In this episode, Dave Rubinstein interviews Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon, a company that provides Postgres solutions. 

They discuss: 

• The factors that have contributed to adoption of PostgreSQL
• Why PostgreSQL has leapfrogged over MySQL in popularity
• What to expect in PostgreSQL 18

In this episode, Jenna Barron interviews Antje Barth, principal developer advocate for generative AI at AWS.

They discuss:

• The skills that are becoming more important as AI adoption increases
• The emergence of the AI engineering role
• The trend of "vibe coding"

Resources:

Amazon Q Developer

Episode transcript

In this episode, Jenna Barron speaks with Emilio Salvador, vice president of strategy and developer relations at GitLab, about AI agents in software development. 

Key talking points include: 

• How AI agents compare to traditional forms of automation in the software development process
• Challenges teams may face when implementing agents
• The impact AI agents will have on the role of software developers

In this episode, David Rubinstein interviews Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS, about the current state of serverless.

They discuss:

• Why serverless adoption has stagnated
• The complexity of serverless architecture
• What needs to change to increase adoption

In this episode, Jenna Barron interviews Simon Ritter, deputy CTO of Azul, about the six features in Java 24 he thinks are most exciting, including faster startup times for Java apps, improvements to the Stream Gatherers API, and more. 

Learn more about Java 24 here: https://sdtimes.com/java/java-24-is-now-available-with-release-of-stream-gatherers-class-file-apis/

In this episode, David Rubinstein interviews, Stephen Watt, VP of the Office of the CTO at Red Hat, about open source AI.

They discuss: 

• Differences between open source software and open source AI
• The difficulty in applying open source principals to AI
• Efforts made to define open source AI

In this episode, Jenna Barron interviews Martin Reynolds, field CTO of Harness, about the misalignment between developers and FinOps. The company recently did a report that backed up the claims that developers and FinOps aren't properly aligned, and they talk about some of the findings of that report. 

Some key points of discussion include:

• The fact that over half of developers say their cloud purchasing commitments are based on guesswork
• The lack of data on idle cloud resources, unused resource, and over or underprovisioned workloads
• Processes and tools that can help with alignment
• How the adoption of AI has contributed to the problem

Read Harness' report here: https://www.harness.io/finops-in-focus 

Read the transcript of this episode here: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/qa-the-growing-divide-between-developers-and-finops/ 

In this episode, Jenna Barron interviews Lukasz Karolewski, senior staff software engineer at LinkedIn, and Ajay Prakash, staff software engineer at LinkedIn, to talk about how they built a prompt engineering playground at LinkedIn to improve cross-team collaboration with non-technical teams.

They discuss:

• Why they built the playground
• The choice to use Jupyter notebooks
• The work they did to make sure it was accessible to non-technical users
• How it's facilitated faster innovation at the company

They detailed their work in this blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/blog/engineering/product-design/building-collaborative-prompt-engineering-playgrounds-using-jupyter-notebook 

In this episode David Rubinstein interviews Eran Yahav, co-founder and CTO of Tabnine, about why its important to provide AI assistants with clean code.

They discuss: 

• The importance of defining organizational rules and best practices to guide the AI
• How to use AI-assisted refactoring to improve legacy codebases
• If organizations should apply KonMari principles to their codebases

Join SD Times news editor Jenna Barron for a panel discussion on DeepSeek and what developers need to know about this model that has been in the spotlight for the past few weeks. 

The conversation covers why DeepSeek has gained so much attention, what makes it different from other models, proper data security and hygiene practices for using DeepSeek, and predictions for the future of AI innovation. 

The speakers include:

• Melissa Ruzzi, director of AI at AppOmni
• Bratin Saha, chief product and technology officer at DigitalOcean
• Kate O’Neill, author, speaker, and executive consultant on technology’s impact on the human experience

Related resources from our speakers:

• Kate’s new book, What Matters Next: A Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions - https://www.koinsights.com/books/what-matters-next-book/
• AppOmni’s webinar on AI security and balancing the risks and benefits of AI - https://appomni.com/webinars/ai-security-balancing-business-and-saas-risks/ 
• AskOmni, a chatbot for SaaS security - https://appomni.com/askomni/ 
• How to Run DeepSeek R1 Large Language Models on DigitalOcean GPU Droplets - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/deepseek-r1-gpu-droplets 
• DigitalOcean Deploy 2025 Keynote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phxuIai5cD8 

The video for this conversation was also posted to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdtkj2YN4Nw 

In this episode, David Rubinstein interviews Damien Garros, co-founder and CEO of OpsMill, about middle code, a concept that sits somewhere between programming and low-code/no-code.

They discuss:

• What middle code is
• The influence generative AI has had on this technology
• How middle code can be used to accomplish things not possible with low-code or no-code

In this episode, we interview Dylan Thomas, senior director of product engineering at OpenText Cybersecurity, about the evolution from shift left to shift everywhere.

At the end of 2024, he predicted: "In 2025, DevSecOps will continue evolving beyond the ‘shift-left’ paradigm, embracing a more mature ‘shift everywhere’ approach. This shift calls on organizations to apply the right tools at the right stages of the DevSecOps cycle, improving efficiency and effectiveness in security practices. Lightweight analysis in IDEs will help developers catch issues early, while automation integrated into pull requests and CI/CD pipelines will ensure a cohesive ‘integrate once’ approach for core functions such as SAST, SCA, and increasingly DAST, particularly for API security testing."

