Podcasts
Welcome to a new episode where we share stories from the field. For the first time, we’re thrilled to welcome guests to the show! This week, we’re joined by Elena Stojmilova, Technical Lead at Open GI, and Peter Hunter, Technical Architect at Open GI, alongside our Hosts Andrea Magnorsky and Kenny (baas) Schwegler. Elena shares...
When developing your software products, be it coding, testing, user experience, product management, or all the other elements required to solve a customer need, do you understand what the rest of the people do to make that happen? What about the other people in your organisation, maybe working on different products or even other legs...
The episode explores the tension between necessary on-the-spot decision-making during a software incident and subsequent organizational governance. Andrea’s story sets the scene: a colleague makes a critical, correct decision under pressure, only to have a later, higher-level investigation reverse it without adequately addressing the systemic issue that caused the incident, leading to frustration and burnout....
Software teams often reach for Kubernetes or similar prepackaged answers as default solutions to complex problems. But Kubernetes isn’t a strategy—it’s a tool. Using it prematurely can bury your team in unnecessary complexity and unwanted consequences. These ‘default’ answers reflect a deeper issue: we don’t understand the problem we’re solving. Through real-world examples, we’ll discuss...
When it comes to giving software teams the autonomy to make their own decisions, trust can be a delicate thing. This is particularly true when those decisions can have a wider impact on other teams and the overall system. If organizations are shifting towards decentralized decision-making, how do they replace the safety net of authority...
In this episode Andrew Harmel-Law, Kenny (Baas) Schwegler, and Andrea Magnorsky discussed the difficulties of facilitating software architecture decisions, particularly when teams are hesitant to take responsibility. Kenny shared his experience at a growing company that needed to choose a new front-end framework (Vue or React) to scale from 8 to 115 developers. His goal...
In this episode, Andrew Harmel-Law, joined by Andrea Magnorsky and Kenny (Baas) Schwegler, discusses “ghost decisions,” which are fundamental architectural choices that are often undocumented, implicit, or even forgotten. These decisions can cast a long shadow, influencing everything from technology choices to team structures. Key Takeaways Implicit Decisions: Andrew shares his experience with projects where...
In this talk, we’ll explore quality as an emergent property of our teams, tools, and processes—not just something we test at the end. We’ll look at challenges like speed to market and enshittification(1), and how they impact our approach to quality. We’ll introduce practical ways to think about quality through attributes like testability, observability, and...
“I would have killed that if it was just me, 100%,” said Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek about Discover Weekly, a feature that would become one of Spotify’s most loved product features, almost a brand in itself. Designers and senior engineers were equally skeptical, but the team was still able to ship the feature....
In this episode, Kenny and Andrea discuss how to move from a blocking, “ivory tower” or hands-on architect role to a more facilitating one. They explore the importance of transparency as a first step in improving an organisation’s approach to software architecture and design. The goal is to shift decision-making to the people who have...