What does it really mean to support developers in a world where the tools are getting smarter, the expectations are higher, and the human side of technology is easier to forget?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Frédéric Harper, Senior Developer Relations Manager at TinyMCE, for a thoughtful conversation about what it takes to serve developer communities with credibility, empathy, and long-term intent. With more than twenty years in the tech industry, Fred's career spans hands-on web development, open source advocacy, and senior DevRel roles at companies including Microsoft, Mozilla, Fitbit, and npm. That journey gives him a rare perspective on how developer needs have evolved, and where companies still get it wrong.

We explore how starting out as a full-time developer shaped Fred's approach to advocacy, grounding his work in real-world frustration rather than abstract messaging. He reflects on earning trust during challenging periods, including advocating for open source during an era when some communities viewed large tech companies with deep skepticism. Along the way, Fred shares how studying Buddhist philosophy has influenced how he shows up for developers today, helping him keep ego in check and focus on service rather than status.

The conversation also lifts the curtain on rich text editing, a capability most users take for granted but one that hides deep technical complexity. Fred explains why building a modern editing experience involves far more than formatting text, touching on collaboration, accessibility, security, and the growing expectations around AI-assisted workflows. It is a reminder that some of the most familiar parts of the web are also among the hardest to build well.

We then turn to developer relations itself, a role that is often misunderstood or measured through the wrong lens. Fred shares why DevRel should never be treated as a short-term sales function, how trust and community take time, and why authenticity matters more than volume. From open source responsibility to personal branding for developers, including lessons from his book published with Apress, Fred offers grounded advice on visibility, communication, and staying human in an increasingly automated industry.

As the episode closes, we reflect on burnout, boundaries, and inclusion, and why healthier communities lead to better products. For anyone building developer tools, managing technical communities, or trying to grow a career without losing themselves in the process, this conversation leaves a simple question hanging in the air: how do we build technology that supports people without forgetting the people behind the code?

Useful Links

• Connect with Frédéric Harper
• Learn More About TinyMCE

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

What does it really take to build a fintech company that quietly fixes one of the most frustrating problems SMEs face every day?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier, the Founder and CEO of iBanFirst, for a candid conversation about entrepreneurship, timing, and why cross-border payments have remained broken for so long.

Pierre-Antoine's story begins in London, where his early career as an FX trader felt like a compromise at the time, yet quietly gave him a front-row seat to inefficiencies most people accepted as normal. That experience would later shape two companies and a very clear point of view on how money should move across borders.

Pierre-Antoine walks through his first venture, Combeast.com, one of France's earliest FX brokerages for retail investors, and what he learned from selling it to Saxo Bank and staying on to run Western European operations. That chapter matters, because it exposed the gap between how sophisticated FX markets really are and how poorly SMEs are served when FX and payments are bundled together inside traditional banks. Out of that frustration, IbanFirst was born in 2016 with a simple idea: treat cross-border payments as a specialist discipline, not a side feature.

Today, IbanFirst serves more than 10,000 clients across Europe and processes over €2 billion in transactions every month. We dig into why growth has continued while many fintechs have slowed, from a product designed to be used daily, to proactive sales, to a new generation of CFOs and CEOs who expect the same clarity and speed at work that they get from consumer fintech tools.

Pierre-Antoine explains how real-time FX rates, payment tracking using SWIFT GPI, and multi-entity account management change the day-to-day reality for SMEs trading internationally.

We also talk about Brexit, and how being rooted in continental Europe created an unexpected opening. Pierre-Antoine shares why expanding into the UK, including the acquisition of Cornhill, made sense, and why London's payments ecosystem still stands apart in scale and depth. Along the way, he is refreshingly open about the heavy investment required in compliance, trust, and regulation, and why nearly a third of IbanFirst's team focuses on operations and oversight.

