DevCast

DevCast is the podcast of Dev Technology Group, and its host, John Janek, introduces himself as the firm's Chief Technologist. That framing matters. This is a company show, and many of the people at the microphone are Janek's own colleagues: a member of the AI team, an application developer who helped lead the summer interns, an Agile coach and a coworker stepping into a new role. The firm's work runs across the federal government, so the talk keeps landing on the practical side of public-sector technology. Artificial intelligence runs through several conversations. Mariana Ritchie, from Dev's AI team, describes retrieval augmented generation as the point where large language models stopped being a novelty and started drawing on a chosen set of sources for a specific job. Janek also frames her as someone approaching the middle of her career, having joined the company as the pandemic began, so the conversation carries a career thread alongside the technical one. Abigail Haddad, a former member of an AI team at DHS, brings more caution. She uses AI to write code but draws a line: D3 JavaScript worries her less, since it is unlikely to invent data, while Python data processing needs something close to line-by-line review plus testing. She hopes AI leads to more code, not less. Tools that cannot be audited trouble her, and non-deterministic ones trouble her more. Tiffany Ceasor takes a wider view, laying out every seat on a typical product team, from UX and front end to data engineering, back end and machine learning, and noting she has held each of them. Cloud platforms come up just as readily. A group recap of AWS re:Invent, the Las Vegas conference the host says fills the entire Strip, lands on an argument about certification: exams that can be passed by memorizing answers, versus skills-based testing inside a simulated environment. The internship episode brings in Bethany, an application developer and intern lead, alongside members of the internship team whose projects touched Microsoft integrations, AWS and Ask Sage. Agile delivery rounds out the mix. In 'Kanban vs Scrum', returning guest Joyce Karschwab, the firm's Agile Evangelist and Coach, goes back to the Agile manifesto to explain how a short list of values turned into a spread of frameworks and interpretations. Janek's hosting is openly enthusiastic. He says more than once how excited he is, then gives guests room to think out loud, and several conversations close with him asking the guest to come back. The payoff is hearing practitioners describe how they actually use the tools and staff the teams. A listener curious about AI coding assistants has an obvious entry point in the Abigail Haddad conversation. One who runs delivery teams may prefer 'Kanban vs Scrum'.