Tech League is a podcast by engineers who've been around long enough to know when something is genuinely useful and when it's just hype. Hosted by Toby Sears and Krisztian Fisher, two senior engineers with decades of experience across startups, scale-ups and enterprise, each episode tackles a real topic: architecture decisions, career growth, the tools everyone's using, and the mistakes nobody talks about.
No sponsored segments. No thought leadership waffle. Just two people who've shipped software, run teams and broken production, telling you what they actually think.
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into EuroStack, an industry-led lobby initiative pushing for European digital sovereignty. Krisztian breaks down what EuroStack is, what it proposes, and why it matters now. They cover the scale of Europe's dependency on non-European tech (260 billion euros per year flowing out), what it actually means to be a "European" company, how public procurement could bootstrap a European tech ecosystem, and why trust in US hyperscalers has finally broken. They also explore the companion site euro-stach.com, a directory of 1620+ European alternatives across 64 categories.
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian welcome their first proper guest: Alan Richardson, a 30-year software veteran and testing specialist known as Evil Tester. They dig into testing in the AI era: how to test AI-generated code, whether TDD still makes sense with AI, why self-healing tests are a red flag, and how AI is opening up security and adversarial testing. Alan makes the case for architecture-first development as the key to getting good test output from AI agents.
0:00 Introduction and guest intro: Alan Richardson (eviltester.com)
2:00 Why testing matters more in the AI code generation era
5:30 Architecture-first: good code leads to good tests
10:00 Does TDD work with AI? Why it mostly doesn't
14:30 Playwright and UI tests: the abstraction problem
23:00 Information theory and what testing actually is
27:00 Adversarial AI testing: using AI to exploit your own CVEs
#16 Bunny CDN
Season 1 · Episode 16
Friday, March 20, 2026 • Duration 34:53
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian continue their EU cloud deep dive with a hands-on look at Bunny CDN (bunny.net). Toby used it to launch the new TechLeague podcast website on a static Astro site in under 10 minutes, with Terraform infrastructure, built-in DNS, automatic SSL, and GitHub Actions deployment. They cover the full product offering including CDN, object storage, video streaming with free transcoding, edge scripts, magic containers, and BunnyShield security. They also touch on Tangled.sh, a Helsinki-based distributed git platform built on the AT Protocol that recently raised 3 million euros.
7:00 Company background: Slovenian, EU-based, 120+ PoPs globally
#15 Agentic Engineering
Friday, March 13, 2026 • Duration 01:01:57
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian share their hands-on experiment building a real group management app using Claude Code and agentic engineering. Toby spent roughly a month's worth of hours prompting Claude to build a cross-platform mobile and web app with Expo, a Node/Express API, Postgres on Scaleway, Hanko authentication and Terraform infrastructure — all without looking at the code. They discuss what worked surprisingly well, what fell apart, the token costs, how agentic engineering compares to managing juniors, and what they would do differently next time.
5:50 How the initial prompt and brainstorming worked
7:45 Not looking at the code
9:05 Context7: giving Claude access to latest API docs
10:35 First pass results
12:46 API and database quality: better than expected
#14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway
Season 1 · Episode 14
Friday, February 27, 2026 • Duration 53:45
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian kick off an ongoing series exploring the EU cloud and software stack. Following a previous episode on EU digital sovereignty, they have set themselves a challenge: build their side projects entirely on EU-based services. This episode covers hands-on experience with Forgejo for source code management, Scaleway as a cloud provider, and Hanko for authentication. They share honest feedback on what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are compared to the big American hyperscalers.
13:48 The gap between self-hosting and a managed service
#13 OpenClaw
Season 1 · Episode 13
Friday, February 20, 2026 • Duration 52:50
In this episode, Toby is joined by Xavier (Zavi) for a relaxed conversation about OpenClaw, an open-source project that lets you build a personalised, memory-aware AI assistant running on your own hardware. They share hands-on experiences setting it up with Telegram, Claude and local models, and discuss what makes it feel different from a standard chat interface: persistent memory in markdown files, heartbeat schedules, proactive check-ins, and a soul file that shapes personality over time. The conversation also covers security, prompt injection risks, the skill ecosystem, local model options, and the cultural questions around long-running AI companions.
1:40 Why does it feel different from a standard AI chat?
3:51 Setting it up: first impressions
4:45 Practical use cases: standups, workshop manuals, tractor parts
7:04 How the heartbeat and memory systems work
#12 DevOps and SecOps
Season 1 · Episode 12
Friday, February 13, 2026 • Duration 01:25:49
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a deep look at DevOps and SecOps: where the ideas came from, what they were supposed to mean, how they got warped by the industry, and what good looks like in practice. They cover the waterfall origins of ops as a separate team, the shift-left movement, the build-it-you-run-it principle, why DevOps as a job title makes no sense, platform engineering, and how security is going through the same transformation. They also cover common anti-patterns, DORA metrics, how to get buy-in for a transformation, and what it looks like when it works at scale.
1:57 The waterfall origins: why ops and dev were separate
5:45 Full stack and the rise of the developer-operator
8:40 Why the old model produced poor software quality
11:04 The move to agile and SaaS changed everything
14:15 DevOps as a term: what went wrong
#11 How to build great engineering organizations
Season 1 · Episode 11
Friday, February 6, 2026 • Duration 01:21:31
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into how to structure and scale engineering organisations effectively. Drawing on years of consulting experience, they cover autonomous teams, domain-driven ownership, reducing cross-team handovers, internal platform teams, Conway's Law, the dangers of gatekeeping in ops and security, why self-service tooling is non-negotiable, and what it looks like when organisations are run like a portfolio of internal startups. A practical guide for engineering leaders and anyone building out an eng org.
1:43 When does an organisation become the bottleneck?
3:39 Starting with the problem space: divide and conquer
6:22 Autonomous teams and moving away from top-down command
8:03 How to detect misalignment: count the handovers
9:15 Conway's Law: use it intentionally
12:27 Single ownership and full accountability per domain
#10 EU Digital Sovereignty
Season 1 · Episode 10
Friday, January 30, 2026 • Duration 54:45
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into EU digital sovereignty: why it matters now more than ever, the legal landscape around the EU Data Act and the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, and the very real risk of European economies being dependent on US-controlled cloud infrastructure. They cover the contradictions between US and EU data law, the limitations of US hyperscalers setting up European entities, the current state of European cloud providers, the opportunity for EU tech to leapfrog incumbents, and what engineers can do right now to contribute to a more sovereign European digital stack.
2:35 The conflict between US Cloud Act and EU GDPR
5:09 How the EU has responded: the Data Act explained
9:31 What the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework actually measures
21:02 Are US hyperscaler EU entities really sovereign?
27:01 The current state of European cloud providers
#9 Mistakes have been made
Season 1 · Episode 9
Friday, January 23, 2026 • Duration 01:07:22
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian drop the technical polish and get honest about the biggest mistakes of their careers. From wiping a month of startup data with a single wrong command, to nearly electrocuting himself pulling a chassis from a live rack, to a rounding error in financial software that ended up in front of the CFO — the stories are equal parts hilarious and painful. They also cover bad search-replaces on live Cassandra clusters, taking on management too early, a wrong-direction DD command, and accidentally generating a massive AWS bill. A candid episode about how experience is often just accumulated failure.
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