Tech League

#18 EuroStack

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into EuroStack, an industry-led lobby initiative pushing for European digital sovereignty. Krisztian breaks down what EuroStack is, what it proposes, and why it matters now. They cover the scale of Europe's dependency on non-European tech (260 billion euros per year flowing out), what it actually means to be a "European" company, how public procurement could bootstrap a European tech ecosystem, and why trust in US hyperscalers has finally broken. They also explore the companion site euro-stach.com, a directory of 1620+ European alternatives across 64 categories.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:30 What is EuroStack and why Krisztian is excited about it

4:00 The scale of the problem: 260 billion euros/year leaving Europe

7:00 Europe as a fragmented market vs the US and China

10:00 The three pillars: Buy European, Sell European, Fund European

13:00 How public procurement can generate demand and bootstrap growth

17:00 The 1-to-10 ratio: every public euro attracting 10 private

20:00 Risk of government focus pulling cloud providers away from innovation

24:00 Startup acquisition culture: why European exits go to US companies

28:00 Defining "European": jurisdiction, control, supply chain, no extra-EU restrictions

33:00 AWS sovereign cloud: smoke and mirrors

37:00 Timeline to 2030 and the gradual transition approach

40:00 Geopolitical risk: Ukraine, Starlink, and the dependency reality

44:00 European openness vs American/Chinese protectionism

48:00 Why trust in US tech has finally broken

52:00 Opportunities for European engineers and companies

55:00 Wrap-up

Technologies and Initiatives Mentioned
EuroStack initiative: https://eurostack.eu/

Solution directory: https://euro-stack.com

Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com

OVH Cloud - https://www.ovhcloud.com

#17 Testing in the AI era

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian welcome their first proper guest: Alan Richardson, a 30-year software veteran and testing specialist known as Evil Tester. They dig into testing in the AI era: how to test AI-generated code, whether TDD still makes sense with AI, why self-healing tests are a red flag, and how AI is opening up security and adversarial testing. Alan makes the case for architecture-first development as the key to getting good test output from AI agents.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction and guest intro: Alan Richardson (eviltester.com)

2:00 Why testing matters more in the AI code generation era

5:30 Architecture-first: good code leads to good tests

10:00 Does TDD work with AI? Why it mostly doesn't

14:30 Playwright and UI tests: the abstraction problem

23:00 Information theory and what testing actually is

27:00 Adversarial AI testing: using AI to exploit your own CVEs

33:00 Security scanning tools vs penetration testing with AI

38:30 Domain expertise still matters

43:00 Generalist vs specialist in the AI era

47:00 The junior developer pipeline problem

51:00 Will AI homogenise software and design?

54:00 Wrap-up

Links:

Evil Tester https://eviltester.com

Playwright: https://playwright.dev/

Agentic EQ: https://agentic-qe.dev/

Vite: https://vite.dev/

Claude : https://claude.com/

Snyk: https://snyk.io/

Aikido: https://www.aikido.dev

Hacker One: https://www.hackerone.com/

Wiz: https://www.wiz.io/

#16 Bunny CDN

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian continue their EU cloud deep dive with a hands-on look at Bunny CDN (bunny.net). Toby used it to launch the new TechLeague podcast website on a static Astro site in under 10 minutes, with Terraform infrastructure, built-in DNS, automatic SSL, and GitHub Actions deployment. They cover the full product offering including CDN, object storage, video streaming with free transcoding, edge scripts, magic containers, and BunnyShield security. They also touch on Tangled.sh, a Helsinki-based distributed git platform built on the AT Protocol that recently raised 3 million euros.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:21 Building the TechLeague website with Astro and Bunny CDN

2:57 Built-in DNS and automatic SSL

4:46 Deploying static files: FTP now, S3 compatibility coming

5:28 Sign-up experience and free credits

6:00 Standard vs Volume network tiers

7:00 Company background: Slovenian, EU-based, 120+ PoPs globally

8:28 Full product overview: storage, stream, DNS, edge, containers

10:18 Video streaming with free transcoding

11:00 Pricing: $0.01/GB storage, $0.01/GB egress

12:27 Limitations: not a full cloud provider

14:30 Magic containers: serverless with anycast IP

17:00 BunnyShield: WAF, DDoS protection, rate limiting

18:49 BunnyOptimizer: on-the-fly image resizing via URL params

19:46 SLA and EU sovereignty

22:00 Can it replace CloudFront?

23:00 getdeploying.com for comparing CDN providers

24:00 Could we host podcast videos on Bunny?

