In this episode, Jenna interviews Wade Wegner, chief ecosystem and growth officer at DigitalOcean, about the importance of developer advocacy.

They discuss:

• The relationship among developer advocacy, developer relations, and technology evangelism
• Effective strategies for engaging with developers
• Metrics to track to know that advocacy is contributing to product growth

In this episode, Jenna interviews Dr. Manny Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of OpenOrigins, the company behind Human-Oriented Proof System (HOPrS), which can be used to determine if an image or video has been altered or is AI-generated.

They discuss:

• How it works and how it differs from other tools that try to do this
• How it can be used to address concerns around AI-generated content
• Its recent acceptance into the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Lab

In this episode, Dave interviews Justin Cantrall, AI engineer and architect at OpenText, about specialized language models.

They discuss:

• The difference between specialized language models and large language models
• The benefits and disadvantages of choosing specialized language models
• Open weight models 

In this episode, Jenna interviews Maya Palfreyman, product marketing director at Quickbase, who leads the company's research on gray work.

They discuss:

• What gray work is and what sort of tasks qualify 
• How it affects software developers
• The impact of unaccounted gray work in planning cycles

In this episode, Dave interviews Jack Pertschuk, principal engineer for Algorithms and Platform at Pinecone. They discuss:

• What semantic search is and where it falls short
• The difference between sparse and dense vectors
• How search technology powers AI

In this episode, Jenna interviews Julianna Lamb, co-founder and CTO of Stytch, about MCP and how it handles authorization. 

They discuss:

• Where MCP gets it right and where more work is needed
• Issues with traditional auth in agentic workflows
• Designing auth flows for agents vs humans

In this episode, Jenna Barron interviews Tammuz Dubnov, founder and CTO of AutonomyAI, a company that makes AI agents for software development. 

They discuss:

• What vibe coding is
• The risks associated with it
• Where it can be used and where it should be avoided

In this episode, Jenna welcomes back Simon Ritter, CTO of Azul, to talk about the history and evolution of Java, which is celebrating its 30 year anniversary this year.

They discuss: 

• The software development landscape at the time Java was created
• Key moments in Java's history
• What has made it such a resilient and long-lasting language

In this episode, Dave interviews Dan Ciruli, senior director of product management at Nutanix (and ex-Googler), about the history of Kubernetes. They discuss:

• What was going on at Google that led to the creation of Kubernetes
• The importance of getting the industry to agree on a non-vendor-specific way of deploying workloads
• Initial concerns from VM vendors about being replaced by containers
• The story behind Kubernetes' name and logo

This episode originally aired on 5/8/25 on our sister podcast, Get With IT, where we discuss topics related to ITOps. 

In this episode, Dave interviews Priti Naik, vice president of architecture at Chase, about the company's Expert Engineering (E2) program.

They discuss:

• What the program involves 
• What prompted its creation
• How graduates stay updated on new technologies and trends

In this episode, Jenna interviews Zohar Einy, CEO of Port, about engineering feedback loops.

They discuss:

• The purpose of engineering feedback loops
• Where most organizations go wrong
• What makes feedback actually actionable

Thank you to Broadcom for sponsoring this episode. Learn more about their VSM offerings here: https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management

In this episode, Dave interviews Jean-Louis Vignaud, head of ValueOps at Broadcom, about how VSM and AI are coming together.

They discuss:

• The business implications of using AI in VSM
• Concerns around data privacy and proprietary information in AI
• Recapping Broadcom's recent VSM Summit

In this episode, Jenna interviews Dean Coclin, senior director of Industry Strategy at DigiCert, about the recent vote by the CA/Browser Forum to shorten the lifespan of TLS certificates to 47 days by 2029. 

They discuss:

• The schedule for the changes and the gradual increments lifespans will shorten by
• The rationale behind shortening certificate lifetimes
• How to start preparing for changes

DigiCert will be hosting a webinar on this topic on May 6 called "Unpacking Certificate Changes: Live Expert Q&A." Register here: https://digicert.registration.goldcast.io/events/2c6c723b-5725-4406-9289-6df8ddd20f93?referrer=https://www.digicert.com/&referrer=https://www.digicert.com/&referrer=https://www.digicert.com/&referrer_page=a28f9ca5-7abf-4ce2-9b6b-571e50e49239

Read an article based on this episode here: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/preparing-for-tls-certificate-lifetimes-dropping-from-398-days-to-47-days-by-2029/

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