Tech League

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer
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Tech League is a podcast by engineers who've been around long enough to know when something is genuinely useful and when it's just hype. Hosted by Toby Sears and Krisztian Fisher, two senior engineers with decades of experience across startups, scale-ups and enterprise, each episode tackles a real topic: architecture decisions, career growth, the tools everyone's using, and the mistakes nobody talks about. No sponsored segments. No thought leadership waffle. Just two people who've shipped software, run teams and broken production, telling you what they actually think. New episodes every week. https://www.techleaguepodcast.com

  1. #18 EuroStack

    3D AGO

    #18 EuroStack

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into EuroStack, an industry-led lobby initiative pushing for European digital sovereignty. Krisztian breaks down what EuroStack is, what it proposes, and why it matters now. They cover the scale of Europe's dependency on non-European tech (260 billion euros per year flowing out), what it actually means to be a "European" company, how public procurement could bootstrap a European tech ecosystem, and why trust in US hyperscalers has finally broken. They also explore the companion site euro-stach.com, a directory of 1620+ European alternatives across 64 categories. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:30 What is EuroStack and why Krisztian is excited about it 4:00 The scale of the problem: 260 billion euros/year leaving Europe 7:00 Europe as a fragmented market vs the US and China 10:00 The three pillars: Buy European, Sell European, Fund European 13:00 How public procurement can generate demand and bootstrap growth 17:00 The 1-to-10 ratio: every public euro attracting 10 private 20:00 Risk of government focus pulling cloud providers away from innovation 24:00 Startup acquisition culture: why European exits go to US companies 28:00 Defining "European": jurisdiction, control, supply chain, no extra-EU restrictions 33:00 AWS sovereign cloud: smoke and mirrors 37:00 Timeline to 2030 and the gradual transition approach 40:00 Geopolitical risk: Ukraine, Starlink, and the dependency reality 44:00 European openness vs American/Chinese protectionism 48:00 Why trust in US tech has finally broken 52:00 Opportunities for European engineers and companies 55:00 Wrap-up Technologies and Initiatives Mentioned EuroStack initiative: https://eurostack.eu/ Solution directory: https://euro-stack.com Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com OVH Cloud - https://www.ovhcloud.com

    50 min
  2. #17 Testing in the AI era

    MAR 27

    #17 Testing in the AI era

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian welcome their first proper guest: Alan Richardson, a 30-year software veteran and testing specialist known as Evil Tester. They dig into testing in the AI era: how to test AI-generated code, whether TDD still makes sense with AI, why self-healing tests are a red flag, and how AI is opening up security and adversarial testing. Alan makes the case for architecture-first development as the key to getting good test output from AI agents. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction and guest intro: Alan Richardson (eviltester.com) 2:00 Why testing matters more in the AI code generation era 5:30 Architecture-first: good code leads to good tests 10:00 Does TDD work with AI? Why it mostly doesn't 14:30 Playwright and UI tests: the abstraction problem 23:00 Information theory and what testing actually is 27:00 Adversarial AI testing: using AI to exploit your own CVEs 33:00 Security scanning tools vs penetration testing with AI 38:30 Domain expertise still matters 43:00 Generalist vs specialist in the AI era 47:00 The junior developer pipeline problem 51:00 Will AI homogenise software and design? 54:00 Wrap-up Links: Evil Tester https://eviltester.com Playwright: https://playwright.dev/ Agentic EQ: https://agentic-qe.dev/ Vite: https://vite.dev/ Claude : https://claude.com/ Snyk: https://snyk.io/ Aikido: https://www.aikido.dev Hacker One: https://www.hackerone.com/ Wiz: https://www.wiz.io/

    1h 9m
  3. #16 Bunny CDN

    MAR 20

    #16 Bunny CDN

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian continue their EU cloud deep dive with a hands-on look at Bunny CDN (bunny.net). Toby used it to launch the new TechLeague podcast website on a static Astro site in under 10 minutes, with Terraform infrastructure, built-in DNS, automatic SSL, and GitHub Actions deployment. They cover the full product offering including CDN, object storage, video streaming with free transcoding, edge scripts, magic containers, and BunnyShield security. They also touch on Tangled.sh, a Helsinki-based distributed git platform built on the AT Protocol that recently raised 3 million euros. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:21 Building the TechLeague website with Astro and Bunny CDN 2:57 Built-in DNS and automatic SSL 4:46 Deploying static files: FTP now, S3 compatibility coming 5:28 Sign-up experience and free credits 6:00 Standard vs Volume network tiers 7:00 Company background: Slovenian, EU-based, 120+ PoPs globally 8:28 Full product overview: storage, stream, DNS, edge, containers 10:18 Video streaming with free transcoding 11:00 Pricing: $0.01/GB storage, $0.01/GB egress 12:27 Limitations: not a full cloud provider 14:30 Magic containers: serverless with anycast IP 17:00 BunnyShield: WAF, DDoS protection, rate limiting 18:49 BunnyOptimizer: on-the-fly image resizing via URL params 19:46 SLA and EU sovereignty 22:00 Can it replace CloudFront? 23:00 getdeploying.com for comparing CDN providers 24:00 Could we host podcast videos on Bunny? 26:50 Reflection: EU cloud is better than we thought 28:05 Tangled.sh: a distributed EU git platform on the AT Protocol 31:14 Wrap-up Technologies Mentioned Bunny CDN - https://bunny.net?ref=v8cfwfmh3r Astro - https://astro.build Terraform - https://www.terraform.io Tangled.sh - https://tangled.sh getdeploying.com - https://getdeploying.com Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com AT Protocol - https://atproto.com

