Summary

In this episode, Erika talks with Salma Alam-Naylor about software engineering craft, programming best practices, and why the long game beats shortcuts. As AI coding tools proliferate and everyone chases speed, Salma digs into deliberate practice, sustainable career strategies, and building genuine expertise that compounds over time. Perfect for engineers feeling burnout from the hype cycle.

Links

• Salma’s website: https://whitep4nth3r.com/

• 2021 Jamstack Jammies (Community Creator Award) https://2021.jamstackconf.com/jammies/

• Fat bear week website: https://explore.org/fat-bear-week

• Hell.com wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell.com

  
  

Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

Tech careers don't need to mean grinding LeetCode. In episode 57, John Crickett — 30+ year engineer, Coding Challenges creator (90K+ subscribers) — makes the case that programmer productivity skyrockets when you build real tools instead. We dig into why your own Redis, Git, or shell beats practice problems, how Coding Challenges went from $17 domain to viral sensation (1,500 signups in one weekend), and what it means to level up through systems programming.

Links

• Coding Challenges (Newsletter): https://codingchallenges.substack.com/
• Coding Challenges Website: https://codingchallenges.fyi
• From The Challenges - Git: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/from-the-challenges-git
• Will AI Kill Coding?: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/will-ai-kill-coding
• Using AI To Solve A Coding Challenge: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/using-ai-to-solve-a-coding-challenge
• Tech Lead Journal #178 — John Crickett: https://techleadjournal.dev/episodes/178/
• Confessions of a Data Guy — What Makes Great Engineers: https://www.confessionsofadataguy.com/decades-in-software-engineering-what-actually-makes-great-engineers-john-crickett/
• Coding Chats Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/59GU7gzyK2RdIDVkhNS2nt
• John Crickett on GitHub: https://github.com/johncrickett
• John Crickett on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett
• John Crickett on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
• John Crickett on X: https://x.com/johncrickett

Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Bethany: https://trustyduck.dev

• Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com

• ⁠Erika: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

Summary

Career growth through mentorship and work-life balance with Dave Schwantes, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. Brittany and Dave explore why running toward meaningful work beats running from burnout, how mentorship became his primary form of engineering leverage, and what career happiness actually looks like across different life stages. From Instacart and Couchsurfing to building in-house bootcamps, Dave shares how sustainable engineering culture beats individual productivity hacks—and his take on how AI tools reshape what engineers really need to master.

Links

• Dave's personal site: https://dinosaurseateverybody.com
• Don't Break Prod (bite-sized career advice): https://dontbreakprod.com
• Grave Danger (Dave's spooky ska band) on Bandcamp: https://gravedangerskath.bandcamp.com
• Dave on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dorkrawk.bsky.social
• Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschwantes
• Dave on GitHub: https://github.com/dorkrawk
• Web Dev Challenge Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw
• The Engineer Manager Pendulum article: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/

Host

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

Summary

Sabrina Goldfarb rejected the tech career playbook. No CS degree, bootcamp instead, teaching before big platforms. Now an engineer on GitHub's Copilot team and instructor at Frontend Masters, she shares how methodical planning, patience, and trust in the process led to career growth most thought impossible. If you're considering a non-traditional path in software engineering, this episode proves there's more than one way to build a meaningful tech career.

Links

• Frontend Masters: Practical Prompt Engineering: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/prompt-engineering/
• Sabrina Goldfarb on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sabrinagoldfarb

Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28
• Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

Summary

In this episode of the Overcommitted Podcast, hosts Bethany and Erika sit down with Warren Parad, CTO and co-founder of Authress, a user authorization API built for reliability. Warren shares how his team stayed fully operational during the massive AWS US-East-1 outage in October 2025 using DNS failover and multi-region strategies, and what the delayed alert logs taught them about timestamp trust.

The conversation kicks off with a candid discussion on AI agents and critical thinking, whether managing multiple coding agents is really multitasking or just micromanagement, and what the trade-offs mean for early-career engineers. Warren traces his reliability-first mindset back to his roots in electrical engineering and healthcare IT, where late-night on-call pages through Citrix proxies and hospital billing systems shaped how he thinks about uptime today. The group also explores what it really takes to build a Five Nines organization and how hiring practices need to match the reliability culture you want. The episode wraps up with a round of Never Have I Ever: SRE Edition, featuring Friday deploys gone wrong, blaming DNS, and discovering outages from customer tweets.

Links

Authress, Warren's company, user authorization API for software makers. The product he's building and wants to plug.

Adventures in DevOps Podcast, Warren's podcast, co-hosted with Will Button. 300+ episodes on DevOps, engineering leadership, and cloud architecture.

