"Would you rather debug the navigation system on Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve, or would you rather fix a production bug on your company's e-commerce platform on Black Friday?"

It's the end of an era on Dev Interrupted as we say farewell to host Conor Bronsdon and welcome a fresh voice, Andrew Zigler!

Join us for a nostalgic trip down memory lane as Conor revisits his favorite interviews and moments from Season 4 and beyond, including discussions on chaos engineering, technical debt, and the human side of managing software engineers. He shares memorable stories from guests like Charity Majors, Rob Zuber, Kelly Vaughn, and many more, while reflecting on the evolution of Dev Interrupted and its impact on the engineering leadership community.

But it’s not all bittersweet. Get an exclusive sneak peek at the exciting changes coming to Dev Interrupted in 2025. Expect the show to double down on research and data, explore new formats, and even hit the road with live events. Plus, the Dev Interrupted Substack will feature more frequent newsletters, unique analysis of research white papers, and insights from guest writers. 

You don’t want to miss this special episode filled with laughter, reflection, and a surprise holiday-themed game of Would You Rather. 

The team is taking off the holidays but we’ll see you back here on January 7th for the start of Season 5!

Show Notes

Transcript 

Conor Bronsdon: 0:00

Don't mind me just derailing the episode. I'm like, I'm done hosting this thing. I can just derail now. I'm a guest. I get to screw around.

Andrew Zigler: 0:06

You mean this isn't going in?

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 0:09

I'm sure some of it will. Adam's already thinking about the video clip he's going to get off this.

Conor Bronsdon: 0:13

He loves a good blooper. This might be the intro to the whole episode probably now.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 0:25

Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm Ben Lloyd Pearson, your host, and I'm thrilled to be joined by our former current host, I'm not sure yet, Conor Bronson, and our newest addition to the team, Andrew Ziegler. So it's great for both of you to be here with us today.

Conor Bronsdon: 0:42

Hey everyone. Great to be back. And Andrew, fantastic to meet you. I'm excited to see what you do with the show.

Andrew Zigler: 0:46

Hey, thanks for bringing me on. You know, I'm excited to be here and carry the mantle. And then I hope everyone keeps being honest in the comments going forward.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 0:53

Yeah, and yort of why there's a bit of confusion about current or former, I mean, to us, you've actually been, you've been gone for a little while, but to the Dev Interrupted community, you've actually been a host up until, I think, just a couple of weeks ago, but, you know, I wanted to bring you back for, what's become kind of an annual tradition for us, this holiday episode that we're having. and you know, it's a little bittersweet, right? Cause I mean, we have you back and it's great to see your, your face again and hear your voice, you know, in the holidays like this is all about like spending time with, the people you care about, looking back on what you've accomplished and, think about What you can start to celebrate in the new year, So, you know, we may be saying goodbye to you after this episode, but actually just one sneak peek, we will have one more episode next year where you'll pop back in as our host. this is our farewell to you. And I really wanted to give you an opportunity to, share your reflections with our audience before we officially send you out the, out the door. Yeah. And then, you know, as a part of that, we're also welcoming Andrew to our team here at Dev Interrupted, who's going to be a regular on this show. And in fact, he may end up being a host on most of the episodes moving forward. So if you listened to last week, you got the chance to hear him for the first time, but you'll be hearing a lot more. So thanks again for both of you for coming here today. And I know it's a lot of news for our audience to digest right now.

Conor Bronsdon: 2:12

I, I love it. it's been an incredible, four years with Dev Interrupted. building the show, working with you, Ben, working with Dan, obviously the amazing production crew, Jackson, Adam, Chris, everyone who's been involved over the years. And I just can't wait to see where you two and Dan take the show next year. there's such an opportunity for Dev Interrupted to continue to be the central hub for engineering leaders and engineers who want to become leaders to have a community, to have insights and hopefully continue to content. I look forward to continuing to listen to the show every week, uh, even if I'm not going to be a part of it. And, I'll say for our listeners, you can always find me on LinkedIn as well. So don't hesitate to reach out. I love hearing from you all. And, uh, yeah, Ben, Andrew, just so excited to see what you do with the show.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 2:56

Yeah. And, you know, I personally am just extremely grateful for the opportunity to continue the success of DI. So, you know, looking forward, like I really think there are opportunities for us to take the next step. What we've been given, this gift that we've been given to new heights. our audience is really engaged with the, with the things that we cover. So, you know, I think there's, there's an opportunity here for us to really ramp that up and deliver a lot more So, all right, we've got that out of the way. I want to have a little fun. I'm going to give Conor a chance to share, what his favorite moments from the show have been. But before that, I want to have a little bit of fun before we get into it. So, I've Come up with a, would you rather, like, let's do some, would you rather questions like with a little bit of a holiday twist. so I know each one of us has come up with one and Andrew, I think you're up first on this one.

