Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights

overcommitted.dev | Women in Tech and Tech Mentorship
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Join Overcommitted for insightful conversations with women in tech, software engineers, and programming experts focused on advancing software engineering careers. Explore topics such as software ethics, system reliability, infrastructure resilience, programming best practices, and agentic AI development. Our hosts share career insights and tech mentorship to boost developer productivity and code quality for passionate programmers and software engineers alike.

  1. 1일 전

    Closed That Tab: What "How Complex Systems Fail" Teaches Software Engineers

    Closed That Tab is back. Erika finally read Richard Cook's How Complex Systems Fail, an 18 point paper Cook wrote with patient safety and medical systems in mind, but one that is frequently discussed in web development and software engineering since the foundational principles apply universally. Erika and Bethany work through what holds up in practice. They cover the difference between normal failure and catastrophic failure, why knowing your system's baseline is its own skill, and why fixes are never free: every change adds complexity, knowledge gaps, and new risk. They get into safety as a set of defensive actions, including rate limiting, caching, rollback plans, feature flags, backups, playbooks, and watching for drift. Then they take on Cook's most contested claim, that root cause analysis is fundamentally wrong for complex systems, and where they agree and disagree. Bethany makes the case that incident reviews are still one of the best learning tools available, as long as psychological safety comes first. The conversation also digs into hindsight bias and self-blame, the difference between taking accountability and taking blame, practitioners as both the risk and the defense in a system, why training and safety work are chronically undervalued, where AI helps during an incident and where you still need a human expert, practicing failure through game days and shadowing, and keeping on-call sustainable so you do not burn out the people holding the pager. Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.devBethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.devErika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead Links How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/HowComplexSystemsFail.pdfThinking In Systems: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/thinking-in-systems/

  2. 9월 22일

    Lean TDD with Brian Okken

    Brian Okken, lead engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, creator of the pytest book and course, and author of the new book Lean TDD, joins us to rethink test driven development. His core argument: write tests at the highest level that still makes sense, so you can refactor, restructure, and hand work to an agent without rewriting your suite every time. We dig into why function-level tests with heavy mocking are often harder to write than system-level tests, why the "TDD takes too long" complaint usually comes from testing at the wrong level, and why old rules about test speed no longer hold up on modern machines and CI. The conversation also covers the lean side of Lean TDD: what counts as waste in a test suite, when to delete tests you wrote on the way to a better one, and why a thousand tests is not automatically better than twenty. Brian shares how caring about the whole system rather than just his slice of it changed his career, how he works with AI agents while still reading every line they produce, the stigma around test engineering roles, and what he learned self-publishing a 100 page book and recording the audiobook himself. He closes with advice for newer engineers on large codebases and why everyone is winging it more than you think. Lean TDD Book: https://leantdd.com/ Free sample chapter (chapter 1): https://leantdd.com/downloads/lean-tdd-chapter-1-sample.pdf Brian’s Blog: https://pythontest.com/ Brian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/okken/ Brian on GitHub: https://github.com/okken pytest course: https://pythontest.com/courses Test & Code podcasthttps://pythontest.com/testandcode Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.devBrittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.comErika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead

