alphalist

100 episodes! We couldn't let this milestone pass us by without thanking all the people who made the past 100 episodes (and all the future ones 🙂) possible. Thank you to our guests. You don't know what an impact your words and ideas have had on CTOs and the tech world.  Just the other day a #CTO told us just some of the many practices he does that were inspired by the podcast.  And he is not the only one. So thank you Sebastian Thrun, Marty Cagan, David Heinemeier Hansson, Tim O'Reilly, John Romero, Sebastian Betz, Stephan Schulze, Jan Sören Ramm, Daniel Gebler, Sergey Anikin, Christian Hardenberg, Ahti Heinla, Johannes Schaback, Matthias Laug, Jean-Michel Lemieux, Tyler McMullen, Eric Bowman, Jean-Denis Greze, Mitchell Hashimoto, John Graham-Cumming, Jason Warner, Frank Karlitschek, Olivier Bonnet, Peter Grosskopf, Eric Johnson, Rasmus Rothe, Matthias Jugel, Cheryl Hung, Alex Solomon, Charity Majors, Andreas Schranzhofer, Mark Porter, Alesia Braga, Kore Nordmann, Fabian Wesner, Sagnik Nandy, Chad Fowler, Marco Palladino, Snir Yarom, Frédéric Rivain, Ilya Grigorik, Laura Major, Taylor Otwell, Daniel Krauss, Michael Kagan, Mike Perham, Niilo Säämänen, Eben Upton, Oren Etzioni, Mikko Hypponen, Cal Henderson, Rachel Potvin, Ken Coleman, Kathryn Koehler, Uncle Bob (Robert). Martin, Andreas Stryz, Yonatan Zunger, Bjarne Stroustrup, Maria Meier, Aron Spohr, Carlo Szelinsky, Ryan Singer, Thanasis Noulas, Renaud Visage, Patrick Campbell, David Linthicum, Dominik Angerer, Malte Ubl, Kent C. Dodds, Will Larson, Shawn swyx W, John Engates, Richard Socher, Vikas Gupta, Stephen Wolfram, Steven Rogelberg, Sarah Polan, Teresa Torres, Gertrud Kolb, Aviran Mordo, Abi Noda, Thomas Dohmke, Mike Fisher, Scott Chacon, Luca Rossi, Melissa Perri, Bob Moesta, Andy Walker, Johanna Rothman, Allan Leinwand, Melanie Rieback, David Gebhardt, Charles Gorintin, Patrick Kua, Alex Ewerlöf, Matthew Skelton and Jason Fried! Thank you to the team behind the scenes both at alphalist and Podstars by OMR. Thank you to our sponsors who have allowed us to bring these ideas to CTOs. And most of all, thank YOU. Thank YOU for inspiring us to keep doing what we do - bringing ideas to CTOs. Hundred episodes is just the beginning. We have so much more to discuss and so many ore brains to pick 🙂 

Being effective != FEELING effective As a CTO, you might relate to this. Afterall, because your work is not a line of code that can be run... You work hard and think hard but you won't see results immediately. So how can a #CTO handle self-efficacy? Well, this is how @David Gebhardt, CTO at mobile.de handles it. Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/eVK8Cidq

The secret sauce of #DeveloperMarketing? #Documentation. (and well-designed API calls) We thought we were just getting insight into the #SDK business, but we learnt a lot about cross-platform #performance and developer marketing with Dr. Daniel Hauschildt (MD & CPTO at IMG.LY). As a client-side offering (no servers!), IMG.LY needs to take extra steps to ensure reliability on all devices, platforms 💻 and browsers 🌐. From crafting developer-friendly documentation to optimizing performance on every device and platform imaginable, Daniel shares hard-earned insights from the SDK business. 👨💻What makes an SDK truly developer-friendly? 🤔 📜Documentation: The secret sauce of INBOUND developer marketing 🔌 API Design: Beauty of purpose-driven entry points 🧩How they build for the future with modular design  🐙 Cross-platform support: native vs. cross-platform frameworks (React, Flutter etc.) ⚙️Why they focus on algorithm optimization over compute optimization Listen here:  https://lnkd.in/dSsccPQj

