often overlooked or viewed as a luxury when it comes to actually building products. This is unfortunate: taking accessibility seriously throughout the process of development and design will not only help foster a more equitable industry, it will also lead to better products for everyone.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Scott Shaw and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by Kate Linton and Katie Peterson to discuss the importance of shifting accessibility left — making it a first-order concern that's part of the earliest stage of the product development lifecycle. They explore why many companies are failing on accessibility, how it can be done properly and the wider benefits of such a shift.
Data Mesh is one of the most powerful and widely-discussed concepts to emerge from Thoughtworks in recent years. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the risks and challenges it data can pose — from the perspective of both privacy and organizational effectiveness — it has only become more relevant.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Zhamak Dehghani (Thoughtworks alumnus and author of O'Reilly's Data Mesh: Delivering Data Driven Value at Scale) and Emily Gorcenski join Rebecca Parsons and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss Data Mesh's place in the industry today, more than three years on from the first time we discussed the topic on the podcast. Together they explore some of the challenges organizations face when adopting it and what its future looks like, as it continues to push the world to rethink data centralization.
Low-code and no-code development platforms have been heralded in recent years as a solution to engineering talent gaps and as a trend that will properly democratize technology, allowing even non-coders to build applications from scratch. However, despite the marketing rhetoric, such platforms pose considerable challenges: how do they fit alongside existing development projects? To what extent do they enable or restrict our ability to build the kinds of software we want and need?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Mike Mason are joined by Scott Shaw and Xu Hao to discuss the state of play in the world of low-code and no-code. They explore the different types of platforms that have emerged in the space and ask what organizations need to consider before they invest time, energy and money in integrating them.
For many who have been part of the recent migration of users from Twitter to Mastodon, their first encounters with the "fediverse" have been puzzling, even disorienting. Given a decade in which we've all grown accustomed to the affordances of corporate social media, it's not surprising people have questions: How does it work, exactly? How am I supposed to use it?
With so much current interest in the platform — and the wider ecosystem of which it is a part — in this special bonus episode of the Technology Podcast, Birgitta Böckeler digs into the technology and culture of Mastodon with the help of Effy Elden, Moritz Heiber and Julien Deswaef, three Thoughtworkers that have been long-time residents of the fediverse. They discuss how Mastodon works, how it sits within the broader decentralized social media landscape and whether this move to Mastodon marks the start of a new chapter in how the world views social media.
Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the concept of “evolutionary architecture” and demonstrated how it can help organizations manage change effectively in fast-moving business contexts and an ever-shifting technology landscape.
The book has now been updated, with its second edition due to be published in December 2022. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Rebecca and Neal talk to Birgitta Böckeler and Scott Shaw about the new edition and discuss how seeing various applications of evolutionary architecture over the last five years has led them to identify new issues and challenges. In particular, they talk about how the new edition takes up the question of automating architectural governance using fitness functions, and what this means for the way we build and maintain complex software systems.
While putting together this year's Technology Radar, Conway's Law — the idea that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their communication structures — was the subject of a lot of discussion. Should we fight it — by deploying the inverse conway maneuver? Or do we need to adopt a more nuanced approach and consider how we can leverage it?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Martin Fowler and James Lewis join hosts Birgitta Böckeler and Mike Mason to delve into Conway's Law. They explore what Conway's Law means for organizations today, how it should — and should not — be applied and why everyone working in and around software systems needs to pay close attention to it.
Read the 1968 paper (by Melvin Conway) that identified the phenomenon.
The “Basal Cost” of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama. The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the number of calories a human body burns just to maintain normal functioning. Applied to software development, the concept is intended to help us pay much more attention to the long term costs — like additional complexity and maintenance — of building a new feature.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, James Lewis and Georgina Giannoukou join hosts Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler to discuss the Basal Cost of software and explore how it can help organizations and software development teams better manage product and system complexity.
Although many books have been written on software testing over the years, Gayathri Mohan's Full-Stack Testing, released earlier this year with O'Reilly, is unique: by taking a comprehensive look at many different aspects of testing across the development lifecycle, it emphasizes the importance of a truly holistic approach.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Gayathri joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ken Mugrage to discuss the book, her experience as a QA and testing's important and changing role in the future of software development.
Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific, dependent on the challenges and goals of an organization.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Tim Cochran and Ajey Gore join Rebecca Parsons to discuss technical debt in startups and scale-ups. Taking in the causes of technical debt in both types of organizations, the various ways it can manifest itself, and approaches and practices for tackling it, the episode dives deep into Tim and Ajey’s experiences leading technology and engineering teams around the world.
Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific, dependent on the challenges and goals of an organization.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Tim Cochran and Ajey Gore join Rebecca Parsons to discuss technical debt in startups and scale-ups. Taking in the causes of technical debt in both types of organizations, the various ways it can manifest itself, and approaches and practices for tackling it, the episode dives deep into Tim and Ajey’s experiences leading technology and engineering teams around the world.
Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future can obscure the reality of what engineers and organizations are doing today.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Scott Shaw and Birgitta Boeckeler are joined by Cam Jackson and Kuldeep Singh to discuss the XR work Thoughtworks has been doing with clients. Together they explore what it means for engineers and how the future of the technology might evolve.
Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future can obscure the reality of what engineers and organizations are doing today.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Scott Shaw and Birgitta Boeckeler are joined by Cam Jackson and Kuldeep Singh to discuss the XR work Thoughtworks has been doing with clients. Together they explore what it means for engineers and how the future of the technology might evolve.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that epidemiology is incredibly complex: the millions of edge cases, what-ifs, and counterfactuals make modelling exceptionally difficult. One way of tackling this complexity is through agent-based modelling.
In this episode, Rebecca Parsons and Premanand Chandrasekaran are joined by Thoughtworks colleague Jayanta Kshirsagar and Gautam Menom, professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University. They discuss how Thoughtworks has been helping researchers in India using agent-based modelling with two custom-built tools: EpiRust and BharatSim.
