Pragmatism in Practice

Thoughtworks Technology Podcasts

With attention turning to our systems and technology for remote working, funding for modernization projects has surged. Beyond costs, there are important considerations for enterprise modernization for the journey to success. In this podcast episode, Sarah Taraporewalla, Director of Enterprise Modernisation, Platforms and Cloud, Australia discusses what executives should have top of mind as they tackle enterprise modernization projects and how technology leaders can enable these efforts by first and foremost focusing on and communicating value to the organization.

The journey to enterprise modernization starts with value

Modern companies have audacious goals and initiatives to become data-driven, but many still suffer a data disconnect. Despite increased investment, expanded commitment and more tools at their disposal, how can companies translate gathering tons of data into becoming a data-driven business? In this episode, Zhamak Dehghani, Director of Emerging Technologies, North America explains how Data Mesh brings people closer to data and insights.

Data-driven with Data Mesh

The last episode in this four-part series of the ABCD framework discusses how leaders can thrive in ambiguity through purpose-driven drive. With lessons from the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, this episode will help leaders translate drive into building resilient and high-performing teams.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/podcasts/abcd-model-leadership-drive

ABCD Model for Leadership: Drive

A recent study shows there is a close correlation between technology proficiency and business growth. How does your organization’s level of digital proficiency compare to competitor brands in your market? How can you build technology as a culture into your organization at all levels? In this podcast, we discuss the advantages that lie in technology proficiency existing beyond the office of CIO and the impacts in business growth across regions.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/pragmatism-in-practice/technology-proficiency-imperative-for-business-growth

Technology proficiency: the new imperative for business growth

With the advent of big data analytics, powered by the ease of moving data to the cloud, the pressure on companies to get data right to make million-dollar decisions in a few seconds has become paramount. How can organizations set themselves up for success when it comes to data? What are some of the foundational elements to have in place? In this episode, Jason Hare shares the principles of establishing a data governance plan for forward-thinking organizations.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/podcasts/pragmatism-in-practice/data-governance-data-driven-organizations

Data governance: The foundation of data-driven organizations

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with retired Thoughtworker and co-signatory of the Agile Manifesto, Jim Highsmith. He talks us through his experiences, from working on the Apollo missions to dropped card desks, the birth of the agile movement and its future in a post-pandemic world.

Jim Highsmith — a 54-year agile journey

In this issue of Perspectives we explore the implications across data, people and ethics, and offer techniques to build a successful AI program for the long term.

Check out 'Artificial intelligence and machine learning: augmenting the future of business, creativity and innovation' on www.thoughtworks.com/perspectives

Intro to Perspectives: AI/ML

Lean Enterprise was a landmark book, exploring how large enterprise could learn from start-ups and deliver innovation at scale — how they could respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products. Thoughtworks Technology Podcast catches up with two of the book’s authors to hear about its genesis, its impact and why there’s not likely to be a second edition.

Delivering innovation at scale

In today’s modern distributed systems are by their very nature complex. The decisions you need to make — around the wiring of your services, what size should the services be, and how should they call one another — are uniquely complex. In Software Architecture: the hard parts, the authors explore the rough edges of software architecture and look at how you can effectively do trade analyses that work for you. We catch up with two of the book’s co-authors.

The hard parts of software architecture

In the past decade, NoSQL has gone from being an interesting experiment to becoming business critical. We catch up with Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage, co-authors of NoSQL Distilled, to understand why the database technology took off and where it’s proven its capabilities in the enterprise and how thinking around issues such as persistence models has evolved.

The rise of NoSQL

There’s often debate around the build-versus-buy decision for digital capabilities. But when it comes to integrating disparate systems, the convenience of some modern integration tools can result in point-in-time integrations: ones that are never intended to evolve, with all the complexity and cost that entails. Here, we catch up with Brandon Byers to explore the limits of low-code tools and the perils of thinking you can buy integration.

You can't buy integration

Things have come a long way since Kent Beck first wrote about test-driven development 20+ years ago: the languages we use, our deployment environments and the rise of low-code tools. Former Thoughtworker Saleem Siddiqui has just written a new book on TDD and joins our podcast team to discuss why this book — and subject — is more pertinent than ever.

TDD for today

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Podcast, Neal Ford explains to Johannes Thönes what architectural considerations can be derived from the DevOps movement. 