Andrew Zigler: 3:45

Yeah, so I wanted to put together a really nerdy one to kick things off something that, uh, really you have to use your imagination. So would you rather debug the navigation system on Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve? Or would you rather fix a production bug On your company's e commerce platform on Black Friday.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 4:07

Oof, man. You know, I have, I have actually quite a few, or I've seen quite a few reactions about the stress that engineers that do e commerce, Deal with this time of year. Like, I don't think it's really even Black Friday anymore. It's like an entire like month and a half period where they, like, they have to have like five, nine uptime, you know, cause like to them, it's like things are measured in seconds. You know, the more minutes you're down, the more tens of thousands of dollars your business is like bleeding out, you know, and that's super high stress. So like. You know, I actually have my own story, just like anyone who's ever worked in engineering long enough does of crashing our production system. And, there was, I think about a 20 minute period where we actually were losing production data and kind of akin to, to like that Black Friday experience. And fortunately after, you know, within about 20 minutes, I got, we weren't losing data anymore, but then I was glued to my seat for the next 10 hours, like basically rebuilding a bunch of infrastructure from scratch. And it was the most stressful day of my life. In fact, it was, it was so stressful that I decided I would never be in a situation where I have to respond to production outages again. one thing I discovered is that I actually kind of do work in high pressure situations. Like if it's like a 10 hour time frame to solve the problem. So I'm definitely going to go with Santa's sleigh is my answer.

Conor Bronsdon: 5:34

Yeah, I have a cheeky answer here. Cause I, I, I'm with Ben, frankly. Like, there's a reason I don't work in e commerce. I deeply admire the folks who can take on that kind of on call stress. and not to say that obviously if we're serving other businesses, there aren't crucial things that we're, we're doing for them. but timelines are less about, you Per second, typically with, uh, like DevTools, that kind of thing. And more about this is a problem we need to solve it. So I'm definitely going Santa's Sleigh, but my, my real answer for that is that Santa's obviously magic. and so like the navigation of the Sleigh system is clearly just the backup. He's may have gotten used to it, but like the, he's been doing the job for thousands of years. It's not a problem. He can go back to it a bit. Like, yes, it's not top of the line, but he'll figure it out. So I just feel like the, to Ben's point, the stress is a lot lower there. And. I think it speaks to the broader point here. I mean, this is a silly combo, but, really consider as you're taking on engineering challenges, the implications of when something goes down. and it's true whether or not you're looking at an engineering challenge or even like, Hey, let's say like Andrew or Ben and I is sick. Like, how do we fill in for that? and I think that's a lesson you hear from a lot of leaders on the show. And so Andrew, I love that you kind of brought up this challenge here. I think often we plan for success. And maybe don't always plan for what happens when failure occurs.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 6:51

I think what you just proposed, Conor, is chaos engineering for Santa, because you're saying, like, can Santa still find everyone without his navigation system?

Conor Bronsdon: 7:01

I absolutely am. we've had a couple of incredible chaos engineering episodes on the show and a big fan of them. everything Netflix has done with it for sure.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 7:10

Alright, I'll go next, because I think I've got a good one. we're hitting the holidays, you're gonna go see family, Alright, there's going to be all sorts of people from different walks of life, so in that environment, while you're visiting family over the holidays, would you rather have to explain the concept of technical debt to your grandparents, or teach a toddler how to write a unit test?

Andrew Zigler: 7:30

Oh, I love this one, because these are definitely concepts that have parallels in the lives that, you know, like a grandparent or a toddler has. I'll take the toddler one. Actually, I think I would have better luck teaching a toddler how to write a unit test, just because they're already so preconditioned to learn and to not try to teach you something. But something about that that's really funny to me is that, you know, We're always teaching kids and toddlers how to do everything in their life through, basically, unit tests. Like, think about when you have a kid and you're trying to get them to learn how to tie their shoes. you know, there are some basic checks there, like, did you tie a bow? Were those shoelaces strung through all of the eyelets? Did you tie your shoelaces together somehow in the process? Like, there's lots of basic checks you should do, and those are basically unit tests. So, then the biggest challenge is, um, You know, how do you get the toddler to sit down in front of a computer and type it out? I don't have the answer to that one, but I think that they could wrap their head around the idea.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 8:29

Yeah, my kid is currently into Minecraft, and he watches videos that include things like redstone programming, and he's like, Daddy, I want to do programming, and I'm like, yeah!

Andrew Zigler: 8:39

Yeah, exactly that. I have nieces and nephews. I play Roblox with them. Roblox gets them so excited about computers and engineering and building stuff. And now they ask me all the time like, Oh, can we just hack around in the Roblox studio and make whatever? And how does this work? It opens up those inquisitive questions.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 8:56

Yeah, what about you, Conor?

