GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

GOTO

The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.

  1. Engineering Leadership in Turbulent Times • Sarah Wells, Pat Kua & Daniel Terhorst-North

    1d ago

    Engineering Leadership in Turbulent Times • Sarah Wells, Pat Kua & Daniel Terhorst-North

    This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant & Author of "Enabling Microservice Success" Patrick Kua - Founder of the Tech Lead Academy Daniel Terhorst-North - Originator of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) & Principal at Dan North & Associates RESOURCES Sarah https://bsky.app/profile/sarahjwells.bsky.social https://linkedin.com/in/sarahjwells1 https://www.sarahwells.dev Patrick https://hachyderm.io/@patkua https://twitter.com/patkua https://www.linkedin.com/in/patkua https://github.com/thekua https://patkua.com Daniel https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod https://github.com/tastapod https://mastodon.social/@tastapod http://dannorth.net/blog DESCRIPTION Engineering leadership becomes significantly more complex in times of uncertainty. This conversation highlights how leaders must shift from rigid plans to adaptable thinking—balancing delivery, team well-being, and long-term direction while navigating constant change. A key takeaway is that great leadership isn’t about having all the answers, but about creating clarity, trust, and resilience within teams. The speakers emphasize communication, context-awareness, and empowering engineers as the foundation for thriving—even when everything feels unstable. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Sarah Wells • Enabling Microservice Success • https://amzn.to/4aa8xrv Patrick Kua • Talking with Tech Leads • https://amzn.to/3ECO3xB Patrick Kua • The Retrospective Handbook • https://amzn.to/4jpxxQN Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons & Patrick Kua • Building Evolutionary Architectures • https://amzn.to/42qXJV2 Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising • Fearless Change • https://amzn.to/49uuune Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising • More Fearless Change • https://amzn.to/4tX6GAR Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    50 min
  2. Modern Concurrency in Java • Bazlur Rahman & Michael Redlich

    4d ago

    Modern Concurrency in Java • Bazlur Rahman & Michael Redlich

    This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub A N M Bazlur Rahman - Java Champion & Author of "Modern Concurrency in Java" Michael Redlich - Java Champion & Lead Java Queue News Editor at InfoQ Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/443 RESOURCES Bazlur https://bsky.app/profile/bazlur.ca https://x.com/bazlur_rahman https://github.com/rokon12 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazlur https://bio.site/bazlur https://bazlur.ca Michael https://twitter.com/mpredli https://github.com/mpredli01 https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-redlich-13a966 https://about.me/mpredli DESCRIPTION In this GOTO Book Club episode, Java Champion A N M Bazlur Rahman joins host and fellow Java Champion Michael Redlich to discuss Modern Concurrency in Java — the first comprehensive update to Java concurrency literature in 20 years. Bazlur traces his motivation to the arrival of virtual threads in JDK 21, which he describes as a fundamental shift in Java's concurrency cost model: platform threads were expensive and scarce, demanding careful pooling; virtual threads are cheap, plentiful, and behave like ordinary threads from the developer's perspective, without requiring a new programming model. The book covers this evolution end-to-end, from the history of threads through to structured concurrency, scope values, and the modern frameworks that have already adopted virtual threads — most with a single config change. The conversation also takes a nuanced look at reactive programming's future. Bazlur's conclusion is that reactive remains compelling in specific contexts — event-driven streaming systems, architectures needing end-to-end back-pressure — but it's no longer the default answer to scalability. For most microservices doing blocking I/O, virtual threads are now the stronger default, and reactive becomes a deliberate architectural choice rather than an automatic one. The book's goal is to give developers both the conceptual grounding and the practical guidance to make that choice confidently — understanding the tool one level deep, so they can design better systems, not just configure their way through a framework. RECOMMENDED BOOKS A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9 Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    35 min
  3. Roc & Zig: A Compiler Rewrite Story • Anjana Vakil & Richard Feldman