    35 min
  4. #15 Agentic Engineering

    MAR 13

    #15 Agentic Engineering

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian share their hands-on experiment building a real group management app using Claude Code and agentic engineering. Toby spent roughly a month's worth of hours prompting Claude to build a cross-platform mobile and web app with Expo, a Node/Express API, Postgres on Scaleway, Hanko authentication and Terraform infrastructure — all without looking at the code. They discuss what worked surprisingly well, what fell apart, the token costs, how agentic engineering compares to managing juniors, and what they would do differently next time. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction: the experiment 1:15 Why Expo for cross-platform mobile and web 2:54 The architect document approach 5:50 How the initial prompt and brainstorming worked 7:45 Not looking at the code 9:05 Context7: giving Claude access to latest API docs 10:35 First pass results 12:46 API and database quality: better than expected 14:40 UI issues: the weak spot 17:20 The bug list testing session 24:23 How sub-agents and parallel work played out 26:07 The Claude usage limit dark pattern 28:15 What it cost: 247 euros for roughly 100 hours of work 31:30 Code quality and lessons from the spec 38:48 The testing problem: agents writing tests for their own code 45:20 The 80/20 rule: great at the fun stuff, weak on the boring 50:30 SaaS disruption: custom software at commodity prices 57:25 How to build LLM memory and learning loops 1:00:25 Summary and what we would do differently Technologies Mentioned Claude Code - https://claude.ai/code Expo - https://expo.dev Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com Hanko - https://hanko.io Terraform - https://www.terraform.io Playwright - https://playwright.dev Context7 - https://context7.com Node.js - https://nodejs.org PostgreSQL - https://www.postgresql.org

    1h 2m
  5. #14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway

    FEB 27

    #14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian kick off an ongoing series exploring the EU cloud and software stack. Following a previous episode on EU digital sovereignty, they have set themselves a challenge: build their side projects entirely on EU-based services. This episode covers hands-on experience with Forgejo for source code management, Scaleway as a cloud provider, and Hanko for authentication. They share honest feedback on what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are compared to the big American hyperscalers. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction and the EU sovereignty challenge 1:48 Finding EU alternatives: european-alternatives.eu 3:47 Looking for a GitHub replacement 5:50 Forgejo: the open-source Gitea fork 8:27 What works in Forgejo and what doesn't 10:46 Hosting Forgejo on Scaleway 13:48 The gap between self-hosting and a managed service 15:18 Scaleway overview: regions, services and Terraform support 20:35 Scaleway serverless functions and containers 25:02 Service-to-service authentication 28:34 Deploying Forgejo, databases and runners on Scaleway 36:04 Logging, metrics and Cockpit observability 40:27 Scaleway regions: Amsterdam, Paris, Warsaw 42:25 IAM limitations and enterprise considerations 44:14 Hanko: EU-native user authentication 48:32 Comparing EU stack total cost vs AWS plus Datadog 50:05 What's next: OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak Technologies Mentioned - EU alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu - Codeberg: https://codeberg.org - Forgejo: https://forgejo.org - Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/ - OVHcloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/ - UpCloud: https://upcloud.com - Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com - Elastx: https://elastx.se/en - Hanko: https://www.hanko.io