26:50 Reflection: EU cloud is better than we thought

28:05 Tangled.sh: a distributed EU git platform on the AT Protocol

31:14 Wrap-up

Technologies Mentioned

Bunny CDN - https://bunny.net?ref=v8cfwfmh3r

Astro - https://astro.build

Terraform - https://www.terraform.io

Tangled.sh - https://tangled.sh

getdeploying.com - https://getdeploying.com

Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com

AT Protocol - https://atproto.com

#15 Agentic Engineering

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian share their hands-on experiment building a real group management app using Claude Code and agentic engineering. Toby spent roughly a month's worth of hours prompting Claude to build a cross-platform mobile and web app with Expo, a Node/Express API, Postgres on Scaleway, Hanko authentication and Terraform infrastructure — all without looking at the code. They discuss what worked surprisingly well, what fell apart, the token costs, how agentic engineering compares to managing juniors, and what they would do differently next time.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction: the experiment

1:15 Why Expo for cross-platform mobile and web

2:54 The architect document approach

5:50 How the initial prompt and brainstorming worked

7:45 Not looking at the code

9:05 Context7: giving Claude access to latest API docs

10:35 First pass results

12:46 API and database quality: better than expected

14:40 UI issues: the weak spot

17:20 The bug list testing session

24:23 How sub-agents and parallel work played out

26:07 The Claude usage limit dark pattern

28:15 What it cost: 247 euros for roughly 100 hours of work

31:30 Code quality and lessons from the spec

38:48 The testing problem: agents writing tests for their own code

45:20 The 80/20 rule: great at the fun stuff, weak on the boring

50:30 SaaS disruption: custom software at commodity prices

57:25 How to build LLM memory and learning loops

1:00:25 Summary and what we would do differently

Technologies Mentioned

Claude Code - https://claude.ai/code

Expo - https://expo.dev

Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com

Hanko - https://hanko.io

Terraform - https://www.terraform.io

Playwright - https://playwright.dev

Context7 - https://context7.com

Node.js - https://nodejs.org

PostgreSQL - https://www.postgresql.org

#14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian kick off an ongoing series exploring the EU cloud and software stack. Following a previous episode on EU digital sovereignty, they have set themselves a challenge: build their side projects entirely on EU-based services. This episode covers hands-on experience with Forgejo for source code management, Scaleway as a cloud provider, and Hanko for authentication. They share honest feedback on what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are compared to the big American hyperscalers.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction and the EU sovereignty challenge

1:48 Finding EU alternatives: european-alternatives.eu

3:47 Looking for a GitHub replacement

5:50 Forgejo: the open-source Gitea fork

8:27 What works in Forgejo and what doesn't

10:46 Hosting Forgejo on Scaleway

13:48 The gap between self-hosting and a managed service

15:18 Scaleway overview: regions, services and Terraform support

20:35 Scaleway serverless functions and containers

25:02 Service-to-service authentication

28:34 Deploying Forgejo, databases and runners on Scaleway

36:04 Logging, metrics and Cockpit observability

40:27 Scaleway regions: Amsterdam, Paris, Warsaw

42:25 IAM limitations and enterprise considerations

44:14 Hanko: EU-native user authentication

48:32 Comparing EU stack total cost vs AWS plus Datadog

50:05 What's next: OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak

Technologies Mentioned

- EU alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu

- Codeberg: https://codeberg.org

- Forgejo: https://forgejo.org

- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/

- OVHcloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/

- UpCloud: https://upcloud.com

- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com

- Elastx: https://elastx.se/en

- Hanko: https://www.hanko.io

#13 OpenClaw

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby is joined by Xavier (Zavi) for a relaxed conversation about OpenClaw, an open-source project that lets you build a personalised, memory-aware AI assistant running on your own hardware. They share hands-on experiences setting it up with Telegram, Claude and local models, and discuss what makes it feel different from a standard chat interface: persistent memory in markdown files, heartbeat schedules, proactive check-ins, and a soul file that shapes personality over time. The conversation also covers security, prompt injection risks, the skill ecosystem, local model options, and the cultural questions around long-running AI companions.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:33 What is OpenClaw?

1:40 Why does it feel different from a standard AI chat?

