GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

Will McGugan, prolific open-source Python dev behind Rich and Textual, now building Toad, a sleek terminal frontend for AI coding agents. He explains why current AI coding UIs feel stuck in the past. The conversation highlights Toad’s ACP plugin approach, streaming markdown, prompt editing, syntax highlighting, and how AI fits into real developer workflows.

Ian Darwin, author and longtime Java trainer behind Java Cookbook, shares stories from early Java days and publishing with O'Reilly. He discusses favorite Java features like string templates and records. They cover tool choices such as JUnit and Mockito, practical chapter picks like regex and reflection, and candid thoughts on AI, hiring juniors, and why the fifth edition still matters.

Marcin Grzejszczak, Java Champion and Spring Cloud Contract contributor, recounts a career from C++ to shaping contract testing. He tells how a simple typo that broke production sparked Spring Cloud Contract. The talk explores AI-generated contracts from production traffic, reducing manual overhead, and why context is the underrated pillar of observability.

Lukasz Dynowski, independent consultant and co-author of Learning API Styles, brings low-level networking insight to API design. He discusses starting APIs from the network layer, choosing protocols and encodings based on context, public vs internal API trade-offs, mixing transports for different traffic, and traits that make APIs usable and maintainable.

Jay Wengrow, software engineer, founder of Actualize and author of practical programming books. He explains how text LLMs become agents by emitting special notations that trigger real functions. They cover guardrails like regex and judge models, splitting work across specialized models, a 150-line podcast-generating agent, and why building from first principles can beat premature frameworks.

Jodie Burchell, Senior Data Science Developer Advocate with a background in clinical psychology, biostatistics, and NLP. They unpack what generative AI and transformers actually are. They talk about why ML fundamentals and data quality still matter. They examine ethics, bias, and practical governance. They trace AI boom–bust history and clarify AGI versus narrow AI.

Charles Humble, author and consultant focused on cloud infrastructure and sustainability, discusses real-world edge computing. He explains far and device edge distinctions. They explore surprising uses in agriculture, healthcare, retail, and ship deployments. Conversation covers vendor choice, day-two operations, sustainability gains from local processing, and the responsibilities of tech in the era of generative AI.

Rebecca Parsons, CTO Emerita at ThoughtWorks, brings ethical and business-risk lenses. Gregor Hohpe, architect and author, shares platform and scale thinking. Barry O'Reilly, founder and author, focuses on organizational change and decision boundaries. Andrew Harmel-Law, ThoughtWorks principal, talks practical architecture facilitation. They riff on designing for chronic dysfunction, LLM impacts, safeguards, slow tech shifts, integration pain, and where small experiments pay off.

Laurentiu Spilca, Java Champion and author focused on Java, Spring, and security. They discuss why developers avoid security. They cover essential cryptography concepts, pitfalls of reinventing standards, risks from AI-generated code, and the importance of understanding certificates and PKI.

Elton Stoneman, freelance consultant, trainer and author of Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, talks about the updated second edition. He covers Docker fundamentals, multi-platform images, Docker Compose and local app modeling. They discuss portability across clouds, image optimization and what separates beginners from experts.