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GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

GOTO

The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.

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S6 · E60
August 28 · 39 min
The Forest & The Desert Are Parallel Universes • Kent Beck
This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Kent Beck - Software Engineer & Creator of Extreme Programming RESOURCES https://bsky.app/profile/kentbeck.bsky.social https://www.kentbeck.com https://github.com/KentBeck https://twitter.com/KentBeck https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentbeck https://tidyfirst.substack.com/about ABSTRACT So close and yet so far. We see similar behaviors in The Forest & The Desert, but with opposite meanings. Similar words but opposite meanings. Superficially similar goals but working out at completely different scales. What is The Forest? What is The Desert? Why are they so different, despite the similarities? And how can we get from crumbs to cake and stay there? [...] Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3659 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Kent Beck • Tidy First? • https://amzn.to/4gscjjK Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres • Extreme Programming Explained • https://amzn.to/3sBASDG Kent Beck • Test Driven Development • https://amzn.to/3U4AXLs Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN Kent Beck • Implementation Patterns • https://amzn.to/3sBlCGL Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E59
August 21 · 45 min
AI, Corporate Responsibility & Democratic Legitimacy: Extended Q&A • Joanna Bryson
This Q&A session was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Joanna Bryson - Professor of Ethics and Technology, Responsible Data Science for Human Development RESOURCES https://bsky.app/profile/j2bryson.bsky.social https://mastodon.social/@j2bryson https://twitter.com/j2bryson https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryson https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com Links https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en DESCRIPTION Joanna Bryson challenges many popular assumptions about AI and AGI. She argues that current generative AI systems are not autonomous intelligences but powerful tools that compress and reproduce human cultural knowledge at scale. While these systems can appear intelligent, they remain dependent on human-created data, corporate incentives, and carefully engineered guardrails. Bryson cautions against anthropomorphizing AI and emphasizes that many concerns about AI stem from misunderstandings about how these systems actually work. The discussion ultimately centers on responsibility and governance. Bryson argues that transparency, accountability, and democratic oversight matter far more than debates about machine consciousness. Whether discussing AI companions, recommendation algorithms, open-source models, regulation, or AI-assisted software development, her conclusion remains consistent: technology is not destiny. Engineers, companies, policymakers, and citizens all have agency in shaping how AI is deployed, regulated, and integrated into society. [...] Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3783 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Chris Miller • Chip War • https://amzn.to/4aBCUKT Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman • Underground Empire • https://amzn.to/3YdXdGX Phil Winder • Reinforcement Learning • https://amzn.to/3t1S1VZ Alex Castrounis • AI for People and Business • https://amzn.to/3NYKKTo Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E58
August 14 · 32 min
The Platform Engineer’s Handbook • Ajay Chankramath & Kaspar von Grünberg
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/451 Ajay Chankramath - Founder & CEO at Platformetrics & Co-Author of "The Platform Engineer’s Handbook" Kaspar von Grünberg - Founder & CEO at Stealth & Author of "Thinking in Platforms" RESOURCES Ajay https://www.linkedin.com/in/chankramath https://github.com/achankra https://x.com/ajchantw https://chankramath.com https://platformetrics.com Kaspar https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvgruenberg https://github.com/Kasparvongruenberg https://kasparvongruenberg.com Links https://peh-packt.platformetrics.com DESCRIPTION Ajay Chankramath — author of The Platform Engineer’s Handbook — joins Kaspar von Grünberg to unpack why he wrote a 14-chapter, code-first practitioner's guide instead of another theory-heavy platform book. The conversation's core thesis: the reason developers don't adopt platforms isn't a technology gap, it's a product discipline gap — a failure to treat developer experience as a first-class outcome with a real feedback loop. Ajay walks through the book's arc, from Kubernetes and service-mesh foundations through self-service portals to enterprise-grade concerns like policy-as-code and FinOps, and makes a pointed case for building on 100% open-source, vendor-agnostic tooling as a hedge against geopolitical and licensing whiplash. The most relevant thread for engineers building with AI today: citing a McKinsey finding that only 6% of AI initiatives show real productivity gains, Ajay argues that agentic AI doesn't reduce the need for platform engineering — it raises the stakes. As coding agents become genuine actors in the SDLC rather than tools, IDPs need a new layer for agent context, memory, tool registries, and guardrails, and that layer "must be built, owned, and operated by you," not bought off the shelf. His conclusion: the differentiator in the AI era isn't which frontier model you use — it's whether your platform foundations are solid enough to make agents safe and productive at all. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ajay Chankramath • The Platform Engineer's Handbook • https://amzn.to/4eCSibM Ajay Chankramath & Eamonn Ryan • Domain-Driven Platform Engineering • https://amzn.to/3TdiC3J Chankramath, Cheneweth, Oliver & Alvarez • Effective Platform Engineering • https://amzn.to/3OnxN8i Kaspar von Grünberg & Luca Galante • Thinking in Platforms • https://weaveintelligence.io/thinking-in-platforms-book Gregor Hohpe • Platform Strategy • https://amzn.to/4cxfYdb Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E57
