Episódios
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In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, 25 years in software architecture, former chief architect at Microsoft, startup CTO, and the creator of Residuality Theory, to get to the root cause of what senior architects actually do when they say they run on gut feeling. When Microsoft asked Barry to teach junior architects how he did his job, he discovered he couldn't describe his own methods, and neither could any of the senior architects he asked. That frustration turned into two books and a PhD in complexity science. We dig into why a random simulation of stress produces architectures that survive events nobody predicted, why equirements and risk management quietly limit the very thinking they were supposed to support, why our industry spreads ideas through charisma instead of scientific proof, and whether an LLM can ever produce an architecture. If you've ever been told "that's just experience," this episode puts words on it.
00:00 Cold Open: The Architect vs the Implementer
02:06 Guest Introduction: Structuring the Magic
03:00 Pure Mathematics: Help or Trap?
06:20 Think Less, Do More? The Industry's Thinking Problem
09:09 Why Software Isn't Developing as a Science
12:26 Pop Culture, Gurus, and the Hype Machine
15:09 "My Industry Is Low Stakes": Why Quality Still Pays
17:54 Two Books That Decide If You're an Architect
22:09 Creativity vs Craft: Naming the Magic
25:39 Residuality Theory: The Marbles Analogy
31:59 How to Start: The Naive Architecture and Random Stress
36:35 Attractor States: Why Stressing Works
39:30 All Architecture Is Stress
44:14 The Trouble with Non-Functional Requirements
48:49 Should Architects Become Domain Experts?
52:02 Does This Apply to Small Systems and Startups?
57:36 Answering the Critics: "We've Always Done This"
01:01:28 Stressor Analysis: Architecture Never Stops
01:04:57 Shared Language and Reflective Practice
01:07:04 Has AI Made Code Cheaper?
01:12:54 Can LLM Agents Do Residuality?
01:18:43 The Walk Around the Problem Is the Point
01:20:40 First Steps into Residuality
01:25:18 Book Recommendations
01:29:39 A Benign Pride: Fly Fishing at 34 Meters
01:32:01 Question for the Next Guest and Closing
Find Barry at:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-o-reilly-b924657/
• Barry’s first book: https://leanpub.com/residuality
• Barry’s second book: https://leanpub.com/architectsparadox
• The intro talk you should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MPUoiG6w_U
Find me (Nune) at:
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/
* Substack: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/
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In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Eric Lubow, a CTO who treats organizations like distributed systems, which means the root cause of a broken team is usually a design problem, not a people problem. Eric has spent more than 20 years building and repairing teams and platforms, from co-founding SimpleReach to running engineering through dozens of acquisitions at Thrasio, and he is now Chief Product and Technology Officer at Mapp. He is also a jiu-jitsu coach, and that shapes how he leads. We get to the root cause of what actually makes a team healthy, why becoming a manager means changing your definition of done, and why ceding control is the part nobody warns you about. We talk about leading AI agents the way you would lead a person, why silent heroes quietly turn into silent burnouts, and how to hire into a team instead of into a vacuum. Honest and specific, with none of the leadership-content platitudes, including the lonely parts of the job most people at the top never say out loud.
00:00 Introduction: What Makes a Healthy Team
03:05 Jiu-Jitsu, Languages, and a Healthy Ego
08:23 Martial Arts, Balance, and "Everything Is Maintenance"
13:12 Teams as Distributed Systems and Conway's Law
16:38 The IC-to-Manager Transition: Ceding Control
19:10 Delegation and a New Definition of Done
22:24 Giving Away Your Legos
23:49 Can You Learn to Be a Manager?
25:21 Don't Just Become the Opposite of Your Bad Manager
27:54 Leading AI Agents Like You Lead People
31:55 Will AI Replace People? Force Multiplier, Not Replacement
36:45 What Actually Makes a Team Healthy
38:56 Adoption Curves and Why Teams Mimic Leaders
42:06 A Culture of Sharing vs Shadow IT and Shadow AI
47:41 The Hero Problem: Silent Heroes, Silent Burnout
53:20 Burnout, Boundaries, and Trusting the Team
55:33 Hiring Into a Team, Not a Vacuum
1:02:15 The Loneliness of Leadership
1:06:48 Why "I Don't Know" Is a Sign of Strength
1:09:13 Book Recommendations: Sci-Fi and Leadership
1:13:49 What Eric Would Tell His Younger Self
1:15:45 The Most Benign Thing You're Proud Of
Find Eric at:
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eblubow/
• His blog: https://eric.lubow.org (which heavily influenced this episode)
• Beyond the Belt podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@beyondthebeltpod
Find me (Nune) at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/ Substack: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/ -
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In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Orel Zilberman, the solo builder behind WriteStack, the biggest tool out there for Substack creators. Orel spent 599 days shipping around ten products that made zero dollars, then picked one thing, stuck with it for six months, and turned it into a six-figure business. He has lived three versions of solo building in three years: before the current AI tooling, as it arrived, and now. We get to the root cause of what AI actually changed for one-person companies and what it didn't. Building got faster, but knowing what to build, and sticking with it long enough to find out if it works, is exactly as hard as it always was. Honest and unfiltered, including the messy parts most "become an entrepreneur" content leaves out.
00:00 Introduction to Root Cause and Solo Building
04:57 The Journey of Building WriteStack
06:42 What is SubStack and WriteStack?
