004 Engineering Career Ladder

I hope you can spot the multiple puns in this title ;)We talk about Nicolas' Go exploration. The scaling issues of GitHub, the mythical Model from Anthropic, the future of Open Models.. and where Philipp is going to next?

We talk about the importance of learning concepts and languages instead of just generating everything. We also discuss how the constant rush in the industry is unhealthy and creates unnecessary FOMO, along with a few notable libraries we explored over the past weeks for JavaScript sandboxing and Ruby GraphQL optimizations.Links:https://rivet.dev/https://sandboxagent.dev/https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/https://shopify.engineering/faster-breadth-first-graphql-executionhttps://eversole.dev/blog/the-80-percent-nobody-celebrates/Chapters:00:00 Exploring Golang and Learning New Programming Paradigms06:00 Code Leaked and Industry Pressure for Rapid Progress11:38 Creating Fear of Missing Out in the Industry19:28 Optimizing GraphQL API and Positive Discoveries

The conversation centers around the exploration of development environments, challenges with code editors, discussion on LM providers, cost considerations of LM usage, exploring new programming languages, Rust and Go as development languages, improving legacy tooling with Rust, and AI development and complexity.

We're back after a quick break and talk about the differences in the JS ecosystem on the backend side. Also, a new category: bug of the week, and we talk a bit about a project we hacked on to put an agent in a sandbox.Links:https://void.cloud/ https://agentclientprotocol.comhttps://linuxcontainers.org/incus

We start the episode and talk about Oban for Python, sharding in Postgres with PgDog, and Next.js by Cloudflare.And then we dig deeper about career ladders and promotions.Linkshttps://oban.pro/articles/bridging-with-obanhttps://pgdog.dev/https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinexthttps://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-reveals-about-the-future-of-software

The main topic of this weeks episode is a conversation about the impact of AI coding agents on development collaboration and how we think the software development life cycle (planning, code review, and CI/CD) will change.

In this episode, we cover the impact of AI on the developer community, work-life balance and AI burnout, concerns about job security, exhaustion and context switching in development, and touch on the future of software development and collaboration. Links:• Your startup idea is their weekend holiday by Andreas Klinger• AgentLogs by Philipp Spiess• Software Collaboration in the AI Age by Philipp Spiess

Join us for another walk in the Prater with no sun for the second month in a row. We talk about model-release-week, the new Codex app, AI sandboxes, and orchestration challenges before we dive into interviewing and the impact of AI on the interviewing process for both parties. We end with a positive note about the AI community in Austria.

In this pilot episode, Nicolas and Philipp discuss the rise of OpenClaw and MoltBook, the democratization of coding, and the impact of AI on software engineering. They also explore the security implications of AI tools and the slow pace of innovation in big tech companies.