    Jun 5

    Roc & Zig: A Compiler Rewrite Story • Anjana Vakil & Richard Feldman

    This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. https://gotopia.tech Richard Feldman - Software Engineer at Zed Industries & Author of "Elm in Action" Anjana Vakil - Freelance Software Engineer & Developer Educator Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/442 RESOURCES Richard https://bsky.app/profile/rtfeldman.bsky.social https://twitter.com/rtfeldman https://www.linkedin.com/in/rtfeldman https://github.com/rtfeldman Anjana https://bsky.app/profile/anjana.dev https://github.com/vakila https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjanavakil https://anjana.dev Links https://zed.dev https://adventofcode.com https://www.roc-lang.org DESCRIPTION Richard Feldman and Anjana Vakil trace the Roc programming language's ambitious ground-up compiler rewrite — from Rust to Zig — which happened to coincide almost exactly with the year AI coding assistants went from useful to transformative. Richard describes how AI's role shifted over just 12 months: from mechanical test-porting grunt work, where it was reliable but limited, to genuine architectural collaboration on harder problems. The key insight is that guardrails don't live in prompts ("never do this" gets ignored constantly), they live in the code itself — invariants and automated feedback loops that catch the AI when it strays, rather than instructions it will cheerfully disregard. The conversation widens into what the AI era means for software quality and trust. Both are wary of the coming wave of AI-generated "slop" — buggy, mediocre software produced at scale — but Richard makes the counterintuitive case that competitive pressure might actually force quality up: if everything is slop, the products that aren't will stand out hard. Anjana draws a parallel to consumer electronics brand trust: just like we pay a premium for the USB-C cable we know won't cause a fire, developers and users will increasingly gravitate toward names and communities they can vouch for. The open source contribution model, they agree, needs new systems to navigate this — and Roc v1, due before the end of 2026, will be a test case. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Richard Feldman • Elm in Action • https://amzn.to/387kujI Dean Bocker • Don't Panic! I'm A Professional Zig Programmer • https://amzn.to/3ljKT8d Tim McNamara • Rust in Action • https://amzn.to/3ux2R9u David Drysdal • Effective Rust • https://amzn.to/4dAjbdX Eric Normand • Grokking Simplicity • https://amzn.to/3gz7o3C Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    33 min
  4. Tech Truth: Agile Evolution & the Future of SW Engineering • Martin Fowler & Kent Beck

    Jun 2

    Tech Truth: Agile Evolution & the Future of SW Engineering • Martin Fowler & Kent Beck

    This conversation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Martin Fowler - Pioneer of Various Topics around Object-Oriented Technology & Agile Methods Kent Beck - Software Engineer & Creator of Extreme Programming RESOURCES Martin https://x.com/martinfowler https://www.martinfowler.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-fowler-com Kent https://bsky.app/profile/kentbeck.bsky.social https://www.kentbeck.com https://github.com/KentBeck https://twitter.com/KentBeck https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentbeck https://tidyfirst.substack.com/about DESCRIPTION Martin Fowler and Kent Beck — two of the authors of the Agile Manifesto and perhaps the most influential duo in software engineering history — reunite for an unscripted conversation spanning thirty years of friendship, craft, and the relentless pace of change. They discuss how AI ("the Genie") has become a genuine part of both their workflows: Kent uses it as an endlessly patient tutor for exploration between features, while Martin distinguishes between AI as a tool for talking to computers versus the irreplaceable human skill of talking to the people who need software built. Both are optimistic about the future, though Kent's optimism takes characteristically sharp form: he expects the industry to keep making the same mistakes, which means he'll still be employed teaching the same lessons 20 years from now. The conversation also revisits the Agile Manifesto at nearly 25 years old, with both reflecting on what Extreme Programming got right — feedback loops, testability, evolutionary design — and what the broader adoption missed or diluted. Martin is candid that progress in software has been slower than he'd like, though he points to a "forest" of practitioners who have genuinely advanced the craft. On the question of a Manifesto reunion, both gently redirect: it belongs to the next generation now. Their closing advice to a junior developer in the audience is perhaps the most memorable exchange in the whole session — use the gaps between features to learn, and never forget that understanding the domain and the people in it is ultimately what separates good programmers from great ones. Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3780 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Martin Fowler • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3EVcHXQ Martin Fowler & Pramod Sadalage • NoSQL Distilled • https://amzn.to/3ChIpu7 Martin Fowler • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture • https://amzn.to/3lp4sIq Martin Fowler • Domain-Specific Languages • https://amzn.to/3nzOIFk Martin Fowler • UML Distilled • https://amzn.to/3kahjyA Kent Beck • Tidy First? • https://amzn.to/4gscjjK Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres • Extreme Programming Explained • https://amzn.to/3sBASDG Kent Beck • Test Driven Development • https://amzn.to/3U4AXLs Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN Kent Beck • Implementation Patterns • https://amzn.to/3sBlCGL Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    54 min
  5. Spec-Driven Dev Is Back. But Not How You Think • Daniel Terhorst-North & Gojko Adzic

