Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Great Engineering War Stories
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Today's episode is from the archives. Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites.
These four stories are ordered by scale. We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.
In order of appearance:
- Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
- Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime. A story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
- Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello. The story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
- Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter. A story about screening your customers for success