Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Episodes
Be brilliant at the basics: Inside Looking Glass 2026
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Thoughtworks 2026 Looking Glass report was published in January. Designed to provide business and technology leaders with the tools to better unde...
Durable computing: What is it and why now?
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Managing distributed systems and complex workflows can be challenging. What happens when something fails? If a task isn't executed to completion, that...
Inside AI/works™: An agentic development platform
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In January 2026, Thoughtworks launched AI/works™, an agentic development platform. It promises to make the capabilities of AI agents a reality for t...
Unlearning, experimentation and engineering rigor in an agentic world
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In a world that's being transformed by AI agents and agentic systems, how do software developers unlearn what they know while also maintaining enginee...
Exploring AI agent platforms
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
If AI agents really are the future of how work will be done — in software engineering and beyond — the platforms on which they are built, run and ...
Architecture antipatterns and pitfalls: Good intentions, bad habits and ugly consequences
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
You can grasp the basics of software architecture by learning design patterns but you probably won't master it — to do that you have to get to gri...
Are we entering the 'age of intent' in digital interaction?
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 'age of intent' is a phrase that's been around for a number of years. However, with the rise of AI agents in 2025 it has the potential to become a...
AI-assisted software development in 2025: Inside this year's DORA report
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This year's DORA report focuses on AI-assisted software development. While one of the key themes is just how ubiquitous AI is today in software engine...
We still need to talk about vibe coding: Reflections on 2025's word of the year
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Vibe coding was, remarkably, named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary at the start of November 2025 — pretty good going for a term t...
How developers can get the most from new AI coding workflows
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the biggest stories in software engineering in 2025 is the impact of generative AI on the software development lifecycle. From advances in codi...
Themes from Technology Radar Vol.33
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In every Thoughtworks Technology Radar we feature three to five themes that represent the core issues and topics that emerged from the conversations w...
What does an AI strategy with humans at the center look like?
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone knows an AI strategy is important — but how do you build one with humans at the center? That's a question Tiankai Feng, Thoughtworks Global...
What we're talking about when we talk about context engineering
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone seems to be talking about context engineering. That was certainly the case in our recent discussions for the upcoming edition of the Technolo...
Mean time to shared understanding: Bridging the gap between citizen developers and developers
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although the concept of the 'citizen developer' isn't new, with the rise of AI the relationship between those building software without much technical...
Organizational design and Team Topologies after AI
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Managing technological change in an organization — particularly a large and complex one — has always been challenging. But thanks to the rapid ado...
Context engineering: Tackling legacy systems with generative AI
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Generative AI can be incredibly powerful when it comes to legacy modernization. Not only can it help us better understand a large, aging codebase, it ...
Navigating AI opportunities at MYOB
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How should businesses go about actually navigating AI? It's one thing to strategize and generate new ideas, but what needs to be done to put it into p...
Caring about documentation in the LLM era (w/ Heidi Waterhouse)
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we co...
Why the tech industry needs Expert Generalists (w/ Martin Fowler)
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The technology industry has embraced specialisms — not just in different fields or job roles, like web development or security, but even in terms of...
The three new fallacies of distributed computing
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" —...
MCP and SRE: Why the future of IT operations is agent-driven
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools? In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore ...
Unpacking Google I/O 2025
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Google I/O 2025 took place in May. It's always a great opportunity to find out how Google is trying to shape the industry agenda, but this year the pr...
Accelerating mainframe modernization using generative AI
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mainframe modernization is hard: there's a huge amount of complexity that needs to be understood before it can be effectively addressed. Generative AI...
Exploring the fundamentals of software engineering
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You might think you know software engineering, but what are the really fundamental elements? What are the concepts, ideas and practices that are compl...
Themes in Technology Radar Vol.32
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.32 was published at the start of April 2025. Featuring 105 blips, it offered a timely snapshot of what's interesting...
We need to talk about vibe coding
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The term 'vibe coding' — which first appeared in a post on X by Andrej Karpathy in early February 2025 — has set the software development world ab...
Infrastructure as code in 2025
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly ten years after the first edition of Infrastructure as Code was published by O'Reilly, Kief Morris is publishing a third edition of the book. B...
How fitness functions can help us govern and measure AI
06 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is inherently dynamic: that's true in terms of the field itself, and at a much lower level too — models are trained on new data and algorithms ad...
Architecture as code
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can we better define and clarify architectures to ensure consistency and control? If, as Neal Ford and Mark Richards discussed on a recent episod...
Decoding DeepSeek
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The release of DeepSeek's AI models at the end of January 2025 sent shockwaves around the world. The weeks that followed have been rife with hype and ...
