Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights

overcommitted.dev | Women in Tech and Tech Mentorship

Join Overcommitted for insightful conversations with women in tech, software engineers, and programming experts focused on advancing software engineering careers. Explore topics such as software ethics, system reliability, infrastructure resilience, programming best practices, and agentic AI development. Our hosts share career insights and tech mentorship to boost developer productivity and code quality for passionate programmers and software engineers alike.

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#75
Tuesday · 44 min
Life Tech Stack | Developer Productivity Beyond Work
Engineers architect systems for work—but what about life? In this episode, Bethany, Brittany, and Erika reveal their personal tech stacks: the tools, habits, and sometimes deliberately low-tech strategies that power their daily routines, family life, and wellness. Discover how software engineer thinking applies to work-life balance, plus practical productivity systems you can steal for your own life. Links https://www.trustyduck.dev/posts/tech-stack-2025/ https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://github.com/ngerakines/jd https://wisprflow.ai/ https://obsidian.md/ https://www.chezmoi.io/ https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Cancelling-Headphones-Bluetooth https://www.goodinside.com https://www.readtangle.com/ https://www.sportsgossipshow.com/ https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/classical-music-happy-hour https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pragmatic-engineer/id1769051199 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-brew-ride-home/id1355212895 Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E74
August 25 · 40 min
Content Creation, Craft, and Code: Inside Dreams of Code with Elliott Minns
Elliott Minns takes us inside Dreams of Code and his path from software engineer and manager to full-time content creator. He shares how he turns complex technical work into clear stories, balances depth with accessibility for a developer audience, and keeps craft at the center of the creative process. His latest project, a next-gen video editor built in Rust, brings those worlds together through technically ambitious work involving hardware, media encoding, and zero-copy performance. The conversation also explores how ADHD shaped Elliott's career and creative process, what he learned from Dan Martell's "Buy Back Your Time," and why delegating to skilled humans still beats delegating to AI for some creative tasks. We dig into the economics and limitations of LLM-powered product features, how Elliott handles feedback from a technical audience, and why the ability to build software by hand still matters even as AI changes day-to-day development. https://www.youtube.com/@dreamsofcode https://x.com/dreamsofcode_io https://www.buybackyourtime.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhjEL817Onw https://www.youtube.com/@dreamsofautonomy Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev
S1 · E73
August 18 · 39 min
Is Pair Programming Dead? | Code Quality & Engineering Culture Debate
Summary This week on Overcommitted, Brittany, Bethany, and Erika try out a new format: instead of interviewing a guest, the three of them rate a running list of software engineering topics as overrated or underrated. They start with the fun stuff — dark mode, mechanical keyboards, standing desks, Vim, dotfiles — before moving into practices and process, where the real disagreements show up. Pair programming and code review as a quality gate both get contested, with opinions that have shifted noticeably since AI tools entered the picture. From there the conversation covers stand-ups, sprint retros, story point estimation, 1:1s with managers, microservices, serverless, feature flags, software rewrites, vibe coding, and the myth of the 10x engineer, with each host landing in a different place on more than a few of them. It's a faster-paced, more opinionated episode than usual, and a good one for anyone who wants to hear three engineers who've worked together for years actually disagree on record. Links Loop Engineering Blog Post: https://brittany-ellich.offprint.app/a/3mrjj34puva23-108-prs-in-eight-days-accidentally-discovering-loop-engineering Steve Yegge Blog Post: https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ Rewrites Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhlnan0dSUE&t=5s Sean Goedecke Article: https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-dont-have-to-be-smart-if-you-think-clearly/ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠ Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com ⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E72
August 11 · 36 min
Starting a Software Engineering Career | Beating Imposter Syndrome in the AI Era with Sreya Sarathy
