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Rock the Code
21 Episodes
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Victor Rentea is a software engineer and architect, and an instructor. He's trained thousands of people in person at 150+ companies around the world. He's the highest-energy trainer and speaker I've come across.
You can find Victor's workshops at https://victorrentea.ro
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0:00 Intro
1:03 What Victor's training still teaches after AI
4:57 AI as a promotion: architect, product, or QA ninja
9:35 LGTM fatigue and multi-LLM code review
16:06 Victor's agentic setup: mouse-driven, voice-dictated
18:27 Software craftsmanship in the agentic era
22:25 Victor's training style and high energy
27:05 Handling contradictions in the room
31:47 Memorable trainings and the 80-senior room
36:12 How to start as a trainer/consultant
44:29 Juniors and skill erosion in the AI era
50:24 Over-engineering, hexagonal architecture, and AI
55:00 Tests, Gherkin, and acceptance-driven development
1:01:24 How Victor learns: newsletters and bright people
1:03:21 The JPoint failure that made Victor a better speaker
1:05:53 Advice for mid-senior devs riding the AI wave
Stephan Janssen is the founder of Devoxx, the largest chain of developer conferences in the world.
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0:00 Intro
1:13 Vibe coding the Devoxx Companion app
5:30 Spec-driven development and the client-side validation bug
9:00 Token economics: spending €500 in one hour
15:00 Selfware and local models on Mac Studio
17:15 AI trends at Devoxx: MCP, agentic engineering, vibe coding's death
23:00 DHH's 180° and the developer renaissance
31:00 AI alignment and the Hugging Face agent incident
39:48 Skills still worth having as a senior engineer
44:28 What makes an amazing conference talk
49:17 Memorable Devoxx moments: hoverboards and proposals
55:20 Landing great speakers: bribing Joshua Bloch with Belgian beer
1:00:56 The future of Devoxx and DevRel in the age of AI agents
1:03:01 Robotics, local models, and what to learn next
Trisha Gee is a software engineer with more than 20 yeras of experience, a Java Champion and author of several books on Java and developer productivity. She is a frequent conference and keynote speaker and has held many roles around developer advocacy, training, consulting, and now managing an open-source project (the Aeron messaging protocol).
You can find Trisha's work at https://trishagee.com/
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0:00 Intro
0:54 The Rise and Fall of Stack Overflow
5:05 Shortcuts vs. Fundamentals: Where to Draw the Line
15:03 What Actually Hasn't Changed in Software Engineering
21:04 Misusing the Word 'Refactor'
25:46 The Future of IDEs in an Agentic World
32:12 Teaching Developers to Read Code
37:58 Burnout: The 100% Capacity Problem
37:59 AI and the Joy of Coding
45:59 The Disappearing Junior Developer Pipeline
51:55 Pair Programming at LMAX: 6 Months vs. 10 Years
1:00:20 What Developer Advocacy Looks Like Now
1:07:18 Staying Relevant Without Panicking
1:18:09 Rebuilding a Website with Claude
1:24:04 Skill Atrophy and Using AI Without Losing Your Edge
1:31:19 Blogs and Resources Worth Reading
1:37:24 Are We Close to AI Best Practices?
1:40:03 Aeron, Determinism, and Agent Control Planes
Daniel Spiewak is known for spearheading Cats Effect, one of the major effect systems in the Scala ecosystem, and for leading Typelevel, a mini-ecosystem of libraries and tools for functional programming in Scala. He's held various senior engineering roles and is currently working for NVidia as a distinguished engineer.
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0:00 Intro
1:00 Cats Effect 3.7 and Scala Native multithreading
6:30 Building async I/O from scratch on LLVM
9:30 The integrated runtime: replacing Java NIO on the JVM
13:30 Scala Native vs Rust: who wins?
17:00 Popularizing Scala Native with minimal resources
20:24 Scala in the agentic coding era
28:00 Where Scala's tooling falls short for AI agents
33:30 Resource lifecycle bugs: capture checking as the fix
37:38 Daniel's work at NVIDIA on autonomous vehicles
43:00 The Distinguished Engineer role explained
49:19 Becoming a Distinguished Engineer fast
54:18 Holding abstractions and bare metal simultaneously
1:03:00 Lessons from open source on people and patience
1:13:19 Starting a foundational OSS project: the steam engine analogy
1:20:00 The open frontier: DevOps and deployment orchestration in Scala
1:33:00 Unison's insight and what Scala should borrow
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an engineer, a professor at University of Houston, an author of more than 10 programming books, and a prolific speaker at technical conferences. He's trained tens of thousands of software engineers all across the world, consulted dozens of companies, and he's recognized as a Java Champion since 2013.
You can find Venkat's work at https://agiledeveloper.com/
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0:00 Intro
1:07 AI as an amplifier: smart gets smarter
3:02 Why automated testing matters more with AI
7:38 The cost of failure and engineering discipline
12:50 Skin in the game: software's accountability gap
18:02 LLM-driven speed vs. engineering rigor
20:04 Local vs. global optimization in software orgs
26:21 LLMs vs. compilers: the cognitive decline fear
37:27 Gang of Four and SOLID: still relevant?
43:15 Design patterns as language deficiencies
46:32 Java's evolution: lambdas, value types, and the 6-month release cycle
55:02 invokeDynamic: the invisible JVM feature that changed everything
59:48 TypeScript, Elm, and the case for immutability
1:08:11 "There's got to be a better way"
1:19:10 TDD in practice: pair programming over training
1:26:41 Working for impact, not income
1:31:07 Venkat's approach to conference talks and live coding
1:38:01 The Kyiv keynote disaster
1:41:38 The art of elegant code
1:42:50 Immutability: human reasoning vs. system performance
1:47:51 "Help and seek help"








