Published Work · Videos
A Devoxx talk on Test-Driven Navigation, the Coding Interviews with Alex series, and the long-running Software Breakthroughs for the 21st Century collection — working engineers taking live problems in front of a camera, guest conversations, and AI roundtables, with the thinking done in real time rather than described after the fact. Roughly 73 hours in total.
This is the complete catalogue of everything recorded. A few of these also appear under Training Material, selected there for what they teach.
Recorded on the main circuit, in front of a room.
October 10, 2025 · Devoxx · 67 min
AI promised to take refactoring off our hands and instead delivers sweeping, uncontrolled changes. Test-Driven Navigation is the workflow that tames it: failing tests act as hyper-specific instructions that force the assistant into safe, incremental steps. Combines XP's three C's with Permaculture by Succession, includes a live-coded red-green-refactor cycle with an AI partner, and reframes code review — writing the next test is the review. The closing argument is that the developer's role is not obsolete but elevated: mechanic to race engineer, coder to architect.
A pretend technical interview with a real engineer, run as a working session rather than a quiz. Guests include Robert C. Martin, Esko Luontola, Maxi Contieri, Gregor Riegler, Daniel Markham, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Simon Revill, and Philip Wong. Multi-part sets are listed in viewing order.
November 25, 2024 · 57 min
A faux coding interview with Simon Revill taking the challenge and Robert C. Martin supplying live commentary, staged to show how seasoned front-end developers actually approach a problem. Uncle Bob's advice centres on bringing unit tests and microtests to front-end work and letting TDD guide the design; Simon's ability to pivot mid-problem is the other half of the lesson.
June 11, 2022 · 88 min
The longest session in the set, and a direct demonstration of how to solve a problem by supplying a series of concrete examples as tests, then generalizing from those examples to reach the right structure at the right level of abstraction. Maxi Contieri joins to add his own TDD expertise.
June 5, 2022 · 59 min
Esko Luontola works the challenge in Clojure — full TDD, functional throughout, with a REPL in the loop — while Daniel Markham questions and pushes from the side. Ends with an extended exercise in TCR, test and commit or revert.
May 19, 2022 · 38 min
Gregor Riegler — software development coach and, by Alex's description, a merciless refactorer — takes on the hairy problems that surface whenever you try to model a real-world situation in code.
May 19, 2022 · 42 min
Picking up where Part 1 left off, Gregor works through the thornier details of building the system under test-driven development.
May 2, 2022 · 50 min
The session that opened the series. Philip Wong, an experienced engineer and manager, walks through how he approaches implementing brand-new functionality from a standing start.
May 3, 2022 · 74 min
Philip grows the solution step by step: breaking the work into small pieces, keeping the code running at all times, and moving from primitive-obsession code toward real business abstractions. The stated criterion for optimal design — easy to read, easy to reason about, risk-free to modify.
The seven coding interviews are collected in the Coding Interviews with Alex playlist on YouTube.
A running series begun in January 2021 around one question: why has software engineering stayed stuck while every other branch of engineering kept making breakthroughs? Sixty-five hours of guest conversations, roundtables, and Guild working sessions. Grouped below; newest first within each group.
The 2026 run: recurring roundtables on what AI is doing to the profession, and the working meetings of the AI Craftspeople Guild that grew out of them. Full sessions, unedited.
August 5, 2026 · 6 min
The Guild's first real mob programming session. Technical glitches meant only part of it was captured, so this is the surviving fragment.
July 21, 2026 · 53 min
The Guild's retrospective for July 2026 — what the group had learned so far and what to change going forward.
July 17, 2026 · 51 min
The core team works on the ACG Rubric, a Guild framework offering a scaffold for assessing the practices individuals and teams use when employing agentic AI to build software.
June 30, 2026 · 57 min
The first ACG core team working session, recorded in full.
April 23, 2026 · 1h 55m
Nearly two hours of the Guild's first online mob programming session.
April 16, 2026 · 1h 53m
Guild weekly meeting number six, recorded end to end.
April 14, 2026 · 2h 32m
The longest session in the set at two and a half hours — Guild weekly meeting number five.