August 7 · 47 min
State of the Art of Platform Engineering • Abby Bangser & Charles Humble
This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in April 2026. https://gotopia.tech Read the full transcription of this interview here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/450 Abby Bangser - Principal Engineer at Syntasso & Team Topologies Advocate Charles Humble - Freelance Techie, Podcaster, Editor, Author & Consultant RESOURCES Abby https://bsky.app/profile/abangser.bsky.social https://twitter.com/a_bangser https://github.com/abangser https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser https://www.syntasso.io/members-area/abby/profile Charles https://bsky.app/profile/charleshumble.bsky.social https://linkedin.com/in/charleshumble https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble https://conissaunce.com Links https://blog.container-solutions.com/paula-kennedy-on-platform-team-responsibilities-patterns-and-anti-patterns http://sites.libsyn.com/406853/syntasso-coo-paula-kennedy-on-platform-team-responsibilities-patterns-and-anti-patterns https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/platform-as-a/0642572243777 https://github.com/Cloud-Native-Platform-Engineering/cnpe-community/issues/79 https://www.kratix.io https://leaddev.com/ai/nobody-knows-what-programming-will-look-like-in-two-years https://leaddev.com/ai/shipping-faster-thinking-less-the-ai-code-verification-trap https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/11/20/announcing-the-platform-engineering-maturity-model https://platformengineering.com/features/portals-and-pipelines-arent-enough-avoiding-the-platform-facade DESCRIPTION Abby Bangser opens with a clear-eyed status report on platform engineering: the concept of centralizing shared capabilities with self-service delivery is well understood, but the execution keeps going wrong in the same way. Organizations move from DevOps to platform engineering, but their platform teams end up becoming the new bottleneck — a centralized group drowning under the weight of the entire organization's requests, which is exactly what DevOps was supposed to fix. Abby traces this to an architectural problem: too many platforms are still built as centralized Terraform machines rather than as a marketplace of composable offerings. Her "platform as a product" test is blunt and useful: has the team ever said "no" to a feature request, or deprecated something? If not, they don't have a product — they have a request queue. The AI dimension is where the conversation gets most urgent. Abby's position is direct: AI agents are the new forcing function for platform maturity. The biggest misconception she wants to dismantle is the persistent equation of platform engineering with infrastructure-as-code: renaming your Terraform team doesn't count. Platform engineering is about building an experience — for human developers and increasingly for AI agents — that is self-service, compliant, and coherent at organizational scale. The Team Topologies model of interaction modes (from high-collaboration to fully automated on-demand APIs) gives a useful health check for where a platform actually sits on that maturity curve. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Chankramath, Cheneweth, Oliver & Alvarez • Effective Platform Engineering • https://amzn.to/3OnxN8i Gregor Hohpe • Platform Strategy • https://amzn.to/4cxfYdb Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E56
July 31 · 28 min
The C4 Model: Visualizing Software Architecture • Simon Brown & Susanne Kaiser
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/449 Simon Brown - Author & Creator of "The C4 Model" Susanne Kaiser - Independent Tech Consultant & Author of "Architecture for Flow" RESOURCES Simon https://simonbrown.je https://bsky.app/profile/simonbrown.je https://twitter.com/simonbrown https://linkedin.com/in/simonbrownjersey https://c4model.com Susanne https://bsky.app/profile/suksr.bsky.social https://mastodon.social/@suksr https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannekaiser1 https://susannekaiser.net Links https://structurizr.com DESCRIPTION Simon Brown explains that the C4 Model started not as a grand design theory, but as a practical answer to an embarrassing problem: running a workshop on architecture diagramming, he realized he couldn't understand any of the diagrams being produced. The model formalized his own consulting practice of hierarchical handover documentation — context diagram at the top, containers below, components and code at the bottom — giving it a name and making it teachable. His core advice is to start with just the top two levels: context and container diagrams. These change infrequently, are quick to draw, and deliver immediate value. Levels three and four — components and code — are included for completeness but age rapidly with every commit, and in most cases aren't worth the maintenance overhead. Two especially practical insights emerge from the conversation. First, how to handle microservices: if your team owns all the services inside a system boundary, each service is a collection of C4 containers; if you depend on another team's service that you can't see inside, model it as an opaque software system. This maps naturally to how domain boundaries and team ownership actually work in practice. Second, the surprisingly important distinction between modeling and diagramming: C4's real value is the shared vocabulary — systems, containers, components, code — not the visual notation itself. Teams using entirely different tooling can communicate clearly because they've agreed on what the words mean. Simon is firm that there will be no C4 v2; the model is intentionally lightweight, and adding more would risk turning it into the next UML — comprehensive, heavy, and largely abandoned. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Simon Brown • The C4 Model • https://amzn.to/4xB9V33 Susanne Kaiser • Adaptive Systems With Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping & Team Topologies • https://amzn.to/3XTmNCc Nick Rozanski &, Eóin Woods • Software Systems Architecture • https://amzn.to/4cOLtTv van Kelle, Verschatse &Baas-Schwegler • Collaborative Software Design • https://amzn.to/4iv0N8I Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E55