Given the variety of architectural styles — and the unique technology landscapes at every organization — how can you develop a set of metrics that can reliably guide your organization to improve? Andrew Harmel-Law has been grappling with this question for some time. We catch up with him to hear how he thinks DORA’s Four Key Metrics provide invaluable guardrails that can empower teams and improve the software delivery process.
Thoughtworks regularly emphasises the importance of culture in building and maintaining high-quality software when working with clients. So, for episode 100 of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, we wanted to reflect on how the organization — and its leaders — has gone about trying to build a culture of innovation over the last couple of decades. Featuring CTO Rebecca Parsons and Chief Strategy Officer Chad Wathington, this episode offers an insight into some the successes, failures, and characters that have shaped Thoughtworks over the years.
The idea of best practices is becoming an anachronism — given today’s complex technology landscape, the notion that there can be a single best way of doing anything seems fanciful. Our crew explore the thinking behind sensible defaults: that there may be some practices which act as de facto starting points on any given project because they’re effective — practices such as pair programming, TDD or continuous integration. But context is vital and there may be circumstances which makes the default choice invalid — or at least suboptimal.
Mutation testing has long been a proven method for driving software quality in a way unit testing can't. But it can be a long, expensive and computationally intensive process. Our podcasters explore effective strategies for mutation testing and how to establish when it's right for your projects.
In the second part of our exploration of legacy displacement, we look at the practicalities of making upgrades work, from strategies for decomposing huge monoliths into manageable chunks as well as the methods for delivering those parts now that you've broken your monolith up.
Updating legacy systems has been a common feature of enterprise IT. But — strangler-fig pattern aside — there’s little written about how to do it effectively. We explore the ideas of legacy replacement — and even legacy displacement — with a group of colleagues that are writing an article series on the topic for martinfowler.com. In the first episode of this two-part series, we look how they’ve come up with patterns for legacy displacement.
We’re all subject to cognitive biases. And whether we’re aware of them or not, they can have a profound impact on the code we write — especially when working in an agile environment, where we have to constantly deal with uncertainties. We take a deep dive into where our biases emerge, the impacts they can have and how we can mitigate them to improve the quality of our code.
From extreme programming to pairing with Ward Cunningham and the earliest days of .Net to building communities in a remote-first world, Thoughtworks’ CEO Guo Xiao has seen huge changes in the tech industry. We hear how he went from being a graduate developer to leading a company of more than 10,000 — and what he’s learned about developing software along the way.
We catch up with Dave Farley to hear about the genesis of his blockbuster book, Continuous Delivery — which he authored with Jez Humble — as well as his latest tome, Modern Software Engineering. He shares his ideas about the art of software development and common misconceptions about the principles of engineering.
There are a handful of common problems organizations encounter on their journey as a scale-up, where some of the practices that enabled them to flourish as a start-up produce a level of technical debt that threatens to impede future growth. In this episode, we explore how to tackle some of those bottlenecks.
From pair programming to the daily standup, the global pandemic challenged how we think about the practices and rituals that were a daily part of developers’ lives. Our podcasters explore what changes were enforced, how it impacted teams — and whether any of those changes will stick in the new normal.
Many organizations regard code freezes as a way of reducing the risk of downtime during periods of peak demands. But associating outages with changes often masks a wider lack of faith in the deployment process — which is potentially where your focus should be. Here, our podcasters explore the negative impacts of code freezes and also the instances where code freezes can be beneficial.
A multicloud strategy, where you have a business-critical application that’s engineered to run across multiple cloud platforms, can be appealing for a number of reasons, including reliability, regulatory and risk. But, like most architectural decisions, there are trade offs. Here our podcast team explore the intricacies of multicloud and the implications of making that journey.
Through the adoption of DevOp practices, we’ve all become accustomed to product teams having full control over their continuous delivery pipelines right the way through to production. When organizations start out with homogenous sets of product teams, all doing similar things, compliance can fit in pretty readily. But issues arise as the scale grows and teams want to do validation checks in different ways. Our podcasts explore the ideas of compliance as a product, which aims to make compliance more manageable at scale.
Each year, Thoughtworks's Looking Glass report explores the technology trends we think will have far-reaching consequences. We catch up with one of the report's authors, to hear more about what the future holds for enterprise technology.
Ahead of the release of the second edition of his landmark book, Fluent Python, our team catch up with author Luciano Ramalho to hear about what’s happening in the world of Python — and why it’s popularity continues to endure.
At Thoughtworks, our internal Techops team created a self-service developer platform — NEO — with the goal of slashing the time it takes for developers to build digital products within the company. We catch up with Swapnil Deshpande and Prakash Subramaniam about designing a platform that can deliver what developers need in an easy and intuitive manner — and deliver business value.
Lean inceptions combine design thinking and methodologies from the Lean startup movement to provide teams with ways to get started on their projects and identify a minimum viable product as part of building an amazing business solution. We catch up with Paolo Caroli to hear about his new book on the subject as he share a few tips along the way.
Following on from our earlier episode on the Software Architecture: the hard parts, we’re joined by the other two co-authors of that book to explore issues around data architecture and how that fits into these broader concepts of architecture. We discuss how it is that what looks like a software decision is frequently influenced by data.
Things have come a long way since Kent Beck first wrote about test-driven development 20+ years ago: the languages we use, our deployment environments and the rise of low-code tools. Former Thoughtworker Saleem Siddiqui has just written a new book on TDD and joins our podcast team to discuss why this book — and subject — is more pertinent than ever.
There’s often debate around the build-versus-buy decision for digital capabilities. But when it comes to integrating disparate systems, the convenience of some modern integration tools can result in point-in-time integrations: ones that are never intended to evolve, with all the complexity and cost that entails. Here, we catch up with Brandon Byers to explore the limits of low-code tools and the perils of thinking you can buy integration.
