Beyond Coding
by Patrick Akil
Latest episode
Meta Staff Engineer: What the Best Engineers Do Differently
Meta Staff Engineer: What the Best Engineers Do Differently
About this podcast
For software engineers ready to level up. Learn from CTOs, principal engineers, and tech leaders about the skills beyond coding: from technical mastery to product thinking and career growth. Created by Patrick Akil. Powered by Xebia
Episodes
The newest 20 of 274 episodes
- Meta Staff Engineer: What the Best Engineers Do Differently · 33 min · Episode 274Meta Staff Engineer Sajal Rustagi reveals what Staff Engineers do that most don't and what the best engineers do differently to reach the top. While foundational behaviors like…
- How Senior Engineers Use Coding Agents On Prod Infrastructure · 42 min · Episode 273How do senior engineers use coding agents on prod infrastructure when “make no mistakes” is just a polite request? Kerim Satirli (HashiCorp, an IBM company) explains why prompt…
- Lead Architect Reveals His Rules for Coding Agents · 1 h 15 min · Episode 272Lead Architect Carlos Kelkboom shares his rules for coding agents and how great engineers architect software with AI. One of the great ones is: he throws away generated code the…
- What the Best Engineers Built for Their Coding Agents · 1 h 14 min · Episode 271What happens when coding agents see your entire system: code, services, infrastructure and live traffic, all connected? Most agents are blind to everything outside the repo…
- Why Coding Agents Keep Making Your Codebase Worse · 45 min · Episode 270HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, who coined "context engineering", on why AI agents degrade codebases over time. He breaks down a benchmark that measures AI code quality across…
- How Amp Ships 50 Times a Day With AI Agents · 43 min · Episode 238Amp ships to production around 50 times a day with AI agents, but the change that makes their team ship faster isn't AI at all. Dario Hamidi, AI engineer at Amp, makes the case…
- How Top Engineers Still Get Hired When Most Get Ghosted · 34 minHow do top engineers still get hired in 2026 when most applicants get ghosted, 120,000 people have been laid off this year, and hiring managers say they can't find talent? A…
- Why an Ex-Googler Bet Everything on an Open-Source Database · 40 min · Episode 267Jordan Tigani helped create Google BigQuery, then got fired as Chief Product Officer on a Friday morning. He planned to hack on DuckDB to learn Rust. Investors offered to fund it…
- How the Best Engineers Build a World Model (Google Earth Creator & Niantic Spatial CTO) · 37 min · Episode 266Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon on how the best engineers solve problems most give up on — from a 4D model of the world to shipping research in months. He built Google Earth…
- How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience · 50 min · Episode 265How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the…
- Amazon AI Lead: What Differentiates The Best AI Coding Models · 42 min · Episode 264How does Amazon build its agentic AI? Michael Giannangeli, Head of Product for Amazon Nova and Agentic AI, breaks down evals, RL gyms, and model routing. He also explains why the…
- Wes Bos: How Developers Stand Out When AI Writes the Code · 25 minAI is changing what developers build, but code alone is no longer enough to prove what you can do. Wes Bos explains why engineers need to solve problems beyond syntax, how agent…
- Career Advice Every Software Engineer Needs Right Now · 55 min · Episode 262Answering engineer questions on AI pressure, career growth, product thinking and impact. Including the production incident I'm glad happened, and the mindset I refuse to accept…
- DX Expert: What The Best Engineers Solve After The Code Review Bottleneck · 1 h 22 min · Episode 261How do you prove AI is shipping more features? Amos Haviv leads the Developer Workflow teams at Booking.com, supporting 4000 engineers operating 8000 repos. Everybody is burning…
- AWS Veteran: The New Software Development Life Cycle · 1 h 53 min · Episode 260"I need to stop using Opus. This doesn't work." That was Heitor Lessa's conclusion after a refactor cost him 200 million tokens, and it forced him to rebuild the entire agent…
- Vercel VP: What Senior Engineers do Differently · 28 min · Episode 259What senior engineers do differently has less to do with output than most career ladders suggest, and Lindsey Simon, VP of Engineering at Vercel, has watched the distinction…
- Cracked Solo Dev: Why the Fastest Engineers Are Falling Behind · 40 min · Episode 258The fastest engineers are falling behind, and Kitze was one of them. He built his reputation on raw coding speed, then realized his coding wasn't competing with anyone's coding…
- AI Cloud CTO: Why These Engineering Skills Get You Hired No Matter What · 59 min · Episode 257Danila Shtan runs engineering at Nebius, one of the biggest AI clouds in the world, and he told me exactly which engineers he hires on the spot. There are only hundreds of people…
- Tech Career Expert: Why Applying to Jobs No Longer Works · 47 min · Episode 257120,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026, yet there are 60,000 open roles. Engineers applying are sending out 100 applications for zero replies. Former Reddit, Uber and…
- AI Frontrunners: Why Coding is Solved But Engineering is Not · 52 min · Episode 255Jeroen Gordijn and Jeroen Dee: two frontrunners who stopped writing code months ago and say software development is already solved. Typing code is no longer necessary, but what…
