Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi!Thiago is former director of engineering at Nubank and with a long and successful tech career in companies like ThoughtWorks, Apple and more. But right now, he's on a sabbatical and he's been for more than six months.So get ready for an incredible chat where we talked about your identity as an engineering leader, psychology, Claude Code and more.(00:00) Preview(01:01) Introduction(03:25) Quitting the job(10:32) Planning during a sabbatical(14:03) Detaching from your work identity(20:31) Measuring progress(26:03) Finding yourself: Claude Code and second brain(33:34) The biggest revelations(45:22) Thiago's next chapter—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Matt McClernan, CEO of Augment Code!With Matt, we went through the findings of our own research that we developed together with Augment, surveying more than 400 engineering teams about how they're using AI.And we went through many topics, from the differences between personal and team adoption, challenges, how documentation looks like a secret weapon, how to manage context in AI coding, and much more. And then we talked about the future, how the UX of AI coding is changing with IDEs, CLI tools and agents, and what the future might bring.(00:00) Preview(01:26) Introduction(02:16) Personal vs Team AI Adoption(09:25) The journey of AI adoption(13:06) The role of documentation(18:13) AI and Context: the Augment secret sauce(25:44) Helping AI with context(28:17) Quality control in AI coding(36:30) Companies and AI in the near future(45:54) The state of UX in writing code(51:54) The scope of Augment—This episode is brought to you by Snyk! Join a live session with Vandana Verma Sehgal, OWASP Leader and Staff Developer Advocate at Snyk, on Thursday, December 11, at 11am ETRegister at https://go.snyk.io/12-11-owasp-top-10-isc2.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=so-sp&utm_campaign=dm_im-refactoring_wbn_251211_owasp-top-10&utm_term=refactoring&utm_content=ad&ref=plug.dev—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI!With Rob, we talked about software delivery, the impact of AI, and how to build great product engineering teams. And next, we discuss trade-offs between standardization versus flexibility in software organizations, and lessons learned from our respective past mistakes.(00:00) Preview(01:22) Introduction(03:33) Industry Changes and AI's Impact on Development(08:59) The Bell Curve of Metrics and Team Performance(12:09) From Engineering Metrics to Business Outcomes(14:31) Building Effective Small Teams(25:35) Experience vs. Curiosity(37:18) Scaling Challenges and Technology Decisions(49:26) Organizational Standards and Leadership Philosophy—This episode is brought to you by Codacy! Codacy helps developers save time in code reviews, so developers can focus on other things.Start your free trial and get 20% off your first 3 months at codacy.com/refactoring—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Hywel Carver! Hywel is co-founder and CEO of Skiller Whale, which provides live team coaching for software engineering teams. With Hywel, we got deep into what makes traditional developer training awful, what engineers truly learn and what they should learn. Then we explored how to measure the impact of learning and how AI may possibly change both how learning works and our own skills.(00:00) Preview(01:15) Introduction(02:22) Hywel's journey in tech(06:20) Spreading good learning(07:55) Training as a compliance(09:34) The effectiveness of learning(12:42) Training with an expert(18:02) Knowledge, Skill and Wisdom(24:16) How Skiller Whale works?(30:26) The outcomes(34:53) Finding the proper learning method(40:12) Measuring learning value(46:54) AI, humans and code bases—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Darragh Curran! Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users.With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team resources to it. Then we discussed how AI is being adopted inside Intercom itself to achieve Darragh's ambitious goal of doubling the team's productivity.And finally, we explored Darragh's own role as CTO and what he believes he needs to get right to make all of this happen. (00:00) Preview(01:31) Introduction(02:19) How Intercom changed with AI(07:02) Intercom and Fin(11:37) AI productivity gains(16:36) Measuring productivity increase(25:06) Experience and AI(31:02) AI in large and legacy systems(32:47) The CTO role in an AI framework(38:56) Good for human = Good for AI(42:03) Improving AI models: Fin's case(45:03) How Fin improved so fast(49:08) One big challenge—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]