SummaryWhat does it look like to start a software engineering career right now, when AI has erased the "grunt work" that used to be how new grads learned? Brittany and Bethany sit down with Sreya Sarathy, a software engineer at Northwestern Mutual and 2025 UW–Madison grad (double major in computer science and data science), who spent her first year out of school running a free virtual panel series that drew 1,500+ registrations across speakers from Apple, Amazon, IBM, Starbucks, Ford, Deloitte, and GitHub.Sreya shares the Stack Overflow moment that broke her imposter syndrome spiral in college, why adding more to her plate cured her burnout instead of making it worse, how she built the early-career community she wished existed, and what it's like being handed advanced work as a new grad because AI now does the tasks juniors used to cut their teeth on. Plus: her product teardowns on Substack, what senior engineers can actually do to support early-career folks, and her dream of a low-pressure "optimize your life" hackathon.Links- Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sreya.sarathy/- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sreyasarathy/ - Substack - https://substack.com/@sreyasarathy- Website - https://sreyasarathy.com/- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - https://bookshop.org/p/books/designing-data-intensive-applications-the-big-ideas-behind-reliable-scalable-and-maintainable-systems-chris-riccomini/7dfa8afce8f3816e?ean=9781098119065&bkshp-astro=t- Don’t Make Me Think -https://bookshop.org/p/books/don-t-make-me-think-revisited-a-common-sense-approach-to-web-usability-steve-krug/d30340ad4751d00d?ean=9780321965516&bkshp-astro=tHosts:- Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev- Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠⁠ ⁠- Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com
S1 · E71
August 4 · 35 min
Closed That Tab: Agentic Identity, AI Security Incidents, and Loop Engineering
This week we're trying something new: Closed That Tab, a segment where each host shares one thing they finally read that was worth the time. Erika brings a post on agentic AI identity and delegation - covering why OAuth isn't quite enough for agents that accumulate permissions across a request lifecycle, and what transaction tokens (an IETF draft proposal) offer as a solution. Bethany covers Simon Willison's breakdown of the OpenAI security incident, where an eval harness escaped its sandbox by chaining zero-day vulnerabilities - and what responsible sandboxing and observability should have caught earlier. Brittany shares how she accidentally built a loop engineering system before knowing the term existed: a continuously running agent harness using git worktrees, sub-agents, and a memory file to close around 20 PRs a day, including self-healing flaky tests. Links: Erika’s Agentic AI Identity Read: https://khaledzaky.com/blog/delegation-is-the-real-identity-problem-in-agentic-ai Bethany’s OpenAI CyberAttack Read: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack Empire of AI: https://bookshop.org/p/books/empire-of-ai-dreams-and-nightmares-in-sam-altman-s-openai-karen-hao Brittany’s Loop Engineering Read: https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ Superpowers: https://github.com/obra/superpowers Brittany’s Loop Engineering Blog post: https://brittany-ellich.offprint.app/a/3mrjj34puva23-108-prs-in-eight-days-accidentally-discovering-loop-engineering Hosts: Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠ Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com ⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
#70
July 28 · 1 hr 5 min
Open and Async Work | Remote Engineering Culture with Ben Balter
Learn how async-first communication transforms remote engineering culture and developer productivity. Ben Balter, open source governance expert, shares practical strategies for building transparent, documented workflows that help distributed teams collaborate without synchronous bottlenecks—and why this matters for engineers navigating complex project ownership. Links https://ben.balter.com/contact/ https://bsky.app/profile/ben.balter.com https://open-and-async.com/ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠⁠ ⁠ Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E69
July 21 · 36 min
Building Terminal Graph, a Spatial Development Environment, with Caidan Williams
Caidan Williams put your terminals, browsers, editors, and AI agents on one infinite canvas. He joins Erika and Brittany to talk about Terminal Graph, the spatial development environment for macOS he built for himself first, and the self-taught path that took him from Minecraft mods at 13 to partner at a Seattle dev studio. We get into the dataflow model that sets Terminal Graph apart, like piping a git diff straight into Claude Code or grepping a dev server's logs into a browser node. Caidan explains Blueprints, his approach to sharing a whole team workflow as a single file, and what it's like to run a product inside a holacracy with no bosses and no venture money. Then he tells his career story. No college degree. A gap year spent applying to around 500 companies. Computer vision on dental and MRI images. Burnout, a layoff, and a cross-country move to Seattle with one duffel bag. His honest takeaway is that persistence, not raw talent, is what got him here. If you build your own tools, wire agents into your workflow, or you're finding a non-traditional way into engineering, this one is for you. Links Terminal Graph: https://terminalgraph.com/ Caidan Williams: https://caidan.dev/ Tools mentioned LazyGit: https://lazygit.dev/ Neovim: https://neovim.io/ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ ⁠ Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com/ Follow Overcommitted so you don't miss next week's episode, and share it with an engineer who'd like it.
