Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we could just be shipping code? Of course we do; particularly if we want to communicate and share software with other humans. 

To discuss documentation in 2025, Technology Podcast host Lilly Ryan is joined by Heidi Waterhouse, a very special guest with an esteemed and varied career in techni...

The technology industry has embraced specialisms — not just in different fields or job roles, like web development or security, but even in terms of particular platforms or stacks. But are we losing something as every tech professional is forced to push themselves into increasingly smaller niches?

Martin Fowler and Unmesh Joshi think so. They've been thinking a lot about the importance of what they call "Expert Generalists" — profe...

Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" — flawed assumptions that often get made when teams move from monolithic to distributed software architectures. In recent years, software architecture experts and regular writing partners Neal Ford and Mark Richards have identified a further three new fallacies of distributed computing:...

What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools?

In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a powerful new way to give AI agents deeper awareness of the tools, information and history they need to work effectively in the operations space. Unlike traditional APIs that just t...

Google I/O 2025 took place in May. It's always a great opportunity to find out how Google is trying to shape the industry agenda, but this year the predominance of Gemini meant the event was a chance to get a better look at how Google will play its hand in the AI market in the months to come.

To dissect the headlines from this year's Google I/O and explore what we can learn about Google's strategic focus — and how the company is th...

Mainframe modernization is hard: there's a huge amount of complexity that needs to be understood before it can be effectively addressed. Generative AI, however, can be a particularly powerful tool for understanding mainframe legacy codebases, something we've been exploring with Mechanical Orchard while working together on its Imogen modernization platform.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Alexey Boas...

You might think you know software engineering, but what are the really fundamental elements? What are the concepts, ideas and practices that are completely essential? What makes software engineering what it is?

Thoughtworker Nate Schutta and Dan Vega are attempting to address those questions in their upcoming book with O'Reilly, The Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Covering topics ranging from reading code through to the impor...

Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.32 was published at the start of April 2025. Featuring 105 blips, it offered a timely snapshot of what's interesting and important in the industry. Through the process of putting it together, we also identify a collection of key themes that speak to the things that shaped our conversations.

This time, there were four: supervised agents in coding assistants, evolving observability, the R in RAG and ...

The term 'vibe coding' — which first appeared in a post on X by Andrej Karpathy in early February 2025 — has set the software development world abuzz: everyone seems to have their own take on what it is, how it's done and whether it's a bold new chapter in the history of programming or an insult to anyone that's ever written a line of code.

Clearly, then, we need to talk about vibe coding — and that's precisely what we do on this e...

Nearly ten years after the first edition of Infrastructure as Code was published by O'Reilly, Kief Morris is publishing a third edition of the book. But why a new edition now? What's changed in technology and business over the last decade?

Quite a lot, as it happens. To talk about what's new — both in the infrastructure world and in the book itself — Kief Morris joins host Ken Mugrage on the Technology Podcast. They discuss each ed...

AI is inherently dynamic: that's true in terms of the field itself, and at a much lower level too — models are trained on new data and algorithms adapt and change to new circumstances and information. That's part of its power and what makes it so exciting, but from a business and organizational perspective, that can make governance and measurement exceptionally difficult. How can we know that our AI is optimized for the right thing...

How can we better define and clarify architectures to ensure consistency and control? If, as Neal Ford and Mark Richards discussed on a recent episode of the Technology Podcast, software architecture intersects with many different facets of software development and delivery, what can we do to better manage architectures in a way that is adaptable and dynamic?

Neal and Mark return to the guest seats to speak again to host Prem Chan...

The release of DeepSeek's AI models at the end of January 2025 sent shockwaves around the world. The weeks that followed have been rife with hype and rumor, ranging from suggestions that DeepSeek has completely upended the tech industry to claims the efficiency gains ostensibly unlocked by DeepSeek are exagerrated. So, what's the reality? And what does it all really mean for the tech industry?

In this episode of the Technology Podc...

Generative AI's popularity has led to a renewed interest in quality assurance — perhaps unsurprising given the inherent unpredictability of the technology. This is why, over the last year, the field has seen a number of techniques and approaches emerge, including evals, benchmarking and guardrails. While these terms all refer to different things, grouped together they all aim to improve the reliability and accuracy of generative AI...

Software architecture necessarily intersects with a diverse range of critical things, including implementation, infrastructure, data and engineering practices. All these elements require serious consideration and reflection if you're to architect effectively. 

To discuss these various intersections, Thoughtworks' Neal Ford and his long-time collaborator Mark Richards join host Prem Chandrasekaran on the Thoughtworks Technology Podc...

Who should be involved in the process of making decisions about software architecture? That's a question that's been puzzling Thoughtworker Andrew Harmel-Law for some time — so much so that he decided to write a book about it. The result is Facilitating Software Architecture. Published by O'Reilly in December 2024, it's both an argument for and a guide to involving more people in the architecture decision process.

To discuss the to...

With the rise of generative AI, the concept of the uncanny valley — where human resemblance unsettles, disturbs or disgusts — is more relevant than ever. But is it a problem that technologists need to tackle? Or does it offer an opportunity for greater thoughtfulness about the ways generative AI is being built, deployed and used?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Lilly Ryan is joined by Srinivasan Raguraman to discuss...

Legacy modernization is an enduring challenge — and as systems become more complex, the difficulty of understanding and modelling a system so it can be modernized only becomes more difficult. However, at Thoughtworks we've seen some recent success bringing generative AI into the legacy modernization process.

To discuss what this means in practice and the benefits it can deliver, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Thoughtworks colleagues...

Data contracts are a bit like APIs for data — they make it possible to interface with data in a way that ensures the transfer of data from one place to another is stable and reliable. This is particularly important for building more reliable data-driven applications.

To discuss data contracts, host Lilly Ryan is joined on the Technology Podcast by Andrew Jones, the creator of the data contract concept (in ...