GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Dennis Hansen - Air Force Veteran, Chief Systems Engineer & Author of "Model-Based Systems Engineering and Requirements Definition"
Jorge Orellana - Model Based Systems Engineer at IERUS Technologies & CEO & Founder at SCATTERBRAINS

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/445

RESOURCES
Jorge
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorge-orellana-0b729129

DESCRIPTION
Dennis Hansen brings over six decades of systems engineering experience to this GOTO Book Club conversation — from Air Force airborne navigation technician to Chief Systems Engineer at L3Harris on programs including the complete rebuild of the GOES-R ground system for NOAA and NASA. His book argues that the fundamental failure mode in complex system development is the same every time: requirements are defined too loosely, too late, or across multiple model layers simultaneously. He structures the approach using an onion model — a layering framework he was taught by a Motorola engineer in 1961 — where each layer (mission, capabilities, activities, technical requirements, specifications) must be completed before the next is begun. Skipping layers or trying to do two at once invariably produces excess or faulty requirements that surface as expensive failures during system testing, or worse, after deployment.

The second half of the conversation focuses on why modeling tools are databases, not drawing programs — a distinction Dennis considers critical. Every element in the model carries its associated requirements and the reasoning behind design decisions, which means that when you return to work after a weekend, you don't lose hours reconstructing your thinking. More importantly, when change requests arrive — and they always do — a maintained model lets you trace the impact backwards through the system and understand exactly what has to be modified, rather than slapping on a fix that creates five new problems. Dennis's closing advice is the thread that runs through the entire book: collaborate at every stage, every discipline working together rather than in silos, and define things properly upfront. Everything else follows from that.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Dennis Hansen • Model-Based Systems Engineering and Requirements Definition • https://amzn.to/4e6IiqJ
Kossiakoff, Seymour, Flanigan & Biemer • Systems Engineering Principles and Practice • https://amzn.to/4a7Elj9
Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass • Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook • https://amzn.to/4wYnj12
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted in May 2026.
https://gotopia.tech

Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/445

Jake Warner - Co-Founder & CEO at Cycle  @JakeWarner 
Charles Humble - Freelance Techie, Podcaster, Editor, Author & Consultant

RESOURCES
Jake
https://bsky.app/profile/jakewarner.com
https://x.com/jakewarner
https://github.com/JakeWarner
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakewarner
https://jakewarner.com

Charles
https://bsky.app/profile/charleshumble.bsky.social
https://linkedin.com/in/charleshumble
https://mastodon.social/@charleshumble
https://conissaunce.com

DESCRIPTION
Jake Warner, co-founder and CEO of Cycle.io, traces a pattern he's watched repeat itself since his OpenStack days: a new orchestration technology arrives, developers adopt it enthusiastically, it grows in complexity, and organizations eventually ask whether managing it is really a core competency. He made a decade-long bet that Kubernetes would follow the same arc — and built Cycle as the answer: a distributed control plane that lets companies own their own infrastructure and compute while still getting a clean, platform-like experience on top of it. The key design principle is a high ceiling without sacrificing simplicity — companies shouldn't have to re-platform every time they grow, and they shouldn't have to give up infrastructure ownership to get ease of use.

The conversation then pivots to Sovereign Cloud, which Jake frames not as a niche regulatory concern but as a fundamental trust and ownership question. He draws attention to a risk many organizations underestimate: the control plane itself. Unlike many platforms where the control plane is a single point of failure and a blackbox, Cycle's architecture ensures that even if the control plane goes down, customer infrastructure keeps running — servers maintain their own manifests and restart containers independently. Looking ahead, Jake expects more regions and countries to build their own cloud equivalents, driven by privacy concerns, data residency laws, and geopolitical pressures that are accelerating faster than the technology is.

His conclusion: the organizations that handed AWS all the keys are beginning to realize the cost — and the industry is correcting.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Alan Hamilton • Sovereign Cloud Operations • https://amzn.to/4dqYAe4
Leonard J. Horta • The Cloud Exit Strategy • https://amzn.to/4dXqeiN
Charles Curry & Tanessa Curry • Cooling the Cloud • https://amzn.to/4a0d4iA
Liz Rice • Container Security • https://amzn.to/3oU4iJe
Liz Rice • Kubernetes Security • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-security/9781492039075
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2025.
https://yowcon.com

Matt Brunt - Dungeon Master & Team Tinkerer

RESOURCES
https://bsky.app/profile/brunty.me
https://mastodon.social/@brunty
https://github.com/Brunty
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbrunt
https://brunty.me

ABSTRACT
You enter the dungeon, as the echoes of your footsteps sound around you, something catches your eye - is that… oh, oh no.

You grab your trusty sword and with your fellow adventurers, you seek to overcome the mighty challenge that lays ahead of you: building software.

