Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Tech Careers Insights

Summary
In this episode, Erika talks with Salma Alam-Naylor about software engineering craft, programming best practices, and why the long game beats shortcuts. As AI coding tools proliferate and everyone chases speed, Salma digs into deliberate practice, sustainable career strategies, and building genuine expertise that compounds over time. Perfect for engineers feeling burnout from the hype cycle.

Links
Salma’s website: https://whitep4nth3r.com/

2021 Jamstack Jammies (Community Creator Award) https://2021.jamstackconf.com/jammies/

Fat bear week website: https://explore.org/fat-bear-week

Hell.com wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell.com

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

Tech careers don't need to mean grinding LeetCode. In episode 57, John Crickett — 30+ year engineer, Coding Challenges creator (90K+ subscribers) — makes the case that programmer productivity skyrockets when you build real tools instead. We dig into why your own Redis, Git, or shell beats practice problems, how Coding Challenges went from $17 domain to viral sensation (1,500 signups in one weekend), and what it means to level up through systems programming.

Links

Coding Challenges (Newsletter): https://codingchallenges.substack.com/
Coding Challenges Website: https://codingchallenges.fyi
From The Challenges - Git: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/from-the-challenges-git
Will AI Kill Coding?: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/will-ai-kill-coding
Using AI To Solve A Coding Challenge: https://codingchallenges.substack.com/p/using-ai-to-solve-a-coding-challenge
Tech Lead Journal #178 — John Crickett: https://techleadjournal.dev/episodes/178/
Confessions of a Data Guy — What Makes Great Engineers: https://www.confessionsofadataguy.com/decades-in-software-engineering-what-actually-makes-great-engineers-john-crickett/
Coding Chats Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/59GU7gzyK2RdIDVkhNS2nt
John Crickett on GitHub: https://github.com/johncrickett
John Crickett on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johncrickett
John Crickett on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johncrickett.bsky.social
John Crickett on X: https://x.com/johncrickett

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Bethany: https://trustyduck.dev
Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com

⁠Erika: ⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

Summary
Career growth through mentorship and work-life balance with Dave Schwantes, Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. Brittany and Dave explore why running toward meaningful work beats running from burnout, how mentorship became his primary form of engineering leverage, and what career happiness actually looks like across different life stages. From Instacart and Couchsurfing to building in-house bootcamps, Dave shares how sustainable engineering culture beats individual productivity hacks—and his take on how AI tools reshape what engineers really need to master.

Links
Dave's personal site: https://dinosaurseateverybody.com
Don't Break Prod (bite-sized career advice): https://dontbreakprod.com
Grave Danger (Dave's spooky ska band) on Bandcamp: https://gravedangerskath.bandcamp.com
Dave on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dorkrawk.bsky.social
Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschwantes
Dave on GitHub: https://github.com/dorkrawk
Web Dev Challenge Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2sEoZG8EIw
The Engineer Manager Pendulum article: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/

Host
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

Summary
Sabrina Goldfarb rejected the tech career playbook. No CS degree, bootcamp instead, teaching before big platforms. Now an engineer on GitHub's Copilot team and instructor at Frontend Masters, she shares how methodical planning, patience, and trust in the process led to career growth most thought impossible. If you're considering a non-traditional path in software engineering, this episode proves there's more than one way to build a meaningful tech career.

Links
Frontend Masters: Practical Prompt Engineering: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/prompt-engineering/
Sabrina Goldfarb on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sabrinagoldfarb

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Bethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28
Erika (Eggyhead): https://github.com/eggyhead

Summary
In this episode of the Overcommitted Podcast, hosts Bethany and Erika sit down with Warren Parad, CTO and co-founder of Authress, a user authorization API built for reliability. Warren shares how his team stayed fully operational during the massive AWS US-East-1 outage in October 2025 using DNS failover and multi-region strategies, and what the delayed alert logs taught them about timestamp trust.
The conversation kicks off with a candid discussion on AI agents and critical thinking, whether managing multiple coding agents is really multitasking or just micromanagement, and what the trade-offs mean for early-career engineers. Warren traces his reliability-first mindset back to his roots in electrical engineering and healthcare IT, where late-night on-call pages through Citrix proxies and hospital billing systems shaped how he thinks about uptime today. The group also explores what it really takes to build a Five Nines organization and how hiring practices need to match the reliability culture you want. The episode wraps up with a round of Never Have I Ever: SRE Edition, featuring Friday deploys gone wrong, blaming DNS, and discovering outages from customer tweets.

Links
Authress, Warren's company, user authorization API for software makers. The product he's building and wants to plug.
Adventures in DevOps Podcast, Warren's podcast, co-hosted with Will Button. 300+ episodes on DevOps, engineering leadership, and cloud architecture.
How When AWS Was Down, We Were Not, Authress's blog post detailing their resilience strategy during the October 2025 AWS outage. Referenced in Theme 1 questions.
So You Want to Build Your Own Authorization?, Warren's article on why authorization complexity creeps up on teams. Referenced in Theme 2 questions.
An Interview With Warren Parad, CIAM Weekly, March 2025 interview covering Warren's views on CIAM, FedCM, and the future of authentication.
FedCM, Browser Native Auth (Adventures in DevOps Episode), Adventures in DevOps episode diving into FedCM and why authentication should move from user-land to kernel-land.
Warren Parad on LinkedIn, Warren's LinkedIn profile.
Warren Parad on Bluesky, Warren's Bluesky profile.
Warren Parad on GitHub, Warren's GitHub profile, includes Authress repos, OpenAPI Explorer, and other open-source work.
Authress Knowledge Base, Technical articles from the Authress team on auth, security, and infrastructure.
Warren Parad, Personal Site, Warren's personal website.

Hosts
Overcommitted
Bethany Janos
Erika (Eggyhead)