Inside Home Depot's Edge Platform with Dillon TenBrink

Matt Klein: Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes, the show where we dig into the stories of the people shaping the future of app-based computing, with a special focus on mobile. I'm your host, Matt Klein, co-founder and CTO of bitdrift, as well as the founder of Envoy Proxy. Each episode we'll talk with engineers, founders, and technical leaders who've transformed the way their companies build and understand what's happening inside their systems. We'll dig into the challenges, the breakthroughs, the lessons learned, and we'll wrap it all up with their hottest takes. So let's dive in.

Today I'm thrilled to have with us Dillon TenBrink, a distinguished engineer at The Home Depot based in Austin, Texas. He spends his time building large-scale platforms, modernizing cloud and edge systems, and helping teams use AI and automation to work better at the scale and pace of retail. He's passionate about practical engineering, growing people, and turning complex systems into something teams enjoy using. Welcome, Dillon. Thank you for joining us.

Dillon TenBrink: Thanks so much, Matt. This has been a fantastic podcast to listen to, so I'm excited to be a guest on it today.

Matt Klein: I'm very excited to have you, especially because I want to learn what it means to do mobile and computing in the retail world. But before we get there, I'd love to hear about your career. How did you get started in computing, and how did you get to where you are today?

[00:01:26] FROM A CENTRAL CALIFORNIA FARM TO SILICON VALLEY

Dillon TenBrink: It's been a lifelong journey of curiosity, and honestly a wild ride. I'm not even sure I could account for it if you had written it into a story. I was a farm kid growing up in central California. Technology was not our jam, but for some reason these things called computers, at the dawn of personal computing, really spoke to me. I was always a tinkerer, whether it was the tractor out in the yard or the three-wheeler, so computers came naturally. Here was this experimental thing I could play with, where I could write code and create things out of nothing. In that, I found a calling.

When you ask how I got into a career, I've never really thought about it that way. I come to work every day genuinely excited to explore the space and learn something new. It's always been about continuous, lifelong learning for me. That's how I stumbled into the dot-com era. I was in the Bay Area at the right time and the right place in my career, worked at a couple of startups out there, and learned a ton about how the environment works, about venture capital, and about how startups actually run. As a 19-year-old growing up in Silicon Valley, it was amazing. Life-defining.

Matt Klein: What did your farm grow? Tell us a bit more about that.

Dillon TenBrink: Central California is a big agricultural belt, so we had everything from almonds to alfalfa to cows and horses on the land. Typical farm situation: my family and grandparents lived next door, big acres of wide open spaces, lots of room to sit out and dream and think.

Matt Klein: I realize we're getting wildly off topic, but in modern farming, how much technology is involved now? Is your family still in the farming business?

Dillon TenBrink: They're not, but if they were today, I have to imagine they'd need a CTO of some kind now. Technology has advanced so much that it's permeated everything we do, including farming.

Matt Klein: I was reading recently about modern tractors, how they're GPS-controlled, run AI, all these things. Pretty amazing. So you left the farm. Did you go to school in the Bay Area? Is that how you wound up there?

Dillon TenBrink: I didn't. I wound up there because of some really great mentors in my life who said, "Dillon, you have a passion for this. Come do this." At that time, I'd graduated high school and had the option to go to college or go work at a startup, and the startup was frankly more interesting to me. It's a great question when you ask how I got where I am in my career, because I actually never went to college. I've done all of this outside of school, through hard work, through coaches and mentors, and by surrounding myself with people who could educate me on the business, on technology, on how to build stories, on how to craft visions and get them into people's heads.

That's one of the things I try to share when I talk to junior engineers thinking about how to grow their careers. It's not necessarily about the diploma on the wall or the specific work you did in your twenties. It's about how you define yourself as a person day to day. My path didn't take me through college. It took me through startups, learning from some of the best and brightest in the industry at the time, both the great things and the terrible things about startups.

Matt Klein: You never know what the alternative universe would have been. I have felt many times that I should not have gone to college and instead should have done what you did. It's hard to know how my life would have been different, or the same. Looking back on a long career, do you think you made the right decision at that point?

