https://clearmeasure.com/developers/forums/

Michael Nygard advises consulting firms, private equity teams, CTOs, CEOs, and boards when they require senior technology judgment for limited-term, high-impact situations — including architecture assessment, platform rescue, cloud and data cost intervention, AI engineering enablement, technical diligence, divestiture and carve-out architecture, and operating-model redesign. Over a 35-year career, he has worked at the seam where people, processes, organizations, and the systems they build intersect. Most organizations treat those as separate problems. The hardest failures, and the most consequential wins, live precisely where they interact. That through-line is what Release It! is fundamentally about. The vocabulary it introduced — circuit breakers, bulkheads, stability patterns — is now standard in how the industry discusses reliability, and the book is widely cited as foundational to DevOps and cloud-native practice.

At Nubank, he led the Data Business Unit with over $300 million in annual spend, then served as Chief Architect with reach across 2,500 engineers while the customer base grew from 75 million to 125 million across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Results included cutting data-platform spend roughly 50% year-over-year, improving on-time data availability past 99%, building governance aligned with LGPD, GDPR, and CCPA, moving team engagement from the bottom decile to the 60th percentile, and rolling out AI coding tools to more than 90% of engineers without customer-visible quality regression.

At Sabre, as part of the CTO office, he helped lead development-practice modernization, GCP migration strategy, mainframe offload architecture, technical diligence, and divestiture architecture across thousands of applications and hundreds of products. He is most effective when the stakes are real, the system is sociotechnical, and the solution must hold across architecture, execution, economics, and organizational behavior.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtnygard/
Personal Blog & Website: https://www.michaelnygard.com
GitHub: https://github.com/mtnygard Twitter/X: https://x.com/mtnygard
Release It! (Pragmatic Programmers): https://pragprog.com/titles/mnee2/release-it-second-edition/
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know (O'Reilly): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/97-things-every/9780596800611/
Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6089.Michael_T_Nygard
LinkedIn Articles: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/mtnygard Presentations Archive: https://github.com/mtnygard/presentations/wiki

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Brady Gaster is a Principal PM Architect at GitHub, where he works on Apps, Agents, MIDI, and most notably, Squad — an open-source framework for orchestrating AI agent teams with GitHub Copilot. A longtime contributor to the .NET ecosystem, Brady previously served as Principal Program Manager on the .NET and Visual Studio team, leading work on SignalR, Orleans, microservices, and HTTP APIs.

He is the co-creator of Squad, which allows developers to define a team of specialized AI agents that collaborate on real engineering work.

When he's not building developer tools, Brady enjoys making music in his basement with synthesizers and guitars, and spending time with his two sons.

Website / Blog: https://bradygaster.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/bradygaster
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradygaster/
Twitter/X: @bradygaster

Previous Appearances on the Azure & DevOps Podcast:
Episode 102 — Brady Gaster on SignalR and More
Episode 221 — Brady Gaster: Orleans
Episode 295 — Brady Gaster: .NET Cloud Native
Episode 331 — Brady Gaster: Upgrading .NET apps

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https://clearmeasure.com/developers/forums/

Matthew Renze is an AI researcher, consultant, and author, and the founder of Renze Consulting, where he has trained over 500,000 software developers and IT professionals worldwide. He has delivered over 200 keynotes, presentations, and workshops on every continent — including Antarctica — for clients ranging from tech startups to Fortune 500 companies. A nine-time Microsoft MVP in AI, Matthew is also the president of the Renze AI Research Institute, where he studies how self-reflecting large language model agents improve problem-solving performance, trustworthiness, and value alignment. Most recently he was accepted into the Doctor of Engineering program at Johns Hopkins University, and he featured as an interview subject in the 2026 documentary "AI Everywhere."

Website: https://matthewrenze.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewrenze/
Twitter/X: @matthewrenze
GitHub: https://github.com/matthewrenze (via profile links)

Our OpenClaw agent ("Bob") - Bob's website: https://bobrenze.com/
- Bob's blog: https://blog.bobrenze.com/
- Bob's book: https://a.co/d/014kieQI
- Agent ranking site: https://agentfolio.io/

Stage 1 - Communicating in steps with an AI assistant
- ChatGPT - https://chatgpt.com/
- Claude Chat - https://claude.ai/

Stage 2 - Collaborating on tasks with an AI agent
- GitHub Copilot - https://github.com/features/copilot
- Claude Code - https://claude.com/product/claude-code
- OpenAI Codex - https://openai.com/codex/

Stage 3 - Supervising processes with an agentic workflow
- LangChain / LangGraph - https://www.langchain.com/langgraph
- Microsoft Agent Workflows - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/agent-framework/workflows/