July 24 · 44 min
Cloud, Containers, Security & AI - What’s Now, What’s Next? • Adrian Mouat, Kief Morris & Sam Newman
This interview was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Adrian Mouat - Developer Relations at Chainguard & Author of "Using Docker" Kief Morris - Author of "Infrastructure as Code" & Distinguished Engineer at Thoughtworks Sam Newman - Author of "Building Microservices" & "Monolith to Microservices" RESOURCES Adrian https://bsky.app/profile/adrianmouat.com https://twitter.com/adrianmouat https://github.com/amouat https://linkedin.com/in/adrianmouat http://www.adrianmouat.com Kief https://bsky.app/profile/kief.com https://twitter.com/kief https://github.com/kief https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiefmorris https://infrastructure-as-code.com https://kief.com Sam https://twitter.com/samnewman https://www.linkedin.com/in/samnewman http://samnewman.io http://samnewman.io/blog https://github.com/snewman ABSTRACT In this session, Sam Newman will interview Kief Morris and Adrian Mouat, both experts in their field. We will explore the current reality of security in the container world, how infrastructure automation is impacted by AI, and whether platform teams are actually working. We’ll also be taking lots of questions from the audience! [...] Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3938 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Adrian Mouat • Using Docker • https://amzn.to/3PEYIJL Liz Rice • Container Security • https://amzn.to/3oU4iJe Kief Morris • Infrastructure as Code • https://amzn.to/4e6EBQc Sam Newman • Building Resilient Distributed Systems • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-resilient-distributed/9781098163532 Sam Newman • Monolith to Microservices • https://amzn.to/2Nml96E Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E54
July 17 · 1 hr 3 min
Signals & Levers • Elisabeth Hendrickson, Joel Tosi & Charles Humble
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Elisabeth Hendrickson - Advisor, Coach, Speaker & Co-Author of "Signals & Levers" Joel Tosi - Co-Founder & CTO at Dojo & Co & Co-Author of "Signals & Levers" Charles Humble - Freelance Techie, Podcaster, Editor, Author & Consultant Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/448 RESOURCES Elisabeth https://ruby.social/@testobsessed https://github.com/testobsessed https://www.linkedin.com/in/testobsessed https://curiousduck.io Joel https://mastodon.social/@joeltosi https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-tosi-531a3b Charles https://bsky.app/profile/charleshumble.bsky.social https://linkedin.com/in/charleshumble https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble https://conissaunce.com Links https://ruthmalan.com http://www.ask-force.org/web/Discourse/Rittel-Dilemmas-General-Theory-Planning-1973.pdf DESCRIPTION Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi open by explaining why systems thinking is having a moment right now: organizations that went all-in on Agile and DevOps are finding those returns plateauing, and the rise of AI is forcing engineering teams to reexamine where their real bottlenecks are. The book, Signals & Levers, gives software engineers a practical vocabulary and toolkit for that examination. A core insight is that most organizational dysfunction isn't caused by bad people or bad intentions, but by systems that produce bad outcomes predictably and structurally. The named archetypes in the book — over 20 of them, covering patterns like escalating technical debt, the "fixes that fail" loop, and the boiling frog — give teams a shared language to recognize and reason about those patterns without having to discover them from scratch. The most practically actionable section of the conversation covers signals versus levers: understanding the difference between information (a signal) and an intervention point (a lever) is the foundation for making changes that actually work rather than changes that feel productive and achieve nothing. On AI, both authors are cautious in the right ways: Elisabeth uses it daily as a thinking partner but keeps herself firmly at the steering wheel. Joel's warning is starker — AI amplifies whatever is already true about your organization, including dysfunction, and if it lets you ship faster than you can learn, the consequences may be severe. The book closes with an exercise for the reader: if AI doubles your delivery speed, what happens when you can ship faster than you can adapt? RECOMMENDED BOOKS Elisabeth Hendrickson & Joel Tosi • Signals & Levers • https://amzn.to/4g6Fb3C Diana Montalion • Learning Systems Thinking • https://amzn.to/3ZpycdJ Don Norman • The Design of Everyday Things • https://amzn.to/4fV6QVl Gene Kim • The Unicorn Project • https://amzn.to/3woXQDz Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford • The Phoenix Project • https://amzn.to/3X9cYxa Peter Degrace & Leslie Hulet Stahl • Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions • https://amzn.to/3ScP0D9 Frederick Brooks Jr. • The Mythical Man-Month • https://amzn.to/4gd10OV Gerald Weinberg • An Introduction to General Systems Thinking • https://amzn.to/4dZCsaO Donella H. Meadows • Thinking in Systems • https://amzn.to/3XtqYCV Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E53
July 10 · 34 min
The Architect's Guide to the AI Era • Luca Mezzalira & Teena Idnani