This episode is a quick introduction to what Microservices are, what kind of architectural principles can be used to implement them, what a good test strategy for microservices can can look like. We also explain why you should have a continuous delivery practice running before starting to develop Microservices.  

DevOps and Microservices: Architectural Considerations

In the most recent Technology Radar, Scott Shaw and his colleagues from the ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board have added Microservice Envy to the Hold Ring, because they are concerned people are overdoing it. Start small, start with one Microservice,” is Scott's advice.

In this interview, Johannes Thönes talks to Scott about the prerequisites of being successful with a Microservice style architecture. First, you need to have an automatic deployment pipeline in place so you can deploy effectively and frequently to the cloud. You also need to have good DevOps practices and infrastructure automation around, so spinning up a dedicated server is not something that takes month.

Scott explains, that for being able to do Microservices, you need to have a clear understanding of the domain, which will give your Microservices their bounded context rooted in your domain. 

His advice for green field application, especially when you don’t have the practices in place, is to start with a monolith (or one lonely Microservices) and then split it up, when it makes sense. 

“Services need to evolve," he says.


Are You Infected By Microservice Envy?

In this episode, we talk about the role of a tech lead and how Pat Kua is helping new tech leads on their journey. We talk about the responsibilities of a tech lead and how this can be very overwhelming in the beginning. We also discuss the importance of a technical vision, what distinguishes a technical vision from an architecture and how we can teach tech visioning.

Every tech lead has his own style, so Pat tells me. So if you are new to the job, you will need to develop your own style. 

So, what should a participant in a tech lead program take out of it, I ask. Pat responds: “I would like to take the participants to say that they are comfortable [...] with the many responsibilities a tech lead has to deal with. I’m not expecting them to be experts in every skill.”

We close by talking about Pat’s Book “Talking with Tech Leads”, with interesting interviews from tech leads all over the industry.

Training Tech Leads

Our newest ThoughtWorks podcast is a thought provoking discussion between Sam Newman, consultant, and Erik Doernenburg, head of technology, ThoughtWorks Europe, in which they contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of microservices and cloud computing.

During the conversation, Erik advises listeners that the focus should be on the implementation of the actual services and not on the "glue" in between the services. 

Sam offers up an analogy, saying implementing an architecture based on microservices is like working with marble. You must chip away gradually. “It’s an incremental thing, not an upfront exercise,” he says.


No Silver Bullets: Real-world Techniques for Implementing Microservices and Cloud

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Tech Leaders Podcast, ThoughtWorks CTO Rebecca Parsons and Author and Software Architect Neal Ford discuss the meaning of evolutionary architecture and how organizations can use it as a business advantage.

Neal explains, "When you introduce things like DevOps and continuous delivery, all of a sudden you change the level of granularity in which you can make changes in your architecture and that becomes a really huge enabler for being able to make decisions at a higher level..."

Rebecca adds, "What you need to do on Day One is think about what are the critical success factors for your architecture? Does it need to be highly available? Does it need to be highly scalable? Is security your major driving concern? Is it data loss? Those are all possible outcomes for architectures and all systems don't display the same kind of characteristics. That's what we mean when we're talking about evolutionary architecture."

Evolutionary Architecture with Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford

In this episode, Johannes Thönes, a ThoughtWorks developer based in Hamburg, interviews Lukasz Plotnicki, also a developer and ThoughtWorker, on the Backend for Frontend microservices pattern. Lukasz is the author of BFF @ SoundCloud, an article about the backend for frontends pattern which he looked into with Sam Newman at SoundCloud. This pattern describes the creation of one specific backend to provide functionality specifically to the need of a single client.

Johannes talks with Lukasz about the BFF pattern rooted in a Microservices environment. First, they explain the difference between UI fragment composition and the backend for frontends approach as two alternatives. Then they discuss how backend for frontends fit into a microservices architecture and how it can be structured organizationally. We close the episode by discussing how many backend for frontends are already out there.

BFF @ SoundCloud

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, Software Architect Neal Ford, Prasanna Pendse, Tech Principal,  and Jonny LeRoy, Head of Technology, North America, discuss blockchain, how it differs from Bitcoin and what the future holds for the technology. 

