Thoughtworks Technology Podcast Thoughtworks

Global craft marketplace Etsy has grown at an impressive rate in recent years. From 2019 to 2021 sales and revenue tripled. This growth has been enabled by a significant technology modernization project which, amazingly, was completed just weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic erupted in March 2020, the start of a period in which millions of people took to Etsy to purchase cloth face masks. Without the modernized systems and infrastructure, Etsy would have struggled to cope with consumer demand.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason is joined by Etsy's Chief Architect Keyur Govande, the company's former CTO Mike Fisher and Thoughtworks North America Technical Director Tim Cochran to discuss how Etsy tackled the challenge of scaling to meet the needs of its expanding market. They talk through the technical challenges and the organizational focus required to scale in a way that was sustainable for the business yet impactful for Etsy's users.
Read Tim Cochran's article about evolving Etsy's culture on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-product-delivery-culture.html 
...And his piece on using the cloud to scale: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/etsy-cloud-scale.html
Learn more about Thoughtworks partnership with Etsy: https://www.thoughtworks.com/clients/retail-ecommerce/etsy-scaling

When we think about machine learning today we often think in terms of immense scale — large language models that require huge amounts of computational power, for example. But one of the most interesting innovations in machine learning right now is actually happening on a really small scale.
Thanks to TinyML, models can now be run on small devices at the edge of a network. This has significant implications for the future of many different fields, from automated vehicles to security and privacy.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Andy Nolan, Director of Emerging Technology at Thoughtworks Australia, and Matt Kelcey of Edge Impulse, to discuss what TinyML means for our understanding of machine learning as a discipline and how it could help drive innovation in the years to come.

We often describe our high-tech and digitally mediated world as "complex" but we rarely spend much time considering how that complexity can be cleverly deployed as a means of duping or manipulating us. However, trends like NFTs have brought this into clearer view. This is not to say it's a novel phenomenon — from dark patterns in UX design to pages and pages of end-user license agreements (EULAs), leveraging complexity for nefarious ends has long been an unsavory aspect of the technology industry.
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Neal Ford are joined by Thoughtworks designer Kate Linton and Thoughtworks North America Head of Legal Jeremy Gordon to discuss what they describe as "the weaponization of complexity." Together, they grapple with the cynicism at the center of such activities and discuss some of the ways we can tackle it.

The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of technologies and practices that the company believes the industry should be interested in, based on the actual experiences of Thoughtworkers working with clients. With its first edition launched in January 2010, it is now a fixture of the Thoughtworks calendar, released twice a year in the spring and fall.
Although it has been around for more than a decade, we're well aware that people have lots of questions about it. One comes up more than others: how do you actually put it together? Giving a good, short answer is difficult — for those involved, it's a long process involving various stages of writing, debate and deliberation.
 However, with the next edition of the Radar — volume 28 — just weeks away, we wanted to give the world an insight into how we put Technology Radar together. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Marisa Hoenig, Perla Villareal and Camilla Crispim join host Neal Ford to discuss the work that goes into producing it and what the experience is like.

Covid-19 unleashed a wave of medical and pharmaceutical research and innovation across the world. In India, the government launched the Drug Discovery Hackathon, an initiative designed to bring together expertise in fields ranging from biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, machine learning and virology to discover new drugs that could help thwart the pandemic. 
One team that took part was from Thoughtworks India. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, two of the members — Pooja Arora and Justin Jose — talk to Rebecca Parsons and Ashok Subramanian about a number of projects they worked on during the hackathon. Among other things, they explain how they used reinforcement learning to improve the efficacy of potential drugs in tackling what was, at the time, a virus that was only partially understood.

Serverless received significant attention when it first emerged in the middle of the 2010s. And although it has now entered the mainstream and is today used in a diverse range of scenarios and architectures, it nevertheless remains a topic that causes considerable confusion and debate: where should we use it? How should we use it? Sometimes, what even is it, exactly?
In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike Mason and Prem Chandrasekaran are joined by former Thoughtworker Mike Roberts — author of "the canonical book on serverless," Programming AWS Lambda — to discuss the current state of serverless. They examine the ways that serverless is understood today and explore the impacts and challenges it has for both businesses and software developers.
Read Mike Roberts' book Programming AWS Lambda: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-aws-lambda/9781492041047/ Read Mike's long-read on serverless on martinfowler.com: https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html