Coding Chats

On Coding Chats, John Crickett interviews software engineers of all levels from junior to CTO. He encourages the guests to share the stories of the challenges they have faced in their role and the strategies and tactics they have used to overcome those challenges providing actionable insights other software engineers can use to accelerate their careers.

Coding Chats is a technology podcast hosted by John Crickett, with 83 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

John Crickett hosts Coding Chats, a technology show with 83 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Coding Chats

  Startup Advisor Secrets: Hiring, CTOs & Going From POC to Product

  May 28, 202624 minS0

  <p>Coding Chats Episode 80 - start-up advisor Alexander Berkovich shares his expertise on building successful start-ups, hiring strategies, CTO roles, and the importance of communication between technical and business teams. Discover practical tips for navigating the challenges of early-stage companies and how to align technical excellence with business goals.</p><p><br></p><p>Chapters</p><p>00:00 Introduction to Start-up Advising</p><p>02:09 The Day-to-Day of a Start-up Advisor</p><p>05:39 Hiring Challenges in Start-ups</p><p>07:39 Defining the Role of a CTO</p><p>10:36 Common Mistakes in CTO Hiring</p><p>12:59 Bridging the Gap: Technical and Business Communication</p><...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Coding Chats

  AI Agents Have a Memory Problem (And You're Probably Making It Worse)

  May 21, 202647 minS0

  <p>Coding Chats Episode 79 - Richmond Alake, Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle, joins John to discuss agent memory — how AI agents store, retrieve, and adapt to information. He argues that developers building memory on flat files are naively reinventing the database, and that once you factor in concurrency, security, and scalability, a proper database is inevitable. The conversation covers the full memory stack and how Oracle's AI database keeps embeddings and data together without shipping sensitive information to external providers.</p><p><br></p><p>The pair also explore why memory is the most universally relatable concept in AI...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Coding Chats

  I got into computers to avoid people then they put me in charge of them!

  May 14, 202649 minS0

  <p>Coding Chats Episode 78 - John Crickett talks to Robert Harris, an experienced engineering leader. Robert shares hard-won lessons from years of leading software teams, drawing on a distinctive "human systems" lens to explain why so many engineering organisations struggle — not because of bad people, but because of broken systems, misaligned leadership, and invisible cultural forces.</p><p><br></p><p>The conversation weaves together philosophy, practical management advice, and candid personal anecdotes, making it equally relevant for first-time engineering managers and seasoned CTOs. The central thread throughout is that software is fundamentally a human endeavour, and leaders who treat it...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Coding Chats

  The Death of Writing Code: OpenAI's Engineer on the Rise of Harness Engineering

  May 7, 202650 minS0

  <p>Coding Chats Episode 77 — Arnaud Fournier, Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, talks to John Crickett about how AI is fundamentally reshaping software engineering. He explores how OpenAI's own engineers have largely moved away from writing code line-by-line, shifting instead to what he calls "harness engineering" — orchestrating agents, preparing context, and steering AI to do the heavy lifting.</p><p><br></p><p>The conversation covers practical ground for engineers at every level: how to successfully adopt agentic coding in your workflow, best practices for integrating tools like Codex into enterprise environments, and what it's really like to work at the fron...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Coding Chats

  LLM as a Judge: Why Your AI Might Be Marking Its Own Homework

  Apr 30, 20261h 7mS0

  <p>Coding Chats episode 76 - John talks to Laura Dietz - a computer science professor whose work focuses on whether AI evaluation metrics actually tell the truth. She's known for her critical take on "LLM as a judge" — not because she thinks it's useless, but because she wants numbers that mean something rather than numbers that just make a system look good.</p><p><br></p><p>The conversation tackles some uncomfortable realities for software engineers: using an LLM to write code and another to review it is a circular trap, prompt engineering shouldn't be a computer scientist's day job, an...

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Coding Chats. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.