Bethany Janos 
Brittany Ellich 
Eggyhead 
Jonathan Tamsut Kate (00:00) now I would say that it’s kind of taken for granted that most developers use some sort of AI code assistant and are using an agentic IDE. so, know, organizations need to be prepared for that. And all of that really vindicates, one of Redmonk’s core tenants, which is our philosophy around the new kingmakers.
which is that developers are the ones who are going to be making purchasing decisions. And so if you look at how adoption of these tools has sort of evolved, you might see in several organizations that maybe developers didn’t really, like their organization weren’t, you know, paying for a co-pilot plan or they weren’t paying for one of these cursors, whatever, one surf. But as time has gone on, they have finally gotten, you know,
their developers were probably using them, but they didn’t have a company plan. But now, of course, lot of companies have said, OK, wait a second. We need to actually be in control of this and make sure that our information isn’t being sent to some cloud that we don’t have access to or I think we’re in the process of putting up a lot of guardrails as an industry. But also, developers are only going to use tools that work well.
Bethany (01:03) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host Bethany and I’m joined by…
Brittany Ellich (01:10) I’m Brittany Ellich.
Bethany (01:11) We met while working on a team at GitHub and quickly realized we were all obsessed with getting better at what we do. So we decided to start this podcast to share what we’ve learned. We’ll be talking about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect. Technology is constantly changing at a rapid pace, which is one of the most exciting but intimidating aspects for professionals trying to focus on what trends
tools and practices are most important. Today’s guest is someone whose job is to help industry professionals do just that. Kate Holterhoff is an analyst at Redmonk, a developer focused analyst firm, and we are thrilled to have her here to share about her work and how we can learn from her process to keep up. Welcome, Kate.
Kate (01:58) Hi, it’s great to be here.
Bethany (01:59) So let’s start about just kind of discussing what does an analyst for a developer-focused analyst firm even do? Walk us through how you maybe approach your research for an analyst and what your day-to-day looks like.
Kate (02:12) Yes, yeah, I get asked this question a lot, as you can imagine, because analyst is kind of a squishy term and there’s lots of different types of analysts. the sort of longer technical term is that I’m an industry analyst. And so a lot of folks have heard of companies like Gartner or IDC, Forrester, those are some of the bigger ones. I work at a company called Redmonk and yes, we are developer focused. We’re also smaller and so there’s only four analysts.
And we have sort of made our name for ourselves in terms of speaking for the practitioners. And what that means is that we follow trends in the industry. We work in developer watering holes, such as Reddit, Hacker News, Blue Sky, places where the developers are speaking their mind. And we try to give voice to that. So we speak a lot to the open source community, like
We are interested in what actual adoption trends look like and not just what the vendors would like them to look like. And obviously, we spend a lot of time at conferences. I’m a big podcast buff. So I’m a big fan of learning what developers think by way of hearing it. And so yeah, that’s sort of the sort of larger philosophy is that
Developer led adoption is important and we should pay attention to it and I don’t know so yeah, would you want me to talk a little bit about my my day-to-day as as part of that?
Bethany (03:31) That would be awesome. Also, really curious what this data ends up feeding into and what these insights go towards as well.
Kate (03:39) Yes, yes, great question. Okay, well, I am a former academic. So to be honest, I just wanna learn forever. And so the research part to me is super fun. But that obviously isn’t it. So what we do do is we’ve got a blog, we run our own podcast, which is called the MonkCast, and we do consulting. So companies, if they are a client of ours,
will speak to us about any subject that’s top of mind. So the idea is that a lot of companies want to talk to us. They want to persuade us of the relevance and the importance of their own products. But if they are our clients, we will also talk back to them. We’ll give them our feedback. And so the type of feedback that they often want will be showing us pitch decks, and we’ll give them
advice about maybe how to improve that. We’ll talk a lot about messaging trends. mean, sometimes companies are just interested in what we’re hearing around certain technologies. And all of us sort of have our interests laid out. So, you know, you can kind of pick your analyst that you think would be the most interesting on a particular subject matter.
But also we’ll do like website reviews. So I mean, obviously that’s a really important marketing channel and it’s extremely difficult, my goodness. You know, it has to appeal to not only the business side, but also to developers who go there looking for the documentation, right? So yeah, so we will review any sort of marketing materials, but also yeah, we’ll just have conversations. And since the pandemic, a big part of what we do is actually creating sort of external facing media.
