Practical CTO judgment in real time.
CTO Think Podcast follows Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess through the messy middle of technical leadership. The conversations move from Vue authentication and no-code tools to remote management, startup judging, workplace tradeoffs, and public accountability.
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CTO Think Podcast is built around practical conversations between Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess. The show sounds like two technical leaders thinking in public while real work keeps interrupting neat theory. A side project quiz app becomes a discussion about Vue, Firebase login state, history, and release readiness. A workplace tool in Power Apps becomes a way to talk about automation, human error, and where no-code platforms can actually help. The pacing is informal. The judgment is direct. Startup ideas are not treated as pitch-deck theater; they are tested against market research, personas, churn, privacy, friction, prototypes, and whether the founders know what they still have not proved. Management episodes carry the same concrete style. Team reorganizations, remote work, kids in the house, sales pressure, tech debt, and delivery mandates are treated as connected problems rather than separate lanes. The show is especially strong when it weighs imperfect choices. One conversation circles an employee raise during a sudden economic shock and the competing responsibilities around promises, profitability, and fairness. Another examines the move from coding manager to non-coding manager, including the frustration of living with old architectural choices while still shipping useful work. CTO Think also steps outside narrow software topics when the moment calls for it. Its episode on Black Lives Matter, white privilege, police violence, accountability, guilt, responsibility, and helping is blunt, reflective, and unresolved in the right way. The show does not package leadership as confidence. It presents it as repeated decisions under incomplete information. That makes the technology talk feel grounded. It is about code, but also about teams, money, institutions, and consequences. Listeners looking for polished frameworks may find it loose. Listeners who want experienced operators reasoning through live tradeoffs will find the texture useful.
Made for: For engineering managers, senior developers, founders, and product-minded technologists who prefer candid tradeoff analysis over polished leadership slogans. It especially fits listeners dealing with legacy systems, remote teams, side projects, and business pressure.
What sets it apart: The show connects small implementation details to broader leadership consequences without forcing tidy conclusions. A Firebase auth bug, a startup pitch, a pay decision, and a public accountability conversation all receive the same practical scrutiny.
A pragmatic podcast about leadership, product dev, and tech decisions between two recovering Chief Technology Officers.
A 'zero friction' pitch meets Don and Randy, and you're soon counting every tap.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A football quiz app turns Vue user status and Firebase authentication into a grounded live-debugging review.
The episode uses a small football rules quiz app to get at a familiar product-stage problem: the gap between a nearly finished Vue build and something people can return to without friction.
A CTO-minded review of police accountability, leadership orders, and the burden of judgment behind the badge.
This single-episode review frames police accountability as a question of leadership, judgment, and systems under pressure. Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess focus on what happens when an order like "clear the square under all circumstances" meets protesters on the street, then…
A candid, grounded look at engineering management when coding time gives way to staffing, delivery, and team energy.
This episode frames a career shift as a practical question: what does technical leadership keep when coding moves out of the center? Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess trace a reorganization that landed as quarantine began, the choice not to add another manager after revenues…
Startup judging turns practical when polished plans face questions about proof, market size, privacy, and user effort.
This Old App's follow-up on the Gator Big Idea competition treats startup judging as a test of what a polished plan can actually prove. The stronger pitches include a medical device for patients with lost upper-extremity function or total lock-in syndrome, using EEG and eye…
A sharp, measured look at how a business plan can reveal a startup team's judgment before the product is built.
The episode uses a business-plan competition as a way to judge whether would-be founders understand the market they hope to serve. The hosts focus on a team that has done competitor research, built four user personas with individual stories, and assumed 75 percent churn for a…
Power Platform news with practical static.
A Vue quiz app for high school and college football rules is already at about 0.9 release level, but authentication, history, and Netlify production auth errors are holding it back.
CTO Think spends most of its runtime on George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, police accountability, and what white male leaders should do with guilt and privilege.
Don Vandemark describes being moved from developer-manager work to a strictly managerial role after COVID-era revenue drops stopped a planned hire for a second team.
CTO Think Podcast's "Big Ideas Getting Planned, Part 2" compares two top Gator Big Idea competitors: a medical device for locked-in syndrome that combines EEG and eye tracking, and a coconut-opening tool that cores green and Thai coconuts.
The speaker is preparing to judge “The Big Idea” business-plan competition through the University of Florida Entrepreneurship Center and says 100 of 220 points are left to his own judgment.
Don Vandemark and Randy Burgess examine difficult management choices during the COVID-19 shutdown, including whether to delay a promised raise worth less than $50 per week.
Randy describes career stability as getting paid to "put shackles on the fun" when technical decisions require other people's approval.
Don Vandemark describes using Microsoft Power Automate and Power Apps to replace a Twilio-triggered tool and build a timesheet-entry app for his facility maintenance company.
Hosts discuss a friend's app launch using Flutter and Firebase, highlighting side project management.
A developer discusses migrating a chat client to Firebase functions and the challenges of revisiting old code.
Two developers discuss their experiences building a project called 'chasms' and compare Vue and React frameworks.
Hosts interview a senior software engineer about his background in tech meetups and coding dojos, setting up a discussion on software development and leadership.