Conor Bronsdon: 8:57

Well, I'll just say, first of all, I love Andrew's answer here, because I completely agree that. Part of our kind of communal duty, particularly as parents or family of toddlers, is to help them basically train that testing within their own mental framework of like, hey, how do I approach these tasks? So I think For scalability purposes, and Andrew is perfectly on here, let's, let's, let's start that training early. Let's, let's have them think like an engineer. think that'll benefit them throughout the rest of their life. But I will take grandparents here because I think there are simple metaphors around technical debt and the debt that they are familiar with, with their financial lives. and I actually don't think that concept would be too hard to explain. and, simply using the kind of, Hey, here are the trade offs you're going to make by making these decisions and equating it to the, their experience with the financial system, I think would actually be fairly simple.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 9:49

So I tricked you both. This is actually a trick question. And at first I agreed with Andrew, but, then I realized we live in the age of GPTs. There's a custom GPT for everything. I could totally imagine a GPT that is designed to explain to my grandparents, like this is what Ben is talking about when he says all of these geeky things. and I could also see a GPT where, my kid is able to just Ask it to write a unit test and like, it would do it.

Conor Bronsdon: 10:19

I think it speaks to the preponderance of AI we have, in our society and discourse right now that I am the one who have recently joined an AI company and Ben's the one who's bringing up AI solutions to our questions.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 10:30

Yeah. Well, speaking of which, I think your, your question has to do with AI. So, so what's, what's your, would you rather?

Conor Bronsdon: 10:36

Sure, we got a simple one here to close it out. would you rather give up Gen AI or spell check for the rest of your life?

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 10:44

Man, as somebody who writes a ton, both of those are terrifying to me.

Conor Bronsdon: 10:54

a new spell checker for Gen AI? Because if so, that's an easy answer, I feel like.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 10:57

I feel like that's cheating.

Andrew Zigler: 10:59

That's gotta be cheating.

Conor Bronsdon: 11:00

why I gotta, I gotta make sure we, that's not allowed for anyone listening.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 11:04

Yeah, so I actually did work for, there's about a three year period where most of my writing was done on this documentation platform that had no built in spell check. and it was like pulling teeth at first, but then it turns out the human mind actually gets pretty good at compensating for stuff like that. And I got to a point where I could start to identify spelling errors. So I think I'm going to go with spell check just because I feel like if I gave up. Gen AI I would get left behind. I'd become a dinosaur almost immediately.

Andrew Zigler: 11:34

I feel similarly to Ben with this question. I would easily give up spellcheck because I personally never need spellcheck. I'm like a spelling nerd. I was like one of those spelling bee people in high school. And I have a degree in Latin. So like spelling has never been like an obstacle. I would definitely be afraid of giving up something like Gen AI in this case, because I think it'd be easy, like what Ben said, to get left behind. not to mention that you could certainly get it to solve the spellcheck problem. And I know all of our first reactions was, oh, that's cheating, but is it really in this, in this context of this question? so that's a really fascinating one.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 12:10

Yeah. And I feel like in the world where, you know, everything is AI generated now, like everyone's posting on LinkedIn with, just clicking the button to automatically write the posts, having misspellings in your content is probably a good, a clear example or an indicator that it was a human that wrote it.

Conor Bronsdon: 12:26

I'll admit I'm completely distracted now and I just want to learn about your Latin degree.

Andrew Zigler: 12:30

We'll have to crack into that in a later episode. I'm sure I can draw lots of parallels.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 12:34

Now that we're, sort of in the holiday spirit, and having some fun, I want to take a moment to just look back at, not only the past year, but just your entire time here, Conor. you know, you've been here at Dev Interrupted since, I believe, since the very beginning, have been, some of your favorite moments, along the way?

Conor Bronsdon: 12:52

Oh, man. I mean, honestly, there are sincerely too many to name them all, so I'm just going to apologize in advance to all the incredible guests who I'm going to forget about our conversations because they happened three, four years ago, because we've been so blessed with the number of conversations we've had. Like you brought up chaos engineering earlier in that concept, and it made me think of another. Two actually great concepts that we, or great conversations we had around chaos engineering that wasn't even on my original notes for this. I'm like, Oh, you know, I've talked to Nora Jones, last year, who was founder and CEO at Jelly and previously at Netflix and a lead in chaos engineering. And you completely brought that conversation back to the forefront for me. Now I want to talk about that one, but originally I had notes on other ones. So it's, it's really been such a blessing to. Learned from so many incredible leaders here and to get to work with Dan and others and you Ben As we've gone through the show because there's been this incredible arc of the show where I think we've leveled up what we've done We've built this amazing community almost what 19, 000 people subscribe to the sub stack now thousands of folks listening every week And we've also been able to bring our giant Dev Interrupted dome, this huge plastic bubble that some of you may have seen on conference floors, to go do recordings. And out of that we've gotten to talk to folks like Luca Rossi at Refactoring, who's become like a friend and a partner to Dev Interrupted, Kelly Vaughn,