So we’ll do sponsored podcasts and sponsored videos. Also, our clients will have us come out to their conferences to speak. So we’ll participate in webinars, may be virtual, may be live, fireside chats, things like that. And then in terms of what my work looks like, mean, top of mind for me these days is travel. We go to a lot of conferences, which is fun, but is also a bit of a challenge. I have small children, so finding the…
The wherewithal to leave them for days on end can be a challenge. However, I love to travel and I love to talk to people and I think it’s a lot of fun. So I do love it. So it’s really a balancing act. And then also just like writing blog posts is a big part of what I do too. I always have something that I’m working on. And so I…
I guess I, you when I wake up in the morning, I very much look forward to trying to dig into those subjects and like I do a lot of interviews for them. And it’s so cool that, you know, folks want to talk to me about this too. Like I have great access as an analyst to some of the leaders in the industry who want to tell me what they think about, you know, something that is happening in the news or some new technology that is coming around or maybe that there’s like three folks who are working in a particular space.
And developers are sort of unsure why there’s suddenly this influx of options and what is that signal. So for instance, I’ll just give you one concrete example. What I’m working on now, which could possibly, I hope, be published by the time that this episode comes out, is on bundlers, so JavaScript bundlers. And so the reason that I’m interested in that is because we’ve got TurboPack from Vercell, and then we’ve got Vite.
Plus, so folks who are interested in the roll down community, that’s a big part of it. But also RS pack. So there’s all these sort of new bundlers. And I was like, why are folks investing all this time into JavaScript bundlers? Where is this coming from? And the TLDR, as a little teaser, is that I think it has a lot to do with just the size of JavaScript these days, Webpack.
was created 10 years ago and the packages just weren’t quite so large. So we’re just shipping a lot more JavaScript these days and so we needed new bundler technology to keep up with it. anyways, a little tangential, but that’s what I love about my job. I like asking those questions. I’m a deeply curious person.
Bethany (07:27) That is so cool. I mean, I just love the idea of the meta of software engineering and looking at that and why these trends pop up. What’s the underlying root causes? And it certainly sounds like your job doesn’t get boring after you’re doing all sorts of things. So that is so cool. ⁓ Really curious, how did you get into this field? It seems like a very unique spot for having both technical knowledge, but then also analyst skills.
Kate (07:45) Yes.
Bethany (07:54) what drove you to getting into this position.
Kate (07:57) Yeah, I mean if you had spoken to me, you know five years ago, I wouldn’t have even known that this was like an option. It’s such a unicorn job. I feel very fortunate to be doing what i’m doing. But yeah, I wanted to be a college professor. I had a background in art, painted some murals in Cincinnati, which is my hometown for many years. And then I pivoted to try to be an English professor. I had dual majored in school and so I
You know that that was my dream for about a decade and I went hard, you know, I I did the whole thing I got the PhD I Adjuncted I did a postdoc. That’s why I’m in Atlanta is I did a postdoc at Georgia Tech and Just at the end of the day there there aren’t really any tenure line jobs So I could have adjuncted forever. I could go out and probably adjunct right now if I wanted to but it’s just not a very good Career, there’s you know, not no benefits. I’ll say that much
So, you know, if folks want to dig into the itinerant labor problem in higher education, I’d be happy to do that. But in any event, I taught myself, a program, and became a front-end engineer in 2018, and did that for a few years. And one of my colleagues from Georgia Tech, who I did the postdoc with, she had gotten the job at Redmonk, like,
immediately after deciding that being a college professor wasn’t for her. And she reached out to me when they decided to hire a fifth analyst. so, know, Kelly and Fitzpatrick, shout out. she got me on board. I was about eight months pregnant when I interviewed for the job with my second. so that was fun. yeah, I…
got the job, it was great, it was a very smooth transition, and I was able to leverage a lot of the stuff that I did in academia with a lot of the things that I learned as a front-end engineer and the interest that I had. For instance, as a front-end engineer, I wrote for CSS tricks, and so that’s the sort of stuff that I was, yeah, yeah. So I was always kind of interested in combining my interests there and using some of the skills that I had gained.
in academia as part of what I was, you know, planning to do in tech. So yeah, I mean, and to prepare for that at Georgia Tech, I taught digital humanities classes, and I also taught in the tech comm section of design courses there. So I was already sort of like focusing my pedagogy on transitioning into a tech career.