Looking ahead, Pierre-Antoine lays out a bold vision for the SME payments market, predicting a future where specialists replace banks in much the same way fintech reshaped consumer money transfers. As cross-border trade grows and currency volatility becomes a daily concern, his perspective raises an interesting question for anyone running an international business today:

if specialists already exist, why keep relying on systems that were never designed for how SMEs actually operate?

Useful Links:

• Connect with Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier
• Learn more about iBanFirst,

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

What happens when artificial intelligence moves faster than our ability to understand, verify, and trust it?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Alexander Feick from eSentire, a cybersecurity veteran who has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of complex systems, risk, and emerging technology. Alex leads eSentire Labs, where his team explores how new technologies can be secured before they quietly become load-bearing parts of modern business infrastructure.

Our conversation centers on a timely and uncomfortable reality. AI is being embedded into workflows, products, and decision-making systems at a pace most organizations are not prepared for.

Alex explains why many AI failures are not caused by malicious models or dramatic breaches, but by broken ownership, invisible dependencies, and a lack of ongoing verification. These are not technical glitches. They are organizational blind spots that quietly compound risk over time.

We also explore the ideas behind Alex's recently published book on trust and AI, which he made freely available due to the speed at which real-world AI failures were already overtaking theory.

From prompt injection and model drift to the dangers of treating non-deterministic systems as if they were predictable software, Alex shares why generative AI requires a fundamentally different security mindset. He draws a clear distinction between chatbot AI and embedded AI, and explains the moment where trust quietly shifts away from humans and into systems that cannot take accountability.

The discussion goes deeper into what trust actually means in an AI-driven organization. Alex argues that trust must be earned, measured, and monitored continuously, not assumed after a successful pilot. Verification becomes the real work, not generation, and leaders who fail to recognize that shift risk scaling errors faster than they can contain them. We also talk about why he turned his book into an AI advisor, what that experiment revealed about the limits of models, and why human responsibility cannot be automated away.

This is a grounded, practical conversation for leaders, technologists, and anyone deploying AI inside real organizations. If AI is becoming part of how decisions get made where you work, how confident are you that someone truly owns the outcome?

Useful Links

• Connect with Alexander Feick
• Learn more about eSentire

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

How much value do your developers actually get to deliver in a typical week, and how much of their time is quietly lost to meetings, context hunting, and process drag?

I'm joined by Phil Heijkoop, Global Practice Head of Developer Experience at Valiantys, for a conversation that cuts through the hype surrounding AI and asks a harder question about why so many engineering teams still struggle to see meaningful returns.

Phil argues that most organizations are only unlocking a small fraction of a developer's true contribution, not because of a lack of talent, but because process drag slowly squeezes out deep, focused work. AI, he explains, does not fix this by default. Without the right foundations in place, it simply accelerates the wrong work at scale.

We explore the long shadow cast by the "move fast and break things" mindset and why that philosophy becomes risky inside regulated, enterprise environments where resilience and trust matter more than speed alone. Phil shares what he sees when organizations chase shiny new tooling while ignoring technical debt, unclear standards, and fragile workflows.

From protecting uninterrupted time for deep work to automating manual friction points and setting shared guardrails, he outlines how teams can realistically unlock three to five times more output before AI even enters the picture. Only then, he says, does AI act as a multiplier rather than a source of chaos.

The conversation also digs into developer experience as a business lever, not a perk, and why leadership clarity, cultural trust, and consistent standards matter as much as tooling choices. We discuss the growing risks in the software supply chain, the sustainability of open source dependencies, and what recent high-profile retirements signal for enterprise teams that depend on them.

If AI is accelerating your organization in the wrong direction, what foundational changes would you need to make today to ensure it amplifies value instead of friction, and how honest are you willing to be about what is really slowing your teams down?

Useful Links

• Connect with Phil on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Phil's work
• Valiantys Website

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

What happens when the future of money stops being about speculation and starts being about people, ownership, and agency?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Dr. Friederike Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis, to unpack a conversation that goes far beyond crypto price cycles or technical hype. This is a thoughtful discussion about where blockchain is heading and, just as importantly, where it could go wrong if we are not paying attention.

