alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

This time I'm talking to an absolute legend: Mitchell Hashimoto, the CTO of HashiCorp the company behind a series of brilliant open source products (Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant) that are highly successfully both business wise and community wise. I would even argue that HashiCorp is the only company that manages to do that. We talk about: The path from 7 to 1000+ employees in the last 10 years 📈📈📈 How Mitch is still able to be a very active github user and contribute a lot of code while growing a big enterprise company to IPO How to build successful open source projects Where to draw the line in open core businesses How to be able to prevent cloud providers from sucking your blood 🧛

Podcast time! In this episode I'm chatting with Jean-Denis Greze, the Head of Engineering @ Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Plaid is a fintech Unicorn from the US that just turned down an acquisition by Visa. We spoke about: The upcoming topic 🔒 Privacy Engineering 🔒 and how it will change our thinking How plaid handles 1000s of connections to banks and integrates with a lot of legacy APIs just fine His thoughts around Defi and Blockchain How they do good business in fintech without touching any money 💰 It was great having you, Jean-Denis!

This time in the podcast I have a very bright guest I admire for years: Eric Bowman, SVP Engineering at TomTom, Former VP Engineering at Zalando AND one of the developers behind the game "The Sims" 🧍‍♂️ He is a brilliant mind when it comes to tech leadership and has strong opinions on autonomy and empowerment. Topics we touched: How 90s gaming development compares to 20s large scale tech teams What TomTom does these days and the technical challenges in location based services & mapping these days How to establish tech culture and open source in a large enterprise The challenges of the automotive industry in a software world 🚗 📈 The importances of the accelerate KPIs in modern engineering orgs and how to move fast 📈 It was a pleasure talking to you, Eric!

This time, I have a very technical podcast on Webassembly and the new kid on the block: the Edge Cloud with Fastly's CTO Tyler McMullen, one of the leading CDNs and edge cloud companies out there. The future of distributed computation: From Serverless to ☁️ Cloudless ☁️ Webassembly as the new industry standard intermediate representation/micro container. And guess what? Your browser most likely already supports it! How a CDN works internally and the challenges of building it How he manages to still be a coding geek in 💰💰💰 10BN company This podcast was actually recorded shortly before Covid - if you wonder how we could meet up in Berlin ;-)

This time I had Jean Michel Lemieux or short JML, the CTO of 🛒 Shopify 🛒 in the podcast. Craziest fact: He took the time two days before black Friday 💥. In the podcast he also told me why. We spoke about: His fight against crazy 👟 sneaker - sniping - bots and how Shopify keeps people in line happy with games What it takes to run the largest Ruby on Rails (majestic ;-)) monolith on the planet Why he does not believe in microservice architecture but still runs some services How he keeps his 2000 engineer army aligned Why he still sells stuff for kids online through his own platform It was crazy fun, even if I missed the swearing after David Heinemeier Hansson took that route.

How he built Ruby on Rails. how he believes in deep focus & zero distractions In this episode I am thrilled to welcome David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp, inventor of Ruby on Rails, founder of Hey.com, book author of books like "Remote" or "It does not have to be crazy at work". Some topics we touched: * How David Discovered the magic of Ruby 💎 * How he finds moments of deep flow in programming and racing * Why Smartwatches are a gift from hell⌚ * Why the 60 hour work week is a stupid lie * Why he would immediately quit if he was hired as CTO of Zalando 👚 * How they successfully manage Basecamp, and why "the Spotify Model" is a myth ☠️ Strong language, be careful ☠️ And: You might notice that I had to laugh at least 60% of the time. Thanks David for your time and this great episode.

Podcast time! This time I have the chance to talk to the judo brown belt owning CTO of the scooter& mobility startup TIER mobility Matthias Laug. Before TIER he co-founded Lieferando and boy, he's a nice guest to talk to. We spoke about: * Why he puts people over tech * What they use to run their large IoT stack * His vision of Scooters talking to each other in a huge mesh * Why he after founding Lieferando and having a large exit still started at Thoughtworks * When to not do backflips even if you perfected doing them He also briefly mentions Eric Bowman, Martin Fowler and Pat Kua who have one thing in common: I did not interview them for the alphalist podcast - Would be happy to chat with you guys too! :)

This time I am talking to my friend Johannes Schaback, CTO of Home24, who is also originally a co-founder of alphalist and one of the brightest minds in the German engineering, tech and business-tech scene. We are talking about his journey through the AI and data world, the Do's and Don'ts and the real world, no bullshit application of machine learning. We are Tackle: * Data is the new oil - wrong or right? * The machine learning models @ Home24 * How ML-infrastructure evolved in the last decade * The necessity to spend more time in the problem space before entering the solution space We talk about mentorship and great people he learned from (*ping* Marc Appelhoff, Brigitte Wittekind, Christian Weiss, Philipp Kreibohm ;-)). Thanks a lot Johannes and looking forward to track your successes at Home24, your career and investments.

In this podcast, it's all about complicated things and my guest masters them all: IoT, Robotics, AI and customer acquisition. Ahti Heinla is former founding engineer of Skype and now runs Starship Technologies as Founder and CTO. In this podcast we talk about Robotics as the coolest thing to build as an engineer How I stopped one of his Robots in Hamburg The hard things about robots 🤖 The hard things about bringing ML models to production Thanks again Ahti for being my guest and looking forward to see more and more of your robots in the wild. Great to see so much innovation coming from Estonia. Looking forward to feedback and guest proposals.

Marty Cagan, inventor of product discovery and partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, discusses misconceptions about Agile, resource waste in modern organizations, product discovery and user testing, and the balance between autonomy and empowerment in product teams. The podcast also compares the approaches of Apple and Google to product management, reflects on the birth of the internet industry, and shares experiences from Marty's time at Netscape.