My recommendations of the best episodes
10. Architectural governance: rethinking the Department of ‘No’ by Rebecca Parsons, Mike Mason and Jonny LeRoy (ThoughtWorks)
Architectural governance does not imply blindly answering no to any new requests and ideas. This podcast explores new approaches to Architectural Governance for the benefit of both, business and IT.
9. Internet History (and Future) with Brian McCullough (Software Engineering Daily)
Without the lessons from Napster, we might not have Spotify. Without the trust model pioneered by ebay, we would not have marketplaces like Airbnb. Brian explains how innovations in one company often lead to success in another.
In Brian McCullough book, How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, he tells the story of the last 25 years of Internet development through the lens of companies like ebay, Amazon, Google, and Apple.
In this podcast, Brian discusses his book, the art of podcasting, and the historical lessons of technology.
8. Understanding Legacy Code with Jonathan Boccara (Software Engineering Radio)
Working with legacy code is a key skill of professional software development that is often neglected. We are usually dealing with a complex undocumented world full of legacy code. However, we struggle to get agreement on what is legacy code. Is it what it was written by someone else? Code without automated unit testing?
Jonathan Boccara, author of The Legacy Code Programmer’s Toolbox discusses understanding and working with legacy code. Host Adam Gordon Bell spoke with Boccara about reading legacy code, developing the right attitude for approaching legacy code and several techniques for improving your legacy code skill set.
7. A Strategy Session with Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale)
In this special episode, host Reid Hoffman answers questions from early-stage entrepreneurs — people in the trenches of startup life all over the world. How do you gain your users’ trust? How do you build a team and company culture at the same time? This Strategy Session is co-hosted with Jason Feifer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine.
6. Leadership with Ben Horowitz (Software Engineering Daily)
Ben frames the relationship between leadership and culture in a thought-provoking way. The leader creates the culture. The culture is the leader. What you do is who you are.
In this podcast, Ben discusses his two books (The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are), and how he has applied these beliefs to Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm he co-founded and leads today.
5. Diving into serverless architecture by Mike Mason, Zhamak Dehghani, Paula Paul and Mike Roberts (ThoughtWorks)
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.
This podcast discusses Serverless architectures from a practical point of view with top experts from ThoughtWorks. You can also refer to my 3 articles series for more information [2].
4. Software IPOs with Tomasz Tunguz (Software Engineering Daily)
Going public allows a company to gain access to the public capital markets. Also, allows previous investors to have a liquidity event, by selling the shares that they purchased from the company in private markets. However, it put some restrictions on the way they operate and in regulatory terms as well.
Tomasz Tunguz is a venture investor at Redpoint, and the author of a popular blog at tomasztonguz.com. In a recent series of posts, Tom has evaluated the S-1s and compared the growth dynamics between a variety of newer public software companies.
This podcast discusses his writing, and offer reflections on what can be learned about company building from the recent series of IPOs and direct listings.
3. Engineering Philosophy with Tyler Cowen (Software Engineering Daily)
Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a podcast that includes guests such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Tyler blogs frequently at Marginal Revolution.
In this podcast, Tyler describes the philosophy outlined in Stubborn Attachments, then we discuss how his philosophy relates to software engineering, podcasting, and economics.
2. Delivering strategic architectural transformation by Zhamak Dehghani, Mike Mason and Ryan Murray (ThoughtWorks)
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.
This podcast episode considers how organizations can transform themselves through a deeper understanding of their systems, the information and their business capabilities — and the interrelation between these things.
- Cloud-Native Applications with Cornelia Davis (Software Engineering Daily)
Applications that started on the cloud are referred to as cloud-native applications. Many of the patterns we were using years ago, now either need to be revised or they do not make sense anymore.
Cornelia Davis is VP of technology at Pivotal and the author of Cloud Native Patterns, a book about developing applications in the distributed, virtual world of the cloud.
I feel this is the best podcast I have listened this year due to the clarity, passion and wealth of knowledge that Cornelia brings to the table. Furthermore, cloud native applications are a hot topic these days.
Final comment
This is a two-way street, please share your thoughts about other episodes that caught your attention this year. Thanks.
References
[1] My top Software Engineering podcast episodes for 2018 by Pablo Iorio
[2] Serverless Architectures I/III: Design and technical trade-offs by Pablo Iorio