3:51 Setting it up: first impressions

4:45 Practical use cases: standups, workshop manuals, tractor parts

7:04 How the heartbeat and memory systems work

9:15 Cron jobs, proactive tasks and the soul file

12:06 The internals: TypeScript, service daemon, CLI and web UI

14:23 Security model: token auth, Tailscale, least-privilege access

17:42 Prompt injection risks

21:30 The skill ecosystem and supply chain risks

28:25 Local model support and failover between providers

32:55 Running local models: gaming laptops, Apple Silicon, VRAM

38:35 Different bot instances developing different personalities

41:45 Long-running AI companions and what they mean for society

44:55 Manipulation risk and the corporate AI companion future

48:15 Practical advice: what to give it access to, and what not to

Technologies Mentioned

OpenClaw - https://openclaw.dev

Claude (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com

Telegram - https://telegram.org

Ollama - https://ollama.ai

Tailscale - https://tailscale.com

#12 DevOps and SecOps

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a deep look at DevOps and SecOps: where the ideas came from, what they were supposed to mean, how they got warped by the industry, and what good looks like in practice. They cover the waterfall origins of ops as a separate team, the shift-left movement, the build-it-you-run-it principle, why DevOps as a job title makes no sense, platform engineering, and how security is going through the same transformation. They also cover common anti-patterns, DORA metrics, how to get buy-in for a transformation, and what it looks like when it works at scale.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:28 What DevOps was actually supposed to mean

1:57 The waterfall origins: why ops and dev were separate

5:45 Full stack and the rise of the developer-operator

8:40 Why the old model produced poor software quality

11:04 The move to agile and SaaS changed everything

14:15 DevOps as a term: what went wrong

16:08 Platform engineering: the natural next step

21:00 Breaking down the dev vs ops cultural divide

25:47 Real-world example: 10x performance improvement through shared ownership

30:29 Security is going through the same transformation

32:49 Shifting security left: from IDE to CI/CD pipeline

37:02 Reachability scanning and avoiding false positives

40:25 The strangler pattern for security posture improvement

43:34 SecOps as enablers, not gatekeepers

45:34 Common DevOps anti-patterns

53:48 Four-eyes principle done right vs done as Jira ping-pong

1:00:00 DORA metrics: how to measure if your DevOps is working

1:05:39 Management buy-in: why it matters and why it's hard

1:11:43 Real transformation stories

1:20:00 Internal platforms and giving teams real autonomy

Technologies Mentioned

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

AWS - https://aws.amazon.com

Grafana Cloud - https://grafana.com/products/cloud

Checkov - https://www.checkov.io

GitHub Actions - https://github.com/features/actions

#11 How to build great engineering organizations

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into how to structure and scale engineering organisations effectively. Drawing on years of consulting experience, they cover autonomous teams, domain-driven ownership, reducing cross-team handovers, internal platform teams, Conway's Law, the dangers of gatekeeping in ops and security, why self-service tooling is non-negotiable, and what it looks like when organisations are run like a portfolio of internal startups. A practical guide for engineering leaders and anyone building out an eng org.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:43 When does an organisation become the bottleneck?

3:39 Starting with the problem space: divide and conquer

6:22 Autonomous teams and moving away from top-down command

8:03 How to detect misalignment: count the handovers

9:15 Conway's Law: use it intentionally

12:27 Single ownership and full accountability per domain

14:32 Internal service teams: when to spin one up

17:09 Each department as its own startup

19:57 Hero syndrome and knowing what not to build in-house

25:13 Self-service tooling: make it so good they choose it

28:33 KPIs, review cadences and cost visibility

36:24 Common anti-patterns: top-down command, founders who don't let go

41:42 Internal tooling teams as natural monopolies

45:26 The operations and security gatekeeper trap

48:20 Shifting from gatekeeper to enabler

53:02 Why developers must own production

57:34 How to set cross-divisional standards

1:07:09 Good internal platforms embed standards in golden paths

1:14:29 Entrepreneurial mindset within organisations

1:18:45 Summary and closing thoughts

Technologies Mentioned

AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks

Apache Airflow - https://airflow.apache.org

Terraform - https://www.terraform.io

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

#10 EU Digital Sovereignty

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into EU digital sovereignty: why it matters now more than ever, the legal landscape around the EU Data Act and the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, and the very real risk of European economies being dependent on US-controlled cloud infrastructure. They cover the contradictions between US and EU data law, the limitations of US hyperscalers setting up European entities, the current state of European cloud providers, the opportunity for EU tech to leapfrog incumbents, and what engineers can do right now to contribute to a more sovereign European digital stack.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:49 The cloud landscape: why it's all American

2:35 The conflict between US Cloud Act and EU GDPR

5:09 How the EU has responded: the Data Act explained

9:31 What the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework actually measures

21:02 Are US hyperscaler EU entities really sovereign?