    Lean TDD with Brian Okken

  3. 9월 15일

    Staff Engineer Archetypes & Glue Work with Jade Dickinson

    SummaryBrittany and Erika close out the Overcommitted book club's read of Tanya Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Path with guest Jade Dickinson, a senior software engineer at Henry Schein One. They dig into glue work and how to make it visible for promotion, the book's staff engineer archetypes, the "why have we stopped" blockers chapter, and what it means to be a delegator on a staffed project. Jade also talks about her path into software after working in GIS mapping for Ebola response, and the group debates whether AI is shifting the scope senior engineers are expected to own. It closes with a staff engineer lightning round: Elm or React, glue work as underrated or a trap, and what a staff engineer is actually for.Links Jade's Blog: https://jadedickinson.com/Jade on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jadedickinson.bsky.socialJade on Mastodon: https://ruby.social/@jadedickinsonHelvetic Ruby Coneference 2026: https://helvetic-ruby.ch/talks/Jade's React to Elm Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdHa4_g3EM&list=PLhBlV3WSUrT3jCmqmYWcUEvmon_6K6WUy&index=18Staff Engineer’s Path: https://www.noidea.dog/staffGlue work: https://www.noidea.dog/glueOpen and Async book: https://open-and-async.com/Staff Engineer Archetypes by Will Larson: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/How I ship post from Sean Goedecke: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.devBrittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.comErika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead

    Staff Engineer Archetypes & Glue Work with Jade Dickinson

  4. 9월 8일

    Can You Trust a 100% Alignment Score? AI Ethics Unpacked

    SummaryIt's a hosts-only week. Brittany and Erika catch up on what they're learning (Erika is starting Designing Data-Intensive Applications; Brittany just began Georgia Tech's online CS master's with a computer vision course) and then work through the week's AI news.First up: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, billed as the company's most aligned model. Brittany and Erika question what "aligned" even means when the headline numbers are a 100% on ExploitBench and a 0% honeypot-cheating rate, and whether a model that's harder to monitor and scores perfectly is aligned or just good at taking the test. That leads into how each of them actually evaluates a new model (spoiler: vibes), why Brittany has drifted back toward cheaper models she understands, and whether frontier models are now a research product rather than a consumer one.They also revisit the AI 2027 paper from their episode last year and how many of its predictions have already landed, debate whether GitHub Copilot approving pull requests is a real workflow change or just signaling, and talk about why the arrival of open-weight models with serious exploit capability means now is the time to get serious about security basics.Brittany closes with ATProto Spaces, the new alpha that brings non-public data to atproto, what it enables for groups and communities, and how her work at Bluesky connects to it.Links OpenAI Release: ⁠https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/⁠AI 2027 Episode: https://overcommitted.dev/ep-13-ai-2027-will-ai-take-my-job/⁠AI 2027: https://ai-2027.com/⁠Copilot Approving PRs: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-09-01-copilot-code-review-can-now-approve-pull-requests/⁠Atproto Spaces Release: ⁠https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha⁠HostsOvercommitted: ⁠⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠⁠ Brittany Ellich: ⁠⁠https://brittanyellich.com⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead⁠

  5. 9월 1일

    Life Tech Stack | Developer Productivity Beyond Work

    Engineers architect systems for work—but what about life? In this episode, Bethany, Brittany, and Erika reveal their personal tech stacks: the tools, habits, and sometimes deliberately low-tech strategies that power their daily routines, family life, and wellness. Discover how software engineer thinking applies to work-life balance, plus practical productivity systems you can steal for your own life. Links https://www.trustyduck.dev/posts/tech-stack-2025/ https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://github.com/ngerakines/jd https://wisprflow.ai/ https://obsidian.md/ https://www.chezmoi.io/ https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Cancelling-Headphones-Bluetooth https://www.goodinside.com https://www.readtangle.com/ https://www.sportsgossipshow.com/ https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/classical-music-happy-hour https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pragmatic-engineer/id1769051199 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-brew-ride-home/id1355212895 Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

  6. 8월 25일

    Content Creation, Craft, and Code: Inside Dreams of Code with Elliott Minns

    Elliott Minns takes us inside Dreams of Code and his path from software engineer and manager to full-time content creator. He shares how he turns complex technical work into clear stories, balances depth with accessibility for a developer audience, and keeps craft at the center of the creative process. His latest project, a next-gen video editor built in Rust, brings those worlds together through technically ambitious work involving hardware, media encoding, and zero-copy performance. The conversation also explores how ADHD shaped Elliott's career and creative process, what he learned from Dan Martell's "Buy Back Your Time," and why delegating to skilled humans still beats delegating to AI for some creative tasks. We dig into the economics and limitations of LLM-powered product features, how Elliott handles feedback from a technical audience, and why the ability to build software by hand still matters even as AI changes day-to-day development.https://www.youtube.com/@dreamsofcode https://x.com/dreamsofcode_io https://www.buybackyourtime.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhjEL817Onw https://www.youtube.com/@dreamsofautonomy Hosts Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev

