PODCAST · technology
Tilt Engineering
by Tilt Finance
Welcome to Tilt Engineering, the podcast that brings you inside Tilt's dynamic engineering world. Designed for curious problem-solvers and passionate technologists, we share our journey of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.Each episode aligns with the content pillars of our engineering blog:Technical Deep Dives: Explore complex technical challenges we've faced and the solutions we've developed, enriched with practical examples, code snippets, and real-world applications.Engineering Culture and Team Spotlights: Get to know the people behind the code. We spotlight team members, share our unique practices, and reveal how we foster a collaborative and inclusive environment.Innovation and Problem Solving: Delve into our innovative approaches, from leveraging AI to implementing zero-downtime deployments, and learn about our decision-making processes and methodologies.Career Growth and Learning: Hear stories of personal and professional growth within our team, and g
Episodes
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(AI Gen) Going Cold Turkey
What happens when the Claude bill stops being subsidised? One Tilt engineer went cold turkey for a week, swapped Claude for an open-weight model running on his own laptop, and measured the fallout. Productivity dropped, but the more revealing loss was a job Claude had been quietly doing all along...
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(AI Gen) The Weak EM Will Become An NPC
AI is quietly turning some engineering managers into NPCs: useful, always available, and out of the plot the moment a real decision is needed. AI doesn't make EMs less necessary, it makes weak technical judgment more expensive. The surviving EM is an engineer who manages the socio-technical…
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(AI Gen) Teaching AI to Read the Room: How We Built an Automated Incident Classifier
After 18 months and ~800 incidents, our Rootly classification fields were mostly empty, no one fills in six drop downs at 2am. This post walks through how Tilt built an automated incident classifier: a scheduled .NET pipeline that scrapes the Slack channel, sends the conversation to Claude, and...
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(AI Gen) Adventures in the Modern Monolith: How do you keep a secret at Tilt?
When 50+ Azure App Service instances restart simultaneously and all reach for the same Key Vault, things break. This post walks through how Tilt built TiltSecret, a lazy-loading, strongly-typed, pipeline-validated system that eliminated throttling, prevented deployment failures, and gave…
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(AI Gen) AI DevOps: Building Intelligent Incident Response Systems
On-call shouldn’t start with archaeology. This post shows how to build an AI-powered incident response workflow that triggers on alert, pulls the runbook, generates and runs KQL, reviews recent commits and feature-flag changes, then posts a Slack-ready summary with evidence. The key is a hybrid...
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(AI Gen) Entropy Resistance
Tech has no shortage of meetings, but the 1:1 might be the last one where the truth still shows up. This piece is about protecting that space from sliding into performance theatre, noticing the subtle signs when trust is eroding, and creating enough room for the real stuff: fatigue, pride, hard...
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(AI Gen) Set Your AI Up for Success: How BDD Tickets Drive Quality Outcomes
Your AI is only as good as the ticket you hand it. We dig into how vague requirements sabotage both humans and machines, why Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria act as a clarity multiplier, and how the simple Given-When-Then structure turns fuzzy intent into something AI can...
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(AI Gen) How We Built a Context-Aware Review Bot That Transformed Our Code Reviews
Tilt (formerly Empower Finance) developed a context-aware review bot using Augment Code's context engine to transform code quality and velocity on its fintech platform. By leveraging Augment's deep codebase understanding of architectural patterns and team conventions, which distinguishes it from...
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(AI Gen) Beyond the Purchase Order: How We Actually Made AI Work for Engineering
Most companies think buying an AI tool is the hard part, but the real challenge is building the scaffolding that makes it useful. At Tilt, adoption only worked once engineers invested in documentation, rules, and workflows that embedded AI into daily practice. This post explores how that...
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(AI Gen) C# String Performance Considerations
In the era of blazing fast compute and memory it’s easy for the performance characteristics of System objects to feel like a thing of the past. However scale in the end, can defeat all our expectations. With Strings we need to be considerate because they are immutable! This means operations like...
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(AI Gen) Rapid-Fire iOS Releases
At Empower(Tilt), a data-driven fintech startup, our lifeblood is understanding our users and how they interact with our products. To do that effectively, we need to get new features and product updates into their hands fast. If you've ever worked in a startup, you know the pace is exhilarating,...
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(AI Gen) Removing Foreign Key Constraints against Hot Tables
A seemingly simple FK constraint drop turned into a high-stakes locking issue that threatened database stability. This post dives into the surprising chain reaction between two related tables and reveals a clever zero-downtime workaround using sp_rename. Perfect for engineers who love creative...
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(AI Gen) Embracing AI at Empower: Beyond Code Generation
Empower's engineering team is redefining what it means to use "the best tools" in a world where AI isn’t just a novelty, but a game changer. In his latest post, James Garrett shows how innovative AI tools are transforming on-call support, QA, and code reviews—taking the timeless principles of the...
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(AI Gen) EF Core N+1 Problem: Diagnosis and Solutions
Paul Gradie reveals how the notorious N+1 problem in EF Core—where seemingly simple data retrieval turns into a series of inefficient database trips—can be the hidden culprit behind performance woes. He breaks down how lazy loading and loops can lead to unnecessary queries, and shares actionable...
