Asynchronous & Unreliable Podcast

Asynchronous & Unreliable is a new podcast on the key concepts behind modern software engineering and AI, and features cheerful and friendly conversations with some of the most interesting folks in computing.

It's hosted by Anne Currie, co-author of O'Reilly's Building Green Software, The Cloud Native Attitude, and the science fiction Panopticon series.

Expect regular guests and lighthearted discussion of some of the most fascinating & sometimes challenging ideas in tech.

Join Anne & Guests

Tech veteran of over 30 years. Anne has worked on everything from distributed systems in the 90s (before the term was invented) to early ecommerce and multiple startups. She is a regular co-host of the Environment Variables podcast from the Green Software Foundation and a prolific writer of fiction that is really non-fiction and non-fiction that is actually fun to read.

Guests In 2026...

Liz Rice

Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, now part of Cisco, and original creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project. Liz is the author of Container Security, and Learning eBPF, both published by O'Reilly. She has previously served on the CNCF Governing Board, and on the Board of OpenUK. She was Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018.

Sam Newman

Author of the bestselling Building Microservices, published by O'Reilly, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.

An independent consultant based in London, working with clients all over the world, Sam works in the cloud and continuous delivery space, and the use of microservice architectures.

Matthew Skelton

One of the foremost leaders in modern organizational dynamics for fast flow of value. Co-author of the award-winning and ground-breaking book ‘Team Topologies’ (part of the IT Revolutions stable), Matthew brings a humane approach to organizational effectiveness.

Holly Cummins

Holly Cummins is a Senior Technical Staff Member on the IBM Quarkus team and a Java Champion. She gets worked up about sustainability, technical empathy, extreme programming, the importance of proper testing, and automating all the things.

Anil Madhavapeddy

Professor of Planetary Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Founding Director of the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

Ed Harrison

The podcast's goto cybersecurity and enterprise security expert. Information security, risk management, IT, and software development, developing in-house IT security policies, and security strategies.

Sarah Wells

Author of O’Reilly's Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational and Cultural Challenges.

Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on engineering effectiveness, microservices, incident management, platform engineering, optimising for flow and technical strategy. She has over 20 years’ experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and DevOps teams.

Gemma Harrison

VP of Engineering @ Lindus Health.

Energetic, driven and collaborative software engineering leader.

Passionate about inspiring and promoting women in tech. Gemma is the podcast's goto person on how AI can be successfully adopted by SMEs.

Charles Humble

Charles was InfoQ’s editor-in-chief from 2014 to 2020, and chief editor for Container Solutions from 2020 to 2023.

Author of Kubernetes at the Edge and The Developer’s Guide to Cloud Infrastructure, Eﬃciency, and Sustainability for The New Stack, and Professional Skills for Software Engineers for O’Reilly. He writes regularly for The New Stack and other publications, and hosts a series of podcasts for GOTO on Engineering Leadership.

Stuart Davidson

Stuart Davidson is a Director of Engineering at Skyscanner, where he works on the messy, fascinating challenge of scaling real-time travel pricing for a global audience. He cares about two things: building resilient distributed systems and building engineering organisations that don’t burn people out in the process.

Based in Edinburgh and collaborating across Europe and Asia, Stuart spends his time thinking about architecture, leadership, and how to make complex systems simpler — technically and organisationally.

Yanqing Cheng

Co-founder of Tollens.ai, an AI quality tooling startup building frameworks for reliable agentic coding. Her career spans over a decade working on high-performance distributed systems and software quality, from networking protocols and 5G core platforms to edge infrastructure at Microsoft Azure. As well as high quality software, she is passionate about psychological safety, neurodiversity inclusion, and developing her people. She co-founded Tollens after spending a wonderful year with her new baby daughter.

Team BGS

Sara Bergman, Anne Currie, and Sarah Hsu

Co-authors of Building Green Software & mainstays of the Hallway Track, where the three of them first met.