AI testing, benchmarks and evals
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Generative AI's popularity has led to a renewed interest in quality assurance — perhaps unsurprising given the inherent unpredictability of the tech...
Exploring the intersections of software architecture
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Software architecture necessarily intersects with a diverse range of critical things, including implementation, infrastructure, data and engineering p...
Who should make software architecture decisions?
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Who should be involved in the process of making decisions about software architecture? That's a question that's been puzzling Thoughtworker Andrew Har...
Generative AI's uncanny valley: Problem or opportunity?
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With the rise of generative AI, the concept of the uncanny valley — where human resemblance unsettles, disturbs or disgusts — is more relevant tha...
Using generative AI for legacy modernization
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Legacy modernization is an enduring challenge — and as systems become more complex, the difficulty of understanding and modelling a system so it can...
Data contracts: What are they and why do they matter?
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Data contracts are a bit like APIs for data — they make it possible to interface with data in a way that ensures the transfer of data from one place...
In conversation with Thomas Squeo, Thoughtworks CTO for the Americas
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be a technology leader today? What kind of challenges must you address? What questions do you need to answer? To explore all that...
Themes from Technology Radar Vol.31
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Volume 31 of the Technology Radar will be released on October 23, 2024. As always, it will feature 100+ technologies and techniques that we've been us...
Build Your Own Radar: Using the Technology Radar as a governance tool
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is, first and foremost, a publication. It's a document that anyone in the tech industry can read twice a year to lea...
Exploring DuckDB: A relational database built for online analytical processing
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There are no shortage of options when it comes to relational databases. While the likes of PostgreSQL have proven enduring, even as the market has evo...
Software service granularity: Getting it right
05 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's widely accepted that, in most cases at least, software systems should be modular, consisting of separate, discrete services. But what about the s...
Measuring developer experience
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Trying to measure developer effectiveness or productivity isn't a new problem. However, with the rise of fields like platform engineering and a new wa...
How can AI support designers?
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence has been presented as a technology with the potential to transform many different fields and professions. One of the most nota...
Sensible defaults: A way to think about our technology practices
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you work in technology, you're constantly making decisions: not just what you should do, but also how you should do it. That's why we developed the...
Tracking technology stacks, practices and experiences across teams
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Understanding your technology estate and how it's being leveraged is critical for organizations; it impacts everything from financial planning to capa...
Inside Bahmni: An open-source digital public good
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bahmni started life as an open-source hospital information management system and electronic medical record for a single hospital in rural India. Today...
How to assess your organization's security maturity
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One of the fundamentals of security is self-awareness: knowing where you may be vulnerable, the practices and processes that aren't yet quite in place...
Continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment: What should be the default?
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite occasional confusion, the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is simple: should deploying to production be on dem...
Themes from Technology Radar Vol.30
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Volume 30 of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar was published in April 2024. Alongside 105 blips, the edition also featured four themes selected by the...
Building at the intersection of machine learning and software engineering
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing machine learning models into production is challenging. This is why, as demand for machine learning capabilities in products and services inc...
Refactoring with AI
18 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Can AI improve the quality of our code? A recent white paper published by code analysis company CodeScene — "Refactoring vs. Refuctoring: Advancing...
How to measure your cloud carbon footprint
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you've ever wondered how to measure your cloud carbon footprint, you can — thanks to a tool that's called, somewhat unsurprisingly, Cloud Carbon ...
Technology through the Looking Glass: Preparing for 2024 and beyond
21 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Looking Glass isn't like most other technology trend reports. It doesn't just tell you what deserves your attention, it's designed to help you use it ...
Diving head first into software architecture
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, Thoughtworker and (prolific) author Neal Ford published Fundamentals of Software Architecture with Mark Richards. They're now back wi...
Exploring the building blocks of distributed systems
22 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Distributed systems are ubiquitous yet complex. They can be particularly demanding for software developers and architects tasked with dealing with the...
Software-defined vehicles: The future of the automotive industry?
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A few decades ago, it would have probably seemed strange to put software and automobility together. However, today software is embedded in all kinds o...
Beyond the DORA metrics: Measuring engineering excellence
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is it really possible to measure the impact engineering teams have on a business' success? At a time when growth is challenging for many organizations...
Asynchronous collaboration: Getting it right
11 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the pandemic, asynchronous working is, today, fairly common. However, it's often easily confused with simply working remotely — and while ...
Looking back at key themes across technology in 2023
28 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With each edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar, we identify a number of key themes that we see as significant in the industry. In the most rec...
Leveraging generative AI at Bosch
14 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Generative AI has, unsurprisingly, been a major topic of conversation within Thoughtworks in 2023. However, as enjoyable as it is to get sucked into d...