In the past decade, NoSQL has gone from being an interesting experiment to becoming business critical. We catch up with Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage, co-authors of NoSQL Distilled, to understand why the database technology took off and where it’s proven its capabilities in the enterprise and how thinking around issues such as persistence models has evolved.
In today’s modern distributed systems are by their very nature complex. The decisions you need to make — around the wiring of your services, what size should the services be, and how should they call one another — are uniquely complex. In Software Architecture: the hard parts, the authors explore the rough edges of software architecture and look at how you can effectively do trade analyses that work for you. We catch up with two of the book’s co-authors.
From creating novel solutions for parking airplanes or identifying the winning formula for single malt whiskeys, our colleagues at Fourkind have extensive experience in building machine learning systems. Here, Max Pagels and Jarno Kartela highlight why deploying ML is different, how edge cases can confound well-trained models and the unexpected areas where ML can deliver better than human-levels of performance.
Lean Enterprise was a landmark book, exploring how large enterprise could learn from start-ups and deliver innovation at scale — how they could respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products. Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with two of the book’s authors to hear about its genesis, its impact and why there’s not likely to be a second edition.
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with retired Thoughtworker and co-signatory of the Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith. He talks us through his experiences, from working on the Apollo missions to dropped card desks, the birth of the agile movement and its future in a post-pandemic world.
As the infamous SolarWinds attack showed, it’s no longer sufficient to just write secure code, you need to ensure that you understand the security risks throughout your entire software supply chain: whether that’s compilers, containers or the tools used to manage deployment pipelines.
Retrospectives can play a vital role in enabling teams to improve continuously. Here, our podcast team is joined by Paulo Caroli, author of Fun Retrospectives to get insights into delivering sessions that energize and inform the whole team — while ensuring they become increasingly effective at meeting their goals.
In today’s cloud-first world, distributed systems are everywhere. Unmesh Joshi gives an insight into his work looking at distributed systems — from distributed databases such as Cassandra to messaging brokers such as Kafka or infrastructure components such as Docker — the common problems that arise and the approaches to solving these problems, which he categorizes as patterns.
Pramod Sadalage co-authored the book Refactoring Databases 15 years ago. The concepts remain hugely relevant today for those exploring microservices. We caught up with Pramod and Martin Fowler to hear about the genesis of the book and explore how the principles of refactoring work in a world of NoSQL databases.
There’s often lots of talk about how companies can make their developers more productive. But it may be more useful to think about developer effectiveness: how to ensure they’re building the most useful products for their customers. This isn’t about working longer or harder or hiring smarter people, it's just working smarter, using your time better and making sure that the company is providing that environment that allows developers to be effective. Our special guests from Spotify and Etsy give us their unique perspectives.
We catch up with the two co-authors of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow to hear about their ideas on enabling enterprises to become more effective at software delivery — and the influence of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load and responsive organization evolution.
Following on from our Earth Day episode on green software engineering, we turn to the concept of Green Cloud. Reducing your IT operations’ carbon footprint is more complex than simply moving to the cloud. We explore how developers can gain insights into the energy usage of their cloud operations and the tools and techniques they can deploy to minimize their cloud-related emissions.
There’s increasing awareness of tech’s carbon footprint but to what extent can software developers help? Is it possible to measure the energy efficiency of your code? Can you write code that saves energy? Our podcast team unpick the art of the possible when it comes to green software engineering.
We talk to two of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto for Software Development — Jim Highsmith and Martin Fowler — to get their perspective on how the agile movement has evolved over the past two decades.
The skill set needed to effectively step up to a tech lead role can be markedly different from the ones you gain as an engineer. That realization is what prompted our former colleague Pat Kua to write his book Talking with Tech Leads. Here, he shares his experiences of how to successfully navigate the journey towards becoming a tech lead.
Our employee No. 1 talks through her experiences of winning over agile skeptics, pair programming refuseniks and TDD doubters, along with her account of the winnebago come mobile computing lab otherwise known as the mythical Thought Mobile. Neal Ford and Alexey Boas join Patricia Mandarino to hear about her ThoughtWorks journey.
Our team catches up with Kief Morris to hear about the release of his updated book on infrastructure as code. They explore how tools, practices and patterns from software engineering can be applied to managing infrastructure — and how IaC has evolved in the years since Kief wrote the first volume.
Once the preserve of gaming and consumer electronics, extended reality (XR) — a combination of virtual and augmented reality — is now finding applications in the enterprise. This might be in testing and training situations or data visualizations. Here, we explore the implications this technology has for the enterprise software development lifecycle.
A vast array of powerful data visualization tools are gaining traction in enterprises looking to make sense of their data sets, for instance D3, Bokeh, Shiny and Dash. In this episode, our team explores to concept of data visualization as part of a complete digital experience, with the workflows and journeys of a wide variety of users.
Computational notebooks — such as Jupyter and Databricks — have soared in popularity with data scientists thanks to the ease with which text, visualizations and code can be combined on a living document. But what works for the data scientist doesn’t always fit with developers’ needs. Productionizing notebooks is fraught with perils. Our podcast team explores how to use computational notebooks most effectively.
Our podcast team catches up with Gregor Hohpe to hear about his book The Software Architect Elevator which looks at how to connect the boardroom to the IT engine room and how architects can drive digital transformations.
The Clojure programming language has seen some radical changes in recent times — not least of which is a change in stewardship of Cognitect, the company that provides technical support for Clojure. Here, we catch up with Stuart Halloway to find out what Cognitect’s acquisition by financial services firm Nubank means for the future of Clojure.
Establishing who someone is and how much they can be trusted is hard — even more so on the Internet. Here, our podcast team explores some new concepts in digital trust, such as decentralized identity, privacy protection and identity ownership.
