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 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.
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
#5 Principal Engineers
Season 1 · Episode 5
Friday, December 12, 2025 • Duration 01:10:42
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian take a deep dive into the world of principal engineers. Krisztian, himself a principal engineer, breaks down what the role actually involves: translating business strategy into technical direction, mentoring without micromanaging, building mental models of complex systems, and interpreting between engineering and senior leadership. They explore the difference between principal engineers and architects, the IC versus management career path, what makes a great versus a toxic principal engineer, how to interview for the role, and what aspiring engineers should focus on to get there.
1:51 Where does principal engineer sit in the career ladder?
3:30 IC versus management track: the fork in the road
6:05 Why the industry created the IC path
7:06 What does a principal engineer actually do day to day?
8:27 Principal engineer versus architect
10:48 Leading by influence, not authority
#4 Startup Engineering
Season 1 · Episode 4
Friday, December 5, 2025 • Duration 58:49
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian tackle the challenges of startup engineering, drawing on experience helping companies scale from nothing to tens of developers. They explore the two main startup archetypes: the bootstrapped zero-to-one prototype phase and the well-funded one-to-many scaling phase. Topics include picking the right tech stack, when to use vibe coding versus proper infrastructure, the danger of over-engineering early, unit economics, multi-account cloud environments, avoiding the trap of rebuilding your data centre in the cloud, and why unblocking other teams is always the highest-value activity.
2:07 Phase one: zero to one, get out the door fast
5:33 Defining MVP and avoiding scope creep
9:57 Zero to one vs one to many: different problems
13:42 Real startup examples: from vibe coding to Kubernetes
15:48 Security, compliance, ISO 27001, GDPR
#3 About vibe coding
Season 1 · Episode 3
Friday, November 28, 2025 • Duration 01:10:52
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian explore vibe coding — building software using AI tools and natural language rather than writing code directly. Krisztian shares hands-on experiments with Replit and Cursor, the hosts discuss the impressive speed of prototyping versus the frustration when things go wrong, and they dig into the hidden security risks of putting powerful development tools in the hands of non-technical users. The conversation also covers AI-assisted cyberattacks, supply chain vulnerabilities, and what the explosion of AI-generated apps means for the software industry.
3:54 Building a microservice diagramming tool with AI
6:55 Toby's experience with Lovable
10:09 Cursor vs Replit
14:00 Getting stuck in loops and losing flow state
23:16 The mainframe parallel: computing cycles and AI costs
#1 Microservices and monoliths
Season 1 · Episode 1
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 • Duration 01:04:44
In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dig into one of software engineering's most debated topics: monoliths versus microservices. They break down what each architecture actually means, where the industry went wrong by treating microservices as a default, and when a well-structured monolith is the smarter choice. The conversation covers real-world scaling challenges, infrastructure complexity, team organisation, Kubernetes fatigue, and the hidden costs of over-engineering early-stage products.
22:03 Infrastructure as code and service ownership
#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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