Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership

Dan Neciu
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Technology
  • Updated weekly

A software engineering podcast for senior developers, staff engineers, and tech leads who build and scale systems in production. Hosted by Neciu Dan, Señors @ Scale features deep, technical conversations with engineering leaders from companies like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Datadog, and Snyk. Every week, we sit down with Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and technical leaders to unpack the real challenges of frontend architecture, micro frontends, React and Vue at scale, design systems, security, reliability, and technical leadership. No fluff, no surface-level takes. Just hard-

  1. 2 days ago

    Accessibility at Scale with Craig Abbott (TetraLogical) | WCAG, Screen Readers, Design Systems

    Your product passes every automated accessibility check. Does that mean anyone can actually use it? Craig Abbott is a Principal Accessibility Specialist at TetraLogical and the former Head of Accessibility at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, one of the largest government departments in the country, where he built a dedicated accessibility practice from nothing and open sourced the DWP Accessibility Manual. He has over 15 years in user centred design, previously working as a designer and design manager, and has led accessibility work across the public sector and at Elastic. In this episode we get into what "sustainable accessibility" actually means, why culture is harder to change than capability, and how to stop accessibility from walking out the door when the one passionate person leaves. Craig breaks down his three C's framework (compliance, culture, capability), the screen reader testing stack he actually recommends, and what you can realistically automate in a CI pipeline with Playwright, Cucumber and Guidepup. We also get into the uncomfortable stuff. Automated tools only catch around 40% of issues. A page can pass WCAG with two pixel text and invisible links. And with 95.8% of the top million websites failing automated checks, the LLMs writing your front end code were trained on all of it. Craig is autistic and ADHD, and he closes on cognitive accessibility, the WCAG AAA gap, and why designing for neurodivergent users is still mostly ignored. Key Topics: - What sustainable accessibility means and why third party audits alone don't get you there - Building an accessibility practice from scratch inside a 100,000 person organisation - The three C's: compliance, culture and capability, and why culture is the hardest - Embedding accessibility so it survives when the champion leaves - JAWS vs NVDA vs VoiceOver vs TalkBack, and why the "worse" reader is the better test - Running screen readers in VMs and BrowserStack without expensive licences - Accessibility acceptance tests in CI with Playwright, Cucumber and Guidepup - Why compliant does not mean usable, with two pixel fonts and invisible links as proof - Shifting accessibility left into design and research, not throwing it at developers - Why you cannot detect screen reader users in your analytics - The three highest impact things: automated tools, keyboard only, structured content - Why CSS and design systems aren't opinionated enough - AI-generated front-end code and the 95.8% problem - Whether AI browsing replaces screen readers, and why LLM interfaces are inaccessible too - Designing for neurodivergence, WCAG AAA, and the COGA guidance CONNECT WITH CRAIG 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbott567/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/abbott567 🦋 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/craigabbott.bsky.social 🌐 Website: https://www.craigabbott.co.uk FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 🏢 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES TetraLogical: https://tetralogical.com WebAIM Million report: https://webaim.org/projects/million/ W3C Cognitive Accessibility (COGA): https://www.w3.org/WAI/cognitive/ Guidepup: https://www.guidepup.dev/ axe-con: https://www.deque.com/axe-con/ #accessibility #a11y #webdevelopment #wcag #frontend #inclusivedesign #softwareengineering #neurodiversity #designsystems #senorsatscale 💬 Has your team ever shipped something fully compliant that users still couldn't use? Tell me about it in the comments.

  2. 26 Jul

    Versatility at Scale with Carmen Huidobro (CTO, Incredible Bee) | 17 Years Freelancing, Automation, Ethical AI