#68
July 14 · 47 min
What VCs Want from Tech Talent | Engineering Careers with Melanie Nabar
What do investors actually look for in software engineers and tech founders? Melanie Nabar pulls back the curtain on what VCs see when evaluating engineering talent, sharing insider insights on career growth, technical credibility, and the skills that matter most when funding is on the line. Perfect for engineers ready to level up their career strategy. Links Melanie Nabar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniejordannabar/ Volition Capital: https://www.volitioncapital.com/ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠ ⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E67
July 7 · 32 min
Safety-Critical Software | System Reliability for Live Events with Lars Olson
Summary What happens when a software bug stops a concert—or endangers a performer flying above the stage? System reliability takes on new meaning in live event tech. This week, Brittany and Erika talk with Lars Olson, full stack engineer at TAIT, about building safety-critical systems that power the world's biggest tours and theme parks. Lars shares how React and Rust meet real-world consequences, why error boundaries matter more than you think, and what production safety teaches us about code quality and engineering culture. Links My Hometown Recipes - ⁠https://myhometownrecipes.com/⁠ Erik Lars Olson - LinkedIn - ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/eriklarsolson/⁠ Bluesky - ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/eriklars.bsky.social⁠ X - ⁠https://x.com/energyblazer⁠ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com⁠ Erika "Eggyhead" Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead⁠
S1 · E66
June 30 · 41 min
Keeping Skills Sharp in the AI Age | Developer Productivity Essentials
As AI code intelligence tools reshape daily programming work, developer productivity and career growth depend less on speed and more on judgment. In this episode, we explore what skills actually matter when AI writes code—and why engineers need a new mindset about staying sharp. From code quality ownership to learning tactics, discover the practical skills that keep your value rising in an AI-native engineering world. Links: Math books: https://www.bravernewmath.com/ Crystal Bepis: https://crystalbepis.com/ GitHub Copilot App: https://github.com/features/ai/github-app Hosts: Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠ Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com ⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E65
June 23 · 43 min
Software Engineering in Production With Cameron Etezadi
What happens when coding becomes nearly free - but everything else in the software delivery process doesn't? Cameron Etezadi, CTO at LaunchDarkly, joins Erika, Brittany, and Bethany to talk about the gap between code that compiles and code that actually works in production. They cover vibe coding pitfalls, the release-observe-iterate loop, how AI is shifting engineers toward frontline manager behaviors, and why speed without control is a liability - not an asset. Cameron also shares how LaunchDarkly changed their intern interview process to reflect the AI era, what EU regulations mean for human accountability in AI-generated code, and why the classic two-pizza team is giving way to something much smaller. Cameron Etezadi is the CTO at LaunchDarkly and brings experience scaling engineering organizations at Google, HashiCorp, and SAP. He's also a licensed flight instructor with ratings in fixed-wing, seaplane, helicopter, and gyroplane - and has logged over 400 skydives. Show notes: Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronetezadi LaunchDarkly: https://launchdarkly.com LaunchDarkly leadership page: https://launchdarkly.com/leadership/ Rainier Flight Service bio: https://www.rainierflightservice.com/rainier-flight-staff/cameron-etezadi
S1 · E64
June 16 · 47 min
Coding Interviews in the AI Era | Beyond LeetCode for Career Growth
Summary Brittany's first weeks at Bluesky are reframing everything she thought about coding interviews. Career growth in tech still hinges on algorithm problems, but AI, remote work, and async development have fundamentally changed what actually signals engineering ability. Why do companies cling to LeetCode when software engineers now solve problems in decentralized, AI-augmented teams? We dig into what hiring should measure, why job-hunting feels unsettled, and how women engineers navigate visibility and advancement in the interview process. Links How GitHub Engineers Learn New Codebases blog post: https://github.blog/developer-skills/application-development/how-github-engineers-learn-new-codebases/ Diataxis: https://diataxis.fr Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev/ Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E63
June 9 · 41 min
Why AI Coding Agents Keep Guessing | Context Gap & Code Intelligence with Dennis Pilarinos