And, you frankly, my PhD is from Carnegie Mellon, so I always have felt very comfortable talking about communication to engineers who, especially younger ones, are often not very interested in hearing about that. But I like a challenge. So that was fun for me. So anyways, all that is to say, it was a very good fit for me. so I’d say, like most jobs I’ve had, I knew someone who helped me to sort of get my foot in the door.
and I am extremely grateful. I love what I do. It’s a really, it’s a fun role and I think it’s really important too.
Brittany Ellich (10:49) This is awesome. I think you fit in well with us. We are all lifetime learners and very passionate about learning. And if I could go to school forever, I would. I am actually just now applying to the Georgia Tech Online Masters because I’ve had this in mind for a while and you have been there. That’s cool. It’s nice to hear. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Kate (10:59) yeah.
good luck to you. Yeah, I understand they have a great program for that.
Brittany Ellich (11:12) Do you have a particular specialization or anything in particular that you look at within Redmonk? You talked about JavaScript bundlers. Is there an area of development that you’re focused on?
Kate (11:24) Yes, I mean, absolutely. I focused on the top of the stack. anything to do, we called it interactive when I was an engineer. So that would include not only UX, but also the design side and front end engineers. I’ve always been very interested in that intersection between the design and the engineers, because that was the job that I had, was that the designers.
would hand off a PSD file to me or an Adobe XD file. We’re talking like, yeah, 2019 era. And I would code it out. And of course now AI can do a lot of that for you. And there’s a lot of folks who are already sort of branching that gap. And so I will obviously talk about DevOps. I will talk infra. I can do the thing. Backend stuff is great. Databases, all of it. But my happy place.
is absolutely talking about front end stuff, JavaScript, frameworks, all of that. so yeah, a lot of the research that I publish tends to be on that. And frankly, anytime someone markets a product as front end. So a recent example of that is front end observability. I was very interested in that. said, well, who’s using this observability product? Like front end engineers don’t do observability? What is this? I’m confused.
Turns out it had a lot to do with real user monitoring. So anyways, I published a bit on that. I did a few podcasts on the subject because I did find it very interesting. historically, so the problem with being an analyst who focuses on the top of the stack is that vendors didn’t use to market to front-end engineers. They weren’t thought to have any purchasing power. You would only market to folks in the back end and who did IT and infra.
because they’re spending the big bucks with the hyperscalers. And fine, you know, I mean, that’s not true. But there’s something to be said for the front end and paying attention to their own needs. Because I think the problem of just talking about developer experience is that there’s a lot of kinds of developers and there’s a lot of sort of specialties within there. And frankly, it’s a moving target even within a subset of it, right?
I’m always wary when folks just kind of paint with a broad brush the idea of DevEx. Like we’re interested in product-led growth or we’re interested in just, you know, making sure that developers can kick the tires, right? I think you want to also think about like, well, what kind of developers are we including in this larger remit? You know, is it also going to be appropriate for, you know, as we widen the aperture of who is considered a developer through vibe coding or, you know, whatever sort of cringe word folks are using?
I’m all in with vibe coding by the way, know, so that’s I’ll take it I own it you know that if that is something that you’re You’re thinking about is including designers and UX folks and accessibility and all these these sort of folks who are working in that basically any web dev Then you know, how are you? meeting them where they are and and making sure that that their needs are met and
So I think that that’s, I try to give voice to that particular segment of the developer community. And because I was in the trenches, because I’ve seen things, I’ve seen terrible things, you know, I spent a lot of time doing it. You know, I could speak with some authority and also I just get, you I’m very interested in it. And yeah, so I’ll pause there.
Brittany Ellich (14:35) That’s awesome. Yes, we, I think we have very different backgrounds within our group of hosts here, but definitely some more front end focus. I’m personally more front end focused, so I love seeing more efforts towards marketing to front end developers because we do have a lot to say and I feel like there’s a lot of…
Kate (14:54) Absolutely.
Brittany Ellich (14:55) There’s movements now towards more like product minded engineers, which I feel like is a term that has come out recently. And I feel like that tends to be often tends to be more like front end focus engineers since they’re often closer to like the product and the customer. speaking of AI though, I’m curious because this is a thing that is happening a lot now. What are your thoughts on
sort of the AI space and how that is trending over time, specifically for developers.