How When AWS Was Down, We Were Not, Authress's blog post detailing their resilience strategy during the October 2025 AWS outage. Referenced in Theme 1 questions.

So You Want to Build Your Own Authorization?, Warren's article on why authorization complexity creeps up on teams. Referenced in Theme 2 questions.

An Interview With Warren Parad, CIAM Weekly, March 2025 interview covering Warren's views on CIAM, FedCM, and the future of authentication.

FedCM, Browser Native Auth (Adventures in DevOps Episode), Adventures in DevOps episode diving into FedCM and why authentication should move from user-land to kernel-land.

Warren Parad on LinkedIn, Warren's LinkedIn profile.

Warren Parad on Bluesky, Warren's Bluesky profile.

Warren Parad on GitHub, Warren's GitHub profile, includes Authress repos, OpenAPI Explorer, and other open-source work.

Authress Knowledge Base, Technical articles from the Authress team on auth, security, and infrastructure.

Warren Parad, Personal Site, Warren's personal website.

Hosts

Overcommitted

Bethany Janos

Erika (Eggyhead)

Summary

In this episode of Overcommitted, Satish Saley, a senior software engineer with extensive experience on DoorDash's search platform team, discusses scaling search systems at a hyper-growth company. This conversation dives deep into software engineering challenges and software development strategies that impact programmer productivity and career growth. Satish details two major engineering transformations: rebuilding the search indexing pipeline with Kafka, Flink, and Elasticsearch, and later replacing Elasticsearch with a custom search engine based on Apache Lucene, which significantly improved performance and reduced costs.

The episode also explores the complexities of migrating off monoliths, securing leadership buy-in for technical rebuilds, and why respecting legacy systems is crucial in engineering culture. Additionally, the hosts share personal stories of database pivots and conclude with a confessional segment on technical decisions that didn't age well. This episode is packed with insights for software engineers and tech professionals interested in the intersection of technology, scaling, and work life balance.

Links

• Satish Saley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satish-saley-65527525/
• Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
• Build Faster Indexing with Apache Kafka and Elasticsearch: https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/open-source-search-indexing/
• Introducing DoorDash's In-House Search Engine: https://doordash.engineering/2024/02/27/introducing-doordashs-in-house-search-engine/

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Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28
• Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

Summary

In this special one-year anniversary episode of Overcommitted, Brittany, Erika, and Bethany reflect on their journey from a small accountability group to a thriving weekly podcast and community of over 160 software engineers. They discuss their experiences within the software development lifecycle, the challenges of maintaining programmer productivity, and the evolution of their engineering culture. Listeners will hear candid stories about mastering interview skills, handling the complexities of production admin, and navigating promotional efforts. The episode also highlights the podcast's unexpected role as a valuable networking tool for remote workers in tech careers. Looking ahead, the hosts share exciting plans including new panel-format episodes, community events, and automation initiatives. Closing with affectionate roasts in their first-ever Overcommitted Superlatives, this episode offers both insight and entertainment for anyone passionate about software projects and sustainable work-life balance in tech.

Links

• Episode 1 - Imposter Syndrome: https://overcommitted.dev/imposter-syndrome-in-software-engineering/
• Overcommitted Discord Server: https://discord.gg/d9gZyYuqKd
• Computer systems: A programmer's perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-3rd/dp/013409266X

Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28
• Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com
• Erika Eggyhead: https://github.com/eggyhead

Summary

In this episode, we dive deep into software development education and programmer productivity with Craig Dennis, developer educator at Cloudflare and creator of AI Avenue. Craig shares his unique journey through tech careers, from early challenges to leading AI education initiatives that empower software engineers to build confidently using AI tools. He champions the philosophy of AI as a power up, not autopilot, encouraging software developers at all levels to embrace AI to enhance their programming skills and accelerate software projects.

We explore Craig's insights from interviewing tech companies like ElevenLabs and HeyGen, tackling skepticism around AI in engineering culture, and highlighting powerful AI capabilities such as structured outputs. Craig also reflects on how global reach and innovative teaching methods are shaping the future of software engineering education, inspiring listeners to move beyond theory and start building with AI today.

Join us for this insightful conversation on AI's role in software engineering, career growth, and improving work-life balance in tech through smarter development practices.

Links

• AI Avenue official website: https://aiavenue.show/
• AI Avenue YouTube playlist (full season): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI6HzeeCy4S-XL166XESd9eAV87beBiWH
• Craig's GitHub: https://github.com/craigsdennis
• Craig on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigsdennis/
• Cloudflare Developer Week 2025 hub: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-week/
• Cloudflare Workers AI documentation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/model-context-protocol/
• Build and deploy Remote MCP servers blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/remote-model-context-protocol-servers-mcp/

Hosts

• Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
• Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28
• Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com