In the first part of this two-part episode, we looked at the challenges encountered when an agile software development mindset runs up against ERP-heavy integration environments. Here we look at some of the solutions that can ease the path toward legacy modernization.
There’s growing interest in empowering non-developers to perform tasks that previously only programmers could do. This can help the enterprise deliver useful things quicker and free up developers to focus on more critical stuff. But challenges emerge when moving the citizen-developer-built applications to production scale. Our podcast team explores the possibilities and problems of democratizing programming.
Enterprise resource planning systems remain business-critical for many organizations. But these decades-old and often highly customized systems weren’t designed to operate in a modern, distributed manner. This throws up huge integration challenges when organizations want to explore how to embrace new digital opportunities. We look at how to overcome some of these challenges.
Open source has become an important model for building interest and trust in a software project. But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to open source. In this episode our podcasters explore different ways to approach open source and examine whether end-of-life has to mean obsolescence.
The need for high quality information at speed has never been greater thanks to competition and the impact of the global pandemic. Here, our podcast team are joined by David Colls and Danilo Sato to explore how data science is helping the enterprise respond: What new tools and techniques show promise? When does bias become a problem in data sets? What can DevOps teach data scientists about how to work?
Code visualization tools can be a great way to understand the intricacies of large code bases but they can be problematic when dealing with very old or very new code sets. Our co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Erik Dörnenburg and Korny Sietsma to look at the benefits and challenges of code visualization, especially when dealing with multiple programming languages.
Astronomers are increasingly turning to machine learning as a means to understand more about our universe — whether that’s the formation of galaxies or the Sun’s activity. Here, our co-hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons catch up with our special guest from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, along with a couple of ThoughtWorkers to hear more about this intersection of data science and astrophysics.
Programming languages are simultaneously a creative and an engineering medium. So how do you find the programming language that most facilitates you being creative, while enabling you to produce code that others can read? In this episode, two of our regular co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford, take a deep dive into the world of programming languages.
When working with modern distributed systems, complexity is a given. But how can you make observability a characteristic of your systems, such that your operators get feedback in the event of an outage? In this podcast our co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford talk to Bharani Subramaniam and Prasanna Pendse about the monitoring and observability in cloud-based systems.
The evolution of modern applications has seen more and more code that runs in the browser, rather than on servers or backend systems. What are the implications of this shift? Are there any lessons to be learned from the past?
Our hosts Mike Mason and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Erik Dörnenburg to explore the implications of having more than 50% of code in the browser.
To get the full benefit of continuous delivery, it pays not to just think about delivering software into deployment, but thinking about the value that’s being delivered. In this episode, our co-hosts Alexey Boas and Rebecca Parsons are joined by ThoughtWorkers, Ken Mugrage, Arvind SV and Scott Davis, to explore continuous delivery in terms of business value — not just the number of builds that have run or pipeline instances.
Great web development isn’t just about the front and backends: the experience the user has is critical to success. In this episode, our hosts Alexey Boas and Subramanian talk to Scott Davis and Zabil Cheriya Maliackal about the principles of user journey testing and the tools such as Gauge and Taiko that can help.
Often, discussions around continuous delivery focus on things that cutting edge companies are doing — at the cost of ignoring those companies that are quietly succeeding with CD. Our hosts, Mike Mason and Alexey Boas caught up with software consultant Pete Hogdson to hear about his new book that explores the practices continuous delivery. The book looks at those companies succeeding with CD, and the common principles they share — such as reducing batch sizes — even while the way they apply those principles varies wildly.
The COVID-19 pandemic meant that for the first time in 10 years, the next volume of ThoughtWorks Technology Radar had to be created via a virtual meeting, instead of face-to-face. Our podcast team share their experiences of working on this complex and highly interactive project. They discuss how the tech held up, what was missing and what worked well.
The increased emphasis on machine learning in the enterprise also seen resurgent interest in Python. What makes Python different from other languages? What are the main features that make it unique? And where will Python go from here? In this episode, our podcasts chat to Luciano Ramalho, from ThoughtWorks Brazil — a renowned author of books on Python — about dunder methods, fast fails and what’s new in the upcoming second edition of Fluent Python.
When it comes to cloud, you may find that for some applications — ones you intend to maintain over a long period of time — you have to account for the possibility of changing providers in the future. Some vendors promise to make that a seamless transition — but in so doing, you might be losing out on some of the rich functionality that the cloud providers can offer. Our regular podcast host, Zhamak Dehghani talks to ThoughtWorks Australia’s Head of Technology, Scott Shaw about the cost of multi-cloud portability and explores how businesses can calculate the risks and rewards of multi-cloud.
Digital transformation has rapidly become an over-used buzz phrase. But the concepts behind it — of putting technology expertise at the core of business leadership — remain critical to delivering new business value.
Our podcast regular, Mike Mason is joined by his co-author, Gary O'Brien to talk about the practical lessons detailed in their new book, Digital Transformation Game Plan.
When it comes to delivering IT in unusual circumstances, ThoughtWorks veteran Patrick Sarnacke has seen it all: from working through coup attempts to dealing with flooded server rooms or just pair programming with a reluctant partner. Mike Mason catches up with Pat to talk through his 20+ year journey with ThoughtWorks and the highlights of his career.
Continuous delivery has gained huge traction in the enterprise, but it means many different things to many different people. In this episode, our regular host Rebecca Parsons is joined by two special guests — and former ThoughtWorkers — Dave Farley and Jez Humble, who in 2010 co-authored the landmark text on the subject, Continuous Delivery. Together, they explore the engineering disciplines continuous delivery and look at the implications this has for the enterprise.
Rebecca Parsons talks to Neal Ford and Mark Richards about their new book that promises to become the definitive guide to software architecture.
The book provides a concise overview on what's needed to become a software architect.