This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. https://gotopia.tech Luca Mezzalira - Solutions Architect, Consultant, International Speaker & Author of "Building Micro-Frontends" Teena Idnani - Senior Solutions Architect at Microsoft & Woman in Tech Leader Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/447 RESOURCES Luca https://www.buildingmicrofrontends.com https://twitter.com/lucamezzalira https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucamezzalira https://linktr.ee/lucamezzalira https://lucamezzalira.com Teena https://www.linkedin.com/in/teenaidnani DESCRIPTION Luca Mezzalira and Teena Idnani open with a clear framing: AI is accelerating certain tasks architects do, but the fundamentals — understanding context, connecting technical decisions to business capability, designing for evolutionary systems — are unchanged and arguably more important than ever. Luca identifies what he calls the shift from a T-shaped to an "M-shaped" architect: broader and deeper simultaneously, using AI as a research accelerator that collapses days of trade-off analysis into hours. Both agree that the biggest current risk isn't that AI will replace architects, but that AI-generated code can look convincingly correct and pass initial testing while concealing edge-case failures that only surface under load, regulatory audit, or upstream change — particularly dangerous in regulated industries like finance. The conversation sharpens around what architects must double down on to stay relevant. Luca advocates for merging deterministic and probabilistic systems through harness engineering — combining linters, static analysis, and deterministic guardrails with AI code assistants to produce more predictable outcomes. More broadly, both conclude that empathy is now a core technical skill: the architect's real job is riding the "elevator" between the engine room and the C-suite, translating freely in both directions. Luca's rule of thumb has shifted from 70% people and context, 30% technical — to nearly 90/10 in the AI era. The competitive edge for architects, they agree, is not in generating code, but in knowing which problems are worth solving and why. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Luca Mezzalira • Building Micro-Frontends • https://amzn.to/4ekqV5Y Luca Mezzalira • Front-End Reactive Architectures • https://amzn.to/43a8VVJ Gregor Hohpe • The Software Architect Elevator • https://amzn.to/3F6d2ax Gregor Hohpe • Enterprise Integration Patterns, Vol 2 • https://amzn.to/3TNedQ3 Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E52
July 3 · 22 min
Model-Based Systems Eng. & Requirements Definition • Dennis Hansen & Jorge Orellana
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Dennis Hansen - Air Force Veteran, Chief Systems Engineer & Author of "Model-Based Systems Engineering and Requirements Definition" Jorge Orellana - Model Based Systems Engineer at IERUS Technologies & CEO & Founder at SCATTERBRAINS Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/445 RESOURCES Jorge https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorge-orellana-0b729129 DESCRIPTION Dennis Hansen brings over six decades of systems engineering experience to this GOTO Book Club conversation — from Air Force airborne navigation technician to Chief Systems Engineer at L3Harris on programs including the complete rebuild of the GOES-R ground system for NOAA and NASA. His book argues that the fundamental failure mode in complex system development is the same every time: requirements are defined too loosely, too late, or across multiple model layers simultaneously. He structures the approach using an onion model — a layering framework he was taught by a Motorola engineer in 1961 — where each layer (mission, capabilities, activities, technical requirements, specifications) must be completed before the next is begun. Skipping layers or trying to do two at once invariably produces excess or faulty requirements that surface as expensive failures during system testing, or worse, after deployment. The second half of the conversation focuses on why modeling tools are databases, not drawing programs — a distinction Dennis considers critical. Every element in the model carries its associated requirements and the reasoning behind design decisions, which means that when you return to work after a weekend, you don't lose hours reconstructing your thinking. More importantly, when change requests arrive — and they always do — a maintained model lets you trace the impact backwards through the system and understand exactly what has to be modified, rather than slapping on a fix that creates five new problems. Dennis's closing advice is the thread that runs through the entire book: collaborate at every stage, every discipline working together rather than in silos, and define things properly upfront. Everything else follows from that. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Dennis Hansen • Model-Based Systems Engineering and Requirements Definition • https://amzn.to/4e6IiqJ Kossiakoff, Seymour, Flanigan & Biemer • Systems Engineering Principles and Practice • https://amzn.to/4a7Elj9 Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass • Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook • https://amzn.to/4wYnj12 Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E51
June 26 · 32 min
Sovereign Cloud: Who Really Owns Your Infrastructure? • Jake Warner & Charles Humble
This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted in May 2026. https://gotopia.tech Read the full transcription of this interview here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/445 Jake Warner - Co-Founder & CEO at Cycle @JakeWarner Charles Humble - Freelance Techie, Podcaster, Editor, Author & Consultant RESOURCES Jake https://bsky.app/profile/jakewarner.com https://x.com/jakewarner https://github.com/JakeWarner https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakewarner https://jakewarner.com Charles https://bsky.app/profile/charleshumble.bsky.social https://linkedin.com/in/charleshumble https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble https://conissaunce.com DESCRIPTION Jake Warner, co-founder and CEO of Cycle.io, traces a pattern he's watched repeat itself since his OpenStack days: a new orchestration technology arrives, developers adopt it enthusiastically, it grows in complexity, and organizations eventually ask whether managing it is really a core competency. He made a decade-long bet that Kubernetes would follow the same arc — and built Cycle as the answer: a distributed control plane that lets companies own their own infrastructure and compute while still getting a clean, platform-like