GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

Arjen Poutsma, longtime Spring contributor who built core features, and Rod Johnson, Spring founder now building agent frameworks, join Trisha Gee. They debate Spring’s evolution, reactive vs virtual threads, AOT/GraalVM work, agent tooling like Mbabel, Java language changes, modulith vs microservices, and AI/data-privacy tradeoffs. Short, lively conversation packed with practical tech perspectives.

Nick Coult, AWS serverless product lead; Janak Agarwal, AWS Lambda product manager; Akshatha Laxmi, hands-on serverless solution architect. They discuss how generative AI speeds scaffolding and prototyping. They debate AI's role in design versus implementation. They cover safe modernization, product decisions driven by customers, and improving developer experience with AI.

Sam Keen, founder and researcher and author of Clean Architecture with Python, brings 30 years of software and architecture experience. He discusses pragmatic Pythonic adaptations of clean architecture. They cover dependency management, onion-layer structure, testability as an architecture health signal, when to wrap third-party services, and how layered design works with AI-assisted development.

Damian Brady, Staff Developer Advocate at GitHub, and Roman Zhukov, Principal Architect at Red Hat, debate AI-assisted development. They cover how AI changes workflows, provenance and traceability of generated code, security and supply-chain risks, legal and ethical responsibilities, and how developer roles and practices must adapt to keep humans in the loop.

Olaf Molenveld, Technology Advisor at CircleCI with decades in CI/CD and release strategies. He and Julian explore how delivery evolved from monoliths to microservices. They discuss pipeline observability, balancing local vs remote development, platform engineering trends, and AI-driven automation reshaping DevOps. Conversation highlights optimization, orchestration, and safer CI/CD for AI experimentation.

Jan Martiška, Quarkus software engineer and integrations specialist, and Martin Štefanko, Quarkus core engineer with app-server experience, and Holly Cummins, senior Quarkus technologist, talk about writing Quarkus in Action. They cover developer productivity, dev mode and continuous testing. They discuss the book’s structure, choosing extensions, native vs JVM tradeoffs, containerization, and frontend options.

Nathen Harvey, leader of DORA research at Google Cloud and product manager focused on software delivery, joins to discuss AI's real effects on software development. He explains why early AI adoption can hurt stability and throughput. He outlines DORA's five delivery metrics and a seven-capability AI model. He explores AI as an amplifier, documentation gains, trust challenges, and practical next steps for teams.

Alexandre Malavasi, CTO, software architect and five-time Microsoft MVP, author of books on .NET. He discusses writing comprehensive technical books and choosing what to include. He talks backend-first structure and integrating ASP.NET Core with React, Angular and Vue. He stresses team skills over trendy tech and the importance of DevOps, monitoring and architectures that enable change.

Holden Karau, an open-source engineer and Apache Spark contributor, shares her journey in tech and her mission with Fight Health Insurance, an AI tool designed to help users appeal health insurance claim denials. She delves into the technical intricacies of distributed data processing, discussing Spark's performance advantages over MapReduce. Holden unveils the challenges of building the appeals assistant, from gathering patient data to navigating insurance regulations, all while emphasizing the significance of sustainable funding for open-source projects.

Andrew Lamb, a Staff Engineer at InfluxData and Apache PMC member, joins tech journalist Olimpiu Pop to explore the innovative FDAP Stack. They dive into the shift from row-based to columnar storage and discuss how technologies like Apache Iceberg improve interoperability. Andrew shares insights on Arrow's standardized memory model, the advantages of Parquet over traditional formats, and the role of open source in accelerating database development. Their conversation highlights the future of database architecture through modular components.