27:01 The current state of European cloud providers

30:06 The leapfrog opportunity: skipping legacy infrastructure

33:03 The geopolitical shift: trust in the US has broken

40:30 Europe's quiet power and how it fights back

44:24 What this means for the tech industry

47:13 The financial sector dependency and existential risk

51:03 What does the transition actually look like?

53:00 What engineers can do right now

Technologies Mentioned

AWS - https://aws.amazon.com

Microsoft Azure - https://azure.microsoft.com

Google Cloud - https://cloud.google.com

#9 Mistakes have been made

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian drop the technical polish and get honest about the biggest mistakes of their careers. From wiping a month of startup data with a single wrong command, to nearly electrocuting himself pulling a chassis from a live rack, to a rounding error in financial software that ended up in front of the CFO — the stories are equal parts hilarious and painful. They also cover bad search-replaces on live Cassandra clusters, taking on management too early, a wrong-direction DD command, and accidentally generating a massive AWS bill. A candid episode about how experience is often just accumulated failure.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:51 The search-replace that corrupted a Cassandra cluster

2:20 Migrating a print shop to Linux in the 90s

5:45 Data centre migration disaster: wrong rack, 3am

8:27 Wiping a month of startup code with DD in the wrong direction

10:24 Tape backups and old-school data loss

13:16 Descending into a coal mine without the tools

18:07 The accidental text that went to the boss

20:33 The kill switch that locked out a paying customer

25:07 Pushed into management too early

28:35 Not surrounding yourself with business people soon enough

38:26 The AWS bill that dwarfed the customer contract value

41:08 The rounding error that ended up in front of the CFO

45:54 The ClickHouse lesson: check managed services first

48:25 Nearly electrocuted pulling a live power supply

51:30 Airport runway lighting and the buffer overflow

1:02:30 Mission command, autonomy and lessons from other industries

1:04:45 Summary: own up fast, learn, and keep doing things

Technologies Mentioned

Cassandra - https://cassandra.apache.org

AWS - https://aws.amazon.com

ClickHouse - https://clickhouse.com

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

#8 About Kubernetes

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian are joined by Xavier Torres, a senior infrastructure and observability engineer, for a practical dive into Kubernetes. They cover what Kubernetes actually is, how pods, services, deployments and ingresses fit together, and what you genuinely need to run it in production. The conversation moves through observability tooling, GitOps with Argo CD, secrets management, service meshes, managed vs self-hosted Kubernetes, autoscaling, and whether Kubernetes is even the right tool for most companies.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction and guest welcome

1:19 Kubernetes explained: what it actually is

3:14 Pods, containers and shared namespaces

6:09 Services: the internal networking abstraction

8:02 Ingress controllers: getting traffic in

10:34 Managed Kubernetes vs self-hosted

16:03 Minimum viable observability: logs and metrics

21:41 Dealing with YAML sprawl

25:57 GitOps with Argo CD

36:09 Stateful workloads with Crossplane

40:22 When does Kubernetes become the wrong hammer?

43:02 The YAML complexity trap for developers

45:46 Service meshes: what they solve and what they cost

51:15 How much of your cluster is actually your workloads?

54:00 Alternatives: Cloud Run, Lambda, Docker Compose

1:00:03 Will Kubernetes be abstracted away by cloud providers?

1:05:51 Local development: K3s, Kind and Minikube

1:12:18 Summary: when to use Kubernetes and when not to

Technologies Mentioned

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

Argo CD - https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io

Helm - https://helm.sh

Crossplane - https://www.crossplane.io

Grafana - https://grafana.com

Prometheus - https://prometheus.io

AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks

Google GKE - https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine

AWS Karpenter - https://karpenter.sh

K3s - https://k3s.io

Google Cloud Run - https://cloud.google.com/run

#7 Cloud vs Data Centre

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a hands-on dive into what it actually means to run your own data centre. Drawing on years of real-world experience racking servers, pulling fibre, configuring BGP and managing colocation suites, they walk through physical layout, cooling, power redundancy, network topology, capacity planning and hidden operational costs — then contrast all of this with the cloud. A rare and genuinely technical episode for anyone curious about what happens behind the abstraction layer.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:27 Our data centre backgrounds

4:09 What does a data centre actually look like?