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 14:12

also, I mean, awesome to see people like Luca really go on to build their own communities as well, you know. Like it's, you know, cause I think that's where we've done best is when we elevate voices,

Conor Bronsdon: 14:22

Absolutely. And then like Kelly Vaughn, who's kind of become this like regular guest and voice on the show. A couple of episodes we've done with Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb. I mean, Charity's just always a joy. Rob at CircleCI, who's now getting more and more involved with us as well. I think when this episode airs, it sounds like you'll have just done a fantastic dinner with them in San Francisco. And I can't wait to hear about that. There's really just been so many, and so many moments that have stood out.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 14:48

Well, I'm gonna ask you to alienate 99 percent of them and pick one. What was your favorite moment?

Conor Bronsdon: 14:57

Okay. Well, I will absolutely cheat on this one then and say Interact. we ran several Interact conferences where we had lots of speakers, and then created a bunch of incredible content around it. so folks may remember maybe our most popular episode, I think still today. Treating devs like human beings, which went viral on Reddit, from back in December of 2022, where we talked to Kelly Vaughn, Jean Hsu, and, Lena Reinhart about how to approach the human side of managing software engineers. and that resonated with so many people. I could, there's so many technical conversations, whether newer ones on AI, older ones on platform engineering, whatever else we could have a conversation about, but to me, that one has really stood the test of time, both as being part of this incredible digital conference series that we started up during the pandemic. And also from the standpoint of, I just think it's so timeless in the concepts being applied, and how much they matter today and will continue to matter.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 15:52

yeah, that is definitely a really awesome moment in Dev Interrupted history. On a similar thread, like was there ever a time that you had a guest where you feel like they really challenged your way of thinking or they like sort of forced you to change your mind on something?

Conor Bronsdon: 16:08

I'll share a serious one and a funny one here. So the serious one for me was we had a conversation last year in 2023 about tech hiring and the trends. Predictions and strategies for it, with Data Peoples, Miriam, Jana Shashi, and Miriam really brought both anecdotal information and so much data, that conversation, it made me deeply think about not just what was happening in hiring in 2023 for devs, which was a very challenging experience. and I think has continued this year as, as we've seen the hiring market. Posts, the kind of 21, 21 bubble blow up, change rapidly for a lot of folks. But it also made me think a lot about what's going to happen with AI. And I think we've seen that accelerate even more with AI agents and the way people are starting to scale organizations and effort differently across systems. and so that really pushed me to expand my thinking there. And then on the fun side of things, I would say. Drata's, co founder and CTO, Daniel Marashlian, joined us for a conversation about why engineers make the best entrepreneurs. And Daniel was just a fantastic guest and he had this amazing screw up story about, as Ben brought up earlier, taking down production and completely destroying things. And it was just such a, a delight to hear someone who. Had achieved so much in their career, built unicorn companies and, been this incredibly successful engineer and now leader, and to really reflect on the humanness of us all. And I think for the folks who are earlier in their career listening to this and maybe get intimidated sometimes by how successful folks are, like, we had on the former CEO of Nutanix, who's, uh, now also the, CEO and co founder of DevRev and has built another billion dollar company at Durag Pandey a few weeks back and had a great interview with him. And I think in those conversations, it's easy to go like, Oh my God, how can I ever achieve the person's success? and I think it's, it's such a joy to remember that like these people are human too, they also probably took production down, and we're all kind of on this learning journey together. We just have different experiences of it. So those were two that really stuck out to me.

Andrew Zigler: 18:13

So we've heard a little bit about your experiences with the guests so far. And I'm curious, what are some of the biggest things you've learned along that journey, being part of Dev Interrupted?