Best practices are often someone’s exaggerated interpretation of how things worked at a certain time and environment. Using the following elements you can cook your own best practices at home: - Generalization - Acronyms - Name-dropping - Advertisement This post is an invitation to use critical thinking when adopting ideas from other environment and timelines because there's a huge risk that they won't work as the label describes. https://lnkd.in/d65fWzpv

Plan and PRACTICE  for better #IncidentResponse with insights from Tim Armandpour, #CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their #SLA. Listen to find out: 🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response. 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure Fridays with Chaos Engineering) 🧑🤝🧑 Ownership: Why tech AND business teams must join post-mortems. ☁️ How to mitigate the impact of your cloud provider’s lower SLA. ⚓ Which architecture patterns are more resilient?  ⚖️ WARNING:  “bend” the CAP theorem at your own risk Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eFPkJXxx

Thank you to all the CTOs who joined us last week at the alphalist #CTODinner2024 Berlin edition. It was YOU who made the event what it was, complete with great exchanges and camaraderie.  Thank you to our Table Captains for facilitating great discussions during the first course: Füsun Wehrmann ( ☸️ AI), Fabian Wesner (☸️ Bootstrapping), Ference Brose (☸️ Security, Ethics and Compliance), John Bettiol (☸️ eCommerce), Peter Grosskopf (☸️ FinTech), David Gebhardt (☸️ People), Matthias Laug (☸️ Product), Barbara Wittenberg (☸️ Sustainablity), Elmar Weber (☸️Tech Leadership), and Lars Rieche (☸️ Tooling). Thank you to our alphalist team. Thank you to Jonathan Trinh 💯, Chaya Trevor, and Martin W. for putting it together.  This event would not have happened without Valentina Colombo finding us the perfect partners for this dinner - Globant. So thank you to Globant for partnering with us to bring CTOs together for great conversations and food. Looking forward to seeing you all again at our 2025 events! P.S.  Lars Rieche and Aykut Çevik -  hope the CTO Karaoke worked out!

A community is important. Also in a professional sense. For me it is important as the exchange with peers allows me to get new insights and perspectives, to validate thoughts and ideas and sometimes also to keep you sane, realizing that the challenges you face are not unique to you, your teams and company, but others experience the same. Or experienced the same in the past and can tell you what worked and did not work for them. All of that was true yesterday at the alphalist CTO Dinner 2024 in Berlin. Set in a beautiful location, we had themed tables, and I was asked to be the table host of one of them ("People"), guiding the discussion. A lot revolved around hiring, promotions, general trends in the technology employee and employer market, hybrid work and office presence and lastly also some exchange on organizational setup, ways of working and the influence of AI. It was a true pleasure to connect and reconnect and discuss a whole variety of topics over some good food and drinks. Big shout out to all the table hosts: Fabian Wesner, Ference Brose, Füsun Wehrmann, John Bettiol, Peter Grosskopf, Matthias Laug, Barbara Wittenberg, Elmar Weber, Lars Rieche And to the organizers: Tobias Schlottke, Chaya Trevor, Jonathan Trinh 💯, Martin W. Already looking forward to the next event of that sort!

"Focus on your strengths. Go figure out what your superpowers are. Don't worry about the rest of the world, right? The real value comes from the internal creative process and knowing who you are, not from trying to be what you think the world needs you to be.” - Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies, speaking on the alphalist #CTOPodcast episode 106. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eU399ER5

I had a great time talking to 👨💻 Daniel Bartholomae (#CTO @ optilyz) on the alphalist #CTOPodcast recently. Not only do they work as cross functional team MEMBERS but they have also ditched JIRA for Miro and Asana! Have a listen here: https://lnkd.in/eeuHKxxU

I recently got the opportunity to talk with Tobias Schlottke on the #CTOPodcast about how moving from cross-functional teams to cross-functional team _members_ allowed us to signifcantly improve outcomes, and how engineering should be about solving business problems, not pushing tickets. Have a listen here: https://lnkd.in/eeuHKxxU