This talk is a look at some of the parallels between Dungeons and Dragons, and software development.

We’ll see how lessons learned through delving into dungeons and fighting monsters with a party of adventurers can help teams of developers when building software in the real world.

Are you ready to join me in a mighty quest for better software? [...]

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://yowcon.com/brisbane-2025/sessions/3641

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Heidi Helfand • Dynamic Reteaming • https://amzn.to/3Fvu5BA
Heidi Helfand • How to Change Your Teams • https://leanpub.com/DRTGuide
Carl Larson & Frank M J LaFasto • Teamwork • https://amzn.to/4cFWseQ
Gene Kim & Steve Spear • Wiring the Winning Organization • https://amzn.to/3QJcfBp
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025.
https://gotocph.com

Abby Bangser - Principal Engineer at Syntasso & Team Topologies Advocate
Dave Farley - Bestselling Author, Founder & Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.

RESOURCES
Abby
https://bsky.app/profile/abangser.bsky.social
https://twitter.com/a_bangser
https://github.com/abangser
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbybangser
https://www.syntasso.io/members-area/abby/profile

Dave
https://bsky.app/profile/davefarley77.bsky.social
https://www.continuous-delivery.co.uk
https://linkedin.com/in/dave-farley-a67927
https://twitter.com/davefarley77
http://www.davefarley.net

DESCRIPTION
Dave Farley and Abby Bangser open with a clear statement: Continuous Delivery isn't a relic of the pre-AI era — it's the foundation that makes the AI era survivable. Dave's definition is simple but consequential: software should always be in a releasable state, verified after every small change. That's not just a workflow preference; it's the same incremental, hypothesis-driven approach that underpins science and engineering. In an AI-assisted world where code can be generated far faster than humans can reason about it, the discipline of small, safe, verifiable steps becomes more critical, not less. The danger isn't AI writing bad code — it's AI writing a lot of code very fast that nobody is properly checking.

The conversation turns to a genuinely alarming DORA report statistic: 70% of developers using AI tools don't distrust the output. Abby draws a parallel to the long-running debate over whether developers can be trusted to test their own code — they usually can't, without a deliberate change in perspective. The same challenge applies to AI-generated code: you need to consciously shift from "prompter" mode to "verifier" mode, and most developers aren't making that switch. Dave closes with a surprising note of optimism: AI may be the industry's best-ever opportunity to finally get XP practices — small increments, automated tests, continuous feedback — embedded into how teams actually work. Not because anyone chose to adopt them ideologically, but because working without them while using AI is visibly, measurably risky.

Read the full abstract here:
https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3779

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Kief Morris • Infrastructure as Code • https://amzn.to/4e6EBQc
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • http://amzn.to/3sVLyLQ
Dave Thomas • simplicity • https://amzn.to/43FghBJ
Dave Farley & Jez Humble • Continuous Delivery • https://amzn.to/3ocIHwd
David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • https://amzn.to/3GI468M
Dave Farley • Continuous Delivery Pipelines • https://amzn.to/3rjetdi
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Barry Feigenbaum - Retired Sr. Principal Software Engineer & Author of "Go for Java Programmers"
Shon Saliga - IBM Storage Evangelist

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/444

RESOURCES
Barry
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryfeigenbaum

Shon
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shon-saliga-32336b2

DESCRIPTION
Dr. Barry Feigenbaum — an IBM, Amazon and Dell veteran with a PhD in Computer Engineering and decades of Java experience — spent time working with Go on microservices and liked it enough to write the book he wished had existed when he made the switch. In this GOTO Book Club episode with longtime colleague Shon Saliga, he walks through the core contrasts: Go is a compiled language that targets a narrower domain than Java — primarily command-line tools and web servers — but excels there with smaller binaries, faster startup, and dramatically lower container overhead. Concurrency is the headline difference: Go's goroutines are far lighter than Java threads, and its channel-based communication model sidesteps many of the problems that make concurrent Java code hard to reason about.

The error handling conversation is particularly illuminating. Java's exception mechanism, while powerful, encourages developers to overuse it for ordinary error reporting — Go simply doesn't allow that by design. Errors in Go are return values, not throws; panics are reserved for truly catastrophic situations. Similarly, Go's implicit interfaces (if you implement the methods, you implement the interface — no declaration required) give the language a flexibility that feels alien to Java developers at first but becomes a strength quickly. Barry's conclusion is clear: for greenfield servers and containerized microservices, Go is worth serious consideration — and for Java developers willing to reset a few mental models, the transition is more tractable than it looks.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Barry Feigenbaum • Go for Java Programmers • https://amzn.to/4uRL3li
Ken Christopher, Barry Feigenbaum, Shon Salig • DOS 5: The Basic • https://amzn.to/4tKDVGs
A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!