Conor Bronsdon: 18:24

Man, I mean, I've named a couple of them already, right? Like the human connection piece of all of us growing as leaders. and I think there's a ton of insights here. we did a whole series on leadership. Going from kind of your first tech lead role to, Hey, I'm in the boardroom now. How do I approach this? that Dan was, our co host Dan Lines was the main, interview on that we did last fall in 2023 that I highly recommend folks listen to. The, I think the whole series is a great look at how to grow as a leader. I'll say personally, I feel like I've grown as a leader just from having these conversations and then trying to apply them in my day to day life and also as a host and, a leader within my own team. it's been so moving to have these examples to look up to. And frankly, I'm, I'm hoping to apply a lot of stuff I've learned with Dev Interrupted to the new podcast I'm hosting about AI, Chain of Thought. listen and wherever you get your podcasts. and it's going to be awesome for me also to see kind of what you guys do next with, with Dev Interrupted to actually learn from that as well. But if I was going to pick like one main takeaway from the show. I think it's something that's just really basic for a lot of engineers, but continually gets driven home to me throughout the process, which is iteration. we've talked about, Hey, the show has grown so much in the four years. And the way that's happened has been through continual improvement. it's been through continual attempts that sometimes all of them always worked out and kind of assessing that success. So. mean, you talked about unit testing for toddlers earlier. Like, Hey, let's do CICD for everything we do in our lives. And I think you'll be better for it. And whether it's a content stream like this, where you have these weekly chances to kind of keep learning, keep growing and, and make mistakes and, build off of them or anything else, I think there's so much to learn from that. This holiday season share the gift of clarity and insight linear B's 2025 engineering benchmarks insights report. With data from over 6 million pull requests and expert analysis from leaders at CircleCI and Mongo DB. It's the ultimate resource for engineering leaders. Check out the show notes, the grab your free copy and give your team the insights they need to hit the ground running in 2025.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 20:37

it's really great to get your perspective on it, and I'm sure our audience is really, enjoying this too because I, I mean, it's, we don't always get the chance to open up behind the curtains to show, how things are produced and, you know, sort of the effort goes into to making this show every week and running a substack and a podcast and trying to always have original ideas that we're bringing to the, to. thanks Conor for all of those, those great memories, that you shared with us. And I think it's a great segue into, what we want to do with this show moving forward. So, you know, next year we're starting a new season. It's going to be season five. we have Andrew here with us and, you know, Andrew, you're the newest member of our Dev Interrupted team. this is your second episode you've got fresh eyes on this. You know, Conor and I have been here for a little while. and I wanted, I wanted to give you a chance just to introduce yourself a little bit to our audience, too, in this, episode. so, you know, just share with us, like, what does your background look like and how are you expecting to be able to apply the things you've done in the past to your time here with Dev Interrupted?

Andrew Zigler: 21:41

I love this question. Opportunity for me to talk about myself. Thank you so much. I am just joking. So a little bit about me. I have an atypical background. Prior to coming to engineering, I worked in education. So I did curriculum design, I built online programs, online educational tracks as well, and kind of help people get more Learning out of the tools they were using every day. But before that, I was even a classroom teacher. I lived abroad. I was in Japan for two years and I had many classrooms of students that I was in charge of and taught. And that was an amazing experience that I'm sure I'll talk more about in the future. But all of those things have made me, the developer that I am, and the person that I am. and having worked in an education background, I bring a lot of desire to teach and to bring together concepts and make them really easy for folks to understand. Something that we've been talking about a lot in software, everyone's heard this phrase about software is eating the world and open source is eating software. Now AI is eating open source and everything's eating everything. But the point of the story is that everyone is going to be impacted by technology and every company is going to be a technology company. And what this means is that there has to be a fundamental shift in how everyone talks about and thinks about software in order for it to be safe and inclusive and to be the most effective for the world that we live in. And that can't just be done by an engineering voice. And it also can't be done by an educator voice alone. we have to reach across the aisles and we have to understand each other. So that's my perspective and why I'm really excited to be here and blend those ideas together, because I see so much potential for a greater world and I think that there's so much that we can talk about. And so I look forward to creating the space for us to do so.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 23:30

Yeah, you know, I often refer to myself as like a cultural anthropologist that's behind the camera because I like to view myself more as like a person here who's here to extract voices so that we can elevate them and share them with our community you know, the thing that makes me excited about having you on the shows I think you really are gonna help us like Pull out the best in people when they come on our episode and really feel like they're conveying their unique perspective to the world. Uh, and then further, you know, I think what's equally important to that is then giving them the platform to share it, as broadly as possible. So yeah, that's got me pretty excited.

Conor Bronsdon: 24:06

I wish we were on Zoom just so I could keep emoji reacting to everything you guys are saying. It makes me so excited. I'm like, I want to be adding these like hearts and claps, and I'm like, ah, dang it. Like,

Andrew Zigler: 24:14

That can be an edit for posts, you know, posts, heart reacts, heart reacts, heart reacts, you know, we'll have like a filter or something.

Conor Bronsdon: 24:21

can be part of our new clip template is, you know, the host reactions that

Andrew Zigler: 24:24

well, you know, it's a podcast, really when you need a soundboard, you need to have like, I love that, I love that, like a button or something.