Summary Dennis Pilarinos has spent nearly two decades building developer tools at Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Buddybuild (acquired by Apple). Now CEO of Unblocked, he's tackling the critical problem holding back agentic AI development: context intelligence. Why do AI coding agents keep guessing? Because they lack the organizational and business context behind the code. In this episode, the Overcommitted hosts dig into how developers and AI agents can truly understand the "why" behind codebases, not just the "what"—and why this matters for code quality, productivity, and shipping reliable tools. Links Dennis' email: dennis@getunblocked.com Unblocked: https://dub.sh/IeI82Vx Dennis on X: https://x.com/dennispilarinos Dennis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennispi/ Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28 Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E62
June 2 · 40 min
Agentic AI Development | Shipping Real Tools with Sterling Chin
Summary What does it actually look like to hand 90% of your workday over to an AI agent you built yourself? Sterling Chin, founding DevRel at Inngest and creator of Marvin, an open-source AI chief of staff with nearly 1,000 GitHub stars, has been doing exactly that for months. In this episode, Sterling joins Brittany to talk through how Marvin works, why he built it, and what he's learned about the real friction points in AI adoption that most people don't talk about. Sterling came into tech through a coding bootcamp after studying elementary education at BYU, landed at Postman where he led the R&D labs team, went viral on LinkedIn for posts about their AI assistant PostBot, and accidentally became a DevRel engineer because of it. Now at Inngest, he's the founding DevRel hire, and still building in public constantly. Links Sterling's Website: https://sterlingchin.com/ Sterling's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterlingchin/ Sterling on GitHub: https://github.com/SterlingChin Sterling on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sterlingchin.bsky.social Sterling on Twitter: https://x.com/SilverJaw82 Marvin: https://github.com/SterlingChin/marvin-template Sterling on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SterlingChin Sterling on Substack: https://sterlingchin.substack.com/ Web Dev Challenge Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw&list=PLz8Iz-Fnk_eTkZvSNWXW_TKZ2UwVirT2M&index=17 Inngest: https://www.inngest.com/ AI Crimes in Production: https://ai-crimes-in-production.com/ Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com
S1 · E61
May 26 · 40 min
AI Code Quality: The New Software Engineering Bottleneck
AI is generating more code than ever, but most engineers aren't verifying it. Sonar Staff AI Researcher Joe Tyler shares breakthrough findings from his LLM Leaderboard research on code quality, the hidden "coding personalities" of different models, and why the real bottleneck in software engineering isn't writing code: it's securing and reviewing it. Discover the gap between developer distrust and actual verification practices, plus how to position yourself for the verification-first future of software development. Topics: AI code quality, LLM research, software engineering careers, code verification, developer tools Show links: Sonar LLM Leaderboard: https://www.sonarsource.com/the-coding-personalities-of-leading-llms/leaderboard/ Sonarqube: https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarqube Sonarsweep: https://www.sonarsource.com/products/sonarsweep/ Joe's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-tyler-a668051b1/ Latent Space: https://www.latent.space/ Turing Post: https://www.turingpost.com/ Nathan Lambert: https://substack.com/@natolambert Cameron Wolfe: https://substack.com/@cwolferesearch Sebastian Raschka: https://substack.com/@rasbt Andrew Ng: https://www.andrewng.org/
S1 · E60
May 19 · 47 min
Design Engineering, Interviews & Job Search | Career Growth with Adam Argyle
Summary Software engineering career moves don't have to be a lottery. In this episode, Adam Argyle breaks down why the technical interview process is fundamentally broken, how design engineering skills actually transfer across roles, and the tactical job search playbook that works today. Whether you're navigating a career pivot, re-entering the market, or just frustrated with the hiring gauntlet, this conversation cuts through the noise on what really matters for career growth and staying sane. Links Adam’s Website: https://nerdy.dev/ Adam’s CascadiaJS 2025 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW6GECIzvsw 10 powerful ways to use CSS variables article: https://nerdy.dev/custom-prop-categories Sizzle Rizzle: https://nerdy.dev/sizzle-rizzle Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28 Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E59
May 12 · 38 min
Building the Decentralized Social Web: From Collective Social to OpenSocial