Stage 4 - Managing a project with an autonomous agent
- OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/
- Hermes: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/

Stage 5 - Leading a mission with an autonomous agency
- PaperClip AI: https://paperclip.ing/

Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/

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Previous Appearances on the Azure & DevOps Podcast:

Episode 44 — Matthew Renze on Data Science for Developers https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/matthew-renze-on-data-science-for-developers-episode-44

Episode 220 — Matthew Renze: Developing Your AI Strategy https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/matthew-renze-developing-your-ai-strategy-episode-220

Episode 249 — Matthew Renze: AI Ethics https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/ai-ethics-with-matthew-renze-episode-249

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Tamir Dresher is a Principal Engineer at Microsoft Threat Protection, where he focuses on scaling AI agent systems and distributed architectures, bringing over 15 years of experience building large-scale distributed systems. He is the co-creator of Squad, an open-source multi-agent runtime for GitHub Copilot that orchestrates AI teams directly inside your repository. Tamir is the author of "Rx.NET in Action" (Manning) and "Hands-On Full-Stack Web Development with ASP.NET Core" (Packt), and has been a lecturer in Software Engineering at the Ruppin Academic Center since 2013. A prominent figure in the Israeli and international developer communities, he is a Microsoft MVP alumnus who speaks frequently at global conferences and writes actively on his blog at tamirdresher.com.

Website / Blog - https://www.tamirdresher.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamirdresher/
GitHub: https - //github.com/tamirdresher
Twitter/X - @tamir_dresher
Blog Post - https://www.tamirdresher.com/blog/2026/05/24/squad-watch-extensions-customer-success
Github - https://github.com/bradygaster/squad

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Chris Woodruff, or as his friends call him, Woody, is a software architect of over 25 years. Woody loves software engineering, especially allowing applications and services to communicate across networks and through Web APIs. He has received Microsoft MVP awards in SQL, Data and C# in the past, along with multiple years of being awarded the AWS Community Builder Award. He's a current board member of the .NET Foundation Woody lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he explores the many breweries in West Michigan and travels with his family. Woody is also a long-time bourbon fan and loves hunting for whiskey bottles.

Website - https://woodruff.dev/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswoodruff/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/cwoodruff
Simplicity-First Website - https://simplicity-first.dev/

Previous Appearances on the Azure & DevOps Podcast:

Episode 262 - Chris "Woody" Woodruff: Network Programming https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/chris-woody-woodruff-network-programming-episode-262

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Jonathan Tower — known to friends and colleagues simply as "J." — is the founding partner of Trailhead Technology Partners, a custom software consulting firm with employees across the U.S., Europe, and South America. A 12-time Microsoft MVP for .NET and a Telerik Developer Expert, J. brings nearly 25 years of industry experience spanning roles from senior architect to director of development. He was recently elected to the .NET Foundation Board of Directors for the 2026–2027 term and is the driving force behind Beer City Code, Western Michigan's largest professional software conference. J. is also a LinkedIn Learning course author and an active speaker at software conferences around the world; including being a speaker at the most recent .NET Conf.

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtower/
Website - https://www.jtower.com/
Trailhead Technology Website - https://trailheadtechnology.com/
Trailhead Technology Events - https://trailheadtechnology.com/events
Trailhead Technology Blogs - https://trailheadtechnology.com/blog
Beer City Code- https://beercitycode.com/

Previous Appearances on the Azure & DevOps Podcast:

Episode 371 - Software Leadership with Jonathan "J." Tower https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/software-leadership-with-jonathan-j-tower-episode-371
Episode 263 - J. Tower: Modernization Strangler Fig Pattern https://azuredevopspodcast.clear-measure.com/j-tower-modernization-strangler-fig-pattern-episode-263

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Ryan Riley is a Senior Lead Software Engineer at Quorum Software in Houston, TX, with deep expertise in functional programming, software architecture, and web API design across the .NET ecosystem. He is a Microsoft Visual F# MVP and longtime open-source contributor, best known for his work on projects such as Frank, WebApiContrib, and the Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) specification. Ryan leads the Community for F# virtual user group and is an active blogger, having recently published a thought-provoking piece in March 2026 examining AI-assisted spec-driven development and its relationship to Agile and historical software practices. He brings a thoughtful, systems-level perspective to software engineering leadership, mentoring, and team-building that spans front-end UX through back-end distributed applications.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley/
GitHub: https://github.com/panesofglass
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/panesofglass

Previous Appearances on the Azure & DevOps Podcast:

Ryan Riley: Leading a Software Engineering Team - Episode 316 (September 23, 2024)

The Power of 10 Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Developing_Safety-Critical_CodeDevelopment Process using AI

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