It's easy for key industry players to talk up AI's potential positive social impact, but what does building for social impact actually look like? At Thoughtworks, a small team has been working on a project called "Jugalbandi," designing AI-driven systems and tools for civil society initiatives, such as a chatbot that helps Indian citizens find information about government programs and schemes in their native language. Earlier this year, Jugalbandi caught the attention of Microsoft CEO Satya...

Generative AI appears to be making an impact in a huge range of fields, but one that we're particularly interested in at Thoughtworks is its use in software development. In recent months, there's been a lot of talk in the industry around issues like whether AI might boost developer productivity and if it can be used for pair programming, but in this episode of the Technology Podcast we try to get beneath the hype to explore the reality of generative AI and software development — how is it...

Open source contributors and maintainers play a vital role in the technology ecosystem. But what's it like to develop and maintain an open source tool — especially one that thousands of other developers use and depend on? In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Srinivasan Sekar and Sai Krishna join hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss their work on AppiumTestDistribution, an open source tool that supports test automation framework Appium. AppiumTestDistribution won a LambdaTest...

The concept of the developer platform and the discipline of platform engineering have been important in shaping how the industry thinks about enabling developers. But what does it mean to actually build and maintain a platform? How can you ensure it actually supports the people that need it? In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Rebecca Parsons are joined by Chris Ford of Thoughtworks Spain and Aidan Donnelly, Director of Technology Platform at Personio, to discuss...

Many of the scale-ups we’ve partnered with over the years will hit road bumps along the way. One common bottleneck we’ve seen are unexpected and dramatic rises in costs. In this episode we talk to members of our Digital Scale-up Studio, to hear their experience of gaining better visibility, improving operational efficiency at scale-ups, while the business maintains growth and gains greater knowledge of customer requirements.   Podcast hosts: Rebecca Parsons, Premanand Chandrasekaran,  ...

The evolution of SQL and the ease of access to ever larger sizes of computational power has made SQL and ETL a useful pairing for practitioners in the data space. But how do they work together exactly? And what challenges can it pose? Bharani Subramaniam and Madhu Podila discuss these issues and much more with hosts Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons on the latest episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast.    

Radio astronomy — a subfield of astronomy that studies the sky using radio frequencies — is data-intensive. That poses a challenge for radio astronomers: building and then communicating scientific insights requires significant processing and analytical work. Thoughtworks has been working with Dr. Neeraj Gupta from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in India to develop solutions to these challenges, including a data processing pipeline, a collaborative platform...

XR is a potentially transformative technology, but it needs to be leveraged in a way that drives value. That isn't straightforward — given effective XR initiatives often require significant experimentation and exploration, simply aligning XR with strict organizational goals and aims will often make it harder to achieve success. How can technologists and product leaders get the balance right? In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Vaibhav Tikekar and Shea Clark-Tieche join hosts Rebecca...

Leadership is an important if often-overlooked quality in the technology industry. However, it is also a complex and multi-faceted thing: it isn't a discrete set of skills, but rather an ability to respond and adapt to the needs of a situation, team or individual. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Ricardo Cavalcanti (Caval) and Arturo Santos from Thoughtworks Brazil join hosts Alexey Boas and Scott Shaw to discuss their experiences of leadership and offer their perspective on the...

Design leader and Thoughtworks alumnus Emma Carter recently published her second book, DesignedUp. In it, she explains how designers can win a seat at the leadership table inside technolology organizations and become effective evangelists and advocates for good design principles and practices. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Emma joins hosts Rebecca Parsons and Scott Shaw to discuss her new book and talks through some of the challenges designers face in even the most...

Thoughtworks recently established a new role — Chief AI Officer. Taking up the position is Mike Mason, a veteran of Thoughtworks with over 20 years at the company, in technology roles spanning developer to technology strategist and author (and occasional Technology Podcast host). Mike will help guide Thoughtworks AI strategy and ensure that we're equipped to support clients trying to leverage AI.  In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Mike talks with hosts Neal Ford and Prem...

It seems obvious to say that mobile usage has grown dramatically over the last decade, but for businesses that have to move to accomodate this type of user behavior, it presents many challenges. While some have successfully gone all-in on mobile experiences, for others, trying to build effectively for multiple channels is as much an organizational challenge as it is a product one. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Scott Shaw and Birgitta Böckeler are joined by Head of...

A changing regulatory environment has made it more important than ever for organizations to embed privacy in their data infrastructure. Doing so, however, can be complicated — that means data scientists have an vital role to play in ensuring privacy is a key concern from both a technical and commercial perspective.  Thoughtworker and data scientist Katharine Jarmul is eager to help fellow data scientists master privacy principles and techniques. Her new book, Practical Data Privacy, covers...

When cloud first hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, its attraction was rooted, in part, in its apparent elegance and simplicity. As it has become an established norm in the industry, such simplicity has given way to more fragmentation and complexity. The growth of "multi-cloud" and adjacent terms such as "hybrid cloud" and "poly cloud" mean that cloud is a field that needs to be sensitively navigated by technology leaders and their organizations. In this episode of the Technology...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and taught at the University of Central Florida. Becoming CTO in 2007, she has seen Thoughtworks — and the wider tech industry — evolve through a period in which the business mainstream has become increasingly comfortable with cutting-edge innovation. In this episode of the Technology...

As an organization matures and grows, silos will inevitably emerge. That can pose problems, particularly in the relationship between product and engineering functions — friction can slow growth and make delivering at speed much more challenging than it was previously. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons is joined by colleagues Rick Kick (Head of Application and Platform Transformation in the Enterprise Modernization team for Thoughtworks North America)...

It's often said that technology moves quickly, but the decisions we make about it can have long-term consequences. That's why identifying these trends — and understanding what they mean — matters. At Thoughtworks we do that with our Looking Glass report. Our most recent edition was published at the end of 2022; it provides a useful framework for thinking through the major shifts that look set to happen across the industry in 2023.  In this episode of the Technology Podcast, regular hosts...

Despite the term being coined two decades ago by Eric Evans, domain-driven design has arguably become more relevant than ever in software engineering, thanks to the rise of cloud and highly complex distributed systems. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Alexey Boas and Ashok Subramanian are joined by Prem Chandrasekaran and  Karthik Krishnan — authors of the new book Domain-Driven Design with Java — to discuss DDD and how it has developed over the last 20 years. They explore how DDD...

The issue of accessibility in relation to technology and software has gained increased attention in recent years. While few would disagree that it's important, it nevertheless remains something that is all too often overlooked or viewed as a luxury when it comes to actually building products. This is unfortunate: taking accessibility seriously throughout the process of development and design will not only help foster a more equitable industry, it will also lead to better products for...