Frontier

Unplanned work blows up estimates, kills team morale, and drives down productivity, which makes it no surprise that the best agile engineering leaders target operations improvements as a core value. Today’s guest Shawn Kuenzler takes that mission even deeper. Scaling engineering teams is what Shawn does, and he joins Ledge to discuss balancing efficiency with […]

You’re one of the largest exercise brands in the world. How do you get your DevOps in shape? Ledge sits down with Bob Chen, Senior Director of Technical Operations at Beachbody to chat DevOps, deployment, working with multiple distributed teams, and knocking off technical debt. See it turns out software teams often want to do […]

Software quality is like integrity – it’s doing the right thing even if no one is watching. That’s according to Merlin Quintin, Director QA Engineering at Redbox. Merlin joins Ledge in this episode to discuss her unique approaches to engineering leadership as a veteran team member at a disruptive media company. Merlin says engineering is […]

Is recruiting engineering talent similar to courting professional athletes? That’s been our experience at Gun.io, and Steve Bayette agrees. After traveling the world as a digital nomad, and successfully navigating two big-name exits, Steve now advises startups on how to hire world-class engineers and build industry-leading products. He’s also an investor in early stage technology […]

No stranger to screens big (very big) and small, David Shapendonk was the Direct of Technical Ops for IMAX before flexing his entrepreneurial muscles. He’s now the CTO of Maestro Games, a startup helping to build technologies that incorporate music therapy with VR gaming to help people with anxiety, PTSD, autism, and other stress-related ailments. […]

You’ll hear a lot of stories on The Frontier about starting, growing, and enhancing engineering teams. In this episode, Philipp Svehla, helps us explore the other side of the coin: bringing a team to a close. At the time of recording, his company had been acquired by a larger firm that decided to wind down […]

As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, sometimes the number of new questions can seem to grow more quickly than the number of answers. In this episode Ledge talks to Leon Thomas, CEO of Jelecos, about their AWS services practice, using it as a lens into the changing world of cloud, secops, […]

What exactly is “technical evangelism?” At Gitlab, it’s sharing opinions on what’s going on in the community as technologists — helping each other to collectively move forward to build better, ship better, and operationalize better so software is more responsive to customer needs. That’s according to Ledge’s guest, Priyanka Sharma.  The great thing about evangelists? […]

You might have heard of the “Iron Triangle” of software development: Cost, Quality, and Speed. You can only choose two. How about the “Iron Triangle” of engineering leadership? No, it’s not a new Game of Thrones episode, but it is an extremely useful tool for implementing leadership across your organization. In this version you choose […]

What if digital and marketing teams could really launch amazing web apps without needing developers? That’s the promise of low-code and no-code platforms. The interesting paradox is the extensive engineering required to create and maintain them. That’s what makes this work so interesting: freeing developers to work on challenging problems while enabling others to achieve […]

Embracing technology to make the world a better place; that’s a common theme with this podcast. Kevon Saber’s story continues to weave that fabric. Kevon started his tech career developing mobile games, later making a personal pivot to focus more on the cross-section of business and people. After completing his MBA at Stanford, he went […]

It only takes a few minutes of talking to Ravi Lachhmann before you realize, “This dude seriously loves engineering.” That personality serves him well as a Technical Evangelist at Cisco company AppDynamics. Ravi’s perspectives on production outages, operating what you build, and “Netflixian” organizational design all come back to one root idea: keep learning, and […]