Once again, we look at the issue of cloud migration, taking a deeper dive into the process and why organizations are looking at creating platforms on top of their cloud infrastructure.
Our co-hosts, Alexey Boas, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks Brazil and Ashok Subramanian, Head of Technology ThoughtWorks UK are joined by Alexandre Goedert Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks Chile. Together, they look at the complexities of building digital platforms that can give teams sufficient freedom to innovate, while maintaining some standardization.
For any large, multinational enterprise, there’s a dilemma at the heart of their software architecture. Centralization promises to save costs, providing a standardized template for how to do things and not waste effort reinventing the wheel. But local markets have unique characteristics, whether that’s customer behavior, regulations or the competitive landscape.
In this episode, our co-hosts Alexey Boas and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Sriram Narayan, an advisory consultant for ThoughtWorks India. Together, they explore the price of reuse: the challenges and trade offs for architects that arise from a centralized blueprint for IT.
Traditional, centralized approaches to infrastructure management risk creating organizational friction and bottlenecks for dev teams. By defining a standardized tech stack, you immediately make it harder to satisfy your teams’ diverse needs.
A self-serve approach can enable teams to tailor infrastructure to their particular needs. But how can you deliver a self-serve infrastructure without paving the way for chaos and ensure the appropriate guardrails are in place? In this episode, our regular co-hosts Neal Ford and Mike Mason are joined by Evan Bottcher, Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks Australia and Zhamak Dehghani, Technology Principal, ThoughtWorks North America, to explore how to benefit from self-service options.
In the latest episode, our regular co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford are joined by colleague and software luminary, Martin Fowler, to talk about his journey with ThoughtWorks.
Together they explore Martin’s life before ThoughtWorks, how he came to join and what it is that’s persuaded him to stay for more than 20 years. They also delve into how Martin’s bliki emerged as an essential guide to all things software and about his passion for enabling everyone to take more control of their computers — and how to do so while maintaining things like code quality and maintainability.
Everyone knows the adage: move fast and break things. But there are a few fields of endeavour where it is quite so apt as the world of drones.
In this episode, our co-hosts Neal Ford and Zhamak Dehghani talk to data scientist, Emily Gorcenski and head of product innovation, Jeremy Abbett, both from ThoughtWorks Germany about their project to build intelligent, autonomous drones. Together they explore the ramifications of writing code in a new, constrained hardware environment, and where faulty code can have huge project ramifications. And yes, there have been a few breakages.
The allure of cloud, with its promises of cost benefits, greater stability and more recently as the lynchpin of digital transformation, is well understood. But if such promises are to be realized, tech leaders need to think beyond just lifting and shifting on-prem applications into the cloud.
In this episode, we’re delighted to welcome a new co-host to our team: Ashok Subramanian, Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks UK. He’s joined by our regular host Alexey Boas and special guest, Alexandre Goedert, Head of Technology, ThoughtWorks Chile.
Together they explore what cloud migration means today, now that the big three cloud platform providers have practically met feature parity. They look at the implications of cloud-to-cloud migration and help uncover some of the hidden costs.
Any developer that’s moved from an object-oriented language to a functional one knows how disconcerting the shift can be. It demands a completely different mindset.
In this episode, our regular co-hosts Neal Ford and Alexey Villas Boas talk to Gregorio Melo about functional programming. He’s just written a book about functional programming, using Clojure as its basis. Together they explore why developers choose to learn functional languages and how they can make the learning curve less daunting.
These days, it can seem that everything is being done as code. But compliance as code isn’t just some fad: it’s about automating compliance processes so that they become more transparent and ensuring any compliance issues that arise can be quickly dealt with.
In today’s episode, our host Rebecca Parsons talks to Satyam Argawala a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks Australia about compliance as code: what it means, why it’s necessary and where to start.
Over the years, there have been numerous approaches to data management: from data warehouses and data marts to data lakes — collating data in a central place. Today, we see many failure modes when it comes to building big data platforms, with organizations stuck in building data architectures such as data lakes that never deliver business value.
In our latest episode, we explore the ideas of data meshes, an alternative approach to serve and surface data organizationally. Our regular co-hosts Mike Mason and Neal Ford talk to Ken Collier, Head of Data Science and Engineering at ThoughtWorks, and Zhamak Dehghani, one of our regular co-hosts and also a Principal Consultant, with a focus on distributed systems architecture.
Everyone knows that tech has upended the business rulebook. But for all the exhortations to go digital, there’s been scant practical advice on how to do it. Until now.
In our latest episode, regular host Mike Mason is joined by ThoughtWorkers Jim Highsmith, Linda Luu and David Robinson to hear about their new book EDGE — value driven digital transformation. The book outlines an operating model that helps companies become holistically agile so that every part of the business — from culture to leadership to tech to product — can adapt and evolve at the speed of change.
The technology choices that businesses make are fast becoming key factors in creating great products and great customer experiences. But who should be responsible for those choices: the CIO or the CTO.
Our regular co-hosts Zhamak Dehghani and Mike Mason are joined by ThoughtWorks’ very own CTO (and erstwhile podcast host) Rebecca Parsons and principal consultant, Marcelo de Santis, who has previously been both a CIO and CTO at large multinational companies. Together they explore how modern businesses can get the technology leadership they need.
The theories of complex adaptive systems devised by the Santa Fe Institute have been used to draw out surprising patterns in the world around us — such as biology in mammals or revenue growth in retail stores. James Lewis, a principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, has been exploring how to apply such thinking to technology, in particular the practices and characteristics that underpin successful uses of microservices.
Join our regular host Mike Mason to hear more about the surprising world of complex adaptive systems, and what technologists can learn from it.
Who wouldn’t want to empower individuals and teams to solve problems as they encounter them? It’s a natural instinct for many developer-led organizations. But as phenomena like Shadow IT or skunkworks have shown, there can be a downside: a lack of coordination over what gets tackled and maintaining solutions over the long term.