Kate (15:22) Well, let me try to narrow that question a little bit because, I mean, obviously, I think about AI broadly all the time. ⁓ so in terms of my research, I tend to do a lot of studying of the agentic IDEs. They used to be called AI code assistants, but now they’re all agentic, right?
Brittany Ellich (15:29) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kate (15:41) which is great. And so for instance, I had early access to IBM’s Bob. Kiro is another fun one, that’s AWS’s Spectre of Development IDE. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what the affordances are for these tools and what they signify about the space and also just putting them through their paces. I don’t have a benchmark, I think that you can look to folks like Simon Willison or…
Even some of the vendors themselves for like, you know, trying to see how well they do for certain tasks. That’s fine. But again, it’s just, it’s always moving. It’s very fluid. So I don’t know, you know, anything that you publish today is going to be outdated, you know, in a week. But I think it’s a lot of fun. And I also think that it is changing the way that we work. And it also has a lot of implications.
for organizations. of course, I enjoy doing my little hobby projects, my personal websites, little RSS feeders, silly stuff like that. That’s fine. And we know that that has pros and cons, and some work better than others. But when we think about developers at enterprises actually using these AI code assistants, there’s a lot of security implications. And there’s also a lot of…
sort of resistance from certain segments in the community. so it’s been fun to like watch that evolve over time. Because now I would say that it’s kind of taken for granted that most developers use some sort of AI code assistant and are using an agentic IDE. so, know, organizations need to be prepared for that. And all of that really vindicates, you know, one of Redmonk’s core tenants, which is our philosophy around the new kingmakers.
which is that developers are the ones who are going to be making purchasing decisions. And so if you look at how adoption of these tools has sort of evolved, you might see in several organizations that maybe developers didn’t really, like their organization weren’t, you know, paying for a co-pilot plan or they weren’t paying for one of these cursors, whatever, one surf. But as time has gone on, they have finally gotten, you know,
their developers were probably using them, but they didn’t have a company plan. But now, of course, lot of companies have said, OK, wait a second. We need to actually be in control of this and make sure that our information isn’t being sent to some cloud that we don’t have access to or whatever. So I think we’re in the process of putting up a lot of guardrails as an industry. But also, developers are only going to use tools that work well. So I think that there’s also this push-pull of, well, that’s fine. But we might be copying and pasting code snippets from our preferred.
know, code assistance, Claude code, you whatever you use, rather than using something that maybe the top down C-suite folks would rather us use. And I think we’re still kind of figuring that out. Like there’s still a lot of tension. So that’s one thing that I focus on with AI. I’d say that another one is about jobs, right? We’re hearing that AI is displacing a lot of workers. And that’s an interesting one for me, because I think that we haven’t seen, we’ve seen layoffs.
But my personal feeling is that it’s more because we’re in a post-zero-interest-phenomena era, or ZERP, you might have heard it called, rather than AI taking our jobs. It’s a scapegoat at best. And I think that that’s still, we’re looking in the future for that to become the case. What I have seen as part of this ZERP thing is offshoring.
a lot of companies are hiring talent from overseas. And so again, we’re calling this an AI issue, but really it’s not. Developers are all using it globally, but I think the fact that it’s become this scapegoat in the IT industry for hiring and for the fact that so many junior developers are not finding jobs as quickly as they have in years past.
is something that is deeply tied to that.
Brittany Ellich (19:20) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Having been on quite a few different teams now, I know that there is never a shortage of work to be done. Even if AI can do the work, there’s always something that developers can be doing. So the likelihood of AI taking our jobs, feel like, in my opinion, is probably pretty low. But who knows? Who knows what the future holds? maybe. Are there any common questions you get asked about?
Kate (19:41) Yeah.
Brittany Ellich (19:45) AI right now from your perspective as an analyst or.