    54 min
  6. #13 OpenClaw

    FEB 20

    #13 OpenClaw

    In this episode, Toby is joined by Xavier (Zavi) for a relaxed conversation about OpenClaw, an open-source project that lets you build a personalised, memory-aware AI assistant running on your own hardware. They share hands-on experiences setting it up with Telegram, Claude and local models, and discuss what makes it feel different from a standard chat interface: persistent memory in markdown files, heartbeat schedules, proactive check-ins, and a soul file that shapes personality over time. The conversation also covers security, prompt injection risks, the skill ecosystem, local model options, and the cultural questions around long-running AI companions. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:33 What is OpenClaw? 1:40 Why does it feel different from a standard AI chat? 3:51 Setting it up: first impressions 4:45 Practical use cases: standups, workshop manuals, tractor parts 7:04 How the heartbeat and memory systems work 9:15 Cron jobs, proactive tasks and the soul file 12:06 The internals: TypeScript, service daemon, CLI and web UI 14:23 Security model: token auth, Tailscale, least-privilege access 17:42 Prompt injection risks 21:30 The skill ecosystem and supply chain risks 28:25 Local model support and failover between providers 32:55 Running local models: gaming laptops, Apple Silicon, VRAM 38:35 Different bot instances developing different personalities 41:45 Long-running AI companions and what they mean for society 44:55 Manipulation risk and the corporate AI companion future 48:15 Practical advice: what to give it access to, and what not to Technologies Mentioned OpenClaw - https://openclaw.dev Claude (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com Telegram - https://telegram.org Ollama - https://ollama.ai Tailscale - https://tailscale.com

    53 min
  7. #12 DevOps and SecOps

    FEB 13

    #12 DevOps and SecOps

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a deep look at DevOps and SecOps: where the ideas came from, what they were supposed to mean, how they got warped by the industry, and what good looks like in practice. They cover the waterfall origins of ops as a separate team, the shift-left movement, the build-it-you-run-it principle, why DevOps as a job title makes no sense, platform engineering, and how security is going through the same transformation. They also cover common anti-patterns, DORA metrics, how to get buy-in for a transformation, and what it looks like when it works at scale. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:28 What DevOps was actually supposed to mean 1:57 The waterfall origins: why ops and dev were separate 5:45 Full stack and the rise of the developer-operator 8:40 Why the old model produced poor software quality 11:04 The move to agile and SaaS changed everything 14:15 DevOps as a term: what went wrong 16:08 Platform engineering: the natural next step 21:00 Breaking down the dev vs ops cultural divide 25:47 Real-world example: 10x performance improvement through shared ownership 30:29 Security is going through the same transformation 32:49 Shifting security left: from IDE to CI/CD pipeline 37:02 Reachability scanning and avoiding false positives 40:25 The strangler pattern for security posture improvement 43:34 SecOps as enablers, not gatekeepers 45:34 Common DevOps anti-patterns 53:48 Four-eyes principle done right vs done as Jira ping-pong 1:00:00 DORA metrics: how to measure if your DevOps is working 1:05:39 Management buy-in: why it matters and why it's hard 1:11:43 Real transformation stories 1:20:00 Internal platforms and giving teams real autonomy Technologies Mentioned Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io AWS - https://aws.amazon.com Grafana Cloud - https://grafana.com/products/cloud Checkov - https://www.checkov.io GitHub Actions - https://github.com/features/actions

    1h 26m
  8. #11 How to build great engineering organizations

    FEB 6

    #11 How to build great engineering organizations

    In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into how to structure and scale engineering organisations effectively. Drawing on years of consulting experience, they cover autonomous teams, domain-driven ownership, reducing cross-team handovers, internal platform teams, Conway's Law, the dangers of gatekeeping in ops and security, why self-service tooling is non-negotiable, and what it looks like when organisations are run like a portfolio of internal startups. A practical guide for engineering leaders and anyone building out an eng org. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:43 When does an organisation become the bottleneck? 3:39 Starting with the problem space: divide and conquer 6:22 Autonomous teams and moving away from top-down command 8:03 How to detect misalignment: count the handovers 9:15 Conway's Law: use it intentionally 12:27 Single ownership and full accountability per domain 14:32 Internal service teams: when to spin one up 17:09 Each department as its own startup 19:57 Hero syndrome and knowing what not to build in-house 25:13 Self-service tooling: make it so good they choose it 28:33 KPIs, review cadences and cost visibility 36:24 Common anti-patterns: top-down command, founders who don't let go 41:42 Internal tooling teams as natural monopolies 45:26 The operations and security gatekeeper trap 48:20 Shifting from gatekeeper to enabler 53:02 Why developers must own production 57:34 How to set cross-divisional standards 1:07:09 Good internal platforms embed standards in golden paths 1:14:29 Entrepreneurial mindset within organisations 1:18:45 Summary and closing thoughts Technologies Mentioned AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks Apache Airflow - https://airflow.apache.org Terraform - https://www.terraform.io Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

    1h 22m
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About

Tech League is a podcast by engineers who've been around long enough to know when something is genuinely useful and when it's just hype. Hosted by Toby Sears and Krisztian Fisher, two senior engineers with decades of experience across startups, scale-ups and enterprise, each episode tackles a real topic: architecture decisions, career growth, the tools everyone's using, and the mistakes nobody talks about. No sponsored segments. No thought leadership waffle. Just two people who've shipped software, run teams and broken production, telling you what they actually think. New episodes every week. https://www.techleaguepodcast.com

Information

  • Creator
    Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer
  • Show Website
    Tech League