[Disclaimer: This podcast isn't an introduction to blockchain.  To the get the most out of it, you should have some knowledge of the technology.]

During the conversation, Neal cautions that the current problems with Bitcoin have nothing to do with the viability of blockchain as a technology, “but has everything to do with all the non-technical aspects of currency and how messy that is in the real world.”

The podcast closes with advice from Jonny on peeling back some of the underlying technologies to answer some key questions for technologists. How might you use blockchain? What types of problems could be solved with blockchain? 

These are really good questions to ask. The answer isn't always blockchain.

Enjoy this episode of the ThoughtWorks podcast and, as always, please share your feedback and ideas with us @thoughtworks.


The Future for Blockchain?

In this episode of the ThoughtWorks Beacon Podcast, ThoughtWorkers Jonny LeRoy and Chelsea Komlo talk about security and specifically how it fits into the development process of an agile team.

Jonny and Chelsea begin by talking about the "Security Sandwich" - a concept first coined in ThoughtWorks' Technology Radar. https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

"We called it the security sandwich because the meat of your delivery was in the middle, but then security came on either side like the two pieces of bread, " Jonny explained. "And there would be some upfront security planning and documentation, and then some penetration testing and certification at the end. We are really on a mission to work out how to bake security processes into continuous delivery approaches."

The podcast continues with Chelsea and Jonny providing next steps for tech leaders who want to incorporate a security culture within their respective teams.

"One thing that's important to remember is that you're never going to completely be 100% secure, but you also want to be able to know if something is happening and react. So when we think about security, we think about both hardening our systems and also reacting," Chelsea reminds listeners. 

You can follow us on Twitter @thoughtworks. For more information on ThoughtWorks and our podcast, visit www.thoughtworks.com. 


Incorporating Security Best Practices into Agile Teams

In this edition of the Beacon podcast, ThoughtWorkers Neal Ford, Rachel Laycock and Jonny LeRoy discuss why and how to build your own tech radar. Learn more in this blog article: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/build-your-own-technology-radar or by visiting the Tech Radar https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Build Your Own Radar | ThoughtWorks Beacon

Learn how agile disciplines are applied to the complexities of data science to demonstrate incremental value within intelligent systems and solutions. Join ThoughtWorks' CTO, Rebecca Parsons, and Principal Associate, Alexey Boas, as they interview agile data scientist David Johnston and ThoughtWorks' head of data science, Ken Collier. The result is a better understanding of how agile practices are adapted to the uncertainty of machine learning, and how data scientists fit within a cross-functional agile delivery team.
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https://www.thoughtworks.com/podcasts

Agile data science

RESTful APIs quickly established themselves as useful architectural style for replatforming legacy systems with web-based ones. But increasingly, developers are running into the boundaries of deploying REST and API purity — confronting real world issues such as the rapid evolution of APIs for frontend layers where connectivity is patchy and where APIs should meet the changing visual representation and behavior of the frontend, where we increasingly see the adoption of alternatives such as GraphQL.

In this episode, co-hosts Mike Mason and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Brandon Byars, Market Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks North America and James Gregory, Tech Lead at ThoughtWorks Australia to explore the current state of API design and look at the impact of event-based architectures.

State of API design — REST and beyond

Any developer that’s moved from an object-oriented language to a functional one knows how disconcerting the shift can be. It demands a completely different mindset.


In this episode, our regular co-hosts Neal Ford and Alexey Villas Boas talk to Gregorio Melo about functional programming. He’s just written a book about functional programming, using Clojure as its basis.  Together they explore why developers choose to learn functional languages and how they can make the learning curve less daunting.

Getting to grips with functional programming

For any large, multinational enterprise, there’s a dilemma at the heart of their software architecture. Centralization promises to save costs, providing a standardized template for how to do things and not waste effort reinventing the wheel. But locals markets have unique characteristics, whether that’s customer behavior, regulations or the competitive landscape.

In this episode, we explore the price of reuse: the challenges and trade offs for architects that arise from a centralized blueprint for IT

The Price Of Reuse

Rebecca Parsons talks to Neal Ford and Mark Richards about their new book that promises to become the definitive guide to software architecture.

The book provides a concise overview on what's needed to become a software architect.