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(AI Gen) Building Bonds Beyond the Screen
Onsites are crucial for remote teams to build strong bonds and a thriving company culture. While remote work offers flexibility and efficiency, in-person gatherings provide unique opportunities to deepen relationships, foster collaboration, and align on shared goals. Empower, a fully remote...
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(AI Gen) Managing Disagreements as a Software Developer: Lessons from Think Again
Disagreements are a natural part of the software development process, whether you're debating architectural decisions, choosing the right tools, or prioritizing features. However, conflict doesn’t have to be a source of tension—handled with the right mindset, it can lead to better outcomes and...
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(AI Gen) How to Interview Your Interviewer: Finding the Right Culture Fit for You
Finding the right engineering job goes beyond matching your technical skillset—it’s about creating a balance between your professional ambitions and personal lifestyle. As James shares from his own experience at Empower, achieving long-term career satisfaction means pinpointing your...
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(AI Gen) Building Trust in Remote Teams
Drawing parallels between online gaming and modern work environments, this blog explores the challenges of fostering trust and collaboration in virtual teams. Discover actionable insights to accelerate team cohesion, improve communication, and harness the unquantified power of shared...
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(AI Gen) Technical Debt, Quality, and Trade-offs: Striking the Right Balance
Struggling to balance speed, quality, and technical debt in your software projects? Discover actionable strategies to manage trade-offs, prioritize critical decisions, and deliver reliable products faster. Dive into insights from Empower's CTO, Justin Ammerlaan, and learn how to leverage…
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(AI Gen) INT → BIGINT, a SQL Story
Running out of range on a primary key in SQL Server is a ticking time bomb, especially for high-traffic production tables. This article dives deep into the process of migrating a primary key column from INT to BIGINT, tackling challenges like constraints, clustered indexes, and data...
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(AI Gen) Three Strategies That’ll Accelerate your Path to Staff Engineer
Transitioning from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer is a defining moment in your career—one that demands more than just technical expertise. At this level, your ability to influence, strategize, and lead initiatives takes centre stage. But how do you stand out and pave your way to the next...
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(AI Gen) Measure Twice, Cut, and Have Fun
This blog post, written by James Garrett, a software developer at Empower, discusses the importance of metrics in software development and how Empower uses them to guide feature development, prevent premature optimisation, and build a fun and supportive work environment. It details how Empower's...
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(AI Gen) 6 Design Principles for Azure Pipelines
This article outlines six core principles for developing robust and maintainable Azure pipelines. The author, Paul Gradie, highlights the importance of decoupling build processes from deployment processes to improve efficiency and speed. He also emphasises designing pipelines at the job level to...
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(AI Gen) Let's Talk 1:1
This article from Empower Finance discusses the importance of 1:1 meetings between managers and their direct reports. The author, Dirko Swanepoel, outlines the benefits of regular 1:1s, including building trust, providing feedback, and resolving issues before they escalate. The article provides...
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(AI Gen) Server-driven UI from Scratch
The concept of Server-driven UI (SDUI), a technique that allows for more rapid iteration and deployment of mobile applications by shifting client-side logic to a remote server. The author, Hamish Cundy, details Empower's implementation of SDUI, using Kotlin and GraphQL to decouple the client app...
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(AI Gen) How Functional Programming Made Me A Better C# Developer
Adopting functional programming concepts can improve the quality of C# code. The author, James Garrett, highlights four key concepts – immutability, state management, LINQ, and functional programming in general – and explains how they can simplify complex logic and reduce bugs. The post uses...
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(AI Gen) Modeling World-Class Delivery Systems
This post from Empower Finance’s blog discusses a conceptual model for optimising software delivery by decoupling the build and deployment processes. The author, Paul Gradie, explains how to create a “language” for automation through the stages of versioning, publishing, testing, and deploying.…
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(AI Gen) Introduction to Empowered Engineering
The Empowered Engineering Podcast aims to share the Empower Finance team's engineering journey and foster a culture of continuous learning by showcasing their innovative work and collaborative spirit. The podcast seeks to build a community of passionate problem-solvers and inspire talented...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Welcome to Tilt Engineering, the podcast that brings you inside Tilt's dynamic engineering world. Designed for curious problem-solvers and passionate technologists, we share our journey of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.Each episode aligns with the content pillars of our engineering blog:Technical Deep Dives: Explore complex technical challenges we've faced and the solutions we've developed, enriched with practical examples, code snippets, and real-world applications.Engineering Culture and Team Spotlights: Get to know the people behind the code. We spotlight team members, share our unique practices, and reveal how we foster a collaborative and inclusive environment.Innovation and Problem Solving: Delve into our innovative approaches, from leveraging AI to implementing zero-downtime deployments, and learn about our decision-making processes and methodologies.Career Growth and Learning: Hear stories of personal and professional growth within our team, and g
HOSTED BY
Tilt Finance
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Tilt Engineering have?
Tilt Engineering currently has 28 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Tilt Engineering about?
Welcome to Tilt Engineering, the podcast that brings you inside Tilt's dynamic engineering world. Designed for curious problem-solvers and passionate technologists, we share our journey of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.Each episode aligns with the content pillars of our...
How often does Tilt Engineering release new episodes?
Tilt Engineering has 28 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Tilt Engineering?
You can listen to Tilt Engineering on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Tilt Engineering?
Tilt Engineering is created and hosted by Tilt Finance.
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