In today’s cloud-first world, distributed systems are everywhere. Unmesh Joshi gives an insight into his work looking at distributed systems — from distributed databases such as Cassandra to messaging brokers such as Kafka or infrastructure components such as Docker — the common problems that arise and the approaches to solving these problems, which he categorizes as patterns.

Pramod Sadalage co-authored the book Refactoring Databases 15 years ago. The concepts remain hugely relevant today for those exploring microservices. We caught up with Pramod and Martin Fowler to hear about the genesis of the book and explore how the principles of refactoring work in a world of NoSQL databases.

There’s often lots of talk about how companies can make their developers more productive. But it may be more useful to think about developer effectiveness: how to ensure they’re building the most useful products for their customers. This isn’t about working longer or harder or hiring smarter people, it's just working smarter, using your time better and making sure that the company is providing that environment that allows developers to be effective. Our special guests from Spotify and Etsy give us their unique perspectives.

We catch up with the two co-authors of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow to hear about their ideas on enabling enterprises to become more effective at software delivery — and the influence of Conway’s Law, team cognitive load and responsive organization evolution.

Following on from our Earth Day episode on green software engineering, we turn to the concept of Green Cloud. Reducing your IT operations’ carbon footprint is more complex than simply moving to the cloud. We explore how developers can gain insights into the energy usage of their cloud operations and the tools and techniques they can deploy to minimize their cloud-related emissions.

There’s increasing awareness of tech’s carbon footprint but to what extent can software developers help? Is it possible to measure the energy efficiency of your code? Can you write code that saves energy? Our podcast team unpick the art of the possible when it comes to green software engineering.

Jim Highsmith and Martin Fowler, authors of the Agile Manifesto, discuss the evolution of agile methodologies over 20 years. They cover the creation of the manifesto, synergy between agile and technology, transitioning to adaptive agility, and embracing uncertainty with an agile mindset.

The skill set needed to effectively step up to a tech lead role can be markedly different from the ones you gain as an engineer. That realization is what prompted our former colleague Pat Kua to write his book Talking with Tech Leads. Here, he shares his experiences of how to successfully navigate the journey towards becoming a tech lead.

Our employee No. 1 talks through her experiences of winning over agile skeptics, pair programming refuseniks and TDD doubters, along with her account of the winnebago come mobile computing lab otherwise known as the mythical Thought Mobile. Neal Ford and Alexey Boas join Patricia Mandarino to hear about her ThoughtWorks journey.

Our team catches up with Kief Morris to hear about the release of his updated book on infrastructure as code. They explore how tools, practices and patterns from software engineering can be applied to managing infrastructure — and how IaC has evolved in the years since Kief wrote the first volume.