Kate (19:48) Yeah, well, so folks are always interested in the ROI. And that’s something that I don’t think any numbers are going to be effective in quantifying. I mean, we get asked that all the time. But we get asked for executive numbers frequently, where they’ll say, how do you know what the adoption is of this particular thing? And it’s like, well, you’ve got GitHub stars, and you’ve got Stack Overflow. And it’s like, these are just like,
Prox, you know, proximate metrics. These are not actual You know things that are going to to tell you anything You know cut and dry they you know, they’re all they all can be massaged to say to tell whatever story you think is most appropriate so So yes, I I have a bit of an allergy to numbers like that but yes, we do get asked that frequently and
Gosh, mean, you we get asked about features pretty often. I’d say, you know, one was PRs. mean, you everyone’s familiar with the bottlenecks that code review pose. And so I was very interested in following that. I did write up a piece on how AI is trying to revolutionize that particular part of the SDLC. And…
But again, it’s moving so fast that I’m sure it’s completely outdated at this point. It’s, you know, it’s… Right? Yeah. I mean, it’s all just very… Yeah, everything is fluid. Everything is moving. Again, with my podcast, you know, usage, whatever, I listened to an interview with Andrei Karpathy on Dworkish where he was, you know, discussing the fact that the models just aren’t good enough yet to actually do the sort of agentic workloads that folks…
want, or that would really move the needle. And not even in terms of like AGI, but like in terms of like, yeah, replacing jobs or doing these sort of PRs in a way that’s like eliminates a lot of toil and a lot of like cognitive overhead. So, but yeah, so I just don’t think that we’re quite there yet with the technology to actually do much more than what we already know AI is very good at, which is
you know doing summary work and doing text generation and all that stuff which I love I am all for it. I am such, a geek about like letting you know a transcript You know summarizing a large block of text into something quick and readable or like, you know using it to to yeah Well, so on riverside right the the transcript functionality fantastic
Write me a summary anytime. I love it. That is awesome. I’m all for it. So, you know, so I’m a big, I’m a big believer. I’m, you know, but, but in terms of like taking jobs and all the sort of heavy, heavy stuff that we can align it with, am, I’m less, you know, less bullish.
Brittany Ellich (22:20) Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I am also a big fan of the Riverside Tools. I feel like this podcast would probably not exist if it wasn’t so easy now to make a podcast. Because we’re not editors. Yeah. That’s very cool. Yeah, this is very fascinating to hear about because, yes, like I said, we’re more like we are still in the trenches. feel like one of the things that I’ve found is we…
Kate (22:31) Big same, big same. yeah.
Brittany Ellich (22:44) I think in the last year or so, quite a few of us have been looking, the hosts of this podcast have been looking at doing more public speaking and going to conferences and talking about what we’re doing as developers. And I agree that things seem to be moving so fast. I’m nervous to ever submit anything related to AI because you have to submit months in advance. you’re right, everything changes so quickly that could be…
outdated like three times over by the time the conference even shows up, which is very interesting. But of course, everybody wants a lot of AI related content right now.
Kate (23:18) yeah, yes, very hot. I suspect even
with it being three months out of date, it’ll still be relevant, especially if it’s just, you you just update the model, it’ll be fine.
Brittany Ellich (23:28) That’s true. That’s true. Yeah. So I’m curious more about your academic background and, you know, is that something that you’re interested in like pursuing again in the future? Like, are you interested in going further into academics again or as…
Kate (23:44) Yeah. Well, I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to teaching. Just it is a lot of time. I, yeah, again, I just really didn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile. The numbers are not there. I try not to get too too much on a political soapbox here about that whole situation. But in terms of research, yeah, I every once in a while I’ll submit an essay. And actually, this year, I published my dissertation as a book.
So that was a big weight off my shoulders or albatross from around my neck. And I actually am gonna be attending like the big industry conference for my field next week in order to celebrate that book launch. So I don’t know that I’ll write another academic book, but I can see myself writing articles. And then this is like one of the…
So I had created this digital archive about a 19th century author named H. Reiter Haggard, it was hosted on Heroku’s free tier. And then when they sunset that, it went offline, so it was no longer in existence. And somehow the repo got lost. And very frustrating, I know.
So I have been using vibe coding tools to like recode it out using like specs and things. And also it’s in the way back machine. So I’ve been having fun with that. you know, is that an academic thing? I don’t know, kind of. Like I would love to see that relaunched, but historically I’ve had a real hard time getting vibe coding tools to be able to do Ruby on Rails. Like they just cannot get the versions right. It has been, I don’t know, it’s like an exercise in pain.
I’ve got the database, so I was like, well, I gotta have it in Ruby. mean, there’s no other way. Like, it’s got to be a Rails app. So I actually did just get one working recently, so I am pretty stoked about it. Yeah, I know. But it can’t link the images still, so I don’t know, you know? And I’m like, why am I doing this? But so does that count? I don’t know. That’s kind of like academic stuff. I mean, it’s like I keep in touch with those folks. I’ve just I’ve shifted careers.
so many times at this point. got all these friends and different little cubby holes that I try to keep in touch with, but it’s hard. I think my next writing thing is, of course, I write my blog at Redmonk. That’s going on. But I want to write fiction, and so I might… That’ll be my next, I think, big foray into pseudo-academic work, I think. So we’ll see how that goes.