experience on top of it. The key design principle is a high ceiling without sacrificing simplicity — companies shouldn't have to re-platform every time they grow, and they shouldn't have to give up infrastructure ownership to get ease of use. The conversation then pivots to Sovereign Cloud, which Jake frames not as a niche regulatory concern but as a fundamental trust and ownership question. He draws attention to a risk many organizations underestimate: the control plane itself. Unlike many platforms where the control plane is a single point of failure and a blackbox, Cycle's architecture ensures that even if the control plane goes down, customer infrastructure keeps running — servers maintain their own manifests and restart containers independently. Looking ahead, Jake expects more regions and countries to build their own cloud equivalents, driven by privacy concerns, data residency laws, and geopolitical pressures that are accelerating faster than the technology is. His conclusion: the organizations that handed AWS all the keys are beginning to realize the cost — and the industry is correcting. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Alan Hamilton • Sovereign Cloud Operations • https://amzn.to/4dqYAe4 Leonard J. Horta • The Cloud Exit Strategy • https://amzn.to/4dXqeiN Charles Curry & Tanessa Curry • Cooling the Cloud • https://amzn.to/4a0d4iA Liz Rice • Container Security • https://amzn.to/3oU4iJe Liz Rice • Kubernetes Security • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-security/9781492039075 Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E50
June 23 · 42 min
Dungeons, Dragons & Developers • Matt Brunt
This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2025. https://yowcon.com Matt Brunt - Dungeon Master & Team Tinkerer RESOURCES https://bsky.app/profile/brunty.me https://mastodon.social/@brunty https://github.com/Brunty https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbrunt https://brunty.me ABSTRACT You enter the dungeon, as the echoes of your footsteps sound around you, something catches your eye - is that… oh, oh no. You grab your trusty sword and with your fellow adventurers, you seek to overcome the mighty challenge that lays ahead of you: building software. This talk is a look at some of the parallels between Dungeons and Dragons, and software development. We’ll see how lessons learned through delving into dungeons and fighting monsters with a party of adventurers can help teams of developers when building software in the real world. Are you ready to join me in a mighty quest for better software? [...] Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://yowcon.com/brisbane-2025/sessions/3641 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Heidi Helfand • Dynamic Reteaming • https://amzn.to/3Fvu5BA Heidi Helfand • How to Change Your Teams • https://leanpub.com/DRTGuide Carl Larson & Frank M J LaFasto • Teamwork • https://amzn.to/4cFWseQ Gene Kim & Steve Spear • Wiring the Winning Organization • https://amzn.to/3QJcfBp Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E49
June 19 · 45 min
Continuous Delivery in a World of Constant Change • Abby Bangser & Dave Farley
This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Abby Bangser - Principal Engineer at Syntasso & Team Topologies Advocate Dave Farley - Bestselling Author, Founder & Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd. RESOURCES Abby https://bsky.app/profile/abangser.bsky.social https://twitter.com/a_bangser https://github.com/abangser https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser https://www.syntasso.io/members-area/abby/profile Dave https://bsky.app/profile/davefarley77.bsky.social https://www.continuous-delivery.co.uk https://linkedin.com/in/dave-farley-a67927 https://twitter.com/davefarley77 http://www.davefarley.net DESCRIPTION Dave Farley and Abby Bangser open with a clear statement: Continuous Delivery isn't a relic of the pre-AI era — it's the foundation that makes the AI era survivable. Dave's definition is simple but consequential: software should always be in a releasable state, verified after every small change. That's not just a workflow preference; it's the same incremental, hypothesis-driven approach that underpins science and engineering. In an AI-assisted world where code can be generated far faster than humans can reason about it, the discipline of small, safe, verifiable steps becomes more critical, not less. The danger isn't AI writing bad code — it's AI writing a lot of code very fast that nobody is properly checking. The conversation turns to a genuinely alarming DORA report statistic: 70% of developers using AI tools don't distrust the output. Abby draws a parallel to the long-running debate over whether developers can be trusted to test their own code — they usually can't, without a deliberate change in perspective. The same challenge applies to AI-generated code: you need to consciously shift from "prompter" mode to "verifier" mode, and most developers aren't making that switch. Dave closes with a surprising note of optimism: AI may be the industry's best-ever opportunity to finally get XP practices — small increments, automated tests, continuous feedback — embedded into how teams actually work. Not because anyone chose to adopt them ideologically, but because working without them while using AI is visibly, measurably risky. Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3779 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Kief Morris • Infrastructure as Code • https://amzn.to/4e6EBQc Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • http://amzn.to/3sVLyLQ Dave Thomas • simplicity • https://amzn.to/43FghBJ Dave Farley & Jez Humble • Continuous Delivery • https://amzn.to/3ocIHwd David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • https://amzn.to/3GI468M Dave Farley • Continuous Delivery Pipelines • https://amzn.to/3rjetdi Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E48
June 16 · 33 min
Go for Java Programmers • Barry Feigenbaum & Shon Saliga