    Is versatility the skill that actually survives the AI shift? In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Carmen Huidobro, CTO at Incredible Bee in Vienna. Carmen has spent 17 years in tech, almost all of it freelancing, working across Objective-C, Ruby on Rails, the web, mobile, hardware, and even ABAP in an SAP consultancy. Along the way, she spent five years in developer relations and developer education, and now leads engineering on long-lived macOS products like Renamer. Her argument is that the debate about generalists versus specialists misses the point. What matters is being an expert at adapting: recognizing patterns, carrying solutions across stacks, and dropping into unfamiliar environments without bringing chaos with you. Niches are not going away, but the durable skill is the one that moves between them. We also get into the part most teams get wrong: how to ship AI without betraying the people who use your software. Carmen walks through adding a local LLM to a twenty-year-old Mac app using Mistral and a llama.cpp runtime, why the model downloads on demand instead of shipping in the binary, and why it is opt-in rather than opt-out. Plus, the refugee hackathon app she built in 2016 that the City of Vienna still runs today, why she will not take money from junior developers for bootcamps, and what she calls "white guy-driven development". Key Topics: - Why versatility beats both generalism and specialization - Seventeen years of freelancing across stacks, platforms, and industries - SAP, ABAP, and why niche expertise never disappears - Building an ethical AI toolkit: Mistral, llama.cpp, and on-device inference - Adding an LLM to a legacy macOS app without breaking user trust - Opt in over opt out, and why you should never take features away - Deciding what should be automated and what should not - Pushing back when investors demand AI in the product - Where2Help: the 2016 refugee hackathon project in Vienna still runs - Why the junior developer market broke and what bootcamps can still fix - Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome - What AI will never teach you about solving problems CONNECT WITH CARMEN 🌐 Website: https://carmenh.dev 🐦 X: https://x.com/hola_soy_milk 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/hola-soy-milk 🐘 Mastodon: https://hola-soy-milk.online/ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 🏢 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Incredible Bee: https://incrediblebee.com Bad Website Club: https://badwebsite.club Distribute Aid: https://distributeaid.org #Versatility #Freelancing #Automation #EthicalAI #LocalLLM #Mistral #macOS #OpenSource #SoftwareEngineering #CTO #Podcast #SenorsAtScale 💬 Are you betting on going deep or going wide right now? Tell me in the comments.

  3. 19 Jul

    CI/CD at Scale with Marko Gaćeša (Semaphore) | Semaphore, Product Engineering, Agent Native

    Is testing, not coding, the real bottleneck of the AI era? Marko Gaćeša is Head of Product at Semaphore, the agent native CI/CD platform built for coding agents: fast, affordable, enterprise-ready, and fully open source. A serial entrepreneur and technologist, Marko founded Dry Tools, served as Chief Product Officer at Alchemy Cloud, and has spent his career building high-quality software across domains such as medical equipment and industrial automation before entering the crowded CI/CD market. In this episode, Marko breaks down what it takes to build a product for developers: why flaky tests are the worst enemy of fast delivery, how SemAI uses skills and agents to automate everything from GitHub Actions migration to flaky test analysis, and why the future developer experience lives inside your coding agent, not in a browser tab. We also go deep on the product side: running experiments with feature flags, pricing a CI/CD platform when a "minute of CI" means something different everywhere, product-led growth versus B2B sales, and structuring lean product teams when your engineers are the domain experts. Key Topics: - What Semaphore does and why CI/CD matters - Testing is the biggest bottleneck in the age of coding agents - What "agent native" CI/CD really means - Flaky tests and how SemAI helps agents debug them - Migrating from GitHub Actions automatically - How Semaphore achieves faster and cheaper builds - Running product experiments on infrastructure tools - Pricing strategy in the CI/CD market - Should AI agents trigger deployments? - Product team structure in developer tools - Book recommendations for product-minded engineers CONNECT WITH MARKO & SEMAPHORE 💼 Marko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markogacesa/ 🌐 Semaphore: https://semaphore.io/ 🐦 Semaphore on X: https://x.com/semaphoreci 🐙 Semaphore on GitHub: https://github.com/semaphoreio 💼 Semaphore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/semaphoreci FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev 💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ ADDITIONAL RESOURCES - Semaphore open source repo: https://github.com/semaphoreio/semaphore/ - Semaphore CI/CD benchmark: https://semaphore.io/semaphore-ci-cd-benchmark-performance-and-cost-analysis - Semaphore docs: https://docs.semaphore.io/ - Books mentioned: Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer, plus Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed by Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group #CICD #Semaphore #ProductEngineering #AgentNative #DevTools #DeveloperExperience #AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering 💬 Would you let an AI agent trigger your production deployments? Tell us in the comments.

  4. 12 Jul

    AI Harness at Scale with Maxim Salnikov (Microsoft) | GitHub Copilot, Agent Ops, Context Engineering

    Everyone can buy the same GitHub Copilot licenses. So what actually makes a company AI native? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Maxim Salnikov, AI Dev Tools Solution Engineer at Microsoft, where he leads AI native development enablement for over 100 enterprise customers of Microsoft and GitHub in Norway. Maxim has been building for the web since the late 90s and now spends his days inside real enterprise dev teams, watching how AI adoption succeeds and fails across finance, energy, agriculture, and pure software companies. Maxim breaks down why AI adoption is a change management problem, not a technology problem, and why buying licenses is the easy part. We get into the anatomy of an AI harness, the internal layer that ships with tools like Copilot and Claude Code, and the external layer that successful companies build on top for their own codebases. He also makes the case for two new job titles emerging inside dev teams: context engineers and agent ops. Key Topics: - Why startups outpace enterprises in AI adoption, and how to close the gap - Handling AI skeptics: why one bad experience in 2023 shouldn't be the final verdict - Code as a secondary artifact: the harness is what you actually build - Internal vs external harness layers, and how the VS Code team builds its own tools - Context engineers and agent ops: the new roles appearing in team topology - The AI superheroes anti-pattern and why it doesn't scale - Managing agent skills like dependencies with APM (Agent Package Manager) - How to become an AI native engineer: orchestration over one-to-one chat CONNECT WITH MAXIM 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/webmax/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/webmaxru 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/webmaxru 🌐 Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/maxim-salnikov/ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 🏢 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES 📖 Agentic SDLC Handbook (free book mentioned in the episode) 📦 APM (Agent Package Manager) #AINativeDevelopment #GitHubCopilot #ContextEngineering #AIHarness #SoftwareEngineering #Microsoft #AgenticAI #DeveloperProductivity 💬 Is your team building its own harness on top of AI dev tools, or running them out of the box? Drop a comment 👇