Bethany (26:00) that’s awesome. Very curious on what ideas you have, or even what books you’re reading currently.
Kate (26:07) Yeah, well, it’s historical fiction. So I’ve written 120,000 words of a novel. So we’ll see. And it’s… Yes. Yes. So I’m hoping to get it out to a literary editor by the end of this year. And I decided, though, I needed to rewrite the first chapter. So I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about Leonardo da Vinci. And so right now I’m reading Pascal’s Angel.
Bethany (26:14) What?
Kate (26:28) I I’m pronouncing that right. But yes, I read, I’ve been reading a lot of things about like the Renaissance and either alternate histories that are fun sci-fi that are kind of more aligned with what my actual book is about, but also things to try to get the historical accuracy correct. I was a Victorianist, so me writing about the Italian Renaissance is like, what am I doing? I don’t know.
I did the thing. It was important. So I don’t know. I love pain. This is me. I can’t turn it off. I don’t know. But yes. Pascal’s Angel is the book of the day. I’ve got, I think, 200 pages left.
Bethany (27:01) I you getting a PhD is all we need to know about you loving pain. So ⁓ I dropped out of my first year at PhD. was like, nah, that’s good. I mean, computer science, didn’t choose a focus, but yeah, no, was very much like, I like making money.
Kate (27:06) much pain.
My god, Bethany, what was your PhD gonna be in? What were you studying?
yeah.
Yeah. No, you don’t
make money and that’s not what we do. That’s different. I shouldn’t say that. do. Yeah. One of the most interesting conversations I did through the Moncast was with a gentleman named Scott Stevenson who did his PhD work on particle physics waves, you know? But then he translated that to AI on speech to text. And so like he’s doing like AI stuff. So I was like…
who even knows what you can do with your PhD work? This is, I was like, my god, you know, the dude was working on like, the, you know, particle colliders. And then next thing you know, he’s, he’s, you know, revolutionizing, you know, how, how we’re going to be using AI to do our transcriptions on Riverside. I don’t know what actually, I don’t know what model Riverside uses, but, but there’s ways I don’t, I don’t know that I never found a way. But you know, maybe, maybe you could have, I don’t know. But yes, it’s a
I have lots of thoughts on all of that.
Bethany (28:13) yeah, definitely. mean, it feels like with PhD there’s a lot of skills that can translate. mean, you know, being able to research and have statistical, like knowledge of statistics I think is alone a huge thing for just being effective in any…
any area. So that’s really interesting how people pivot their their specific niche that they’re studying to another area because it is so so niche what you end up getting into. That’s really cool.
Kate (28:40) Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Bethany (28:42) So one thing I am curious about, you mentioned earlier about how Redmonk is trying to enforce that developers do have a lot of purchasing power, especially with front end developers and moving towards that area. But I was curious if you have any tips for how developers can better educate business leaders within their own companies and put more
emphasis on their preferences and opinions for those purchasing decisions.
Kate (29:09) Yeah, I mean, that’s a tough one. I mean, I would just say if you can work at a company where you’re empowered to speak truth to power, then you should just tell business leaders what you think and what you know to be true. I think the most successful companies are the ones who do keep engineering in the fold when it comes to making important business decisions. And yeah, it’s, I don’t know, I would say…
you know, when that alignment happens, it can be transformative. You know, it allows you to reduce project turnaround. And, you know, it allows you to execute business strategies in a better way, right? So, you know, when we think about the long T in terms of like skill sets, you know, being able to have that, you know, the longer horizontal, right, you know, being able to do a lot of things well.
I think companies that can kind of support that sort of learning and being able to speak to folks with a number of different abilities well, you know, will serve them. And so, again, I’m always advocating for engineers to work on their communication skills because many of them think that it’s not as important as having great technical know-how. And of course, it is important. So that’s like the long part of the T, right? But…
being able to go to your manager or folks that are making these business decisions and try to do the sort of cross-skilling and communicating across business functions, They’re going to be able to leverage both of those, right? Both the technical expertise and being able to speak to customers. And so when I’ve spoken with folks who really have studied this and like what makes
startups and enterprise companies successful, you know, they talk about walking that line and a lot of it has to do with finding out what users need and and so if you You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t fulfill a need that users have You’re still not going to succeed At the end of the day, I you know, that’s great. If you’ve got all the features It’s great that if yours is quicker than the competition all that’s awesome
but you need to be able to speak to the business needs as well. So I’d say, you know, just making sure that you’re trying to foster a community within your own organization where that sort of communication is happening is of the utmost importance, but I get that it’s hard.