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Barry Feigenbaum - Retired Sr. Principal Software Engineer & Author of "Go for Java Programmers" Shon Saliga - IBM Storage Evangelist Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/444 RESOURCES Barry https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryfeigenbaum Shon https://www.linkedin.com/in/shon-saliga-32336b2 DESCRIPTION Dr. Barry Feigenbaum — an IBM, Amazon and Dell veteran with a PhD in Computer Engineering and decades of Java experience — spent time working with Go on microservices and liked it enough to write the book he wished had existed when he made the switch. In this GOTO Book Club episode with longtime colleague Shon Saliga, he walks through the core contrasts: Go is a compiled language that targets a narrower domain than Java — primarily command-line tools and web servers — but excels there with smaller binaries, faster startup, and dramatically lower container overhead. Concurrency is the headline difference: Go's goroutines are far lighter than Java threads, and its channel-based communication model sidesteps many of the problems that make concurrent Java code hard to reason about. The error handling conversation is particularly illuminating. Java's exception mechanism, while powerful, encourages developers to overuse it for ordinary error reporting — Go simply doesn't allow that by design. Errors in Go are return values, not throws; panics are reserved for truly catastrophic situations. Similarly, Go's implicit interfaces (if you implement the methods, you implement the interface — no declaration required) give the language a flexibility that feels alien to Java developers at first but becomes a strength quickly. Barry's conclusion is clear: for greenfield servers and containerized microservices, Go is worth serious consideration — and for Java developers willing to reset a few mental models, the transition is more tractable than it looks. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Barry Feigenbaum • Go for Java Programmers • https://amzn.to/4uRL3li Ken Christopher, Barry Feigenbaum, Shon Salig • DOS 5: The Basic • https://amzn.to/4tKDVGs A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9 Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E47
June 12 · 49 min
Engineering Leadership in Turbulent Times • Sarah Wells, Pat Kua & Daniel Terhorst-North
This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant & Author of "Enabling Microservice Success" Patrick Kua - Founder of the Tech Lead Academy Daniel Terhorst-North - Originator of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) & Principal at Dan North & Associates RESOURCES Sarah https://bsky.app/profile/sarahjwells.bsky.social https://linkedin.com/in/sarahjwells1 https://www.sarahwells.dev Patrick https://hachyderm.io/@patkua https://twitter.com/patkua https://www.linkedin.com/in/patkua https://github.com/thekua https://patkua.com Daniel https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod https://github.com/tastapod https://mastodon.social/@tastapod http://dannorth.net/blog DESCRIPTION Engineering leadership becomes significantly more complex in times of uncertainty. This conversation highlights how leaders must shift from rigid plans to adaptable thinking—balancing delivery, team well-being, and long-term direction while navigating constant change. A key takeaway is that great leadership isn’t about having all the answers, but about creating clarity, trust, and resilience within teams. The speakers emphasize communication, context-awareness, and empowering engineers as the foundation for thriving—even when everything feels unstable. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Sarah Wells • Enabling Microservice Success • https://amzn.to/4aa8xrv Patrick Kua • Talking with Tech Leads • https://amzn.to/3ECO3xB Patrick Kua • The Retrospective Handbook • https://amzn.to/4jpxxQN Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons & Patrick Kua • Building Evolutionary Architectures • https://amzn.to/42qXJV2 Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising • Fearless Change • https://amzn.to/49uuune Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising • More Fearless Change • https://amzn.to/4tX6GAR Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E46
June 9 · 34 min
Modern Concurrency in Java • Bazlur Rahman & Michael Redlich
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub A N M Bazlur Rahman - Java Champion & Author of "Modern Concurrency in Java" Michael Redlich - Java Champion & Lead Java Queue News Editor at InfoQ Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/443 RESOURCES Bazlur https://bsky.app/profile/bazlur.ca https://x.com/bazlur_rahman https://github.com/rokon12 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazlur https://bio.site/bazlur https://bazlur.ca Michael https://twitter.com/mpredli https://github.com/mpredli01 https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-redlich-13a966 https://about.me/mpredli DESCRIPTION In this GOTO Book Club episode, Java Champion A N M Bazlur Rahman joins host and fellow Java Champion Michael Redlich to discuss Modern Concurrency in Java — the first comprehensive update to Java concurrency literature in 20 years. Bazlur traces his motivation to the arrival of virtual threads in JDK 21, which he describes as a fundamental shift in Java's concurrency cost model: platform threads were expensive and scarce, demanding careful pooling; virtual threads are cheap, plentiful, and behave like ordinary threads from the developer's perspective, without requiring a new programming model. The book covers this evolution end-to-end, from the history of threads through to structured concurrency, scope values, and the modern frameworks that have already adopted virtual threads — most with a single config change. The conversation also takes a nuanced look at reactive programming's future. Bazlur's conclusion is that reactive remains compelling in specific contexts — event-driven streaming systems, architectures needing end-to-end back-pressure — but it's no longer the default answer to scalability. For most microservices doing blocking I/O, virtual threads are now the stronger default, and reactive becomes a deliberate architectural choice rather than an automatic one. The book's goal is to give developers both the conceptual grounding and the practical guidance to make that choice confidently — understanding the tool one level deep, so they can design better systems, not just configure their way through a framework. RECOMMENDED BOOKS A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9 Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E45