In this episode, our co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Zhamak Dehghani, are joined by Andy Yates, Head of Strategy at ThoughtWorks TechOps, to explore the idea of the Citizen Developer. They look at ways of supporting problem-solving go-getters, while giving them the tools to ensure their efforts are aligned to business needs.
In this episode, our co-hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons catch up with Biharck Muniz Araújo, a principal consultant at ThoughtWorks Brazil, to hear about his new book Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3, a guide to designing, developing, scaling and deploying RESTful APIs for your applications.
Together they explore why the book was written and how REST has continued to evolve, as well as the established patterns and best practices.
A radical approach to enterprise IT is emerging in China — a cloud-based approach to encapsulated business models that enables small enterprises to steal a march on larger competitors and also enables long-established firms to go digital.
The concept is almost unheard of outside China, and in this episode, our co-host Neal Ford and Mike Mason are joined by two ThoughtWorkers from China — Xu Hao, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks China and Liu Shangqi, Frontline Consultant — to delve into the ideas behind Zhong Tai.
While much recent attention has fallen on the use of microservices for building server-side software, many enterprises still struggle with monolithic frontend codebases. In this episode, our regular host Rebecca Parsons talks to Cam Jackson, a senior consultant at ThoughtWorks Australia.
They explore the trend of breaking up a web application into decoupled micro frontends, and how such an architecture can improve delivery quality and efficiency for the teams working on frontend code.
Most organizations today face tension over how many programming languages they should support. But standardizing on just one is likely to be limiting — particularly when many enterprises favor giving dev teams a degree of autonomy. So if one is too few, how many is too many?
In this episode, our co-hosts Rebecca Parsons and Mike Mason are joined by Evan Bottcher, Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks Australia. Together they explore how enterprises can make practical decisions about language choices, so that their developers have the right tools for the right jobs. How can you put in place guard rails that ensure you’re able to maintain standards while giving developers enough autonomy?
In today’s intensely competitive markets, most business leaders recognize the imperative to innovate. But that recognition doesn’t always lead to results. Many companies still struggle to deliver meaningful innovation — something that adds value to their customers.
Our regular podcast host Alexey Boas is joined by Swapnil Deshpande, Global Head of Product Innovation and Incubation at ThoughtWorks. Together they explore how to break down the barriers to innovation, using practical examples from ThoughtWorks’ internal TechOps incubator initiative.
The shift from legacy to digital infrastructure is central to many companies’ strategy to compete in a fast-changing world. But at the architectural level, such change can be hard — or at least expensive — to effect. Not everyone wants to break things when they move fast.
In this episode, our hosts, Zhamak Dehghani and Mike Mason are joined by Ryan Murray, Director of Digital Platforms at ThoughtWorks, to consider how organizations can transform themselves through a deeper understanding of their systems, the information and their business capabilities — and the interrelation between these things.
There are always intense debates to be had when programmers try to decide what the best language will be to accomplish any given task.
In this episode, our co-hosts Alexey Vilas Boas and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Luciano Ramalho, renowned author and Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Brazil to explore programming language features and the benefits of thinking about languages in terms of labels — fundamental language features — rather than paradigms, such as object-oriented or functional languages.
Does thinking in terms of labels help you adopt different programming styles? Can focusing on labels make language syntax less daunting? Can you have too many labels? Listen in to hear the team in exploring new ways of thinking about language choices.
Learn more at thoughtworks.com/podcasts
At ThoughtWorks, we’ve long been wary of the use of multiple cloud providers for the sake of it. We think there’s a significant upside in using the best provider for particular use cases. But in some regulated environments, organizations are forced to adopt a multicloud approach for highly critical workloads.
In this episode, our regular co-hosts, Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Scott Shaw, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks Australia and James Lewis, Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks UK. They explore the challenges of delivering an effective multicloud solution and how to assess the criticality and sensitivity of workloads.
Most organizations today recognize the critical importance of security today. But at the same time, development teams are pushed to move faster, deliver quicker and more frequently, and to behave autonomously. It can be tough to meet these twin demands.
In this episode, our co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Mike Mason explore the ideas of DevSecOps, which seeks to bake security into the development process. They’re joined by Cade Cairns a former Tech Principal at ThoughtWorks, and Ken Mugrage, Technology Advocate for ThoughtWorks Products.
Scott Davis, a principal engineer at ThoughtWorks has been working on web development his entire career. Like many of us, he’s been excited about the emergence of conversational UIs and the growing importance of voice — but Scott’s particular interest stems from the ideas of accessibility.
Our regular podcast hosts, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons, talk to Scott about why the path towards accessibility needn’t be hard, and explore some of the simple things that can be done to make tech more accessible.
Microservices and containers have kick started a revolution in enterprise architectures — and in the developer experience.
In this episode, our host Zhamak Dehghani is joined by Sheroy Maker, head of technology at ThoughtWorks Products, look at how these changes have impacted the ideas of continuous delivery. They explore the challenges such as how to maintain the integrity of complex distributed systems and how to manage deployments of disparate technology stacks.
Learn more about ThoughtWorks at thoughtworks.com
Platform thinking promises to give your business more bang for its technology investment buck, by putting your business priorities at the heart of your approach to delivery. But embracing platform thinking has profound implications for your technical architecture landscape.
Join our co-hosts Alexey Bôas and Zhamak Dehghani as they hear from Renan Martins and Luiz Ribeiro, both of whom are Lead Consultants based out of ThoughtWorks Brazil. They take an in-depth look at the practical realities of introducing platforms into organizations with legacy infrastructure and well-established development teams.
The concepts of governance can sometimes conjure up images of groups whose only task is to say no to the rest of the organization. But it needn’t be that way. Our co-hosts, Rebecca Parsons and Mike Mason are joined by Jonny LeRoy, Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks North America and Zhamak Dehghani — also one of our regular co-hosts, but here for her expertise in distributed systems architecture.