6:27 Tiers of availability

7:14 Racks, blades and colocation

13:06 Power redundancy: dual circuits and hot-swappable components

15:55 Network: SFPs, fibre optic and bandwidth design

18:59 BGP, ASN numbers and getting on the internet

24:13 Cooling: cold aisles and hot aisles

28:52 The cost breakdown: hardware, power, space, staffing

33:18 Capacity planning: the static nature of physical infrastructure

37:00 Team size and skills required

40:17 Hardware lifecycle and refresh cycles

44:05 How servers are ordered, received and racked

47:11 Should you run your own data centre?

50:10 Edge cases where on-prem makes sense

53:38 Hybrid cloud and AWS Outposts

57:09 Cloud vs data centre total cost of ownership

1:03:01 Environmental impact: waste heat and green data centres

1:07:24 How data centre skills transfer to the cloud

1:08:30 Summary: use the cloud if you can

Technologies Mentioned

AWS - https://aws.amazon.com

AWS Outposts - https://aws.amazon.com/outposts

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

Juniper Networks - https://www.juniper.net

#6 Technical Communication

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into technical communication — one of the most underrated yet career-defining skills in engineering. They explore how to tailor your message to different audiences, why the curse of the expert derails so many technical conversations, how good documentation and code naming are themselves forms of communication, why architecture diagrams so often mislead, how to run blameless post-mortems, and why honesty and integrity are the foundations of trust in any technical discussion.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:06 What is technical communication?

2:08 Understanding your audience

5:33 The curse of the expert

7:06 How to explain Kubernetes to non-technical people

9:54 Avoiding jargon with business stakeholders

11:35 Written communication: READMEs, comments, documentation

13:54 Using AI to maintain documentation intent

15:12 Architectural Decision Records

17:37 Naming things properly: services, teams and systems

21:41 API documentation

25:56 Empathy in communication

29:34 Improving public speaking

33:57 Drawing out quieter voices in meetings

35:01 Pre-meeting async writing

38:49 Integrity and saying I don't know

43:13 Learning what the business actually does

46:00 Blameless post-mortems and RCAs done right

49:06 Architecture diagrams: right level of abstraction

53:38 Deployment vs logical architecture diagrams

55:00 Executive-first documentation: start wide, go narrow

58:17 Summary: always lead with context and work down into detail

#2 Getting into the tech industry in 2025

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:59:59 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian tackle one of the most common questions in tech: how do you actually get into the industry in 2025? They cover choosing your first programming language, T-shaped career development, what hiring managers look for in juniors, the impact of AI on junior roles, how to navigate introversion in a collaborative industry, the value of changing companies to broaden perspective, and why your reputation starts mattering from day one. A practical and honest guide for anyone starting out or looking to level up.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:23 Would you start in tech today?

2:32 Find your motivation first

3:23 How to start learning: courses, books, boot camps

5:57 Pick one language and go deep

8:31 What a junior is actually expected to know

10:21 How AI has changed the junior market

13:54 AI as a tool vs AI as a crutch

17:40 Getting into infrastructure and cloud

21:50 The T-shaped engineer

24:11 What hiring managers look for

31:57 What to do in your first interview

33:17 Communication: the neglected superpower

40:11 How to help juniors grow

44:25 Imposter syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger curve

49:09 Understanding the business from day one

51:30 Managing introversion in a collaborative environment

55:58 Career progression: junior to senior to staff

1:03:49 Individual contributor vs management

1:07:22 When to switch companies

1:12:50 Protecting your reputation from day one

1:15:03 Make yourself redundant, not indispensable

1:22:37 Remote work challenges for juniors

Technologies Mentioned

Python - https://www.python.org

JavaScript - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

TypeScript - https://www.typescriptlang.org

Linux - https://www.kernel.org

Terraform - https://www.terraform.io

AWS - https://aws.amazon.com

#5 Principal Engineers

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a deep dive into the world of principal engineers. Krisztian, himself a principal engineer, breaks down what the role actually involves: translating business strategy into technical direction, mentoring without micromanaging, building mental models of complex systems, and interpreting between engineering and senior leadership. They explore the difference between principal engineers and architects, the IC versus management career path, what makes a great versus a toxic principal engineer, how to interview for the role, and what aspiring engineers should focus on to get there.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:51 Where does principal engineer sit in the career ladder?

3:30 IC versus management track: the fork in the road

6:05 Why the industry created the IC path

7:06 What does a principal engineer actually do day to day?

