Refactoring Podcast

Rachel Potvin, SVP of Engineering at Sanity, shares insights on scaling teams, healthy engineering culture, startup planning, and the differences between big tech and startups. She discusses her experiences at Google, GitHub, and Sanity, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned throughout her career journey.

Denis Yarats, CTO at Perplexity, discusses AI products, company structure, and internal AI utilization. Topics include Perplexity's history, AI model costs, open vs proprietary source, engineering team organization, startup planning, 'secret sauce', metrics, and future plans.

Former Facebook employee #10 and Dropbox CTO, Aditya Agarwal, discusses early stage Facebook, differences with Dropbox, challenges of hyper growth, future of engineering management, and the value of being a generalist. Talks about finding company culture, technical CTO role, and the innovative environment at South Park Commons.

CTO at Honeycomb, Charity Majors, discusses observability, testing in production, continuous delivery, and developer experience. Topics include transitioning from monitoring to observing, optimal infra cost allocation, embracing mistakes in distributed systems, evolution of engineering culture, and value of junior engineers in team dynamics.

Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, discusses measuring engineering productivity, finding value metrics, easing pressure, DevEx framework, empowering DevEx in business, responsibilities ownership, and DevEx integration patterns.

Join Daniel Vassallo, creator of Small Bets community, as he shares insights on career transitions, Small Bets philosophy, and self-employment. Learn about market understanding, lifestyle improvements, time allocation, and criteria for idea selection.

Thiago Ghisi, Director of Engineering at Nubank, discusses what makes managers successful, career development in tech, and transitioning from expert to strategist. Topics include productivity, feedback loops, becoming a technical manager, and the Four Ps model for effective management.

Andrew Weaver is co-founder and CEO of CTO Academy, an educational product that works with thousands of CTO today. Andrew has over 25+ years of executive-level experience with companies of various size, including enterprises, SME and early-stage companies across multiple sectors. With Andrew, we discussed gaining the proper skillset to be a good CTO, the imbalances in the tech space, and how to keep up with the current technologies. Here is what we talked about: (00:00) Introduction (03:02) What is CTO Academy and how it works (07:53) What makes a good CTO (14:01) The CTO mindset (20:06) Being a CTO in a remote environment (23:20) Unleashing the "quiet genius" (28:11) How AI is changing tech (36:58) Education & micro-learning (45:11) Q&A — You can also find this at: 📬 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠ 📺 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠ 📱 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple⁠

Wes Kao discusses managing up and bridging the gap between managers and reports. The 'Bad Things / Good Things' framework, good communication in the remote era, and the transition to remote work at Maven are explored. Sync vs async communication, the importance of over-communicating, and Wes' approach to reading are also highlighted.

Discussion with Maria Gutierrez on building healthy engineering orgs, balancing speed and quality, remote work impact, transitioning to manager roles, engineering productivity metrics, AI utilization in teams, and career advice for engineers.