Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

In it's purest form, the microservices architectural pattern tells us to "dream small" while designing services, which is all well and good, but how small is still useful?Pragmatic microservice design helps draw some useful boundaries, and keeps our eyes on shipping product. In this episode we talk to Director of Engineering Daniel Knight about breaking down business problems into known objectives in the business and technical domain, and taking the focus off trying to solve problems we don't yet understand. In that way, product teams can focus on the WHAT while engineering teams can focus on the HOW. It's all about balance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Business and technology leaders face consistent pressure to bring products to market faster. Never in the last quarter century has the pace of change, the quantity of available tools, and the raw compute power been greater. In this episode, slashBlue CEO Tom Dodds joins me to talk about how to build technology that's aligned with the people, process, and purpose of the organization. Does it help people do their jobs better? Is it impacting the company positively? Is it helping the company with their lasting purpose? The answers to these questions contribute to a holistic view of technology implementation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we talk about the software development lifecycle, we often focus on the product and engineering functions, potentially leaving out a critical team: Sales, and specifically Sales Engineers. To add a little color to this role, we invited Chris Goodman, Director of Integrations and Alliances from SentinelOne. Chris gives a different look at customer empathy - one that's directly tasked with helping customers figure out the problems they really have, and how to solve them. At the end of the episode he shares a succint and powerful approach to help engineers stand out and secure coveted roles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) is a global leader in the B2B Travel Management space. The Hotels division within CWT was rebranded as RoomIt in the summer of 2017. My guest in this episode, Alex Behrens, was brought in as Director of Engineering to lead that effort. It's no small feat to build an entirely new tech startup inside of a legacy IT organization, and I talk in detail with Alex about introducing Agile, building internal partnerships, and helping teams across the enterprise innovate faster while still honoring the original thinking that served the company well for many years before this effort. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a difference between working for a startup, founding a startup, working freelance, and working as a consultant for a company on payroll. It all comes down to the risk profile you are willing and able to tolerate, and that is itself a function of the stage of life you're in and other variables. In this episode I sit down with Mong Truong who has worn all of those hats. We talk about the differences, and his current role consulting for large corporate clients as Technical Director of Primitive Logic where he tackles large projects, legacy code, and change management, just to name a few. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you hear "mainframe" I bet you think "old school," or "dinosaur," or at the very least "legacy." After this episode with Compuware's Tim Ceradsky, you might change your mind. With hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL driving the vast majority of transaction processing in the US economy, mainframes aren't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, with COBOL programmers retiring en masse over the next decade, colleges and codes schools are picking up on the massive demand. And get this -- Compuware's tools allow the use of modern CI/CD tools, IDEs, and code visualizations that make a good case to banish the green screen monochrome horror stories you might imagine. Stick around for the fascinating tale of the COBOL Renaissance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When it comes to Quality Assurance, the hot buzz words are "automation" and "moving left." It's true that automated testing beats manual, but throwing a bunch of automated tests on your UI just to increase your test coverage isn't productive.A holistic QA approach means everyone from product to engineering to business stakeholders is on board. In this episode we speak to QA leader David Morgan about building a quality-focused organization from scratch, changing process and culture, and implementing behavior-driven development that empowers stakeholders to speak and share a common language of software quality. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There comes a time in almost every engineer's career where they may need to communicate with a customer, train a teammate, pitch a project, or prove they are credible to a potential client.Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer of Mint.com where she launched v1 of the ubiquitous personal finance platform. She went on to Found Femgineer, an education firm that trains technologists on presentation, public speaking, and communication skills.In this episode I sit down with Poornima to hear tips and tricks that make her students successful.https://femgineer.com/present-book/https://femgineer.com/confident-communicator-course/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alan Spadoni is the Director of Engineering at Buildout. He's was an engineering leader at Groupon for six years prior to his current post. Alan shares some awesome insights on making your engineering culture attractive from a recruiting perspective in a highly constrained hiring environment, especially when you're recruiting for talent on technologies that are no longer at the peak of their hype cycle. Two key areas: make sure candidates have a great experience and make sure your interview process is highly focused on problems that are relevant to the work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of most promising areas for artificial intelligence research rests at the intersection of biology and medicine. That's where we found Robert Fratila, CTO and Co-founder of Aifred Health. He and his team won an XPRIZE at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. He's worked on brain-state classifiers, computer vision packages for autonomous underwater vehicles, and predictive models for cancer patients, just to name a few. In this episode we dig into deep learning, neural networks, and hype-busting truths about the current limits of AI. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.