09:28 "Why Bother" if the platform / big players will replace you
13:14 "Why bother" if AI will replace all SaaS
14:46 Knowing WHAT to Build and How to Distribute
18:30 Finding the Right Idea to Stick With
23:22 Learning from Opportunities and Failures
26:10 Navigating the Cold Start Problem
28:10 Leveraging AI Tools for Productivity
30:49 The Future of Software Engineering in the Age of AI
33:53 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
37:20 Being Better Than Most
38:49 Book Recommendations and Lifelong Learning
41:04 Reflections on Education and Career Choices
Find Orel at:
• His product - https://www.writestack.io/
• His journey - https://theindiepreneur.substack.com/
• Substack notes analysis - https://thewritingedge.substack.com/
• Substack profile - https://substack.com/@orelzilberman
Find me (Nune) at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/ Substack: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/ -
In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Ia Mg - seasoned engineer, former CS and digital literacy teacher at the Free University of Tbilisi, and the author of the blog Bits Complicated - to get to the root cause of learning itself, and whether the machines we've built are about to make us better at it or worse.
We dig into why everyone should understand technology even if they never write code, why domain knowledge has always mattered more than programmers wanted to admit, and what happens to learning when the answer is always one prompt away. Along the way: tech debt as a tax instead of a failure ("legacy as a service"), the "learning debt" that builds every time you accept a ready-made answer, why conversation-based coding is a process problem and not just an output problem, and why learning might be the most rebellious thing you can still do for yourself.
00:00 Guest intro and episode goal
02:45 Teaching Programming to Non-Coders
04:13 The Importance of Technology Literacy
09:41 AI and the Future of Programming
16:10 AI as a Teacher of Programming
22:16 Evaluating AI Responses in Learning
26:49 Concerns About the Next Generation
30:08 AI as an Abstraction in Programming
33:40 Conversational Development vs. Traditional Coding
37:34 Understanding Tech Debt
42:09 Learning Debt in the Age of AI
45:06 AI is the next social network?
46:47 Embracing the Chaos of Innovation
47:59 The Joy of Coding vs. AI
53:22 Navigating the Job Market in Tech
57:30 Book Recommendations
01:02:08 Summary of the Discussion
01:02:41 Learning as a Rebellious Act
01:04:09 Practical Recommendation on using AI consciously
01:06:21 Engineering is more than coding
Find Ia at:
Blog: https://iyamg.com/bitscomplicated/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ia-mgvdliashvili-0b459768/
Blog: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/
Find me (Nune) at: -
In this episode of Root Cause we sit down with Adrian Hornsby — former AWS Principal Engineer, founder of Resilium Labs, and author of Why We Still Suck at Resilience — to get to the root cause of what's quietly breaking inside engineering organizations as AI absorbs more of the thinking. We dig into the gap between how we imagine our systems work and how they actually work, why that gap is where all the real learning lives, and what happens to a team when the thinking itself gets delegated to something that sounds confident but doesn't know which walls are load-bearing.
00:00 Pre-show Banter and the Dog
01:08 Introduction of the Episode and the Guest
05:00 What's Wrong with the Name of the Show
07:35 The Importance of Learning from Successes
09:53 Defining Work as Imagined and Work as Done
13:43 Leading vs Being Hands-On
28:49 Learning From the Gap
30:39 Chaos Engineering
31:31 Load Testing
32:50 Game Days
34:00 ORRs - Operational Readiness reviews
34:41 Learning From the Incident
36:25 How AI has Affected the Gap
41:57 Navigating the Complexity of AI Delegation
43:45 Skill Atrophy and the New Generation of Engineers
47:12 Building Tools That Keep You Smart
52:18 We Need a Crisis to Slow Down
58:30 Building Intuition in AI-Driven Systems
01:03:17 The Human Touch in Technology
01:07:32 Facing Fears and Embracing Change
01:16:28 Question for the Next Guest and Closing
Adrian has generously decided to run a discount with the promocode “rootcausebynune” - for the first 30 copies you can buy his book for as low as 14.99 - that’s over 70% discount over the suggested price!
https://leanpub.com/whywestillsuckatresilience/c/rootcausebynune
Find Adrian at:
Resilium Labs: resiliumlabs.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhorn/ Substack: https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/Find me (Nune) at:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisabek/ Substack: https://www.thoughtfultechnologist.com/ -
In this very first episode of Root Cause we sit down with Marc Babin - an award-winning digital marketing professional and creator of over a dozen of podcasts - to get to the root cause of personal branding - why it matters more than ever and how a busy professional who doesn't like the empty talks can survive the content noise and still make themselves visible.
00:00 Show and Guest Introduction
02:54 The Value of Authentic Content in a Noisy World
06:18 AI and Content: Good Authentic Content is King
09:47 Reel-Thinking vs Podcast Creation
13:57 Creating Engaging Content in Niche Markets
18:14 Sales vs. Marketing: Building Trust Through Content
22:02 The Long Game in Content Creation
25:48 Personal Branding in the Digital Age
28:28 Setting Up for Success in Content Creation
33:05 Overcoming Perfectionism in Content Creation
38:27 Embracing the Silence of Early Content
43:29 Navigating Privacy and Online Presence
48:36 The Discomfort of Starting
53:14 The Root Causes of Expert Silence
57:53 How to Start Creating Content
01:00:30 Question for the Next Guest and Closing
Follow Marc Babin:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/babinmarc/
The Podcast Blueprint Website - https://www.yourpodcastblueprint.com/
The Podcast Blueprint LinkedIn Page - https://www.linkedin.com/company/podcast-blueprint/
Additional Material mentioned in the episode:
The Podcast Consumer 2025 report from Edison Research - https://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/The-Podcast-Consumer-2025-revised-FINAL.pdf
Read People Like a Book: How to Analyze, Understand, and Predict People’s Emotions, Thoughts, Intentions, and Behaviors By Patrick King - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56199402-read-people-like-a-book