  5. 4 Jul

    URL State at Scale with François Best | nuqs, React, TypeScript

    What if your app's state didn't live in memory, but in the URL? François Best is a freelance web developer, open sourcer, and founder of 47ng, where he builds web applications with a privacy-first approach. He is the creator of nuqs, the type-safe search param state manager for React with over 10,000 GitHub stars, used by companies like Sentry, Supabase, Vercel, and Clerk. In this episode, François shares the full story of nuqs, from a woodworking calculator he built during the pandemic to a framework-agnostic library supporting Next.js, React Router, Remix, and TanStack. We dig into the internals: the async update queue, browser rate limits on the History API, throttling and debouncing, render count budgets, and the end-to-end test suite that keeps it all stable across frameworks. We also go beyond the library. François breaks down the recent npm supply chain attacks, explains how staged publishing and reproducible builds protect maintainers, shares how AI agents changed his workflow (including a Cypress to Playwright migration done by Claude Code on Christmas Day), and makes the case for running local AI models when your code can't leave the building. Key Topics: - What nuqs is and the origin story behind it - URL as the source of truth and the async scheduling engine - Browser rate limits, throttling, and debounce semantics - Framework adapters: Next.js, React Router, Remix, TanStack - End-to-end testing across frameworks and render count budgets - What state belongs in the URL (and what doesn't) - Hidden nuqs features: loaders, serializers, URL keys, standard schema - The npm supply chain attacks and how to defend as a maintainer - AI agents in open source: migrations, RFC prototyping, slop PRs - Local AI models for privacy-conscious companies CONNECT WITH FRANÇOIS 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/franky47 🦋 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/francoisbest.com 🌐 Website: https://francoisbest.com FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev 💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ ADDITIONAL RESOURCES - nuqs: https://nuqs.dev - nuqs on GitHub: https://github.com/47ng/nuqs - TkDodo's blog: https://tkdodo.eu/blog - Aurora Scharff's blog: https://aurorascharff.no #React #nuqs #TypeScript #URLState #NextJS #OpenSource #WebDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #SenorsAtScale 💬 What state do you keep in the URL, and have you ever rolled your own search param sync? Tell us in the comments.

  6. 28 Jun

    WebMCP at Scale with Susanna Wong (Typeform, Google Developer Expert) | Browser AI, Offline Models, Agents

    What happens to frontend engineering when software stops being deterministic? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Susanna Wong, Staff Software Engineer at Typeform and Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies since 2020. Susanna's path is anything but typical: she studied engineering in the US, spent close to seven years as an architect and computational designer at firms like Arup, then pivoted back into software, building Kedro and Kedro-Viz at QuantumBlack before moving into AI features at V7 and now Typeform. Susanna breaks down the shift from training your own ML models to building on top of LLMs, what Web AI and offline browser models really offer, and the cross-browser hurdles still blocking local-first AI. She also takes us inside Typeform's multi-agent system, how the team thinks about evals for non-deterministic features, and why WebMCP could change how all of us build websites. Key Topics: - From architecture and computational design to frontend AI - Building Kedro and Kedro-Viz at QuantumBlack - Why training your own models gave way to the LLM baseline - Web AI, offline models, and on-device inference - The cross-browser problem with local-first AI - Typeform's multi-agent system: LangChain, A2A, MCP tools - Evals as unit tests for non-deterministic AI features - Offline vs online evals and tracking drift in production - WebMCP: bringing the web to agents 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanna-wong-london/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/studioswong 🌐 Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcLZGfXKk8c FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📩 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 👤 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES - Kedro: https://kedro.org - WebMCP / React Paris talk on the agent web - Typeform AI: https://www.typeform.com #WebAI #WebMCP #SoftwareEngineering #Frontend #AIAgents #Evals #StaffEngineer #Typeform #MachineLearning #Podcast #SenorsAtScale 💬 Are you building with offline browser models yet, or still calling the API for everything? Let me know below.