8:27 Principal engineer versus architect

10:48 Leading by influence, not authority

12:59 Translating business goals into technical direction

16:20 Building a mental model of the whole system

18:20 Communication: 80% of the job

20:47 Teaching and knowledge sharing

22:01 Mentoring versus knowledge sharing

24:57 How to become a principal engineer

31:44 Red flags: arrogance and decision-making from authority

36:33 Avoiding the gatekeeper trap

39:46 The servant leader mindset

42:32 When to insert your authority: tiebreaking and escalation

45:00 Why principal engineers should not own production code

53:14 Skills to develop on the path to principal

56:25 The importance of breadth across industries

59:23 Spotting fake experience in interviews

1:02:00 How principal engineers are interviewed

1:06:39 Summary: what the role is really about

#4 Startup Engineering

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian tackle the challenges of startup engineering, drawing on experience helping companies scale from nothing to tens of developers. They explore the two main startup archetypes: the bootstrapped zero-to-one prototype phase and the well-funded one-to-many scaling phase. Topics include picking the right tech stack, when to use vibe coding versus proper infrastructure, the danger of over-engineering early, unit economics, multi-account cloud environments, avoiding the trap of rebuilding your data centre in the cloud, and why unblocking other teams is always the highest-value activity.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:26 Setting the scene: two types of startup

2:07 Phase one: zero to one, get out the door fast

5:33 Defining MVP and avoiding scope creep

9:57 Zero to one vs one to many: different problems

13:42 Real startup examples: from vibe coding to Kubernetes

15:48 Security, compliance, ISO 27001, GDPR

17:58 Build vs buy

20:00 Practical tech stack for a solo founder MVP

22:56 Scaling with three developers and early funding

24:47 Unit economics: know your cost per user

28:04 Managing technical debt consciously

30:04 Use boring tech and popular languages

33:14 Organisational structure first, then tech

36:16 Standards, contracts and avoiding API chaos

40:41 Multi-account cloud strategy from day one

43:57 The real cost of blocking engineers

47:52 Unblocking other teams is always highest priority

50:03 Data architecture to avoid cross-domain dependencies

54:14 When to use consultants and fractional expertise

56:03 Summary and key takeaways

Technologies Mentioned

Replit - https://replit.com

Next.js - https://nextjs.org

Vercel - https://vercel.com

Supabase - https://supabase.com

GitHub Actions - https://github.com/features/actions

AWS EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eks

Kubernetes - https://kubernetes.io

#3 About vibe coding

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 07:00:00 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian explore vibe coding — building software using AI tools and natural language rather than writing code directly. Krisztian shares hands-on experiments with Replit and Cursor, the hosts discuss the impressive speed of prototyping versus the frustration when things go wrong, and they dig into the hidden security risks of putting powerful development tools in the hands of non-technical users. The conversation also covers AI-assisted cyberattacks, supply chain vulnerabilities, and what the explosion of AI-generated apps means for the software industry.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:50 What is vibe coding?

1:47 Krisztian's experiment with Replit

3:54 Building a microservice diagramming tool with AI

6:55 Toby's experience with Lovable

10:09 Cursor vs Replit

14:00 Getting stuck in loops and losing flow state

23:16 The mainframe parallel: computing cycles and AI costs

28:42 Pricing and the race to the bottom

33:27 Why you still need developers in the loop

40:05 Supabase and Lovable integration, vendor lock-in

44:29 Security risks of vibe coding

47:28 AI-assisted cyberattacks and the arms race

59:05 Supply chain attacks and model poisoning

1:01:34 The explosion of AI slop

1:05:08 Prompt engineering and LLM manipulation

1:08:00 Summary and recommendations

Technologies Mentioned

Replit - https://replit.com

Cursor - https://www.cursor.com

Lovable - https://lovable.dev

Supabase - https://supabase.com

Claude (Anthropic) - https://www.anthropic.com

React - https://react.dev

TypeScript - https://www.typescriptlang.org

GitHub Copilot - https://github.com/features/copilot

OpenRouter - https://openrouter.ai

#1 Microservices and monoliths

Toby Sears & Krisztian Fischer — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:30:06 GMT

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into one of software engineering's most debated topics: monoliths versus microservices. They break down what each architecture actually means, where the industry went wrong by treating microservices as a default, and when a well-structured monolith is the smarter choice. The conversation covers real-world scaling challenges, infrastructure complexity, team organisation, Kubernetes fatigue, and the hidden costs of over-engineering early-stage products.

https://techleaguepodcast.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:40 What is a monolith?

2:31 What are microservices?

3:50 The case for monoliths

7:46 Scaling problems with monoliths

8:17 Running a monolith like a microservice