April 14, 2026 · 2h 02m
The eleventh roundtable, running just over two hours.
April 3, 2026 · 2h 23m
An in-depth discussion of the merits and demerits of engaging with and using AI.
April 2, 2026 · 1h 59m
Guild weekly meeting number four, covering a wide range of member-raised topics.
March 29, 2026 · 1h 51m
A review of the Guild's collaboration assets and the idea of shared AI rituals to make collective work more reliable and demonstrable — white papers, an AI rituals repository, a mission statement built on technical excellence and human advocacy, plus a Hall of Fame and code of conduct.
March 26, 2026 · 1h 57m
Opens with introductions tying members' artistic and musical backgrounds to the Guild's purpose, then turns to strategy: a drafted mission statement centred on building AI that serves individuals, protects agency and dignity, and resists centralized extraction.
March 20, 2026 · 1h 40m
Built around Joshua Kerievsky's line that AI must become our partner in production, not just in development.
March 19, 2026 · 1h 57m
Reviews progress on the Guild — charter, code of conduct, member profiles, a Hall of Fame and Shame, eleven white papers — then debates membership standards and reputation: open entry versus vetting, and what removal should look like.
March 17, 2026 · 1h 02m
Continuing what Alex calls the pilgrimage toward safely adopting AI in the software profession.
March 6, 2026 · 2h 16m
Framed on Brecht's line that the chief aim of science is not to open a door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error. Time is a non-issue for machines, so they behave as though the supply of it were unlimited — and the errors scale accordingly.
February 28, 2026 · 2h 39m
How teams should actually use LLMs, with the emphasis on verification, maintainability, and effects on human behaviour. Covers research showing fluent model output reinforces confirmation bias, and argues for codified mechanical guardrails — TDD, mutation testing — over informal prompting.
February 13, 2026 · 2h 09m
Panelists examine how AI agents and LLMs should serve people rather than unilaterally serving corporate interests, reassessing software's historical promises and diagnosing the risks of surveillance capitalism and techno-feudalism.
February 6, 2026 · 1h 31m
The session with the heaviest guest list — Grady Booch, Kent Beck, Woody Zuill, Tim Ottinger and others — on what AI is bringing to the table in the years immediately ahead.
January 30, 2026 · 59 min
The one that started the series: a think tank convened to work out what 2026 would bring for AI-assisted software development.
Short excerpts lifted from the January 2026 roundtables — one point each, from the people who made it.
January 31, 2026 · 1 min
One minute on a distinction that keeps getting lost: copying material from the training corpus would be regurgitative AI. Generative means producing new patterns from the patterns it learned.
January 31, 2026 · 3 min
Woody Zuill on how to use AI prudently when building and delivering solutions.
January 31, 2026 · 5 min
Matt Burch on the hands-on reality of orchestrating the work of multiple AI agents.
January 30, 2026 · 2 min
Bryan Finster on the fear, bullying, and ganging up aimed at software professionals who use AI to improve their craft — the profession's adoption curve stuck at the angry phase.
January 30, 2026 · 2 min
Fabian Wesner's blunt message to developers hoping AI is not a threat to their jobs.
One guest, one hour, one problem worth chewing on. Recorded between 2021 and 2025 with practitioners whose work changed how Alex thinks about delivery.
August 29, 2025 · 1h 04m
Michele Sollecito on the current state of software development and delivery, and where he expects it to go next.
August 21, 2025 · 1h 04m
Bryan Finster on avoiding the trap of focusing on technology at the expense of business value — how teams set themselves up to fail before they write a line of code.
August 14, 2025 · 1h 00m
Paul Hammond on building on a foundation of technical excellence while making sure the result is genuinely fit for purpose.
October 12, 2023 · 56 min
Clarke Ching on The Bottleneck Rules — where constraints actually sit in a delivery system, and what happens when you optimize everywhere except the one place that matters.
August 3, 2023 · 1h 38m
Carson Gross on his book Hypermedia Systems — the longest of the guest conversations, and the fuller argument behind HTMX.
