GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

Adrian Mouat, Developer Relations at Chainguard and author of Using Docker, focuses on container security and minimal distroless images. He discusses why base images go stale and how smaller images reduce risk. He explains building from source with Wolfi, the role and limits of SBOMs and attestations, and practices like immutability, short-lived credentials, and signing for safer supply chains.

Nick Selby, Managing Partner at EPSD and strategic IT risk advisor, and Sarah Wells, independent consultant and author, dig into the rush to adopt AI and its business dangers. They discuss misleading security jargon from vendors, AI tools needing deep access to sensitive data, sprawling integrations that magnify breach impact, and practical defenses like least-permission, threat modeling, and incident readiness.

Frances Buontempo, consultant, developer and author of Learn C++ by Example, uses short, playable examples to teach modern C++. She discusses concise features like the spaceship operator and structure bindings. Coroutines, generators, and practical patterns like almost-always auto get attention. She also talks about teaching techniques and ideas for future C++ reflection features.

Ewelina Kurtys, strategy advisor and scientist-turned-entrepreneur working on bio-inspired computing, discusses building computers from living neurons. She talks about why living neurons could be vastly more energy efficient, the technical challenges of encoding and plasticity, organoid lifespans and lab constraints. The conversation covers ethics around stem cells, remote-access neuroprototypes, and the potential impact on AI costs.

Susanne Kaiser, independent tech consultant and author of Architecture for Flow, blends Domain-Driven Design, Wardley Mapping and Team Topologies. She explains how to visualize value streams, map context and change coupling, and use a practical Architecture for Flow Canvas. The conversation highlights visual communication, workshops like event storming, and empowering teams to evolve systems iteratively.

Adrian Mouat, a security-focused developer-relations pro and author of Using Docker, and Abby Bangser, a platform engineering lead working on Kratix, discuss balancing security with developer experience. They cover why security feels fear-driven, embedding security into platforms with sensible defaults, supply chain and open-source risks, incentives and ownership models, and practical practices like chaos, on-call, and tooling to make secure work smoother.

Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CTO of Theodo and co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto, explains why lean thinking matters for scaling software teams. He recounts a Japan study trip that reframed agile into lean, explores tech-enabled networks of teams, and shares practical leadership habits like visiting the Gemba and using visual management to sustain learning.

Félix GV, former LinkedIn engineer who built the Venice planetary-scale derived data system, explains how Venice unbundles components like Kafka and RocksDB into independent distributed systems. He covers client caching patterns, rigorous chaos engineering and load tests, trade-offs of asynchronous writes and CAP theorem in multi-region deployments, and experiments integrating DuckDB for analytics.

Simon Rohrer, enterprise tech leader focused on architecture at scale. Jacqui Read, author and communication expert in software design. They discuss what software design really means, the role of architecture decision records and conversations, how to socialize and document designs, when to standardize, and ways to keep design aligned with evolving code and teams.

James Ward, AWS developer advocate and practical ecosystem thinker; Bruce Eckel, veteran author and language historian; Bill Frasure, ZIO practitioner and effects implementer. They discuss what effects are, how they manage unpredictability and resources, why effect typing beats runtime wiring, and how effects are spreading across languages and tooling. Short, focused, and approachable conversation about real-world effect use.