Pragmatism in Practice

Thoughtworks Technology Podcasts

Sustainability has become a business imperative. Emerging practices like green cloud optimization can produce real-world improvements to energy usage, efficiency and your balance sheet. We speak with ThoughtWorkers – Dan Lewis-Toakley, Green Cloud Lead for North America and Elise Zelechowski, Global Head of DEI, Sustainability & Social Change about the wide-ranging business implications of reducing your cloud carbon footprint, how to champion these efforts and measure your impact.

Green cloud optimization: Reduce your digital footprint, increase your bottom line

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

As we slowly emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, this four-part series with Dr. Anita Sands, a global technology and business leader, shares the ABCD framework to help leaders thrive in today’s ambiguous climate. The first principle is awareness – how do you deal with changing environments as each day unfolds. This podcast will help guide authentic leaders to feel more resourceful and better equipped to deal with other forms of ambiguity and to be yourself, skillfully.

ABCD Model for Leadership: Awareness

Dr. Anita Sands shares the ABCD framework to help leaders thrive in today’s ambiguous climate. The second part in the four-part framework explores belonging – the sense of belonging, the clarity of purpose, the shared frame of reference and how it drives people. This podcast helps authentic leaders to apply effective leadership principles in building a culture of belonging.

ABCD Model for Leadership: Belonging

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

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

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

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

Following on from our earlier episode on the Software Architecture: the hard parts, we’re joined by the other two co-authors of that book to explore issues around data architecture and how that fits into these broader concepts of architecture. We discuss how it is that what looks like a software decision is frequently influenced by data.

The hard parts of data architecture

Lean inceptions combine design thinking and methodologies from the Lean startup movement to provide teams with ways to get started on their projects and identify a minimum viable product as part of building an amazing business solution. We catch up with Paola Caroli to hear about his new book on the subject as he share a few tips along the way.

The art of Lean inceptions

Dr. Anita Sands takes lessons from champion sports teams in times of ambiguity and applies it to the business world, through the ABCD framework. The third part of the framework (part 3 of 4) explores the ability to step into new situations with a mindset underpinned by curiosity. This episode will help leaders develop a mindset for curiosity and create an environment that gives teams the capacity to be authentically curious.

ABCD Model for Leadership: Curiosity

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.

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.

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.

Companies are looking to AI/ML to deliver better customer experience, improve productivity, or keep up with the competition. Beyond the popular use of replacing tedious and repetitive tasks with automation, Principal Consultant Jarno Kartela explains the more creative and strategic opportunities to solve business problems and improve product innovation. This episode is for modern decision-makers who want to become more data-enabled, data-informed and science-backed in their operations and strategic planning.

The value of creative AI

UNICEF USA implemented a technology strategy to create a consistent donor experience and put the supporter at the center of their operations. Their technology work meant that during a crisis like COVID, the nonprofit could quickly adapt their operations, workforce and donor relations. Andy Rhodes, CIO for UNICEF USA, shares details of their digital journey, how it has helped increase their social impact and tips for executives leading transformation efforts.

CIO Interview: A digital mission for social impact

Cloud infrastructure has been universally praised for its simplicity, an intuitive, scalable, and cost-effective alternative that promised to transform how we approach IT infrastructure. But as offerings from the major public cloud providers have become more sophisticated, cloud is becoming increasingly complex. Listen to this episode with Max Griffiths, Principal Infrastructure Consultant, to learn more about productizing this part of the business, preparing teams for the skills shift to this new paradigm, ensuring cost savings and enabling the business with product thinking.

Product thinking in the new era of cloud

In healthcare, powerful new data-based tools are revolutionizing the way we make decisions - putting individuals in charge of their own healthcare journeys and supporting the effective delivery of proactive and preventative care. What are the key trends that will help healthcare organizations shift from patient care to continuous wellbeing? In this podcast episode, Scott Davies, Tech Director, shares the trends and technologies that will augment healthcare experiences for patients and organizations.

Healthcare tech trends put the patient at the center

At Thoughtworks, our internal Techops team created a self-service developer platform — NEO — with the goal of slashing the time it takes for developers to build digital products within the company. We catch up with Swapnil Deshpande and Prakash Subramaniam about designing a platform that can deliver what developers need in an easy and intuitive manner — and deliver business value.

Creating a developer platform for a networked-enabled organization

Ahead of the release of the second edition of his landmark book, Fluent Python, our team catch up with author Luciano Ramalho to hear about what’s happening in the world of Python — and why it’s popularity continues to endure.

Fluent Python revisited

Each year, Thoughtworks's Looking Glass report explores the technology trends we think will have far-reaching consequences. We catch up with a couple of our senior technologists, to hear more about what the future holds for enterprise technology.

The big five tech trends for 2022

Sriram Narayan discusses common anti-patterns for teams adopting agile software development.

Anti-Patterns of Agile Software Development

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

In this episode of the Tech Leaders Podcast, Vinod Sankaranarayanan, a program manager with ThoughtWorks, interviews colleague Sriram Narayan, who is an IT Management consultant and the author of a new book, Agile IT Organization Design. 

Sriram's book provides a basis for reviewing and reshaping the IT organization to equip it better for the digital age. Over the next 18 minutes, they explore IT reorganization from a structural angle. They discuss how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT.

Agile IT Organization Design with Sriram Narayan

Functional programming has a lot of concepts which have to be yet discovered by mainstream programming. One, known especially from the Haskell programming language, are Lenses. 

Johannes Thönes met Chris Ford, Software Developer and ThoughtWorker from London, during XConf in Hamburg where he gave a talk on implementing Lenses in Clojure. In this 23 minute interview, Johannes talks with Chris about his experience with Lenses in Clojure. First they define what a Lense is and what you would want to do with it. Then they talk about the specifics of implementing Lenses in a programming language introducing the terms Functor and Function. We close the episode by talking about the possibility to implement lenses in other programming languages such as Java 8 or JavaScript.


Lenses in Clojure

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 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

The tech landscape has changed fundamentally, with the growth in distributed computing and microservices. But it's not always easy to create truly independent services, especially amid time and budget pressures — sometimes it's just easier to allow multiple services to use a shared database.

In this episode, our panel explore the antipatterns we've seen emerge and consider how we can avoid them.

Distributed systems antipatterns

We’re increasingly seeing a trend of organizations exposing events — particularly business domain events — before knowing who the consumers are or what the specific applications are, in the hope that people elsewhere in the organization can discover these events and create value, without us directly orchestrating it. 

But creating big upfront architectures can make developers nervous — not least about costs. Neal Ford and Zhamak Dehghani are joined by Erik Dörnenburg, Head of Technology at ThoughtWorks Germany, and Evan Bottcher, Technology Lead in ThoughtWorks Australia.

Serendipitous Events

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

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