  7. 21 Jun

    Newsletters at Scale with Sebastian Lorber (This Week in React) | RSS Curation, Paid Acquisition, React Server Components

    What does it actually take to run one of the biggest newsletters in the React ecosystem, week after week, for over six years? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Sebastian Lorber, creator of This Week in React, the newsletter read by over 45,000 developers every week, and a core maintainer of Docusaurus at Meta. Sebastian has worked with React since late 2013, spent years as an independent consultant, and slowly turned a side project into his full indie hacker income. Sebastian pulls back the curtain on the entire operation: how a French newsletter aimed at landing consulting gigs became an English curation powerhouse, the exhaustive weekly workflow across 2,000 X profiles and 500+ RSS feeds, and the Gmail size limit that quietly shapes every issue. We get into the unglamorous economics too, why French sponsors couldn't make it sustainable, how he prices and manages four ad slots a week, and why click counts are far more misleading than most sponsors think. The conversation also covers the human side of curation: walking back mistakes with link proxies, staying friends with maintainers while breaking their unannounced work, the slow decline of social reach, and why he checks React feature flags before telling anyone a feature is "shipped." Plus a candid look at the recent TanStack compromise, trusted publishing, and why it gives a false sense of safety. Key Topics: - Starting a French newsletter to attract consulting clients - Pivoting to English and converting an X audience - The exhaustive weekly curation workflow (X lists, RSS, InnoReader) - The Gmail truncation limit and how it shapes each issue - Why French sponsors couldn't make it sustainable - Managing four sponsors a week with Sponsy - Why click metrics are misleading (Apple, corporate security scanners, UTM) - Paid acquisition on X, Instagram, Reddit and what actually converts - Treating subscribers like a stream, not a possession - Checking React flags before announcing features - React Server Components, the activity component, and Docusaurus - The TanStack compromise, trusted publishing, and NPM security GUEST LINKS 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienlorber/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/sebastienlorber 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/slorber 🌐 This Week in React: https://thisweekinreact.com/ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📨 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 👤 My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 📸 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES This Week in React: https://thisweekinreact.com/ Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/ Sponsy: https://getsponsy.com/ #ThisWeekInReact #Newsletter #ReactJS #Docusaurus #OpenSource #IndieHacker #ContentCuration #SoftwareEngineering #ReactServerComponents #NPMSecurity 💬 Do you still read tech newsletters, or has AI and social changed how you keep up with the ecosystem? Let me know in the comments.

  8. 14 Jun

    Monorepos at Scale with Santosh Yadav (Principal DevRel, CodeRabbit) | Nx, Module Federation, AI Code Review

    Poly repos were good when we needed separation. But in the age of AI, do we still need it? Santosh Yadav doesn't think so. In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Santosh Yadav, Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, Google Developer Expert for Angular, GitHub Star, Nx Champion, and Microsoft MVP. Santosh has spent years deep in the monorepo world, including leading the move to Module Federation and driving Nx adoption across 30+ teams during his time as a staff engineer at Celonis. We get into why monorepos are quietly becoming an AI superpower, how context changes everything when AI tools can read your dependency graph, and what it actually takes to migrate 20+ apps off polyrepos. Santosh also pulls back the curtain on CodeRabbit: how they handle context engineering for code review, why they run evals against 40+ models, their AI slop detector for open source, and how the team reacted when the big labs shipped their own code reviewers. Key Topics: - Becoming a GDE, GitHub Star, and Nx Champion (and what each actually gives you) - Migrating 20+ apps to Module Federation at Celonis - Monorepo vs Polyrepo in the age of AI - Why AI tools thrive on monorepo context - What Nx really is and when you need it - Inside CodeRabbit: context engineering, model evals, and the AI slop detector - Sponsoring open source with $1M+ in commitments - How startups survive when the big labs ship competing features GUEST LINKS 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santoshyadavdev/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/SantoshYadavDev 🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/santoshyadavdev 🌐 Website: https://www.santoshyadav.dev/ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale 📨 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe 💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 👤 My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan 📸 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev ADDITIONAL RESOURCES CodeRabbit: https://www.coderabbit.ai/ Nx: https://nx.dev/ #Monorepo #Nx #ModuleFederation #AICodeReview #CodeRabbit #Angular #DeveloperExperience #OpenSource #SoftwareEngineering #StaffEngineer What's your take, are monorepos the right move in the age of AI, or is polyrepo still worth defending? 💬

See All (48)

About

A software engineering podcast for senior developers, staff engineers, and tech leads who build and scale systems in production. Hosted by Neciu Dan, Señors @ Scale features deep, technical conversations with engineering leaders from companies like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Datadog, and Snyk. Every week, we sit down with Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and technical leaders to unpack the real challenges of frontend architecture, micro frontends, React and Vue at scale, design systems, security, reliability, and technical leadership. No fluff, no surface-level takes. Just hard-

Information

You Might Also Like