Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

APIs, microservices, connections to external systems, integration with legacy systems… the list of software complexities gets longer and longer.

In this episode Ledge is joined by global enterprise IT leader Dipanjan Choudhury. With almost 20 years of experience in software development, platform, and consulting leadership roles, we wanted to get his perspectives on risk mitigation so smaller companies can learn from the best practices of larger companies and prepare themselves for growth.

Dipanjan argues convincingly that as QA and Security shift left, so should Risk Management. Because the cost of addressing risks increases exponentially as you move right in the SDLC,  pre-enterprise companies can benefit greatly by adopting this mindset, especially when they are capital-constrained.

When we recorded this interview Dipanjan was the Technical Director of CAST. Since that time he’s taken a role as Associate Director at ValueMomentum.

In this episode, Ledge sits down with Greg Starling, a full stack e-commerce and mobility expert with broad experience in the CTO seat. Ledge and Greg talk through his advice for staying on the right side of Apple’s review processes, and how to stand out in the crowd to potentially earn yourself a mobility partnership spot, based on his experience at Monscierge.

We also discuss how to manage remote team members, going so far as to setup specific video terminals where each remote team member can join conversations with an always-on camera just like they are in the office. Because one of the hardest team configurations is hybrid, the mix of tools and management techniques is challenging to make it work.

At the time of recording, Greg was the CTO of Monscierge. He recently took a new role as Labs Lead for Tailwind.

John Isdell is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures. You may not know of Red Ventures by name, but you’re virtually guaranteed to have been on one of their sites like BankRate.com, Reviews.com, and CreditCards.com. They’re a digital portfolio company with a huge consumer web footprint, and with that footprint comes challenges of scale, legacy code, constant iteration, and evolving staffing needs.

Ledge chats with John about organizing large teams to tackle these challenges, how to hire to handle pretty much every technology, and how to prioritize your organization-wide backlog.

Most of us have engaged with, and even built, products and platforms that make heavy use of messaging. But how does anyone know if those messages convert into sales or other actionable metrics? In this episode I sit down with David Galante, SVP of Marketing and Product Management at Mobivity to talk about how their vast point of sale data system does just that, specifically after having acquired and integrated customer loyalty startup, Belly. Stick around for some solid advice from the product hot seat.

There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Management can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.

Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle tackles the challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams, to technical debt, all the way to succession planning. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

In this episode Ledge sits down with the author to discuss key lessons from the book.

Ubiquitous platform technologies like Wordpress open up a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs in every conceivable sector, yet even user-friendly tools usually require implementation and customization by qualified developers. In this episode with talk with Gun.io client, Arian Mirzarafie Ahi, a biologist and e-learning entrepreneur, about the difficulties of finding a great developer as a non-technical founder. Arian talks through the challenges, and the approach he took to overcome them so he could focus on growing his content business.

Yoav Rubin is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI. Previous to that he was a Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM Research. He’s a published author and self described “software guy” with a lot of interesting perspectives on the state of the art in AI.

Yoav talks with Ledge about how AI, like other technologies, is being democratized through services like Azure AI such that any developer can take advantage of them. The Azure AI environment allows devs to design experiments, develop them, and move domain of AI from specialized experts to everyone.