How tech leadership responds to mass outages can affect internal teams, as well as customer-facing operations.

Reliance on third-party hyperscalers can also mean C-suite tech leadership getting caught flatfooted when outages take down online resources. In late October, AWS and Microsoft Azure went dark temporarily, reminding many companies that they can be at the digital mercy of service providers.

In this week’s podcast, Sunil Peter, CISO and data privacy officer of Maveric Systems; and Pierre DeBois, CEO and founder of Zimana Analytics, discussed how they respond to such situations. They also tackled the latest “Questionable Ideas R Us” tabletop exercises.

What happens when companies have new releases on deck, and it is clear that the dev team is spread too thin?

Teams are always under pressure to deliver, but what if a project calls for overtime across the organization? What happens if those teams are pulled in competing directions?

When major projects are at stake, development teams may face a less-than-ideal circumstance: a race to meet deadlines with near-mandatory overtime.

Such “crunch time” can mean team members get pulled in different directions with little relief in sight until the project is done.

Under such circumstances, CTOs must prioritize where development teams focus, but what happens if other IT resources also need urgent support? New software and apps may need to be delivered, yet existing apps could still need attention.

In this episode of the podcast, Ken Ringdahl, CTO of Emburse, and Larissa Schneider, COO and co-founder of Unframe AI, discuss what happens when teams are spread thin and must deliver, and how they can work to avoid future periods of crunch time.

They also navigated the “Questionable Ideas ‘R’ Us” tabletop exercises, helping the fictional company address its crunch time issues.

Many organizations have at least explored the use of AI in coding, changing the game for professional developers and citizen developers alike. Not that long ago, the conversation focused on what no-code and low-code platforms meant for in-house development. Citizen developers, staffers with limited or no professional background in coding, could use these platforms to produce somewhat simplified apps.

That, in theory, left professional developers more time to focus on more robust, feature-rich software that required their skills.

Use of AI to code got off to a rocky start, with some companies accidentally releasing proprietary code into the wild. But now it seems AI is here to stay as a tool developers might use to streamline their work. Vibe coding – letting AI take much of the lead – takes it even further.

Where does that leave citizen developers, who may have been hitting their stride, and ecosystems that incorporated no-code/low-code platforms?

Krishna Kumar Tiwari, co-founder and CTO of Whilter AI; and Maruf Ahmed, CEO of Dexian, tackled these and other questions about the impact AI has on the citizen developer space.