June 5 · 33 min
Roc & Zig: A Compiler Rewrite Story • Anjana Vakil & Richard Feldman
This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. https://gotopia.tech Richard Feldman - Software Engineer at Zed Industries & Author of "Elm in Action" Anjana Vakil - Freelance Software Engineer & Developer Educator Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/442 RESOURCES Richard https://bsky.app/profile/rtfeldman.bsky.social https://twitter.com/rtfeldman https://www.linkedin.com/in/rtfeldman https://github.com/rtfeldman Anjana https://bsky.app/profile/anjana.dev https://github.com/vakila https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjanavakil https://anjana.dev Links https://zed.dev https://adventofcode.com https://www.roc-lang.org DESCRIPTION Richard Feldman and Anjana Vakil trace the Roc programming language's ambitious ground-up compiler rewrite — from Rust to Zig — which happened to coincide almost exactly with the year AI coding assistants went from useful to transformative. Richard describes how AI's role shifted over just 12 months: from mechanical test-porting grunt work, where it was reliable but limited, to genuine architectural collaboration on harder problems. The key insight is that guardrails don't live in prompts ("never do this" gets ignored constantly), they live in the code itself — invariants and automated feedback loops that catch the AI when it strays, rather than instructions it will cheerfully disregard. The conversation widens into what the AI era means for software quality and trust. Both are wary of the coming wave of AI-generated "slop" — buggy, mediocre software produced at scale — but Richard makes the counterintuitive case that competitive pressure might actually force quality up: if everything is slop, the products that aren't will stand out hard. Anjana draws a parallel to consumer electronics brand trust: just like we pay a premium for the USB-C cable we know won't cause a fire, developers and users will increasingly gravitate toward names and communities they can vouch for. The open source contribution model, they agree, needs new systems to navigate this — and Roc v1, due before the end of 2026, will be a test case. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Richard Feldman • Elm in Action • https://amzn.to/387kujI Dean Bocker • Don't Panic! I'm A Professional Zig Programmer • https://amzn.to/3ljKT8d Tim McNamara • Rust in Action • https://amzn.to/3ux2R9u David Drysdal • Effective Rust • https://amzn.to/4dAjbdX Eric Normand • Grokking Simplicity • https://amzn.to/3gz7o3C Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E44
June 2 · 53 min
Tech Truth: Agile Evolution & the Future of SW Engineering • Martin Fowler & Kent Beck
This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Martin Fowler - Pioneer of Various Topics around Object-Oriented Technology & Agile Methods Kent Beck - Software Engineer & Creator of Extreme Programming RESOURCES Martin https://x.com/martinfowler https://www.martinfowler.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-fowler-com Kent https://bsky.app/profile/kentbeck.bsky.social https://www.kentbeck.com https://github.com/KentBeck https://twitter.com/KentBeck https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentbeck https://tidyfirst.substack.com/about DESCRIPTION Martin Fowler and Kent Beck — two of the authors of the Agile Manifesto and perhaps the most influential duo in software engineering history — reunite for an unscripted conversation spanning thirty years of friendship, craft, and the relentless pace of change. They discuss how AI ("the Genie") has become a genuine part of both their workflows: Kent uses it as an endlessly patient tutor for exploration between features, while Martin distinguishes between AI as a tool for talking to computers versus the irreplaceable human skill of talking to the people who need software built. Both are optimistic about the future, though Kent's optimism takes characteristically sharp form: he expects the industry to keep making the same mistakes, which means he'll still be employed teaching the same lessons 20 years from now. The conversation also revisits the Agile Manifesto at nearly 25 years old, with both reflecting on what Extreme Programming got right — feedback loops, testability, evolutionary design — and what the broader adoption missed or diluted. Martin is candid that progress in software has been slower than he'd like, though he points to a "forest" of practitioners who have genuinely advanced the craft. On the question of a Manifesto reunion, both gently redirect: it belongs to the next generation now. Their closing advice to a junior developer in the audience is perhaps the most memorable exchange in the whole session — use the gaps between features to learn, and never forget that understanding the domain and the people in it is ultimately what separates good programmers from great ones. Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3780 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Martin Fowler • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3EVcHXQ Martin Fowler & Pramod Sadalage • NoSQL Distilled • https://amzn.to/3ChIpu7 Martin Fowler • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture • https://amzn.to/3lp4sIq Martin Fowler • Domain-Specific Languages • https://amzn.to/3nzOIFk Martin Fowler • UML Distilled • https://amzn.to/3kahjyA Kent Beck • Tidy First? • https://amzn.to/4gscjjK Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres • Extreme Programming Explained • https://amzn.to/3sBASDG Kent Beck • Test Driven Development • https://amzn.to/3U4AXLs Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN Kent Beck • Implementation Patterns • https://amzn.to/3sBlCGL Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E43
