I’m thrilled to share that the first season of Swimm’s podcast, Swimm Upstream, is now LIVE!
Over the past few months, I’ve been working with an extraordinary team of colleagues to produce Season 1 of Swimm Upstream – quality curated content for our ever-growing community of tech leaders and software engineers.
Producing Swimm Upstream – the backstory
I want to share a bit of the “why” – why Swimm Upstream?
At Swimm, we’re big fans of knowledge sharing with a focus on growth. My colleagues Oren Toledano, Gilad Navot, Omer Rosenbaum, and I started Swimm on September 18th, 2019 – just about four months before we heard about Covid 19 for the very first time. And so much of Swimm’s early beginnings were in quarantine – working remotely with a lot of coffee, but with so much focus and dedication as we designed and built Swimm – all while learning from our users.
This pandemic profoundly shifted the way the entire world continued to work, communicate, and interact. Moreover, even the tools we began leveraging changed too.
It was a transformative shift.
Like with so many other issues, Covid brought knowledge sharing in development teams to the front and center, just as we were working on ways to make it far better. We also realized that the conversations we were having with our colleagues on the phone, on zoom, over Whatsapp, all had shifted so much that it became clear that we wanted to share these fantastic conversations with inspiring colleagues in a podcast.
The first season of Swimm Upstream
Swimm Upstream is a podcast devoted to engineering team-leads and dev-tool enthusiasts. Because we believe in knowledge decentralization, Swimm is excited to share information and discuss anything related to developing teams. In each of the seven episodes, I explore these very topics with tech leaders from around the world.
The format for each episode is the same, and each episode runs for about 15 minutes. And I’ll share that the discussion is excellent, with so many essential takeaways for leaders in the industry.
Lots of golden nuggets.
Swimm Upstream’s season 1 lineup
I interviewed a fantastic lineup of guests in our first season – inspiring tech leaders including Ryan Atkins (Head of Engineering Operations at Asana), Pat Poels (SVP Engineering at Snyk), Tamar Bercovici (VP Engineering at Box), Yuval Perry (Head of Backend Engineering at Wix), Liran Tal (Director of Developer Advocacy at Synk), and Assaf Cohen (Senior Technical Instructor at Amazon Web Services).
Episode 1: Evangelizing mentorship within your dev teams with Ryan Atkins
In episode 1 of Swimm Upstream, I speak with Ryan Atkins about everything from recruiting, engineering onboarding, and ensuring that mentoring dev teams are culturally valued by organizations.
Episode 2: Clearing roadblocks for developers with Patrick Poels Part 1
In episode 2 of Swimm Upstream, I interview Patrick Poels about his experiences running over potholes and learning from those experiences to clear roadblocks for engineers and product managers.
Episode 3: Building change by creating new muscles with Patrick Poels Part 2
In episode 3 of Swimm Upstream, I continue my conversation with Patrick Poels in this special part 2 series. Pat discusses making changes in engineering organizations, communicating those changes, and creating a playbook for building autonomous teams.
Episode 4: Unboxing team knowledge sharing with Tamar Bercovici
In episode 4 of Swimm Upstream, I talk with Tamar Bercovici about the challenges of keeping engineering teams motivated, productive, pushing forward, and sharing knowledge as VP of Engineering at Box.
Episode 5: All about guilds and scaling with Yuval Perry
In episode 5 of Swimm Upstream, I chat with Yuval Perry about managing one of the leading guilds responsible for Wix’s backend. Yuval talks about making sure his team is on the “paved road” and how guilds help software organizations scale quickly and efficiently. .
Episode 6: Converting contributors to core members of OS projects with Liran Tal
In episode 6 of Swimm Upstream, I talk with Liran Tal about open source projects – inspiring education and empowering developers to increase awareness of application security.
Episode 7: Preparing for unforeseen security breaches with Assaf Cohen
In episode 7 of Swimm Upstream, I end the season with Assaf Cohen and learn about his experiences as a network engineer and a training manager and finding the right balance in creating guardrails, protocols, and best practices for security breaches.
Listen to Swimm Upstream here.
Season 2 of Swimm Upstream
We’re already planning our second season of Swimm Upstream.
So more to come.