Jugalbandi: Building with AI for social impact
30 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At T...
AI-assisted coding: Experiences and perspectives
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in so...
What's it like to maintain an award-winning open source tool?
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool...
Engineering platforms and golden paths: Building better developer experiences
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling...
Managing cost efficiency at scale-ups
03 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many of the scale-ups we've partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we've seen are unexpected and drama...
Exploring SQL and ETL
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the...
Driving innovation in radio astronomy
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Radio astronomy — a subfield of astronomy that studies the sky using radio frequencies — is data-intensive. That poses a challenge for radio astro...
XR with impact: Building experiences that drive business value
24 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
XR is a potentially transformative technology, but it needs to be leveraged in a way that drives value. That isn't straightforward — given effective...
Leadership styles in technology teams
10 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Leadership is an important if often-overlooked quality in the technology industry. However, it is also a complex and multi-faceted thing: it isn't a d...
Making design matter in technology organizations
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Design leader and Thoughtworks alumnus Emma Carter recently published her second book, DesignedUp. In it, she explains how designers can win a seat at...
Generative AI and the future of knowledge work
13 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Thoughtworks recently established a new role — Chief AI Officer. Taking up the position is Mike Mason, a veteran of Thoughtworks with over 20 years ...
Scaling mobile delivery
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It seems obvious to say that mobile usage has grown dramatically over the last decade, but for businesses that have to move to accomodate this type of...
Making privacy a first-class citizen in data science
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A changing regulatory environment has made it more important than ever for organizations to embed privacy in their data infrastructure. Doing so, howe...
Multi-cloud: Exploring the challenges and opportunities
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When cloud first hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, its attraction was rooted, in part, in its apparent elegance and simplicity. As it has bec...
Scaling up at Etsy
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabl...
TinyML: Bringing machine learning to the edge
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computation...
The weaponization of complexity
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverl...
How we put together the Technology Radar
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on...
Inside India's Drug Discovery Hackathon
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery...
Serverless in 2023
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is toda...
My Thoughtworks journey: Rebecca Parsons
23 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked...
How to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engin...
Six key technology trends for 2023
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends...
Tackling system complexity with domain-driven design
12 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering,...
Shifting left on accessibility
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's i...
Data Mesh revisited
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Data Mesh is one of the most powerful and widely-discussed concepts to emerge from Thoughtworks in recent years. As the world becomes increasingly awa...
Low-code/no-code platforms: The 10% trap and the limits of abstractions
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Low-code and no-code development platforms have been heralded in recent years as a solution to engineering talent gaps and as a trend that will proper...
Welcome to the fediverse: Exploring Mastodon, ActivityPub and beyond [Special]
24 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For many who have been part of the recent migration of users from Twitter to Mastodon, their first encounters with the "fediverse" have been puzzling,...
Rethinking software governance: Reflecting on the second edition of Building Evolutionary Architectures
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Building Evolutionary Architectures was published in 2017. In it, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Pat Kua defined and developed the co...
Reckoning with the force of Conway's Law
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While putting together this year's Technology Radar, Conway's Law — the idea that organizations are constrained to produce systems that mirror their...
Exploring the Basal Cost of software
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The "Basal Cost" of software is an idea from Eduardo Ferro Aldama. The term is borrowed from biology, where the "Basal Metabolic Rate" refers to the n...
Why full-stack testing matters
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Although many books have been written on software testing over the years, Gayathri Mohan's Full-Stack Testing, released earlier this year with O'Reill...
Acknowledging and addressing technical debt in startups and scale-ups
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Technical debt is a ubiquitous problem in software engineering, yet its causes — and the potential ways to address it — are often context-specific...
XR in practice: the engineering challenges of extending reality
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Extended Reality technology — XR — has had a lot of hype in recent years thanks to the concept of the metaverse. But bold visions of the future ca...
Agent-based modelling for epidemiology: EpiRust and BharatSim
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that epidemiology is incredibly complex: the millions of edge cases, what-ifs, and counterfactuals make m...
Mastering architectural metrics
12 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Given the variety of architectural styles — and the unique technology landscapes at every organization — how can you develop a set of metrics that...
Building a culture of innovation
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Thoughtworks regularly emphasises the importance of culture in building and maintaining high-quality software when working with clients. So, for episo...
Starting out with sensible default practices
14 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of best practices is becoming an anachronism — given today's complex technology landscape, the notion that there can be a single best way o...
Better testing through mutations
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mutation testing has long been a proven method for driving software quality in a way unit testing can't. But it can be a long, expensive and computati...
Patterns of legacy displacement — Part two
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the second part of our exploration of legacy displacement, we look at the practicalities of making upgrades work, from strategies for decomposing h...