Conor Bronsdon: 24:31

Alright, I was excited for what next year's gonna look like. Now I'm not so sure.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 24:36

OKR, make a soundboard for Dev Interrupted.

Conor Bronsdon: 24:40

Jackson could help with that.

Andrew Zigler: 24:42

He could,

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 24:44

Man, alright, how do I get back to this?

Conor Bronsdon: 24:46

don't mind me just derailing the episode. I'm like, I'm done hosting this thing. I can just derail now. I'm a guest. I get to screw around.

Andrew Zigler: 24:52

you mean this isn't going in?

Conor Bronsdon: 24:55

This

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 24:56

I'm sure some of it will. Adam's already thinking about the video clip he's going to get off this.

Conor Bronsdon: 25:00

he loves a good blooper. this might be the intro to the whole episode probably now.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 25:05

So, we're going to get into, you know, some of our plans for next year here in just a moment. But before we do that, I just wanted to ask you, Andrew, like, do you have any suggestions? Like if you're going to change something today, what would you want to change right now

Andrew Zigler: 25:17

Well, you know, I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a moment, when we go into future plans for the show, but I'm definitely looking forward, or my own ideas for things that we can do is to dive more into research and data and balance that with the really great anecdotes that we get from our guests. But also, the biggest opportunity I see, and I know our listeners probably agree, is that there are so many common themes among the really incredible guests that come on our show. And there are huge opportunities to tie those themes together into a larger story and show the bigger picture, especially when these anecdotes are from a very unique perspective of stress or tension or a time where there was a Huge amount of change, and there's so much that can be learned from that and applied across different stories. So just because, like, there's such a huge body of work here from so many smart folks, I think that there's a huge opportunity to go deeper on, some of those values that we've learned from them over the years.

Conor Bronsdon: 26:17

I absolutely love that you're thinking about that because some of the most successful work Dev Interrupted has done, to your point, has been when we've tied that qualitative and quantitative together, bringing in like dev productivity data from LinearB's software engineering benchmarks has been a fantastic way to kind of drive home these points. And there's so much opportunity to do more of that on the research side. So I can't wait to see what you do with it, Andrew. That's so exciting.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 26:41

So, Andrew, I was wondering if you could give us a sneak peek on some of the changes that are coming up, specifically as it relates to the format or the structure of this show.

Andrew Zigler: 26:50

Yeah, so we're looking to kind of shake up the format of the show a little bit. But of course, we're not going to shake it up too much, at least at first, because we want to ease everyone into the new experience and the new season. But things that we do want to dive into are, how engineering leaders are measuring and improving things like their developer productivity. We really love to do series and deep dives on how engineering leaders are tackling this problem that's Front of Mind for them and going into next year. so if that is something that is interesting to you or something that you're currently tackling, we'd love to hear your story because that's something that we're actively thinking about right now. And that's just one small example of, new segments and stories that our audience can expect in the coming year. more opportunities to, break up interviews with, more deep dives, like I said, as well on research and data. another thing we're looking to do, is of course, take dev interrupted on the road. when our, Our listeners are listening to this. We would have just gone on the road, and had an event in San Francisco where we brought engineering leaders together. this is something that we want to do more of in the coming year. Having these live events and being at conferences as well. There might be a conference that you attend in the near future where you see a Dev Interrupted booth or you see us walking around interviewing folks. this is a really great opportunity to kind of get involved with the community. And we're looking to grow that experience everywhere we go, including having things like this. Off the conference floor, maybe events, happy hours, uh, learning of, uh, workshops, things like that. So if these are things that are interesting or exciting to you, we'd love to get some feedback on that as well. and you can let us know anywhere you can reach us, which is lots of places.

Conor Bronsdon: 28:29

I love to hear that. I just got to say, like, it's been some of the most fun moments we've had with the show has been when we've had these opportunities to be in person and record a lot of great content and get these insights from listeners, and have these deeper conversations. so excited to see where you all are going to be showing up next year and hopefully I'll see you at a couple of events.

Andrew Zigler: 28:47

And Ben, as well, from my perspective, I'm curious what kind of things you have in mind for the Dev Interrupted substack and where we'll be taking the newsletter next year.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 28:55