Friederike has spent more than a decade building foundational infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, from smart wallets to decentralized exchanges and blockchain networks that quietly power large parts of Web3. But as she explains, the industry is now standing at a fork in the road.

One path leads to blockchain becoming a silent backend upgrade for banks and incumbents, improving efficiency while keeping power centralized. The other path is far more ambitious, using blockchain to return ownership, control, and financial agency to everyday people.

We talk about why financial infrastructure, despite working reasonably well for many of us in Europe, remains deeply inefficient, expensive, and exclusionary at a global level.

A major theme of this episode is usability. Friederike is clear that technology only matters if it improves real lives. She explains why early blockchain products asked too much of users and how that is now changing, with experiences that feel as simple as using a neobank or debit card while preserving true ownership under the hood.

The goal is not to make everyone a crypto expert, but to make financial tools that work seamlessly while remaining genuinely user-owned.

We also explore the darker possibilities. Like any powerful technology, blockchain can be used to empower or to control. Friederike does not shy away from the risks of surveillance, social scoring, and misuse, and she argues that the real battle ahead is cultural, not technical. Values like privacy, free expression, and personal agency need to be defended openly, or the technology will be shaped without public consent.

As we look toward 2026, this conversation offers a refreshing reminder that the future of money is still being written. The question is whether it will be owned by communities or quietly absorbed by the same institutions we already rely on.

After listening to this episode, where do you think that future should land, and what choices are you willing to make to influence it?

• Connect With Dr. Friederike Ernst
• Learn More about Gnosis

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

• Connect with Stuart on Linkedin
• Learn more about ABB

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

Useful Links:

• Connect with Emilio Tenuta
• Learn more Ecolab
• Follow Ecolab on Linkedin

Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Yuyu Zhang to unpack a shift that many developers can feel but struggle to articulate.

Yuyu's journey spans academic research at Georgia Tech, building recommendation systems that power TikTok and Douyin at global scale, and leading the Seed-Coder project at ByteDance, which reached state-of-the-art performance among open source code models earlier this year.

Today, he is part of Codeck, where the focus has moved beyond AI assistance toward autonomous coding agents that can plan, execute, and verify real engineering work.

Our conversation begins with a simple but revealing observation. Most AI coding tools still behave like smarter autocomplete. They help you type faster, but they do not own the work.

Yuyu explains why that distinction matters, especially for teams dealing with complex systems, tight deadlines, and constant interruptions. Autonomy, in his view, is not about replacing engineers. It is about giving them back their flow.

We explore Verdent, Codeck's autonomous coding agent, and Verdent Deck, the desktop environment designed to coordinate multiple agents in parallel. Instead of one AI reacting line by line inside an editor, these agents operate at the task level.

They plan work with the developer upfront, execute independently in safe environments, and validate their output before handing anything back. The result feels less like using a tool and more like managing a small engineering team.

Yuyu shares how parallel agents change both speed and predictability. One agent can implement a feature, another can write tests, and another can investigate logs, all without stepping on each other. Just as important, he walks through the safeguards that keep humans in control.

Explicit planning, permission boundaries, sandboxed execution, and clear, reviewable diffs are all designed to address the very real concerns engineering leaders have about letting autonomous systems near production code.

The discussion also turns personal. Having worked on some of the highest-scale systems in the world, Yuyu reflects on why developers lose momentum. It is rarely about raw ability. It is about constant context switching. His goal with Verdent is to preserve mental focus by offloading interruptions and letting engineers return to work with clarity rather than cognitive fatigue.

We close by looking ahead. The definition of a "good developer" is changing, just as it has many times before. AI is not ending programming. It is reshaping it, pushing human creativity, judgment, and design thinking to the foreground while machines handle the repetitive churn.

If autonomous coding agents are becoming colleagues rather than helpers, how comfortable are you with that future, and what would you want to stay firmly in human hands?