Fundamentals Of Software Architecture

Opportunity is moving faster and more unpredictably than ever before. As a result, organizations are facing a widening gap between fleeting opportunity and their ability to capture it. Authors, Jim Highsmith, Linda Luu and David Robinson share how they have evolved the live implementation of EDGE; the practical model they use to eliminate organizational friction. If you are a business or tech leader, seeking practical approaches to closing the gap between capabilities and opportunity, this is the podcast for you.

Edge: Value-Driven Digital Transformation

In modern work, no one operates alone. Tasks are too complex, knowledge is too specialized and fragmented. We need to work together – to collaborate – to drive the outcomes we want to achieve. Slack’s James Sherrett explores how small tactical changes can affect the collaboration culture of teams and how that culture drives the business results of our organization. If you are a digital leader wanting to influence cultural change in your organization, this is the podcast for you.

Small Changes, Big Effects

Creating a seamless Online to Offline customer experience is a key differentiator in today’s market. Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group, a global, online real estate company shares how organizations can shift their mindsets and learn from the Chinese Online to Offline experience. If you are a digital leader, wanting to leverage your data to delight your customers, this is the podcast for you.

Creating an Online to Offline Mindset

Digital leaders understand the central role that cross-group collaboration plays in innovation and solving challenging problems. Yet most of us agree that collaboration isn’t easy. Harvard University researcher and Harvard Business School executive coach, Lisa Kwan, breaks down why this is the case. If you lead teams or organizations and want to hear about the common collaboration blind spots and barriers and how to overcome them, this is the podcast for you.

The Collaboration Blind Spot

Companies no longer want to build just anything; they want to anticipate and respond to what their customers find delightful and exciting. Mike Varona, Principal Product Strategist at ThoughtWorks, discusses what it takes to create a product organization within your business, to provide the best experience for your customers. If you are a leader wondering how to best support and nurture an internal product discipline, this is the podcast for you.

Creating a Product Organization Within Your Business

Approximately 60% of C-level executives know that blockchain technology is part of their future, but don’t know how or why to use it. Prashant Gandhi, Financial Services Principal at ThoughtWorks, explores how organizations can use this technology to deliver value to their customers and industries. If you are a leader wondering how to create a Blockchain strategy for your organization, this is the podcast for you.

Reimagining Value Delivery with Blockchain

When it comes to delivering IT in unusual circumstances, ThoughtWorks veteran Patrick Sarnacke has seen it all: from working through coup attempts to dealing with flooded server rooms or just pair programming with a reluctant partner. Mike Mason catches up with Pat to talk through his 20+ year journey with ThoughtWorks and the highlights of his career.

IT delivery in unusual circumstances

When it comes to cloud, you may find that for some applications — ones you intend to maintain over a long period of time — you have to account for the possibility of changing providers in the future. Some vendors promise to make that a seamless transition — but in so doing, you might be losing out on some of the rich functionality that the cloud providers can offer. Our regular podcast host, Zhamak Dehghani talks to ThoughtWorks Australia’s Head of Technology, Scott Shaw about the cost of multi-cloud portability and explores how businesses can calculate the risks and rewards of multi-cloud.

A sensible approach to multi-cloud

The increased emphasis on machine learning in the enterprise also seen resurgent interest in Python. What makes Python different from other languages? What are the main features that make it unique? And where will Python go from here? In this episode, our podcasts chat to Luciano Ramalho, from ThoughtWorks Brazil — a renowned author of books on Python —  about dunder methods, fast fails and what’s new in the upcoming second edition of Fluent Python.

Future Of Python

The need for high quality information at speed has never been greater thanks to competition and the impact of the global pandemic. Here, our podcast team are joined by David Coles and Danilo Sato to explore how data science is helping the enterprise respond: What new tools and techniques show promise? When does bias become a problem in data sets? What can DevOps teach data scientists about how to work?

Applying software engineering practices to data science

The Clojure programming language has seen some radical changes in recent times — not least of which is a change in stewardship of Cognitect, the company that provides technical support for Clojure. Here, we catch up with Stuart Hollaway to find out what Cognitect’s acquisition by financial services firm Nubank means for the future of Clojure.

The future of Clojure

Our podcast team catches up with Gregor Hohpe to hear about his book The Software Architect Elevator which looks at how to connect the boardroom to the IT engine room and how architects can drive digital transformations.

The architect elevator

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