Sara improves software and systems efficiency at Microsoft and Sarah is a hands-on expert in all things ops and SRE

Sara Bergman

A backend engineer at Microsoft, specializing in optimizing hardware utilization across hundreds of cloud software teams. Her work focuses on reducing the need and waste in core computation, and increased utilization. She is an advocate for green software practices at Microsoft and externally, she co-authored Building Green Software, and was a finalist in the "Developer of the Year" category at the Nordic Women in Tech Awards 2023.

Niki Manoledaki

A senior Software Engineer currently on the Platform team at Grafana Labs where she helps developers and business partners monitor and reduce costs in the agentic era of cloud computing. Her technical expertise is in cloud sustainability and operational efficiency in Kubernetes and cloud environments. She is a leader in open source software as a CNCF Ambassador, a Green Software Foundation Champion, and an organizer of the Cloud Native Barcelona meetup. She has presented many talks on these topics, including a keynote at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and chaired the conference’s Platform Engineering track. She also collaborated with IBM and Red Hat to donate Kepler, a Prometheus exporter for energy monitoring in Kubernetes, to the CNCF.

Jon Berger

Another stalwart of our Hallway Track, a highly experienced engineering leader who has built, grown, and led organisations of hundreds of engineers that delivered world class, mission critical systems used across the globe. He achieved this by driving continuous training and education for his teams.

His career in technology has spanned every scale, from helping grow a tech company to capital exit to holding a senior role at Microsoft, where his engineering organisation launched Azure's first 5G offering.

Martin Davidson

Over 30 years building systems where failure costs millions — from Microsoft NetMeeting (the grandparent of Teams/Zoom) to Windows Terminal Server to a voicemail platform serving 100 million AT&T subscribers. That background in carrier-grade reliability is why he's suspicious of anyone who thinks AI means we can stop caring about engineering quality.

He now spends his time proving that AI-assisted development isn't just faster; it also opens the door to quality levels that were previously impractical. Comprehensive test suites, agent swarms running overnight, rapid integration of new tools and techniques. He's documented the journey through over 100 articles at 0x4D44.substack.com, which is either admirable dedication or a cry for help.

Jamie Dobson

Jamie is the co-founder and first chief executive of Container Solutions.

A first encounter with a BBC computer and BASIC at the age of nine launched his lifelong passion for programming and software development. Nowadays he focuses on helping executive teams to succeed with the cloud and cloud native, helping them to avoid classic mistakes.

He is the author of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines and the co-author of Cloud Native Transformation and (with Anne Currie) The Cloud Native Attitude.

Ian Mielle

CTO at Container Solutions, helping businesses migrate to modern technologies and ways of working

Author of 'Docker in Practice' et al, and teaches courses for O’Reilly.

[ed: Has a very short bio]

About Asynchronous & Unreliable

On Asynchronous & Unreliable podcast we'll talk about some of the most interesting ideas in software and software systems and how they're currently being applied.

We'll have Keynote Track episodes where we introduce big subjects with some of the world's leading experts in them and Hallway Track episodes with a focus on discussing them with real life practitioners. Both types of episode should be a lot of fun!

In Anne's opinion, the most important part of a conference is the hallway track. The talks give you a focus for your discussions but the discussions themselves are the important bit. The hallway at a conference is where you meet new people, hear ideas from folk like you, and expand your network and your knowledge. The hallway track is where Anne met almost all the speakers on this podcast.

It can be hard to know what to talk to strangers about but the things you just heard that inspired or interested you are great conversation starters. Or you could ask about what they've heard and enjoyed. Try to think of talks as a way to support your hallway track experience. A good conference or podcast is all about what happens when you are not in the room watching the speaker.

As a listener, please do write in with your own questions for the Hallway Track. (Email address coming).

Accompanying each episode will be a Google Doc of key points from the keynote, the hallway track, and the written in questions.

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