You know, product and engineering teams have always butted heads, right? This is like a known… This is, you know, this is a stereotype. There’s probably an ex-KCD comic about this. I don’t know. But, you know, having… But they’re both extremely important. And they both need to align. you know, possibly be under the same heading. I mean, that’s, when we think about DevRel and what, you know…
the folks that are within an organization who are supposed to speak to those developer users, having them be underneath the engineering team is a lot of preferred by the dev role folks themselves. making sure that your metrics and your KPIs and all these sort of ways that you’re measuring impact, that those also speak to business needs, absolutely essential.
Like it’s great if you can vibe at a conference. I love vibing too. That’s my happy place. But I get it. You can’t just do that. You have to actually do a thing with that sort of connection that you’re making. That doesn’t make the connection any less important. But yeah, I think it all kind of comes to the same sort of question of like, do you, within the software industry, how are we merging?
this great technical ability that is whatever company you work at, right? Or AI, right? If we’re thinking at a high level, right? How are we going to actually make this work for everybody and be responsible with it and to make sure that it’s going to be a force for good, right? All of these are questions that I think are extremely important for us to be having across a wide swath.
And yeah, a lot of times engineers are sort of like the last line of like knowing what is a responsible use of that sort of power that we have. yeah, so having them be able to communicate with the business folks is like a, you know, it’s absolutely essential. It might be uncomfortable, but you know, do it and work for companies that foster that. Yeah.
Bethany (33:06) Awesome. Well, that definitely makes a lot of sense. honestly, communication really is such a such a superpower in the engineering space. And advocating for those skills is really important. So really, really love hearing your perspective there. All right, I think we’re coming up at time, but we always do a fun segment. And this week, I mean, you had so
Much as we’ve talked about in this podcast in your background, that is really fun that I guess we’ll talk a little more about, but really curious. What is Victorians in cyberspace?
Kate (33:45) yes. Okay, so you’ve been creeping on my my personal website, which is vibe-coded by the way. Yeah, well I taught a lot of classes over the years. So that was a course that I taught in 2017 at Georgia Tech. And it was, you know, it kind of pulls from the normal like discourse from a lot of Victorians about like how
the humanities are intersecting with computers, right? And so we can, you know, there’s a lot of like monographs about how like Dickens, you know, was thinking ahead to networking. And, you know, Babbage, Ada Lovelace, you know, obviously, the Victorians have a lot of great, great stories to pull from in the history of computing, right? So so that’s an easy win. But in terms of like what we did in that class, like we we did a lot of multimodal projects.
with and it was a freshman course. So it was was the sort of like introductory communication course and we read comic books like Hatter which is a version of Alice in Wonderland. We read the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which is a lot of fun maybe you’ve seen the movie but it’s about adventure fiction and so like my own dissertation work
touched on adventure fiction quite a bit. I’m very interested in the rise of like the Indiana Jones sort of character, which H. Ryder Haggard sort of pioneered with his Alan Quartermaine. And yeah, and so we also read A String of Pearls, which was the Sweeney Todd basis. And what’s great about that one is it was serialized over a long period of time.
and it’s been digitized by one of my colleagues. And of course it’s just like a fun sort of campy, murdery, horror, whatever melodramatic story. And yeah, so we just read a lot of fun Victorian and neo-Victorian books and talked about steampunk, talked about…
Why is it that we’re still making versions of Alice in Wonderland? What’s so cool about that story and why can’t we get over it? And making projects that built on that and allowed us to ask questions about how the Victorians today are extremely prescient and guess relevant in ways that maybe they didn’t anticipate and how we’re still kind of living in the Victorian era. This is…
We’re in the fourth industrial revolution according to some thought leaders. Let’s talk about why is it a revolution? What does all that mean? What are we doing with our cogs and our clockwork implements? So yeah, anyways, it was a fun one though. It was a good class. yeah, there’s parts of me that miss teaching. I’ll say that much. That was a good time.