Yeah. So, you know, we've sort of inconsistently done guest posts in the past. And one of the things I would really love for us to get to is to be more consistent about, sending out newsletters twice a week. the problem is there's just a lot of challenges producing, a weekly newsletter. And then doubling it is just even more effort and difficulties. it might sound strange coming from an organization that creates tons of content, but there's always this challenge of like getting things on for the right format for the media and the channel. And yeah, it ends up being a pretty big endeavor, but I would love to get consistently more unique insights out to our audience through the Substack Newsletter. But the biggest change really is, it's already happening. We're starting to become a lot more Research oriented in the content that we produce. So, one thing we've, we've started doing just in recent months is, doing analysis, unique analysis of new research white papers that come out, from companies like Microsoft, Google, Okta, and this isn't going to stop. there's a lot of research coming out about developer productivity, developer experience, how to apply quantitative metrics to those challenges, We love reading them, we love analyzing them, and we want to share them with our audience. In fact, our goal is to let our audience be the first among their peers that know about the latest trends in research. So, but we also don't want you to spend a lot of time like reading white papers, like it can be quite, quite intensive to decipher sometimes. So if you subscribe to our sub stack, you'll get these delivered as a part of our normal Tuesday newsletter to your inbox. So it's the best way to keep up to date on the latest and greatest of cutting edge research and the things that are impacting your work. So Conor, I actually have a question for you now. so now that you're retiring from the show and becoming a listener, I want you to put on your listener hat and think, what would you like to hear from the show next year?

Conor Bronsdon: 30:56

All right.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 30:56

It's got an actual listener hat.

Conor Bronsdon: 30:58

all right. Listener hat, listener hat. honestly, I think you and Andrew have nailed. Things that I, I'm really excited about. One being the opportunity to do more with the show in, for in person events and both create content out of that, but also to engage the community. I think it was fantastic. So really excited to see that happening. I would also say that I think the substack piece is a huge opportunity where like, as Ben pointed out, we've had some great guest articles in the past. Ben and I have co written a couple of them even, but there's such an opportunity to scale this and to really. Grow the impact there, particularly by bringing in research, particularly by kind of marrying this qualitative and quantitative. So honestly, I think you guys are on absolutely the right track. Like you've kind of taken some of the experimentation and research we've done in the past and are saying, here's how we can scale this. Like Ben, I've loved the segments that you and Dan have been doing, kind of recapping and bringing insights from, guest interviews. For me, I just can't wait to see how you scale it and how you make these kind of repeatable motions. Oh, I will add one more thing, which is, Since I don't have a great insight for you here on like, hey, here's what I think you should do. I'll just say like, I'll name a couple more episodes that I really love, because I just want to keep shouting out the folks who have my favorites, that I think would be great examples. One, like getting the story of how someone built something, I think is something that people love and can have a lot of value. Like going back to One of our early episodes, the audio quality is not as good as the current show, but bear with us if you go back and listen, co founding Kubernetes with Microsoft CVP, Brendan Burns. Brendan's both fantastic person and also is someone who just brought so much insight about how that went down. So I would love to hear more of this, like, Hey, like, here's a person who helped create this amazing open source thing or did this really cool, founding approach. Like how did they really do that? What's the nitty gritty there? and then like for future looking stuff, like Aarathi Vidyasagar, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. really enjoyed talking to her a couple months back, and they've now released like their first LinkedIn AI agent. so kind of staying on that cutting edge with like what's happening at the research, then how is that pairing into product production, I think is great. and then the, the other theme I would just name is like, You know, a couple of conversations from early in season four, Neha Batra with GitHub, VP of engineering there. And then Netflix's Carol Barrett, gave us a kind of blueprint for building inspired engineering teams. And so, you know, exactly what I think Andrew was talking about earlier, that was like the people conversations and the, the qualitative insights paired with quantitative data, I think is what makes, makes a show at its best and really special

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 33:34

Alright, well I've got just one more question before we let our audience go. So Andrew, if somebody wants to get more involved in the Dev Interrupted community, where should they go?

Andrew Zigler: 33:43

The first place they should go is our Substack. If you're only listening to the podcast, then you're only getting half the story. It's important that you go to the Substack and subscribe to our newsletter, where we drop insights every week, and we link to some of these great research topics that Ben's alluding to as well. This format's just going to continue to expand, so definitely make sure that you sign up for the weekly newsletter there, and we'll stay in touch on that platform. As well, you know, you're listening to us on the podcast. If you haven't already, make sure that you're subscribed. That way you can stay tuned for next year and don't have to go hunting for the episodes. And outside of that, on LinkedIn is the best place to be looking for us. We're going to be going to events and, we're going to be making that presence very well known. And so if you are online and you're engaging with. Dev Interrupted, I promise you're not going to miss it. And so when you see us, you know, reach out, say hi, like the comments, share it so that your fellow, leaders and teammates can see, uh, what we're doing here and maybe even join you. you could even send it to your mom, you know, if, if you want to bring her along, going back to the earlier question of how do I explain technical debt to my grandma? I think you can start by maybe, uh, bringing her for the journey as well. And most importantly, if you see me out at a conference anywhere, whether it looks like I'm doing Dev Interrupted stuff or not, you definitely need to come say hello and don't be a stranger.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 35:03

So you heard it here instead of Christmas songs when you're with family this year, play a Dev Interrupted episode.

