Asynchronous & Unreliable - Conversations on The Edge of Software

Anne Currie

Welcome to Asynchronous and Unreliable, the new weekly podcast where we discuss the latest and most fascinating ideas in: software engineering, AI, management, leadership and communications, efficiency, operations, clouds, hyperscaling, resilience and sustainability. Our host is Anne Currie, tech veteran, co-author of O'Reilly's Building Green Software (on building cheaper and more flexible systems ready for the energy transition), The Cloud Native Attitude (on industry embrace of fast flow), and the science fiction Panopticon series (on killer robots in space, amongst other topics). Expect animated, friendly, and lighthearted discussions with some of the most renowned & interesting thinkers and practitioners in technology.  To find out about just a few of our amazing guests in 2026, visit our website.

  1. 22h ago

    Ep 23: Scale Demands Strategy! With Tech Veteran Jon Berger

    ShownotesAnne Currie talks with mission critical software veteran Jon Berger about his upcoming book on strategy, leadership and management, shaped by 30 years of experience across startups, scale-ups, and Microsoft. The conversation focuses on why context matters, how to build alignment, and why internal teaching, writing, and speaking can make leaders more effective when they are not physically present. They also discuss Team Topologies, internal tech conferences, and how AI may create a real discontinuity in team evolution and software delivery. Key topics Jon Berger explains that his book, What Happens When You're Not in the Room, comes from three decades of building, growing, and leading teams at many scalesAnne and Jon discuss why management advice often fails when it is treated as a universal template instead of something that depends on contextJon describes the value of internal training courses, brown bag sessions, and company blogs as ways to build trust, spread ideas, and sharpen communicationThe episode revisits alignment as both a strategic concept and a cultural oneJon breaks strategy into three questions: what are we trying to achieve, what is difficult about it, and how are we going to approach that difficultyTeam Topologies is discussed as a way of organizing multiple teams so they can scale, stay aligned, and avoid stepping on each other’s toesJon highlights team cognitive load as a key insight from Team Topologies and one that matters in real organizationsThe conversation turns to AI and whether engineering teams can evolve incrementally toward AI-assisted or AI-led workflows, or whether that change may be a discontinuity insteadAnne and Jon compare incremental experimentation with a more abrupt shift where engineers stop reviewing code and AI becomes the main producerJon reflects on the difference between useful history in code and tech debt that should not be carried forwardAction items Think about whether your team is solving for the right goal, the real difficulty, and the right approachUse internal speaking, teaching, or writing to help ideas survive after you leave the roomReview whether your organization has useful alignment at both the strategic and cultural levelConsider whether AI adoption in your team is incremental or whether it may require a more deliberate rethinking of team structure

  2. Aug 17

    Ep 22: AI is Forcing A Rethink of Organisation Learning with Team Topologies Author Matthew Skelton

    Internal Conferences, Team Topologies, and the AI Learning Organization Anne Currie speaks with Matthew Skelton, co-author of the bestseller Team Topologies and CEO of Conflux, about why AI is exposing weak organizational design and making intentional knowledge-sharing more important than ever. They chat about how internal conferences, shared language, and clear team boundaries help organizations align faster, reduce duplication, and spread useful practices across the business. The conversation also introduces Matthew’s upcoming book Adapt Together and a new leadership program, Engineering the AI Native Organization. Key topics In this episode, Matthew explains that AI is acting like a bright light on organizational effectiveness, making unclear operating principles and vague responsibilities much harder to ignore. He connects Team Topologies to the broader challenge of organizational architecture, arguing that value flow depends on clear team boundaries, aligned workflows, and shared understanding. Matthew and Anne discuss how internal conferences at places like Financial Times, Metaswitch, and Klarna helped teams share knowledge, avoid duplication, and accelerate cloud native adoption. They emphasize that the real value of conferences is not just the talks, but the hallway track, where context, nuance, and shared meaning are built through conversation. Matthew introduces an innovation and practices enabling team, or IPET, as a way to spot emerging good practices, curate them, and help them spread across the organization. The episode highlights the importance of intentional knowledge diffusion, especially now that AI systems depend on human-generated context and well-aligned terminology. They discuss why leaders must define what good looks like, rather than assuming work is obvious or that teams will naturally converge on the right approach. Matthew argues that organizations need a continuous refresh of context because what worked three months ago may already be outdated in fast-changing environments. The conversation closes with Matthew describing Engineering the AI Native Organization, a leadership program for helping non-engineers understand concepts like APIs, decoupling, and asynchronous working in organizational terms. #AI #learningorganisations #TeamTopologies #ITRevolutions Transcript

