For software engineers ready to level up. Learn from CTOs, principal engineers, and tech leaders about the skills beyond coding: from technical mastery to product thinking and career growth. Created by Patrick Akil. Powered by Xebia

Latest episodes

What Happens When Coding Agents See Your Entire System

October 7, 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

What happens when coding agents see your entire system: code, services, infrastructure and live traffic, all connected? Most agents are blind to everything outside the repo. Adyen Staff Engineer Mat Jones explains what changed once theirs…
Why Coding Agents Keep Making Your Codebase Worse

September 30, 2026 · 45 min

HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, who coined "context engineering", on why AI agents degrade codebases over time. He breaks down a benchmark that measures AI code quality across features, and how his team ships with agents without drowning in…
How Amp Ships 50 Times a Day With AI Agents

September 23, 2026 · 43 min

Amp ships to production around 50 times a day with AI agents, but the change that makes their team ship faster isn't AI at all. Dario Hamidi, AI engineer at Amp, makes the case that pull requests are holding your team back, and explains…
How Top Engineers Still Get Hired When Most Get Ghosted

September 16, 2026 · 34 min

How do top engineers still get hired in 2026 when most applicants get ghosted, 120,000 people have been laid off this year, and hiring managers say they can't find talent? A recruiter, a hiring lead, a career coach and an open source…
Why an Ex-Googler Bet Everything on an Open-Source Database

September 9, 2026 · 40 min

Jordan Tigani helped create Google BigQuery, then got fired as Chief Product Officer on a Friday morning. He planned to hack on DuckDB to learn Rust. Investors offered to fund it before he'd decided to start a company. That company became…
How the Best Engineers Build a World Model (Google Earth Creator & Niantic Spatial CTO)

September 2, 2026 · 37 min

Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon on how the best engineers solve problems most give up on — from a 4D model of the world to shipping research in months. He built Google Earth and ran Google Maps for over a decade, and he's been there…
How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

August 26, 2026 · 50 min

How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the data-structures-and-algorithms foundation everyone was trained on is…
Amazon AI Lead: What Differentiates The Best AI Coding Models

August 19, 2026 · 42 min

How does Amazon build its agentic AI? Michael Giannangeli, Head of Product for Amazon Nova and Agentic AI, breaks down evals, RL gyms, and model routing. He also explains why the bottleneck in software has shifted away from engineering…