Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Looking Glass isn't like most other technology trend reports. It doesn't just tell you what deserves your attention, it's designed to help you use it to focus on what really matters to you. Published once a year, Thoughtworks intends it to be a tool that helps readers make sense of the emerging technologies that are going to shape the industry in the months and years to come.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, lead Looking ...

A few years ago, Thoughtworker and (prolific) author Neal Ford published Fundamentals of Software Architecture with Mark Richards. They're now back with another book on software architecture — written with co-author Raju Gandhi — which offers readers a very different learning experience. Described as a combination of technical book and graphic novel, Head First Software Architecture dispenses with dense prose to present and explain...

Distributed systems are ubiquitous yet complex. They can be particularly demanding for software developers and architects tasked with dealing with the sometimes unpredictable nature of the interactions between their various parts.

That's why Thoughtworker Unmesh Joshi wrote Patterns of Distributed Systems. Published at the end of 2023, the book explores a number of patterns that characterize distributed systems, and uses them to no...

A few decades ago, it would have probably seemed strange to put software and automobility together. However, today software is embedded in all kinds of modern vehicles, enabling capabilities in everything from driving to passenger entertainment. But what exactly does this all mean for the automotive industry? And what demands does it place on design and manufacturing processes?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two Thought...

Is it really possible to measure the impact engineering teams have on a business' success? At a time when growth is challenging for many organizations and questions about productivity and effectiveness dominate industry conversations, getting it right is crucial. And although the DORA metrics are today well-established and extremely useful is it really enough? Do they actually help us tie the work we do to tangible business results...

Thanks to the pandemic, asynchronous working is, today, fairly common. However, it's often easily confused with simply working remotely — and while there are certainly neat synergies between the two, asynchronous working isn't just a description of your working arrangement: it's a set of intentional practices and artifacts that allow people to work together without having to physically be together.

On this episode of ther Technolog...

With each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, we identify a number of key themes that we see as significant in the industry. In the most recent edition — volume 29, published in September — we picked out AI-assisted software development, the challenges of measuring productivity, the rapid growth of LLMs and remote delivery workarounds beginning to mature in a post-pandemic world.

For this, the final Technology Podcast epi...

Generative AI has, unsurprisingly, been a major topic of conversation within Thoughtworks in 2023. However, as enjoyable as it is to get sucked into discussions about the reality, the risks and the benefits of this new technology, what's really interesting — and most important — is understanding how organizations can actually leverage generative AI in a way that's both safe and effective. 

For this episode of the Technology Podcast...

It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems and tools for civil society initiatives, such as a chatbot that helps Indian citizens find information about government programs and schemes in their native language. Earlier this ...

Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in software development.

In recent months, there's been a lot of talk in the industry around issues like whether AI might boost developer productivity and if it can be used for pair programming, but in this episode of the Technology Podcast we try to get beneath the hype to explore the rea...

Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool — especially one that thousands of other developers use and depend on?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss their work on AppiumTestDistribution, an open source tool that supports test automat...

The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling developers. But what does it mean to actually build and maintain a platform? How can you ensure it actually supports the people that need it?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Chris Ford of Thoughtworks Spain and Aidan Donn...

Many of the scale-ups we’ve partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we’ve seen are unexpected and dramatic rises in costs. In this episode we talk to members of our Digital Scale-up Studio, to hear their experience of gaining better visibility, improving operational efficiency at scale-ups, while the business maintains growth and gains greater knowledge of customer require...

The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the data space. But how do they work together exactly? And what challenges can it pose?

Bharani Subramaniam and Madhu Podila discuss these issues and much more with hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons on the latest episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast.

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