The Hallway Track

Software engineering is getting weirder by the week. AI is reshaping how teams work, processes are breaking, and org tension is real - and the best lessons aren't coming from keynote stages or polished LinkedIn posts. The Hallway Track is a podcast for engineering leaders who are building teams, navigating complexity, and looking for ideas that sound like the world they actually live in. Real stories from real teams. No recycled FAANG playbooks. Just honest conversations with the people in the trenches - about what's changing, what's breaking, and what's actually working today. Hosted by Chris Vannoy, founder of Axiomatic Consulting and a 20-year veteran of software teams at startups, agencies, and B2B SaaS companies. New episodes every other week. Connect with Chris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvannoy/ Learn more about Axiomatic: https://getaxiomatic.com/

The Hallway Track is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 6 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts The Hallway Track, a business show with 6 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #5

  Why People With Taste Are Exploding With AI

  Aug 26, 202651 minS0

  <p>Most engineering teams think AI closes gaps. It just makes the existing ones move faster.</p><p>John Nunemaker co-founded Box Out Sports and Very Good Software (Fireside), and created the open source gems HTTParty and Flipper, tools quietly running inside a huge share of Ruby applications, including this show's own.</p><p><br>John put it plainly: "Everyone who has taste, those are the people I'm seeing explode with AI the most."</p><p>We get into why John gave up on focus years ago and gets more done because of it, the scaling crisis that accidentally created...

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  Episode #4

  Miles Sterrett of CareerPlug on Measuring Engineering With AI

  Aug 4, 202642 minS0

  <p>What's the one number that actually proves your engineering team is healthy? Most leaders want something as clean as a sales quota. Most engineering leaders know it isn't that simple.</p><p>Miles Sterrett, Director of Engineering at CareerPlug, an HR platform for franchise businesses built on a codebase pushing 14 years old, built his own answer after hearing that question one too many times.</p><p><br>He and Chris get into the two metrics that actually matter (throughput, and a weighted bug backlog he calls "bug pain score"), the one rule that keeps both from being gamed...

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  Episode #3

  When AI makes code cheap, knowing what not to build is the job

  Jul 21, 202640 minS0

  <p>When code is cheap, the hard part isn't building - it's deciding what's worth building, and trusting yourself to recover when something breaks.</p><p><br>Sam Smith leads product and engineering at Motion, where a team of three-and-a-half people ships compliance software for college athletics. AI didn't make his job easier; it moved the bottleneck. The constraint used to be how fast you could write code. Now you can build almost anything in a week, which makes restraint, not speed, the skill that separates good engineering orgs from chaotic ones.</p><p>In this conversation, Sam and Chris...

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  Episode #2

  Your Job Was Never to Write Software

  Jul 7, 202637 minS0

  <p>Your job was never to write software.</p><p><br>Matt Brown, CTO at Opendate, has spent his career moving between 50-person startups and orgs the size of Salesforce, and what he's learned is that engineering value has always lived somewhere other than the code itself. AI just made that impossible to ignore.</p><p>In this episode, Matt and Chris get into how influence and political capital work in inverse proportion to headcount, why constraints make engineers better rather than more limited, and what the job actually becomes once the machine is writing the code.</p><p>Highlights<...

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  Episode #1

  Boring Code, High Trust, Twelve Deploys a Day

  Jun 23, 202642 minS0

  <p>You've added the retros. The sprint gates. The review cycles. And somewhere along the way, your team stopped shipping and started managing the process you built to help them ship.</p><p>Patrick Byrne, VP of Engineering at Dribbble, has spent over a decade running a top-1,000 site on a majestic Rails monolith with a lean team of six. He's lived every one of those cycles of process expansion and contraction too.</p><p>Here's what he figured out:</p>Process creep is invisible until it isn't. Build teams safe enough to say so before it's too late.Green...

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