Lean TDD with Brian Okken

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1. 

   S1 · E81 · 13 Oct 2026 · 49 minNew

   Stack Overflow Survey Reactions | Software Engineering & Career Insights

   What does Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey reveal about software engineering, career insights, and engineering culture? The Overcommitted hosts unpack the findings, discuss what they mean for developers, and share the trends they’re watching across the profession. Links Developer survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2026 Ed from Polytoken: https://youtu.be/YrmR6EZ5Y1U Hosts Overcommitted: ⁠ ⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ ⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠ ⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev Brittany Ellich: ⁠ https://brittanyellich.com Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠ ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

2. 

   S1 · E80 · 6 Oct 2026 · 33 min

   From Math Teacher to Developer Community Manager, with Roxy Rodriguez-Becker

   Roxy Rodriguez-Becker taught middle school math, moved into the school library after earning a master's in library and information science, and then taught herself to code while raising three kids. She is now a developer community manager at Torc and the host of the She Ships podcast. In this episode she walks through what that transition actually required: the four AM club, waking up to study until she rushed out the door to a five AM gym session, working through 100Devs, and treating the job search as a numbers game with fifty to sixty outreach messages a week. She is candid about the…

3. 

   S1 · E79 · 29 Sep 2026 · 29 min

   Closed That Tab: What "How Complex Systems Fail" Teaches Software Engineers

   Closed That Tab is back. Erika finally read Richard Cook's How Complex Systems Fail, an 18 point paper Cook wrote with patient safety and medical systems in mind, but one that is frequently discussed in web development and software engineering since the foundational principles apply universally. Erika and Bethany work through what holds up in practice. They cover the difference between normal failure and catastrophic failure, why knowing your system's baseline is its own skill, and why fixes are never free: every change adds complexity, knowledge gaps, and new risk. They get into safety as a…

4. 

   S1 · E77 · 15 Sep 2026 · 43 min

   Staff Engineer Archetypes & Glue Work with Jade Dickinson

   Summary Brittany and Erika close out the Overcommitted book club's read of Tanya Reilly's The Staff Engineer's Path with guest Jade Dickinson, a senior software engineer at Henry Schein One. They dig into glue work and how to make it visible for promotion, the book's staff engineer archetypes, the "why have we stopped" blockers chapter, and what it means to be a delegator on a staffed project. Jade also talks about her path into software after working in GIS mapping for Ebola response, and the group debates whether AI is shifting the scope senior engineers are expected to own. It closes with…

5. 

   S1 · E76 · 8 Sep 2026 · 39 min

   Can You Trust a 100% Alignment Score? AI Ethics Unpacked

   Summary It's a hosts-only week. Brittany and Erika catch up on what they're learning (Erika is starting Designing Data-Intensive Applications; Brittany just began Georgia Tech's online CS master's with a computer vision course) and then work through the week's AI news.First up: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, billed as the company's most aligned model. Brittany and Erika question what "aligned" even means when the headline numbers are a 100% on ExploitBench and a 0% honeypot-cheating rate, and whether a model that's harder to monitor and scores perfectly is aligned or just good at taking the test.…

6. 

   E75 · 1 Sep 2026 · 44 min

   Life Tech Stack | Developer Productivity Beyond Work

   Engineers architect systems for work—but what about life? In this episode, Bethany, Brittany, and Erika reveal their personal tech stacks: the tools, habits, and sometimes deliberately low-tech strategies that power their daily routines, family life, and wellness. Discover how software engineer thinking applies to work-life balance, plus practical productivity systems you can steal for your own life. Links https://www.trustyduck.dev/posts/tech-stack-2025/ https://johnnydecimal.com/ https://github.com/ngerakines/jd https://wisprflow.ai/ https://obsidian.md/ https://www.chezmoi.io/…

7. 

   S1 · E74 · 25 Aug 2026 · 40 min

   Content Creation, Craft, and Code: Inside Dreams of Code with Elliott Minns

   Elliott Minns takes us inside Dreams of Code and his path from software engineer and manager to full-time content creator. He shares how he turns complex technical work into clear stories, balances depth with accessibility for a developer audience, and keeps craft at the center of the creative process. His latest project, a next-gen video editor built in Rust, brings those worlds together through technically ambitious work involving hardware, media encoding, and zero-copy performance. The conversation also explores how ADHD shaped Elliott's career and creative process, what he learned from…

8. 

   S1 · E73 · 18 Aug 2026 · 40 min

   Is Pair Programming Dead? | Code Quality & Engineering Culture Debate

   Summary This week on Overcommitted, Brittany, Bethany, and Erika try out a new format: instead of interviewing a guest, the three of them rate a running list of software engineering topics as overrated or underrated. They start with the fun stuff — dark mode, mechanical keyboards, standing desks, Vim, dotfiles — before moving into practices and process, where the real disagreements show up. Pair programming and code review as a quality gate both get contested, with opinions that have shifted noticeably since AI tools entered the picture. From there the conversation covers stand-ups, sprint…