Together they’re exploring new ways of thinking about architectural governance that help the business and IT.
We’re increasingly seeing a trend of organizations exposing events — particularly business domain events — before knowing who the consumers are or what the specific applications are, in the hope that people elsewhere in the organization can discover these events and create value, without us directly orchestrating it.
But creating big upfront architectures can make developers nervous — not least about costs. Neal Ford and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Erik Dörnenburg, Head of Technology at ThoughtWorks Germany, and Evan Bottcher, Technology Lead in ThoughtWorks Australia.
https://www.thoughtworks.com/podcasts
Serverless has become the buzzword du jour. But what does it mean? What are the implications for your enterprise applications when you’re using services where you’re not responsible for the infrastructure that they run on? How do AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and GCP Cloud Functions fit in
To explore these issues, our co-hosts Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Paula Paul, a Tech Principal at ThoughtWorks and Mike Roberts, an external cloud engineering consultant and former ThoughtWorker.
With so many advances in tech promising to redefine the business landscape, how can you establish what to prioritize? How can you make sense of all this change?
ThoughtWorks uses the lens of five Seismic Shifts, which help unpack the significance of these changes: the tech that will power them and the impact they’ll have on business. Taking a deep dive into these issues, we’ve gathered together all of our ThoughtWorks Podcasts hosts — what better way to kick off 2019?
thoughtworks.com/podcasts
For this bonus episode, Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks’ CTO is joined by special guest Danah Boyd, a sociotechnical researcher at Microsoft Research. They explore how bias is introduced in algorithms, the damaging impacts this can have and how this can be mitigated.
Danah is a renowned academic, widely published author and campaigner, with a focus on the intersection between people and technology. She has a strong interest in understanding how contemporary social inequities relate to technology and society more generally.
thoughtworks.com/podcasts
Microservices has emerged as an important architectural choice for the enterprise. But the ecosystem to support microservices is still being built.
In this episode, co-hosts Zhamak Dehghani and Mike Mason are joined by James Lewis — author of one of the seminal articles on microservices — and Lakshminarasimhan Sudarshan, both Principal Consultants at Thoughtworks. They explore the state of microservices today, the pitfalls and anti-patterns (like distributed monolith) we see emerging and how microservices is being used successfully.
thoughtworks.com/podcasts
The way we interact with computers has transformed, from the classic keyboard-screen combination, to touchscreen and latterly — with the advent of digital personal assistants — to voice. These changing interfaces bring with them new challenges in creating software.
In this episode, regular co-hosts Alexey Villas Boas and Mike Mason are joined by Neil Redding and Barbara Wolff Dick as they explore the impact of innovation in our computer interfaces.
RESTful APIs quickly established themselves as useful architectural style for replatforming legacy systems with web-based ones. But increasingly, developers are running into the boundaries of deploying REST and API purity — confronting real world issues such as the rapid evolution of APIs for frontend layers where connectivity is patchy and where APIs should meet the changing visual representation and behavior of the frontend, where we increasingly see the adoption of alternatives such as GraphQL.
In this episode, co-hosts Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Brandon Byars, Market Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks North America and James Gregory, Tech Lead at ThoughtWorks Australia to explore the current state of API design and look at the impact of event-based architectures.
The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar is the must-read report for anyone interested in state-of-the-art software development. In this episode, we take a behind-the-scenes look at how the Radar is built: how technologies get onto the Radar; the in-depth discussions over where they’re placed; and why some things miss out. Regular co-hosts Dr Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford are joined by Marco Valtas, lead consultant at ThoughtWorks Brazil and Camilla Crispim, the outgoing Technical Assistant to OCTO.
https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
The Internet of Things promises radical change in how we interact with the world around — whether it’s coffee makers that turn on when our alarm clocks go off or using brain control to actuate objects. Join ThoughtWorks Principal consultant, Zhamak Dehghani and Principal Associate, Alexey Boas as they explore the practical implications of building IoT software and hardware with Software Developer, Charlie Gerard and Consultant Software Engineer Desiree Santos.
Much has been made of the benefits that tech such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can bring to the enterprise. But to be truly transformational, such tech can’t just bring a one-off improvement in decision making. They need to be able to adapt and change as the world around changes. Join ThoughtWorks’ global head of technology Mike Mason and his guests Christoph Windheuser, ThoughtWorks’ global lead in artificial intelligence and Sheroy Marker, head of technology at ThoughtWorks Products, as they explore how to choose the right data and AI model, to create complex models that are capable of continuously learning.
The tech landscape has changed fundamentally, with the growth in distributed computing and microservices. But it's not always easy to create truly independent services, especially amid time and budget pressures — sometimes it's just easier to allow multiple services to use a shared database.
In this episode, our panel explore the antipatterns we've seen emerge and consider how we can avoid them.
Learn how agile disciplines are applied to the complexities of data science to demonstrate incremental value within intelligent systems and solutions. Join ThoughtWorks' CTO, Rebecca Parsons, and Principal Associate, Alexey Boas, as they interview agile data scientist David Johnston and ThoughtWorks' head of data science, Ken Collier. The result is a better understanding of how agile practices are adapted to the uncertainty of machine learning, and how data scientists fit within a cross-functional agile delivery team. -- https://www.thoughtworks.com/podcasts
In this podcast, ThoughtWorks' Karl Brown and Gurpreet Luthra discuss the benefits, challenges, costs and common myths associated with open source technology. They talk about the suitability of open source software for specific needs, especially in global health. Karl Brown is the Director of Technology for the Office of Social Change Initiatives (OSCI). Gurpreet Luthra is the Product Manager for Bahmni, an Open Source Hospital Management System for low resource environments.