Conor Bronsdon: 35:10

That could be a great episode explaining technical debt to your grandmother or explaining technical debt to your family. This could be a whole theme guys.

Andrew Zigler: 35:17

Explaining technical concepts to your family members is a hilarious concept and About this time last year, I was at AWS reInvent, and they were having a competition, or like a social competition, really, around a party rock, which was creating like LLM applications from just kind of typing in what you wanted it to do, and then a bedrock would take care of all of the logic in the background. And the idea is that anybody can write an app because you're just writing it in your natural language. And so the tool I made while I was at reInvent, was called Eli5. And so it took any conference description or any session track description from anything I went. It broke it down into a way I explain it to a five year old. So that is a tool that you could use to take things you learn at a conference. Yeah, that was something that I did after, uh, I think, I think, uh, Brook Jameson, put me up to task on that one, and that was what I made.

Conor Bronsdon: 36:11

I think I need to use that.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 36:14

So with that said, Conor, I want to express my sincerest gratitude for everything that you've done for Dev Interrupted, you know, both behind the microphone, but also behind the scenes, you know, literally none of this would have been possible without you. So again, thank you. Do you have any final thoughts or messages for the Dev Interrupted community before you head out?

Conor Bronsdon: 36:35

I'm excited. I'll miss y'all. but you're in for a treat with what Andrew and Ben and Dan are going to do with the show, particularly at devinterrupted. substack. com, which you should subscribe to as, of which we keep bringing up, there's such an opportunity to, Have this show be a central part of how engineering leaders and engineers who want to be leaders think about the world. I also want to give a big shout out to Adam and Jackson in particular, who've been integral parts of the podcast production team and have really helped this show grow to what it is, for listeners who want to stay in touch. There are kind of three great ways to do that with me. One, my LinkedIn is the best place. Just LinkedIn, I'm pretty easy to find. They'll probably put an episode link here in the show notes. Please feel free to shoot me a connection request. I love chatting with y'all. And always love to hear what folks are up to. You can also follow my personal writing on my test lab sub stack, which I write in frequently and I'm trying to do more of. ConorBronson. substack. com. And if you want to continue to hear me opine on various topics related to engineering, uh, while I won't be doing quite as much on the broad scale, I am going to still be doing a weekly show as part of the Chain of Thought podcast, focused on AI, so check it out, uh, wherever you get your podcasts, et cetera. And yeah, don't hesitate to reach out. Love hearing from y'all. and I'll give one final CTA here too, which is, folks, you've heard me say this A hundred plus times on the show, maybe 200 at this point, over the last four years. But if you're listening to the show and you're listening to this holiday episode and you haven't left a rating or review for Dev Interrupted on your podcasting app of choice, whether that's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever else, what are you doing? You're listening to the holiday episode. You clearly enjoy the show. You clearly value this community. like we need you. And, yeah, make sure you leave that rating or review. It really does make such a difference in how the show is recommended in the algorithm on Spotify. It helps the show land incredible guests that you get, then get the value from because they see, oh, the show's huge, it's got all these ratings and reviews. so just do it. It takes two seconds. It, it, uh, harms nobody, helps everybody. and that's, I think that's my final time doing that, but, it's been a distinct pleasure. Ben, Andrew,

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 38:41

Yeah, thanks to you, man. And, you know, all I want for the holidays is tons of positive ratings on, on podcast apps. It would be an immense gift to all of us. So, Andrew, it's great to have you here and helping us, keep running this tradition of having this holiday episode and helping us continue to engage with engineering leaders around the world. Is there any last words from you before we end this season? Thanks

Andrew Zigler: 39:08

Well, like I already said, be sure to reach out to me and connect with me. I'm looking forward to meeting and learning more from all of our guests. So I'll make sure that I drop an easy way for you to get in contact with me in the newsletter, which you're definitely going to be subscribing to on Substack after you listen to this. So thanks again. And again, I'm really excited and humbled to be here. So I'm looking forward to hosting many more great conversations like this one next year.

Ben Lloyd Pearson: 39:34

And you know, as we wrap up this holiday episode, I want to take a moment to really just thank all of our listeners for their continued support. We can't do this without you there for us. And if you are enjoying the show, I'm going to do exactly what Conor said he's done 200 times. Please take a moment, subscribe, give us. A rating, tune in every week. It really helps us spread the word of all of these great engineering leaders that we bring on our community. And if you want more delivered to your inbox, we've said it enough already, but please check out our Substack newsletter. The podcast will be taking a short break, but we'll return in three weeks for the start of season five on January 7th. And until then have a safe and happy holiday season.

Conor Bronsdon: 40:18

holidays, everyone.