Bethany (36:24) I mean, I want to take that class now. ⁓ Awesome. And next, I understand you did start a Python learning group to make coding or learning how to code more fun. Are there any groups that you wish existed right now to make things more fun?
Kate (36:26) Thank you.
So here’s the thing, there are probably groups for anything that I would be interested in and I just feel like I don’t have the bandwidth to join them. So I would say if somehow I was able to replicate myself or have infinite time or whatever, Groundhog Day, do everything that I wanna do, I would probably, well, God, yeah, mean, where do we even begin? But maybe a vibe coding group would be fun. Because as I do it, I have all these questions and I’m sure I’m doing things wrong and I’m sure I’m not like,
pushing the affordances of the medium. And so, you know, my approach to that is I keep trying to like build the same app with different IDEs in different ways and different prompts. And like sometimes I use a spec, sometimes I say, can you clone this? you do that? You know, and sometimes it works and I don’t know if it’s because of the IDE I’m using or if it’s because I prompted it better or if it’s because the model’s better. And I have no idea. And a lot of it’s a black box. And frankly,
The fact that I am permitted to kick the tires and I have no token problems is I’m spoiled rotten. Because I’ll tell you what, when I do pay for them, which I do, I use same.new. That’s what I used for my personal website to begin with. I’ve since used many other things. I used up those tokens in the first prompt. were gone. bolt.new, all of these. Or bolt. Yeah, wait, bolt. Yeah.
V0, all of these, lovable. I am a token hoarder. Like, I just, I use them up and then I’m done. I don’t know. It’s tough. So, I don’t know if I would probably be, you know, I would have too much fun in a vibe coding group and, you know, trying to make my, I know, I think the…
the range of like the simple apps like like a medicine reminder or like a Tetris make me Tetris right like it knows how to do that right away because there’s a million of them right but it’s like the thing that I’ve always tried to do with Ruby on Rails is like too hard so I’m like I’m sure someone out there has like found the sweet spot of like here’s right in the middle of like what is an appropriate sized vibe coded app I don’t know I’ve yet to figure that out so yes having a
know, the way I describe this, it sounds more like a support group than a learning group, I’m realizing. And maybe that’s actually what I need. So okay, yes, I’ll, yeah, vibe coding group. That’s what I want.
Bethany (38:50) I love that. We definitely need vibe coding support groups today. ⁓ I’m envisioning almost like going to a coffee shop with a bunch of people and aiming to vibe code a thing at the end of it and then just sharing tips and tricks the entire time. That would be so fun. I would go and I’m an introvert, so.
Kate (38:54) Yeah.
Yeah. Yes.
I love it. Yeah, that’s a great idea.
Bethany (39:09) Awesome. Brittany, are there any groups you wish existed?
Brittany Ellich (39:13) I feel like one that I would really appreciate is I feel like I have connected with a lot of women in tech over especially more and more now that I’m going to all of these different conferences. And I wish that there was a group for that that wasn’t so, I don’t know, like commercial. I feel like a lot of the women who code type groups are like, oh, and join our thing and like come to our conference and stuff like that. felt, and it’s hard to, I don’t know, I don’t know how to put a finger on it. I read an article recently about like,
why women in tech isn’t working or something like that. And I wish that there was a group that actually, I don’t know, was better. I’ll leave it at that. I have thoughts. I’ll write a blog post on it. Yes, maybe, and maybe there’s one that exists out there that already is better, so yeah.
Kate (39:45) Hmm.
All right. Maybe someone will listen to this and give you some advice.
Bethany (40:00) That is too real, but awesome. Well, that is our time this week. Thank you so much for joining us, Kate. Really cool conversations. Where can people find you?
Kate (40:10) Yes, all the normal channels, I’d say. I’m on the blue skies. I dip into X every once in a while, though not there as much as I used to be. But I would say in terms of where I post a lot of our content would be LinkedIn. So definitely find me on LinkedIn. And yeah, and then if you’re a podcast buff.
We at Redmonk have the MonkCast where we have a lot of exciting conversations with folks who are, you know, either developers or tech leaders or folks in the dev role community or I do a lot of news ones, you know, so that’s, you know, if there’s something interesting in the news, I’ll try to reach out to like someone who like wrote the blog post breaking it or whatever. you know, so those are fun too. But yeah, I say the MonkCast. You can definitely hear my musings there.
Bethany (40:57) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is that you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Skies as well and share with your friends. Until next week, bye.