    May 29

    Spec-Driven Dev Is Back. But Not How You Think • Daniel Terhorst-North & Gojko Adzic

    This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted. https://gotopia.tech Daniel Terhorst-North - Originator of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) & Principal at Dan North & Associates Gojko Adzic - Software Delivery Consultant & Author of "Lizard Optimization" and many more Books Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/441 RESOURCES Daniel https://bsky.app/profile/tastapod.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/tastapod https://github.com/tastapod https://mastodon.social/@tastapod http://dannorth.net/blog Gojko https://www.linkedin.com/in/gojko https://github.com/gojko https://twitter.com/gojkoadzic https://gojko.net DESCRIPTION Gojko Adzic and Daniel Terhorst-North tackle the question every software team is wrestling with right now: does AI-assisted development actually work, and if so, how? Their verdict is nuanced. One-shot "spec-to-product" approaches are doomed — both compare them to CASE tools and model-driven architecture of past decades, great for selling to enterprise buyers, disappointing in practice. What does work is tight, iterative feedback loops where AI handles the more deterministic, structural parts of the job while humans retain ownership of domain knowledge, semantic correctness, and architectural judgment. The most practically useful thread of the conversation is Gojko's insight on guardrails: instead of relying on markdown files and hoping your AI agent stays in line, encode your rules as real, automated linting checks — ones that run in CI, apply to humans and bots alike, and include actionable error messages. Daniel adds a complementary observation: AI shines brightest not on core domain code, but on the "quality of life" tasks that never quite make it to the backlog. Their shared conclusion is that the teams winning with AI right now are the ones treating published frameworks as starting templates to rapidly adapt — not gospel to follow blindly. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Gojko Adzic • Lizard Optimization • https://leanpub.com/lizardoptimization Gojko Adzic • Impact Mapping • https://amzn.to/3dQFCOq Adzic, Evans & Roden • Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests • https://amzn.to/3yuDaoL Adzic, Evans & Korac • Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories • https://amzn.to/3jQ4QjP Adzic & Korac • Humans vs Computers • https://amzn.to/2Utz55A Gojko Adzic • Specification by Example • https://amzn.to/3hHrEjb Eliyahu M. Goldratt • Beyond the Goal • https://amzn.to/3wDbAL1 Kent Beck, Fowler, John, William, Don & Gamma • Refactoring • https://amzn.to/3SFBYbN Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    40 min
  6. Connection is Everything: Extended Q&A • Ken Hughes