In this edition of the Beacon Podcast, Software Architect Neal Ford and CTO Rebecca Parsons go deeper into the definition of evolutionary architecture and discuss fitness functions. Learn more by visiting the Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
In this edition of the Beacon podcast, ThoughtWorkers Neal Ford, Rachel Laycock and Jonny LeRoy discuss why and how to build your own tech radar. Learn more in this blog article: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/build-your-own-technology-radar or by visiting the Tech Radar https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, ThoughtWorkers Jonny LeRoy and Chelsea Komlo talk about security and specifically how it fits into the development process of an agile team. Jonny and Chelsea begin by talking about the "Security Sandwich" - a concept first coined in ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar. https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar "We called it the security sandwich because the meat of your delivery was in the middle, but then security came on either side like the two pieces of bread, " Jonny explained. "And there would be some upfront security planning and documentation, and then some penetration testing and certification at the end. We are really on a mission to work out how to bake security processes into continuous delivery approaches." The podcast continues with Chelsea and Jonny providing next steps for tech leaders who want to incorporate a security culture within their respective teams. "One thing that's important to remember is that you're never going to completely be 100% secure, but you also want to be able to know if something is happening and react. So when we think about security, we think about both hardening our systems and also reacting," Chelsea reminds listeners. You can follow us on Twitter @thoughtworks. For more information on ThoughtWorks and our podcast, visit www.thoughtworks.com.
In this episode, we talk to ThoughtWorks developer Florian Sellmayr about LambdaCD, an open source library for building build pipelines as code, written in Clojure. Florian shares with us the problems he has faced with traditional continuous integration systems, for example Jenkins. He makes a passionate case for LambdaCD’s approach of building your pipelines like you build your microservices - using such powerful tools like a functional programming language, version control, tests and refactoring. Finally, Florian outlines how the project evolved from a thought experiment into a library under active use and development and gives hints for upcoming contributors that want to help in shaping LambdaCD’s future. http://www.lambda.cd/
In this 13-minutes long ThoughtWorks Beacon podcast, Neal Ford, a software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks, shares his working definition of "evolutionary architecture." "Here is our working definition of evolutionary architecture," Neal says. "An evolutionary architecture supports incremental guided change as a first principle along multiple dimensions." He also talks about the upcoming book on the topic he is co-authoring with ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Lead Developer and Agile Coach Patrick Kua. Stay tuned. You'll hear much more about this topic from Neal, Rebecca, and Pat as time goes on.
One of the themes we highlighted in the April 2016 edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar was “open source as a virtuous byproduct.” That’s a fairly high-minded phrase. In this 30-minute podcast, ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board Members Badri Janakiraman, Martin Fowler, Mike Mason and Rebecca Parsons discuss this theme and the general state of open source in the industry. The lively roundtable discussion touches on product development, security, technical culture, and machine learning as they relate to open source. The podcast ends with a gentle reminder from Badri: "The availability of tools and source code out there does not mean that we take away the responsibility of development teams in organizations to have discipline and rigor in their development processes." Check out the Technology Radar for more on the trends and technology that is shaping our future: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
With the recent rise of the Zika epidemic across countries around the world, we interviewed ThoughtWorks' Director of Global Health Dr. David Walton to understand more about the Zika virus— its origin, its various symptoms and manifestations, possible remedial measures that we can take as citizens of the world and also the limited role that technology can play in containing this deadly virus.
In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, Software Architect Neal Ford, Prasanna Pendse, Tech Principal, and Jonny LeRoy, Head of Technology, North America, discuss blockchain, how it differs from Bitcoin and what the future holds for the technology. [Disclaimer: This podcast isn't an introduction to blockchain. To the get the most out of it, you should have some knowledge of the technology.] During the conversation, Neal cautions that the current problems with Bitcoin have nothing to do with the viability of blockchain as a technology, “but has everything to do with all the non-technical aspects of currency and how messy that is in the real world.” The podcast closes with advice from Jonny on peeling back some of the underlying technologies to answer some key questions for technologists. How might you use blockchain? What types of problems could be solved with blockchain? These are really good questions to ask. The answer isn't always blockchain. Enjoy this episode of the ThoughtWorks podcast and, as always, please share your feedback and ideas with us @thoughtworks.
In this episode, Johannes Thönes, a ThoughtWorks developer based in Hamburg, interviews Lukasz Plotnicki, also a developer and ThoughtWorker, on the Backend for Frontend microservices pattern. Lukasz is the author of BFF @ SoundCloud, an article about the backend for frontends pattern which he looked into with Sam Newman at SoundCloud. This pattern describes the creation of one specific backend to provide functionality specifically to the need of a single client. Johannes talks with Lukasz about the BFF pattern rooted in a Microservices environment. First, they explain the difference between UI fragment composition and the backend for frontends approach as two alternatives. Then they discuss how backend for frontends fit into a microservices architecture and how it can be structured organizationally. We close the episode by discussing how many backend for frontends are already out there.
In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Tech Leaders Podcast, ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Author and Software Architect Neal Ford discuss the meaning of evolutionary architecture and how organizations can use it as a business advantage. Neal explains, "When you introduce things like DevOps and continuous delivery, all of a sudden you change the level of granularity in which you can make changes in your architecture and that becomes a really huge enabler for being able to make decisions at a higher level..." Rebecca adds, "What you need to do on Day One is think about what are the critical success factors for your architecture? Does it need to be highly available? Does it need to be highly scalable? Is security your major driving concern? Is it data loss? Those are all possible outcomes for architectures and all systems don't display the same kind of characteristics. That's what we mean when we're talking about evolutionary architecture."
Companies of all sizes, and across all industries, are struggling with digital transformation. A data-driven architecture that enables getting the right data, to the right place, at the right time positions an organization to create and deliver exceptional digital experiences. This podcast, a conversation between Scott Shaw, director of technology, Australia and Evan Bottcher, technical principal, provides insight into the challenges companies face when embarking on the digital journey.