alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

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.

How to scale an Engineering Team and more I spoke to Christian Hardenberg, CTO of Delivery Hero 🍔 and formerly Rocket Internet 🚀 on how to scale an engineering org from 200 to 2000 people. Delivery Hero just entered the DAX a week ago and is worth almost 20 BN as of today. He shared his perspective and thoughts on: How to measure software developers at scale How they keep up the pace / velocity What he thinks about OKRs How they manage to integrate all the acquired entities and teams Their secret sauce and why he thinks it is better than Google

This time, I have the honor to talk to Peter Grosskopf, CTO of Börse Stuttgart digital exchange and former CTO of Solarisbank. He's an amazing guy for philosophical discussions around finance, tech and we share one love that is no longer as cool as it was in the 00's: Ruby on rails! This time we discuss:1 How he made regulations his hobby 👓 and wants developers to feel like working for Spotify or Soundcloud even with regulations in place The do's and don'ts in Fintech Why he rather picks mature stacks (aka Postgres and Ruby on rails) against the "new kids on the block" How he thinks about new things tech like Apache Kafka

How to scale a SaaS product I had the chance to interview Sergei Anikin about how to scale a SaaS product. Sergei Anikin comes with vast experience in “large scale tech” as he was with Skype when it was sold 3 times (eBay, Private Equity, Microsoft) and is CTO at 90-million funded Pipedrive (CRM SaaS) now. Laser-sharp focus on the essential features “Scaling problems are good problems to have” Microservices vs. Monoliths Team structure at scale: Missions and Tribes How they do M&A and post merger integration

I had to deal with cybersecurity topics recently; I've even been in touch with the FBI 👮. On this occasion I invited a brilliant guest for the alphalist Podcast: It’s Mikko Hyppönen, a computer security specialist and scientific director at the security company F-Secure. He spent half of his life hacking and chasing hackers and he knows how to talk about it: I saw at least 3 TED Talks by him and yes, they are very entertaining and helpful. Key topics in the Podcast are: The recent Twitter hack and the stupidness of the hackers How cybersecurity evolved and became a required skill for companies and countries His recommendations for modern mid sized companies around Cybersecurity (Where to start with processes, recruiting, tools, budgets) What to do if you’ve been compromised