February 24, 2023 · 1h 05m
Eric Wright on the future of software development and delivery, and where the velocity actually comes from.
December 30, 2022 · 1h 20m
Recorded days after ChatGPT landed. Maxi Contieri, fresh from experimenting with OpenAI and Copilot, argues the profession is standing on the threshold of a major breakthrough.
February 10, 2022 · 1h 01m
Michaël Azerhad, whom Alex dubs Monseigneur TDD, on the nuances of a practice Alex had already been doing for fifteen years and still found new corners in.
January 9, 2022 · 1h 59m
A free-form, two-hour brainstorm with Anton Teterine on where the breakthroughs might come from.
January 4, 2022 · 40 min
Woody Zuill on humanizing the workplace and what genuinely fulfilling collaboration requires.
January 3, 2022 · 1h 23m
Woody Zuill, creator of mob programming — which Alex calls the most significant breakthrough in the profession this century — on spreading the practice.
October 19, 2021 · 1h 03m
Philippe Bourgau on getting better at creating good software, and on building work environments people actually want to be in.
October 13, 2021 · 1h 09m
Austin Chadwick of the Mob Mentality Show on his extensive mob programming experience.
September 27, 2021 · 59 min
A second round with Dragan Stepanović on the roadblocks standing between the industry and the quality it keeps promising.
September 21, 2021 · 1h 01m
Stephan Schmidt on Radical Simplicity: stop slaving over complex machinery and build deep domain solutions instead of generating waste in the form of glue code.
August 6, 2021 · 1h 08m
Dragan Stepanović on the value of continuous code review, and what stops the software creation process delivering on its promise.
May 24, 2021 · 1h 02m
The first HTMX conversation, recorded when Alex had just realized what the technology could do. Carson Gross explains the breakthrough.
February 22, 2021 · 1h 07m
Brian LeRoux on a wide-ranging set of unorthodox takes on software engineering.
January 29, 2021 · 57 min
Josue on user experience degenerating into user exploitation, and what can be done to stop it.
January 28, 2021 · 1h 01m
Paul Biggar on Dark, the platform that let developers change code in the same environment where it runs — the system that later prompted Alex's Draft Flag Driven Development.
January 22, 2021 · 1h 01m
Kerri Miller on the path from Amazon to GitLab, how managing theatre events translates into running back-end services, and why the future is not single-core.
January 21, 2021 · 1h 11m
Jov on improving the conditions of the profession, and on keeping hold of the big picture.
January 15, 2021 · 1h 05m
Alejandro Piad — professor at the University of Havana, finishing a PhD in AI — on the future of AI, software ethics, and how ineffectual the current teaching curriculum is.
January 13, 2021 · 1h 18m
Mario Cervera, PhD computer scientist, on why technical excellence is indistinguishable from quality delivery.
January 12, 2021 · 1h 08m
Jan Giacomelli on moving from electrical engineering into Python and machine learning services, and on the link between quality and deployment frequency.
January 9, 2021 · 1h 06m
An hour with Deni that goes further into software philosophy than these conversations usually do, informed by his background in civil engineering.
January 7, 2021 · 1h 01m
The first episode. Markus Schirp — as authoritative on mutation testing as anyone — on what surviving mutants tell you that a green suite cannot.
Solo pieces and the openers that set the series going.
February 16, 2021 · 21 min
Is there anything after TDD? An introduction to Kent Beck's Test and Commit or Revert — the high-octane version of the discipline, where a failing test throws away the work rather than pausing it.
January 27, 2021 · 38 min
The inaugural chat: a first attempt at discussing the new manifesto the series was built around.
January 16, 2021 · 3 min
Three minutes stating the premise of the whole series: why has software engineering been stuck in a rut for fifty years while every other branch of science and engineering kept making breakthroughs?
January 14, 2021 · 4 min
Software is easily mass produced, but building it well takes a different mental model than the industrial-age assembly line most engineers are still emulating. The argument for abandoning that mindset and returning to craft.
All fifty-six are collected in the Software Breakthroughs for the 21st Century playlist on YouTube.
The writing is the cheapest way to pressure-test how I think before putting anything on a calendar.
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