Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
About the show
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week thoughtbot's Chad Pytel is joined by the people who build and nurture the products we love.
Episodes
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489: CTO Lunches with Kendall Miller
August 24th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 17 secs
Kendall Miller is the Co-Founder and COO of CTO Lunches, a network of engineering leaders to get trusted advice and connections.
From technical insights to business considerations and community engagement, the conversation provides a comprehensive look at Kubernetes and talks about CTO Lunches, a community for CTOs and senior engineering leaders, and a focus on building connections within the tech industry.
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488: Women Who Code with Alaina Percival
August 17th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 40 secs
Alaina Percival is the Co-Founder and CEO of Women Who Code, with a mission to empower diverse women to excel in technology careers.
This discussion offers a detailed look into the women in tech movement, the importance of community, and the drive to create a more equitable industry. It serves as a reflection on both the strides made in fostering diversity and the work still needed to create a truly inclusive technology field.
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487: OtisHealth with Marc Mar-Yohana
August 10th, 2023 | Season 11 | 36 mins 25 secs
Marc Mar-Yohana is the CEO and Founder of OtisHealth, a personal health application and platform for patient-caregiver engagement, population health, and clinical research.
Marc has dedicated his life to developing better tools for families and caregivers to manage their loved one's health. He aimed to create a unified system where all health data could be gathered, enabling caregivers, patients, and medical providers to see the whole picture. OtisHealth allows patients to integrate data from different sources, including wearable devices, and capture information outside clinical settings.
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486: Blox with Simon Ritchie
August 3rd, 2023 | Season 11 | 46 mins
Simon Ritchie, the founder and CEO of Blox, discusses his background and journey leading up to starting the company. He began his career in finance but discovered his passion for technology and finance systems. He worked at Anaplan, a successful finance planning and analysis software company, but saw the limitations of rigid systems when COVID-19 hit. He realized there was a need for a more flexible and accessible financial modeling and planning tool, especially for small businesses and charities.
Blox aims to fill this gap by providing a powerful yet easy-to-use modeling, calculation, and planning engine that sits between spreadsheets and complex enterprise software. The company is about a year old, has raised venture funding, and launched a free tier of its product. They prioritize building a compelling product, iterating quickly, and engaging with users to understand their needs.
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485: Pointz with Maggie Bachenberg and Trisha Ballakur
July 27th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 12 secs
Maggie Bachenberg, CEO, and Trisha Ballakur, CTO, are the co-founders of Pointz, a mobile mapping app that helps navigate bike and scooter riders through safe routes in cities.
Victoria talks to Maggie and Trisha about their cycling backgrounds, how they met and became co-founders, and what they feel is the differentiator for their app versus what was/is already on the market for biking-related apps.
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484: Ruby On Rails: The Podcast with Brittany Martin
July 20th, 2023 | Season 11 | 50 mins 30 secs
Brittany Martin is an Engineering Manager at Shogun, where she manages a team of Ruby and React engineers and is the Co-host of The Ruby on Rails Podcast.
Victoria and Will talk to Brittany about the multitude of stuff she's interested in, including Roller Derby, and gives the story of how she found herself co-hosting the show. She says knowing what your brand is and what listeners should expect from listening to you is super important, and she gives her opinion on what it means to be in the Ruby on Rails Community.
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483: Honeycomb.io with Charity Majors
July 13th, 2023 | Season 11 | 40 mins 46 secs
Charity Majors is Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together.
Victoria talks to Charity about observability, her technical background and decision to start Honeycomb.io, thoughts about the whole ops SRE profession, and things that surprised her along her journey of building a company around observability as a concept.
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482: Evil Martians with Irina Nazarova
July 6th, 2023 | Season 11 | 33 mins 46 secs
Irina Nazarova is CEO of Evil Martians, a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while creating open-source products and services.
Victoria talks to Irina about getting a sense of what people are interested in learning about or what kind of problems they have, how consulting and product development complement each other, and of course, the question on everyone's minds: Is Evil Martians really evil? 😈
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481: Oscar Health with Neetu Rajpal
June 29th, 2023 | Season 11 | 31 mins 49 secs
Neetu Rajpal is the CTO of Oscar Health. Oscar aims to make a healthier life accessible and affordable for all by refactoring healthcare to make great care cost less.
Chad talks to Neetu about working for a relatively new insurance company, reorganizing its structure by getting people into the right positions, and how incorporating large language models and generative AI is an inflection point that will help move things forward.
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480: klo.dev with Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban
June 22nd, 2023 | Season 11 | 39 mins 17 secs
Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban are from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code.
Victoria talks to Aaron and Ala about the Klotho engine, Klotho the CLI tool, and InfraCopilot and how they work together to help enable developer teams to iterate on applications and features quickly.
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479: Wistia with Brendan Schwartz
June 15th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 45 secs
Brendan Schwartz is the Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video.
Victoria talks to Brendan about the latest updates on the platform, interesting problems he found that Wistia was able to remove and help his team get to speed and velocity, and the personal value that drives his decision-making.
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478: Senga with Agnes Malatinszky
June 8th, 2023 | Season 11 | 22 mins
Agnes Malatinszky is the Founder of Senga, which takes care of back-office administrative needs for freelancers, contractors, and solopreneurs.
Victoria and Will interview Agnes about the thoughtbot Incubator program and what led Agnes to choose to apply, what the demands on her time were like, how it worked, and how she feels now that she's at the end of the program.
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477: 20th Anniversary Episode
June 1st, 2023 | Season 11 | 52 mins 35 secs
Chad joins cohosts Victoria and Will to talk about thoughtbot's 20th birthday! 🤖🎉
In this episode, you'll find the 411 on the thoughtbot mascot, "Ralph," taking the company fully remote, and our company values and how we believe products should be designed and built!
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476: OpenSauced with Brian Douglas
May 25th, 2023 | Season 11 | 41 mins 23 secs
Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source.
Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself accountable, and what makes a successful open source project.
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475: Designing Data Governance From the Ground Up with Lauren Maffeo
May 18th, 2023 | Season 11 | 48 mins 45 secs
Lauren Maffeo is the author of Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up.
Victoria talks to Lauren about human-centered design work, data stewardship and governance, and writing a book anybody can use regardless of industry or team size.
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474: Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer Jasper (William) Cartwright
May 11th, 2023 | Season 11 | 43 mins 42 secs
Jasper (William) Cartwright is a Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, and Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer.
Chad talks to Jasper about his podcast Three Black Halflings, which is committed to discussing diversity and inclusion within fantasy, sci-fi, and nerdy culture from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important.