    Content Creation, Craft, and Code: Inside Dreams of Code with Elliott Minns

  7. 8월 18일

    Is Pair Programming Dead? | Code Quality & Engineering Culture Debate

    Summary This week on Overcommitted, Brittany, Bethany, and Erika try out a new format: instead of interviewing a guest, the three of them rate a running list of software engineering topics as overrated or underrated. They start with the fun stuff — dark mode, mechanical keyboards, standing desks, Vim, dotfiles — before moving into practices and process, where the real disagreements show up. Pair programming and code review as a quality gate both get contested, with opinions that have shifted noticeably since AI tools entered the picture. From there the conversation covers stand-ups, sprint retros, story point estimation, 1:1s with managers, microservices, serverless, feature flags, software rewrites, vibe coding, and the myth of the 10x engineer, with each host landing in a different place on more than a few of them. It's a faster-paced, more opinionated episode than usual, and a good one for anyone who wants to hear three engineers who've worked together for years actually disagree on record. Links Loop Engineering Blog Post: https://brittany-ellich.offprint.app/a/3mrjj34puva23-108-prs-in-eight-days-accidentally-discovering-loop-engineering Steve Yegge Blog Post: https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/Rewrites Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhlnan0dSUE&t=5sSean Goedecke Article: https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-dont-have-to-be-smart-if-you-think-clearly/ Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com⁠Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

  8. 8월 11일

    Starting a Software Engineering Career | Beating Imposter Syndrome in the AI Era with Sreya Sarathy

    SummaryWhat does it look like to start a software engineering career right now, when AI has erased the "grunt work" that used to be how new grads learned? Brittany and Bethany sit down with Sreya Sarathy, a software engineer at Northwestern Mutual and 2025 UW–Madison grad (double major in computer science and data science), who spent her first year out of school running a free virtual panel series that drew 1,500+ registrations across speakers from Apple, Amazon, IBM, Starbucks, Ford, Deloitte, and GitHub.Sreya shares the Stack Overflow moment that broke her imposter syndrome spiral in college, why adding more to her plate cured her burnout instead of making it worse, how she built the early-career community she wished existed, and what it's like being handed advanced work as a new grad because AI now does the tasks juniors used to cut their teeth on. Plus: her product teardowns on Substack, what senior engineers can actually do to support early-career folks, and her dream of a low-pressure "optimize your life" hackathon.Links- Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sreya.sarathy/- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sreyasarathy/ - Substack - https://substack.com/@sreyasarathy- Website - https://sreyasarathy.com/- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - https://bookshop.org/p/books/designing-data-intensive-applications-the-big-ideas-behind-reliable-scalable-and-maintainable-systems-chris-riccomini/7dfa8afce8f3816e?ean=9781098119065&bkshp-astro=t- Don’t Make Me Think -https://bookshop.org/p/books/don-t-make-me-think-revisited-a-common-sense-approach-to-web-usability-steve-krug/d30340ad4751d00d?ean=9780321965516&bkshp-astro=tHosts:- Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev- Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev/⁠⁠ ⁠- Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

    Starting a Software Engineering Career | Beating Imposter Syndrome in the AI Era with Sreya Sarathy
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Join Overcommitted for insightful conversations with women in tech, software engineers, and programming experts focused on advancing software engineering careers. Explore topics such as software ethics, system reliability, infrastructure resilience, programming best practices, and agentic AI development. Our hosts share career insights and tech mentorship to boost developer productivity and code quality for passionate programmers and software engineers alike.

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