  3. Aug 10

    Ep 21: What Do Enterprises Have to Fear When Adopting AI? With ex-FT Technical Director Sarah Wells

    Navigating the Evolution of Enterprise Tech: Cloud Native, AI, and Beyond In this episode, Anne Currie and Sarah Wells, ex Financial Times engineering leader and O'Reilly author, explore how enterprises survive rapid technological shifts from cloud native transformations to the rise of AI. They discuss lessons learned from the Financial Times’ cloud journey, the comparative impact of AI on software development, security concerns, and the importance of fostering resilient, adaptable teams in the ever-changing tech landscape. Key Topics: Lessons from the Financial Times’ migration from on-premise to cloud, emphasizing gradual transition and cultural change.Insights into cloud native adoption and what enterprises learn through trial and error in cloud journeys.How AI is transforming development practices, including benefits, pitfalls, and the critical need for asking the right questions.The widening gaps in AI governance, security risks, and the importance of automating security in code reviews and deployment pipelines.Comparing the industry’s early days of internet boom with current AI evolution and understanding the long arc of technological adoption.The enduring necessity of software design, architecture, and human oversight in an AI-enhanced environment.Challenges around junior engineers working with AI tools, the risk of over-reliance, and the importance of effective collaboration.The legal, security, and ethical implications of AI, including managing vulnerabilities and maintaining trust.Reflecting on how past technological disruptions, like the decline of physical newspapers and the rise of digital, inform current industry shifts. Transcript

  4. Aug 3

    Ep 20: AI Data Centers Must Be Sustainable! with Neuralwatt CEO Chad Gibson

    When we make AI data centres expensive and unsustainable that's a choice because they don't have to be. In this episode of Asynchronous and Unreliable, host Anne Currie speaks with Chad Gibson, ex Microsoft co-founder and CEO of AI host and infrastructure company Neuralwatt, to discuss innovative approaches to reducing the energy footprint of AI. Discover how layered technologies, transparency, and customer-driven model choices can help to shape greener, cheaper, and more efficient AI. Key topics NeuralWatt’s multi-layered approach to AI energy efficiency, from GPUs to inference cloud servicesThe key role of software optimization in reducing power consumption and improving model efficiencyHow the demand for open source and Chinese models influences energy efficiency strategiesChallenges in serving large, long-context models like GLM 5.2 and their operational impactsThe importance of transparency and customer demand in achieving sustainable AI practicesThe potential of autonomous agents for further optimizing energy consumptionIndustry trends in hardware, model size, and software innovation pushing AI toward scalabilityReal-world examples of data center practices that either hinder or help sustainability goals Transcript Neuralwatt

  5. Jul 27

    Ep 19: Latest News in AI Code Generation From Mission Critical Software Expert Martin Davidson

    ShownotesExploring AI, Software Development, and Future Possibilities with Martin Davidson for a discussion on #Rustlang, the AI SDLC, Join us for a deep conversation on the latest in AI experimentation, software engineering, and reimagining hardware and UI design. Martin Davidson returns to share insights from his ongoing projects, exploring how AI models like Claude and Codex are transforming the way we build and understand software. #rustlang Main Topics Covered: Martin’s current AI experimentation setup leveraging multiple subscriptions from Anthropic and OpenAI to write complex applications in RustThe shifting landscape of AI models, including the rise of smaller, more capable models like SolThe concept of "software on demand" — creating applications and systems dynamically with AIReimagining operating systems and hardware on demand, inspired by edge computing and unikernelsChallenges and opportunities with AI-generated code and system designs, including over-engineering tendenciesThe evolving infrastructure for software development, including automations, bug tracking, and CI/CD systemsThe philosophical implications of interacting with AI models as collective "we," and their increasing personality and utilityThe future of AI’s role in hardware design, programming languages, and the potential for safer, more efficient systems This episode provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of AI-assisted software creation, hardware design, and the evolving relationship humans have with intelligent systems. Martin's great substack Transcript This is the temperature/cognition site Martin mentioned: https://0x4d44.github.io/thermal-mind/ - And this is about getting Win2K working: https://0x4d44.github.io/win2k/ - This is Colonization & Civ: https://0x4d44.github.io/world-in-640k/ - This is Uno, sorry, Onu: https://0x4d44.github.io/onu/ - A broadband speedchecker: https://0x4d44.github.io/broadband-speed-checker/ - Ocean currents: https://0x4d44.github.io/ocean-currents/

