Engineering Excellence as a Journey: Platform Engineering, Culture, and Technical Leadership
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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Ganesh Datta about building excellent engineering organizations and treating platform engineering as a product.
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What Does Engineering Excellence Look Like in the Age of AI?
The “AI is coming for your job” headlines have been exhausting—especially if you’re a software engineer. But as Cortex.io founder Anish Dhar explains, engineering isn’t dying; it’s evolving. In this episode, Hannah sits down with Anish to unpack what engineering excellence actually means in 2025, why measuring developer productivity is still wildly misunderstood, and where AI coding tools fit into the real world of production-scale systems. Spoiler: you can’t vibe-code your way to a million users.
Anish draws from his time at Uber and Cortex to break down how engineering leaders can better align technical initiatives to business outcomes, adopt AI without sacrificing code quality, and avoid getting swept up in hype cycles that don’t serve the organization.
Code Story: Anish Dhar, Cortex
Anish Dhar grew up in the Bay Area, but now is located in New York. He felt lucky to be surrounded by technology, being in the Bay Area and having his Dad as a software engineer. His earliest exposure to tech was hacking his Wii - and at that point he was hooked. He eventually joined Uber and experienced many of the problems he is solving today. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and playing piano. He loves making music and attending shows to hear other artists, in particular EDM.
How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet
Ben and Ryan are joined by Cortex cofounders Anish Dhar, CEO, and Ganesh Datta, CTO. Cortex offers an internal developer portal that helps devs document and reinforce organizational best practices and improve developer productivity. The portal includes features like scorecards that incentivize developers to improve their work and AI-powered search to make finding information easier.
