The Main Thread

Is your platform secure? How do you know? How do you even know all of the machines, networks, software, and data that make up your platform in the first place? We're joined by Amirali Shahinpour, Head of Security Data Platform at Twitch to discuss driving security priorities across your organization. 

• Prepare (Requires Asset Inventory)
• Identify (Threat intel: what’s affected?)
• Analyze (Pri...

Part 2 of our discussion with Lee McKeeman, Staff Engineer at Google, on empathy and inclusion. Why do companies struggle to prioritize efforts around inclusion and accessibility? And what can we, as technical leaders, do about it?

• Lee:
  • LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmckeeman
  • Substack, https://leemckeeman.substack.com
• Alex:
  • Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore
• Brian:
  • Build and...

Lee McKeeman is currently a staff engineer at Google, who’s also spent time at Amazon and Meta. Lee is passionate about how we as technical leaders can influence our work environments to be more empathetic and inclusive so that people of varying races, genders, creeds, ages, and neruodiversities, all feel empowered to contribute their best ideas to the work that we do. 

• Lee:
  • LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin....

Think about the roles you play in your community. Social planner, Little League coach, Dungeon Master. Did anyone explicitly give you that authority? Or did you just gravitate towards your interests and put yourself out there? Can we do that at work, too? Are we defined by the title given to us by our companies, or can we put ourselves out there to take on broader roles that align with our strengths? David Cunningham, Sr Engineer w...

How do you decide whether that shiny new frontend framework or that highly performant, memory-safe backend language is really going to solve your problems? Join our guest Eric Justusson, as we talk about how to leverage quick experiments, tracer bullets, greenfield projects, and hackathons to responsibly evaluate the benefits and costs of onboarding new tech for your team. 

• Eric

Will AI fundamentally change the way we as engineers interact with our work and our world? Or is it mostly hype? We’re joined today by David Ashe-- Senior Software Engineer with American Express--to explore the benefits, risks, practical uses, and downright bizarre results of AI.

AI has even made some contributions to this Podcast. For instance:

• All Artwork for this podcast is generated by AI using Midjourney.
...

How do you establish a vision of the future that addresses a specific business need for your company? And how do you turn that vision into a concrete strategy to execute? Our guest Brian Jones is an engineering manager in Central Security at Meta, and he'll share his techniques for building vision and strategy at scale. 

CISSP: Certified Information Systems Security Professional

DAU: Daily Active Users

GRC: Governa...

This episode is a tasty one. Today’s guest introduced me to an analogy that illustrates beautifully the progressively growing scope and responsibilities of an engineer from Junior to Senior to Staff and beyond. I love this analogy so much that I invited him onto the show to share it with you. So get out your aprons, prep your mixers, and welcome our guest Andrew Preece, as we whip up: "The Cake Analogy."

• Andre...

So... what is a Staff Engineer anyway? What even is the job description? In this episode, we’re joined by Abhishek Mistry–Staff Engineering Leader at Hudson River Trading–to discuss exactly that. What is this job ICs aspire to? How is it different from management? How do you influence and lead people when you actually have no real authority? Is it better to go broad or to go deep? How does the Staff Engineer scale their impact and ...

On this first episode, Brian Ogilvie and Alex Gaiser discuss where we are in our careers as senior software engineers, what we're looking to learn as we look to grow into Staff+ engineers, and more about the format of the show. 

The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Mode Cloud SQL editor

Refactoring, by Martin Fowler

Staff Engineer, by Will Larson

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