    May 26

    Connection is Everything: Extended Q&A • Ken Hughes

    This Q&A session was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. https://gotocph.com Ken Hughes - The King of Customer Experience Keynote available here: https://youtu.be/tHf-BFM2CNM RESOURCES https://twitter.com/KenHughesIE https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenhughesie https://www.kenhughes.info DESCRIPTION In this extended Q&A following his GOTO Copenhagen 2025 keynote, Ken Hughes — "The King of Customer Experience" — tackles the questions every business avoids asking honestly. He argues that employee experience always comes first: you cannot ask people to deliver extraordinary customer moments unless they themselves feel seen, empowered, and purposeful at work. On ROI, he challenges the entire premise, proposing a shift from "Return on Investment" to "Desire to Invest" — because measuring caring with a ledger is the behavior of, as he puts it, a toxic psychopath. The real unlock, he insists, is placing the user genuinely at the centre — not as a metric, but as a human being who deserves to feel like the only person in the room. The conversation turns to AI's role in making this scalable, and here Hughes lands his most forward-looking point: the era of having to choose between serving the masses and making an individual feel special is ending. AI will enable what he calls "scaled personalization" — the ability to make every customer their own blue dot simultaneously, the way a personalized Minecraft lesson teaches area and perimeter to an 8-year-old who wasn't getting it in a classroom. The session closes with a striking reminder: the brands people remember aren't the ones with the slickest products — they're the ones that made them feel genuinely seen. A nurse. A fishing magazine. Five dollars. That's the bar. Read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3778 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ken Hughes • Taylormaking • https://amzn.to/3WOEgd9 Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz • The Good Life • https://amzn.to/4orelUS Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    40 min
  7. State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans

    May 22

    State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans

    This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026. https://gotopia.tech Ben Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more Books Read the full transcription of this interview here: https://gotopia.tech/articles/439 RESOURCES Ben https://mastodon.social/@kittylyst https://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.social https://github.com/kittylyst https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylyst https://www.kittylyst.com Links https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25 https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitation https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968 https://openjdk.org/jeps/353 https://openjdk.org/jeps/416 https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffm https://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458 https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099 DESCRIPTION In this GOTO State of the Art, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks. The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon. His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9 Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    41 min
  8. Kafka for Architects • Ekaterina Gorshkova & Viktor Gamov

    May 19

    Kafka for Architects • Ekaterina Gorshkova & Viktor Gamov

    This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. http://gotopia.tech/bookclub Ekaterina Gorshkova - Apache Kafka Engineer at SOFTEC & Author of "Kafka for Architects" Viktor Gamov - Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent & Co-Author of "Kafka in Action" Check out more here: https://gotopia.tech/episodes/440 RESOURCES Ekaterina https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekaterina-gorshkova-978bb6 https://medium.com/@katyagorshkova Viktor https://bsky.app/profile/gamussa.dev https://x.com/gAmUssA https://github.com/gamussa https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikgamov https://gamov.io Links 45% off discount code (expires on 25 May 2026): GOTOKGKafka Affiliate link: https://hubs.la/Q044HgTv https://current.confluent.io/london DESCRIPTION Apache Kafka has evolved far beyond a simple message broker — it has become a foundational layer for modern enterprise software. In this GOTO Book Club episode, Ekaterina Gorshkova, author of "Kafka for Architects", shares how her decade-long journey with Kafka — starting in a Czech bank's integration team in 2015 — shaped her understanding of what it really takes to design Kafka-based systems at scale. The conversation covers core architectural decisions, real-world patterns for enterprise integration, the role of Kafka Streams, and how to avoid the classic pitfalls of building systems that "only three engineers understand". The episode also looks forward: Ekaterina and host Viktor Gamov explore how Kafka is increasingly becoming the connective tissue for AI-driven systems, acting as an orchestration layer between intelligent agents, real-time data, and business workflows. Her book's central argument is that while AI and tooling change fast, the fundamental knowledge of how to design robust, event-driven systems is durable and career-proof. Kafka for Architects is framed not just as a technical manual, but as a roadmap for architects who want to get Kafka right from day one — requirements, design, testing, and all. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Ekaterina Gorshkova • Kafka for Architects • https://amzn.to/42mDarU Dylan Scott, Viktor Gamov & Dave Klein • Kafka in Action • https://amzn.to/4vJ3Kcj Viktor Gamov, Tartakovsky, Rasputnis & Fain • Enterprise Web Development • https://amzn.to/3CezL0R Shapira, Palino, Sivaram & Petty • Kafka: The Definitive Guide • https://amzn.to/3RPtdLP Bill Bejeck • Kafka Streams in Action • https://amzn.to/3CGJiiM Bluesky Instagram LinkedIn Facebook CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

    29 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.7
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.

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