Level-up Podcast

Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, breaks down where measuring developer productivity falls short and shares how organizations should aim to balance making decisions based on both quantitative and qualitative data, how to avoid misalignment with leadership, and improve company culture.

Christian Oestreich, Vice President of Architecture at WEX, joins us to dive into how to prioritize your developer enablement programs, getting comfortable with soft and hard metrics, and best practices for using automation to improve developer enablement and keep your team in the flow.

Emily Freeman, best-selling author and former Head of Community at AWS, shares her experiences with developer experience, from measuring it to enacting it — and doing both successfully.

Phillip Carter, Principal Product Manager at honeycomb.io, joins us to discuss developments in OpenTelemetry, how Honeycomb has used LLMs to improve observability, best practices for building with LLMs, and the future of LLMs and machine learning as a whole.

Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, shares his insights on building and leading a successful growth company. He shares his experience on harnessing the strategic potential of DevOps and platform teams, the shift in the You Build It You Own It method, and revolutionizing traditional practices to enhance the developer experience.

Zayna Shahzad, VP of Engineering at OneSignal, shares her insights and experiences in managing and scaling engineering teams. Her experiences highlight the importance of motivation, strong feedback mechanisms, and fostering a sense of ownership and accountability within a team. 

Learn from Sarah Wells, an Independent Tech Consultant, worked for the Financial Times for 11 years. In her time, they scaled from 12 releases each year to over 30,000 — all thanks to microservices (and a lot of engineering enablement work).

Hazel Weakly explores what it takes to iron out a people-first approach for platform teams. By focusing on building effective teams, streamlined infrastructure systems, and the proper set of tools and automation, Hazel has helped multiple companies improve how they build their products.. She knows how to strike the balance between the social and the technical.

Fernando Villalba, Developer Advocate at Opslevel, joins the podcast to discuss where McKinsey's developer productivity article went wrong, functional metrics leaders can rely upon, and more.

In the most recent episode of the Level Up podcast we spoke with Chad McElligott, Senior Staff Engineer at Smartrr. Chad covers how platform engineering plays a vital role in supporting developers and elevating an organization to the next level.