We interviewed him about his predictions, and talked about: 

• What shift everywhere is
• Why people are wanting to transition to this new approach
• How to get started with shift everywhere

In this episode, we spoke with Trisha Gee, lead developer advocate at Gradle, about flaky tests and the challenges of dealing with them.

Key talking points:

• What is a flaky test?
• How can they be identified?
• How can they be prevented in the future? 

Other useful resources on flaky tests: 

• Develocity’s Flaky Test Detection
• Trisha’s recent Flaky Test webinar 
• Trisha’s Blog - How Top Banks Handle Flaky Tests
• Desirable Unit Tests By Kent Beck
• Martin Fowler's Definition of a Contract Test 
• Your Tests are Failing You! (video) 
• 5 Reasons Your Automated Tests Fail (video) 

In this episode, we spoke with Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, about the emerging practice of software engineering intelligence (SEI). At the end of last year, he predicted that "SEI will have a breakout year in 2025 as more and more businesses realize they need to measure the end-to-end business process of software development and delivery in order to drive continuous improvement, truly deliver improved developer experiences and ultimately realize the potential gains for an AI-powered Software Development and Delivery capabilities."

We invited him on the podcast to dive into that prediction further, and we discussed:

• What SEI is
• Why it's gaining traction this year
• How it differs from value stream management, and why it will be more successful

Read all 2025 predictions here: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/predictions-for-software-development-in-2025/

In this episode, we interview Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, about what we can look forward to in 2025 when it comes to containers. 

Key talking points include:

• Cross-platform use cases for containers
• Bending containers to do more for us
• An overview of bootc and how it fits into the future of containers

In this episode, David Rubinstein interviews Brian Fox, co-founder and CTO of Sonatype. They discuss the company's 10th annual State of the Software Supply Chain report. 

Key talking points include: 

• The rapid growth of malicious open-source components
• The increasing length of time needed to remediate vulnerabilities
• How regulations impact supply chain security

Note: This will be the final episode of What The Dev released in 2024. We'll be back in early January 2025! 

In this episode, David Rubinstein interviews Mohamed Lazzouni, CTO of Aware, a company that offers identity verification services. They discuss the current state of biometric authentication, including its challenges, user experience, and ethical considerations. They also talk about concerns regarding deepfakes and the countermeasures to protect against them.

In this episode, editor-in-chief David Rubinstein interviews Tanner Burson, vice president of engineering at Prismatic, about how AI might be destabilizing development pipelines. 

They discuss:

• The lack of long-term thinking around AI in development
• Why AI-generated code is hard to understand and maintain
• Issues with using AI to verify code

Transcript: https://sdtimes.com/ai/podcast-the-negative-long-term-impacts-of-ai-on-software-development-pipelines/ 

In this episode, editor-in-chief David Rubinstein interviews Tobi Knaup, VP and general manager of cloud native at Nutanix. They discuss how AI is driving innovation in Kubernetes, and also how AI adoption is driving people to Kubernetes. 

In this episode, news editor Jenna Barron interviews Julianna Lamb, co-founder and CTO of Stytch, about how to evolve your engineering processes.

They discuss:

• How the dynamic of a team contributes to engineering efficiency
• How to play to the strengths of everyone on the team
• The benefits of engineers having ownership over the work they're doing

In this episode, SD Times news editor Jenna Barron interviews Christophe Sauthier, head of CNCF certifications and trainings, about the benefits of getting a certification. 

They discuss:

• CNCF's recently created Kubestronaut achievement, which developers can get for completing all five of the organization's Kubernetes certifications
• How certifications can improve a developer's career
• What to look for when thinking about getting a certifications

This episode was sponsored by Lucid Software, a provider of a visual collaboration suite for developers. Learn more here: https://lucid.co/ 

In this episode, David Rubinstein, editor-in-chief of SD Times, interviews Jessica Guistolise, evangelist at Lucid Software, about how visual collaboration can improve developer experience.

They discuss:

• Challenges with gaining visibility in software development
• The value of visualizations
• How visual collaboration streamlines Agile development

Resources: 
https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/accelerating-innovation-how-the-lucid-visual-collaboration-suite-boosts-agile-team-efficiency/ 

In this episode, SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein interviews Ayah Bdeir, senior strategic advisor at Mozilla, about the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) effort to define Open Source AI.

Key talking points include:

• Why there's a need to have a definition for open source AI
• The controversy over how to classify training data
• Mozilla's collaboration with OSI on this work 

Open Source AI definition: https://opensource.org/osd 

In this episode, SD Times editor-in-chief David Rubinstein interviews Stacey Kruczek, director of developer relations at Aerospike and steering committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation.

They talk about why developer relations is important, including why the Developer Relations Foundation was formed.

Key talking points:

• What a DevRel does
• How developer relations elevates the role of developers
• The future of developer relations

Transcript: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/qa-why-the-developer-relations-foundation-is-forming/

In this episode, we are joined by Thabang Mashologu, VP of community at the Eclipse Foundation, who dives into the findings of the organization's recent study on the State of Open Source in the Global South.

Key talking points include: 

• The positive impact that open source is having in the Global South
• How developers are using it to drive career growth
• Using open source to solve gender inequality issues 

Download the Report: https://outreach.eclipse.foundation/open-source-global-south-developers