  6. Jul 20

    Ep 18: What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? Jon Berger Reveals His New Book

    What Happens When You're Not in the Room? - Leadership, Media, and Writing Insights #leadership #management #software Book reveal - Jon Berger's new book on leadership and management, What Happens When You Are Not In The Room? comes out on the 1st September 2026. In this episode, Anne Currie and mission critical software and leadership veteran Jon Berger explore the nuances of leadership, the art of writing books, humour in professional communication, and media representations of leadership. They delve into the importance of leading through influence rather than presence, the joys and challenges of authoring, and the relevance of leadership in TV, film, and fiction. Key Topics: The core idea that leadership occurs primarily when you're not in the roomThe significance of influencing others to achieve resultsThe concept of leadership at scale versus micro-managingJon Berger’s new book: What Happens When You Are Not In the Room?The value of humor and storytelling in professional writingPersonal reflections on mistakes and learning as a leaderLeadership as a collective effort, akin to assembling a team or a storyLeadership lessons drawn from TV shows, films, and booksThe importance of encouraging everyone in an organization to be a leaderThe process and motivation behind writing a bookWe'll send you a bonus chapter of the book by signing up at JonBergerLeadership.com Episode transcript

  7. Jul 13

    Ep 17: How Could AI Write Software Much Better Than Humans? With Jon Berger

    The Future of Software: Insights from Experience Discover how seasoned experts (aka old people in computer years) predict the evolution of software development over the next decade, focusing on #AI's transformative role, hardware implications, and the potential for machine-only software. In this episode: Reflection on recent episodes discussing AI and code generation and what they imply for the futureThe challenge of maintaining softwareThe shift from human to AI-centric code creation and the implications for trust and reliabilityHow hardware limitations and technological advances will shape software design and optimizationThe concept of "wet code" — intentionally un-Dry, performance-optimized, AI-generated code that forgoes human maintainabilityThe potential for machine code to replace high-level programming languages entirelyThe evolution from microservices as team management tools to pure operational resilience componentsThe revolutionary impact of AI training on code creation, emphasizing self-learning models akin to AlphaGoThe concept of unikernels and the radical idea of single-kernel systems replacing traditional OS structuresThe importance of shifting from maintainable code by humans to trust-based, AI-driven code systems This episode explores paradigm-shifting ideas about the core foundation of software and hardware in a future where AI rewrites the very fabric of code creation and system design. Transcript

  8. Jul 6

    Ep 16: Did He Recreate Amazon S3 At Home? With Ex Docker CTO & Unikernels Co-Founder Justin Cormack

    A wild ride through Justin Cormack's attempts to build really hard stuff using AI. Did he recreate Amazon s3 in his back bedroom in a couple of weeks? A fun dive into the fascinating world of AI-assisted software development, Unikernels, and the future of programming languages, with Justin Cormack. Justin was the CTO of Docker for a decade, is one of the founders of Unikernels and is a leading figure in cloud-native and systems programming. In this episode, Anne hears all about his current experiments with building big, proper systems code using AI. We also hear about his thoughts on the future of languages. Does Rust have it nailed or might there be something better coming along? Should we really have coding languages at all anymore? In this episode we hear about: Justin's recent experiments with AI-generated code and how it accelerates complex software creationThe concept of unikernels and how they differ from traditional operating systemsChallenges and opportunities in building cloud-native and AI-optimized software systems - good, hard, scaleable softwareThe role of programming languages like Rust, Zig, and emerging trends in AI-friendly languagesJustin's newsletter  #Nix, #RustLang, #AI

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Welcome to Asynchronous and Unreliable, the new weekly podcast where we discuss the latest and most fascinating ideas in: software engineering, AI, management, leadership and communications, efficiency, operations, clouds, hyperscaling, resilience and sustainability. Our host is Anne Currie, tech veteran, co-author of O'Reilly's Building Green Software (on building cheaper and more flexible systems ready for the energy transition), The Cloud Native Attitude (on industry embrace of fast flow), and the science fiction Panopticon series (on killer robots in space, amongst other topics). Expect animated, friendly, and lighthearted discussions with some of the most renowned & interesting thinkers and practitioners in technology.  To find out about just a few of our amazing guests in 2026, visit our website.

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