Podcast Kit
For hosts and producers: a bio to read on air, episodes David can carry, and questions that lead to stories rather than yes-or-no answers.
The guest
David Berube
Software developer, author, and founder. Berube Consulting (advisory) and Durable Programming (implementation).
Bio (read this on air)
David Berube co-founded Casting Frontier and served as its technical lead, architecting one of the world's largest casting platforms — 800,000+ actors, used by 45+ of the Fortune 100, from AstraZeneca to Walmart — through to its 2020 acquisition by category leader Talent Systems. He has written several books on software development, spoken at international conferences, and published articles distributed in 65+ countries. Today he gets called in when a system is too slow, too tangled, or too important to guess at.
One-line version
David Berube co-founded Casting Frontier, architected one of the world's largest casting platforms through to a 2020 acquisition, and now diagnoses and rescues large, complex software systems.
Episode angles
Episodes David can carry
The through-line is the part of software work that doesn’t commoditize: judgment under pressure, reading systems nobody fully understands, and decisions that are expensive to get wrong. Pick the one that fits your audience.
- 01
The engineering skills AI can’t touch
Audiences curious or anxious about what AI does to software careers.
AI can write a function. It can’t walk into a 500,000-line system that’s falling over in production and work out why. The skills that survive — reading unfamiliar systems, troubleshooting under load, telling a slow query from a schema problem — are senior human judgment, and they’re the least exposed corner of the market. A counterpoint to the “AI replaces developers” story, from someone who isn’t selling AI.
- 02
Changing a system you’re afraid to touch
Engineering managers and senior engineers who own legacy code.
The most valuable work often lives inside code already in production that the team is scared to change. The episode is the method: refactor without a rewrite, replace a load-bearing component while everything stays up, run old and new side by side until the new path is proven, keep every change reversible. A full rewrite is sometimes right, and David will say when, but it’s a bigger bet than people admit.
- 03
Why your database got slow again
Technical shows with backend and data-heavy audiences.
Databases don’t get slow once. They get slow again as the company grows. Index, schema, query, or architecture: how to tell which problem you have before you start changing things. Concrete, full of war stories, and useful to a listener who is in the middle of an incident.
- 04
Fourteen years to an exit: the technical decisions that lasted
Founder and startup shows, and anyone who likes a build story.
David co-founded Casting Frontier in 2006 and was technical lead through its 2020 acquisition by the category leader. The long view: which early technical choices held up over 14 years, which he’d make differently, and what broke first as the platform scaled to 45+ of the Fortune 100.
- 05
Build vs. buy, told honestly
Founder and CTO shows where listeners make the tooling call.
The hidden costs on both sides of leaving a SaaS platform. When outgrowing a tool is a real signal to build, when it’s a trap, and what you give up either way. David will say “keep what you have” when that’s the answer.
Sample questions
Questions that work well
Short on prep time? Use these as written, or as a starting point.
- You say AI can write a function but can’t walk into a 500,000-line system that’s falling over and figure out why. Where exactly is the line?
- What’s the first thing you do when you’re handed a codebase nobody understands anymore?
- A database that’s “hit a wall” — what’s usually actually wrong? Index, schema, query, or architecture?
- You argue for changing production systems incrementally instead of rewriting. When is a full rewrite actually the right call?
- You built a platform to 800,000+ actors used by 45+ of the Fortune 100. What broke first as it scaled, and what surprised you?
- When does it make sense to leave a SaaS tool and build your own, and when is that a mistake people regret?
- What’s a technical decision you’ve seen companies get wrong in a way that was expensive and avoidable?
What to expect
An interview, not an ad
David won’t turn the episode into a sales pitch. A closing “where can people find you” is plenty.
Book David for your show
Email info@durableprogramming.com with your show, a likely recording window, and the angle that fits. Logos and more photos are in the press kit.