May 29 · 39 min
Spec-Driven Dev Is Back. But Not How You Think • Daniel Terhorst-North & Gojko Adzic
This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. https://gotopia.tech Daniel Terhorst-North - Originator of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) & Principal at Dan North & Associates Gojko Adzic - Software Delivery Consultant & Author of "Lizard Optimization" and many more Books Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/441 RESOURCES Daniel https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod https://github.com/tastapod https://mastodon.social/@tastapod http://dannorth.net/blog Gojko https://www.linkedin.com/in/gojko https://github.com/gojko https://twitter.com/gojkoadzic https://gojko.net DESCRIPTION Gojko Adzic and Daniel Terhorst-North tackle the question every software team is wrestling with right now: does AI-assisted development actually work, and if so, how? Their verdict is nuanced. One-shot "spec-to-product" approaches are doomed — both compare them to CASE tools and model-driven architecture of past decades, great for selling to enterprise buyers, disappointing in practice. What does work is tight, iterative feedback loops where AI handles the more deterministic, structural parts of the job while humans retain ownership of domain knowledge, semantic correctness, and architectural judgment. The most practically useful thread of the conversation is Gojko's insight on guardrails: instead of relying on markdown files and hoping your AI agent stays in line, encode your rules as real, automated linting checks — ones that run in CI, apply to humans and bots alike, and include actionable error messages. Daniel adds a complementary observation: AI shines brightest not on core domain code, but on the "quality of life" tasks that never quite make it to the backlog. Their shared conclusion is that the teams winning with AI right now are the ones treating published frameworks as starting templates to rapidly adapt — not gospel to follow blindly. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Gojko Adzic • Lizard Optimization • https://leanpub.com/lizardoptimization Gojko Adzic • Impact Mapping • https://amzn.to/3dQFCOq Adzic, Evans & Roden • Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests • https://amzn.to/3yuDaoL Adzic, Evans & Korac • Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories • https://amzn.to/3jQ4QjP Adzic & Korac • Humans vs Computers • https://amzn.to/2Utz55A Gojko Adzic • Specification by Example • https://amzn.to/3hHrEjb Eliyahu M. Goldratt • Beyond the Goal • https://amzn.to/3wDbAL1 Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E42
May 26 · 39 min
Connection is Everything: Extended Q&A • Ken Hughes
This Q&A session was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Ken Hughes - The King of Customer Experience Keynote available here: https://youtu.be/tHf-BFM2CNM RESOURCES https://twitter.com/KenHughesIE https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenhughesie https://www.kenhughes.info DESCRIPTION In this extended Q&A following his GOTO Copenhagen 2025 keynote, Ken Hughes — "The King of Customer Experience" — tackles the questions every business avoids asking honestly. He argues that employee experience always comes first: you cannot ask people to deliver extraordinary customer moments unless they themselves feel seen, empowered, and purposeful at work. On ROI, he challenges the entire premise, proposing a shift from "Return on Investment" to "Desire to Invest" — because measuring caring with a ledger is the behavior of, as he puts it, a toxic psychopath. The real unlock, he insists, is placing the user genuinely at the centre — not as a metric, but as a human being who deserves to feel like the only person in the room. The conversation turns to AI's role in making this scalable, and here Hughes lands his most forward-looking point: the era of having to choose between serving the masses and making an individual feel special is ending. AI will enable what he calls "scaled personalization" — the ability to make every customer their own blue dot simultaneously, the way a personalized Minecraft lesson teaches area and perimeter to an 8-year-old who wasn't getting it in a classroom. The session closes with a striking reminder: the brands people remember aren't the ones with the slickest products — they're the ones that made them feel genuinely seen. A nurse. A fishing magazine. Five dollars. That's the bar. Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3778 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ken Hughes • Taylormaking • https://amzn.to/3WOEgd9 Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz • The Good Life • https://amzn.to/4orelUS Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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S6 · E41
May 22 · 41 min
State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans
This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026. https://gotopia.tech Ben Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more Books Read the full transcription of this interview here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/439 RESOURCES Ben https://mastodon.social/@kittylyst https://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.social https://github.com/kittylyst https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylyst https://www.kittylyst.com Links https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25 https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitation https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968 https://openjdk.org/jeps/353 https://openjdk.org/jeps/416 https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffm https://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458 https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099 DESCRIPTION In this GOTO State of the Art, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks. The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon. His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9 Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!
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