Brittany shares her journey building Collective Social - a Goodreads-style app for all kinds of media built entirely on the AT Protocol - and how it led her to create OpenSocial, a service that lets any app on the decentralized web share group functionality like book clubs. The episode covers the challenges of representing groups when the protocol has no native concept of group identity, using conference talk deadlines as motivation to ship side projects, and rating real-world systems on how well they'd work in a decentralized context. Erika also shares her experience building an interpreter in Go. Show links: Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com Collective Social: https://collectivesocial.app OpenSocial: https://opensocial.community Collective Social on GitHub: https://github.com/collectivesocial "Representing groups in ATProto" blog post (Brittany's site) AtmosphereConf speaker profile: https://news.atmosphereconf.org/3mfpjx5luuc2m GitHub Blog - Build a Personal Organization Command Center with GitHub Copilot CLI: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/build-a-personal-organization-command-center-with-github-copilot-cli/ "The art of saying yes" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/say-yes-do-all-the-things/ "Living in the inflection point" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/living-in-the-inflection-point/ Nick Gerakines episode (EP19 - AT Proto, MCP, and Open Source): https://overcommitted.dev/ep-19-at-proto-mcp-and-open-source-with-nick-gerakines PDX ATProto talk: https://youtu.be/xFdak3HbDmM?si=rZoPfyYYoP2awADJ&t=2302 AtmosphereConf talk: https://youtu.be/GVOywon3X-Q?si=yzKLfFNF8bzNT9-e The ATProto Store: https://atstore.fyi pdsls.dev: https://pdsls.dev Atmosphere Community: https://atmosphere.community npmx.dev: https://npmx.dev Tangled: https://tangled.io This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376492-this-is-for-everyone Topics: AT Protocol, Decentralized Social Media, Side Projects, Open Source, Software Engineering
S1 · E58
May 5 · 46 min
There are no shortcuts | Craft & career growth with Salma Alam-Naylor
Summary In this episode, Erika talks with Salma Alam-Naylor about software engineering craft, programming best practices, and why the long game beats shortcuts. As AI coding tools proliferate and everyone chases speed, Salma digs into deliberate practice, sustainable career strategies, and building genuine expertise that compounds over time. Perfect for engineers feeling burnout from the hype cycle. Links Salma’s website: https://whitep4nth3r.com/ 2021 Jamstack Jammies (Community Creator Award) https://2021.jamstackconf.com/jammies/ Fat bear week website: https://explore.org/fat-bear-week Hell.com wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell.com Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E57
April 28 · 42 min
Build Real Tools, Skip LeetCode: Systems Programming for Career Growth with John Crickett
Tech careers don't need to mean grinding LeetCode. In episode 57, John Crickett — 30+ year engineer, Coding Challenges creator (90K+ subscribers) — makes the case that programmer productivity skyrockets when you build real tools instead. We dig into why your own Redis, Git, or shell beats practice problems, how Coding Challenges went from $17 domain to viral sensation (1,500 signups in one weekend), and what it means to level up through systems programming. Links Coding Challenges (Newsletter): https://codingchallenges.substack.com/ Coding Challenges Website: https://codingchallenges.fyi From The Challenges - Git: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/from-the-challenges-git Will AI Kill Coding?: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/will-ai-kill-coding Using AI To Solve A Coding Challenge: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/using-ai-to-solve-a-coding-challenge Tech Lead Journal #178 — John Crickett: https://techleadjournal.dev/episodes/178/ Confessions of a Data Guy — What Makes Great Engineers: https://www.confessionsofadataguy.com/decades-in-software-engineering-what-actually-makes-great-engineers-john-crickett/ Coding Chats Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/59GU7gzyK2RdIDVkhNS2nt John Crickett on GitHub: https://github.com/johncrickett John Crickett on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett John Crickett on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social John Crickett on X: https://x.com/johncrickett Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Bethany: https://trustyduck.dev Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com ⁠Erika: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead
S1 · E56
April 21 · 39 min
Run Toward Something - Career Growth, Mentorship & Work-Life Balance with Dave Schwantes
Summary Career growth through mentorship and work-life balance with Dave Schwantes, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. Brittany and Dave explore why running toward meaningful work beats running from burnout, how mentorship became his primary form of engineering leverage, and what career happiness actually looks like across different life stages. From Instacart and Couchsurfing to building in-house bootcamps, Dave shares how sustainable engineering culture beats individual productivity hacks—and his take on how AI tools reshape what engineers really need to master. Links Dave's personal site: https://dinosaurseateverybody.com Don't Break Prod (bite-sized career advice): https://dontbreakprod.com Grave Danger (Dave's spooky ska band) on Bandcamp: https://gravedangerskath.bandcamp.com Dave on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dorkrawk.bsky.social Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschwantes Dave on GitHub: https://github.com/dorkrawk Web Dev Challenge Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw The Engineer Manager Pendulum article: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/ Host Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

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