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1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   S1 · E78 · 22 Sep 2026 · 42 min

   Lean TDD with Brian Okken

   Brian Okken, lead engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, creator of the pytest book and course, and author of the new book Lean TDD, joins us to rethink test driven development. His core argument: write tests at the highest level that still makes sense, so you can refactor, restructure, and hand work to an agent without rewriting your suite every time. We dig into why function-level tests with heavy mocking are often harder to write than system-level tests, why the "TDD takes too long" complaint usually comes from testing at the wrong level, and why old rules about test speed no longer hold up on…

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.…