Dillon TenBrink: I think so, and you're right that it's hard to judge. Coming out of high school, my path was going to be communications. Technology was an interesting hobby, but communications was the reasonable job. I wrote articles for the school paper, did play-by-play on the radio, was really involved in that world. I thought I'd get a communications degree and go into sports broadcasting or journalism of some sort, because I loved the storytelling aspect. But there was this other thing happening in the late '90s, and it was such an exciting place to be. At the startups I worked at, they fed us lunch and dinner, we slept on the floors, 60 people united on a singular mission. That collectiveness at that time in my life made a lot of sense.

[00:07:22] APPRENTICESHIP AND FINDING A NETWORKING MENTOR

Matt Klein: I'm curious, learning some of the computer science stuff on the job, do you feel that's more or less useful than learning it in school? I don't know, in some ways I feel like on the job is better.

Dillon TenBrink: It's interesting because we recently had an event here at my Austin building. One of the events I absolutely love is hosting two collegiate hackathons every year at our technology center. We host one called Battle of the Brains, an HSI version, a Hispanic Serving Institution version, and an HBCU, historically Black colleges and universities, version. We fill the building with incredibly talented college kids going for CS degrees, business degrees, finance degrees. They're always asking those of us who've been in the industry longer: what do I need to know? What am I not being taught in school about how the business operates or how to communicate with people? Having not taken the college path either, I see the questions they ask and I know they don't necessarily teach that in school, and I don't know that there's a clean solve for it. There's so much about this industry and about connecting with people that you just have to get your feet wet doing.

Matt Klein: I really do believe that our industry, at least from when you and I came up, is fundamentally an apprenticeship situation. You learn everything from other people, good and bad. Maybe in the age of AI that shifts, but that was our path. So you started out of high school at startups, and you can pick up some habits in those environments, some of them good, some of them bad. Tell us a bit about what it was like to have that as your first working experience, and then how you eventually went from startups to a very big corporation.

Dillon TenBrink: I think it taught me some qualities that I still live by today, and honestly maybe don't consciously think about as often as I should. The collectivism of having a singular goal meant everybody had to do things outside their job description. I was IT support, but I also wrote code sometimes, and I was sometimes the janitor grabbing a broom to clean up the work area. It really instilled this idea that if you see something, you take care of it. There isn't going to be someone whose specific job it is to come along and handle it. That created a lot of independent thinking, but also a lot of independent accountability. Everyone was counting on you to do your role, and there was no time for the kind of coaching structure you might see in a large enterprise.

That mindset stayed with me: nobody is coming along to take care of the thing you're looking at, so you need to jump on it. That gave me opportunities throughout my career to keep saying yes. Never close the door on an opportunity. When someone says, "I need help with something," the first answer is yes, even if you don't know how to do it. I will learn. I will find out.

Matt Klein: I could not agree more. When people ask me for advice, my number one thing is help solve problems and don't complain. There's a lot more to being successful, but just the willingness to jump in and solve problems goes a long way.

Dillon TenBrink: It does, and what you said about apprenticeship is right. That's how the industry grew. There was no generative AI you could turn to for coaching. There weren't even libraries of books written on the topics we were exploring. We were in startup space, inherently creating things that hadn't existed before, so there was nowhere to turn but to people who knew the job better.

One of the most formative experiences in my career was after one of our startups was acquired by Nortel Networks, a big player in the Bay Area at the time. They'd bought Bay Networks and other companies, and they bought us, and we were going through integration. One of the folks assigned to the integration team looked at this 20-year-old IT technician and said, "Do you know anything about networking?" I said no. He said, "I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about networking." For the next six months, he took me under his wing. I was the one on the CLI while he told me commands and explained why we did each thing. He stood in front of the whiteboard and diagrammed things out. I learned about BGP and LACP and the network routing protocols, how to set up routers. I got an education from a mentor that I probably couldn't have gotten from a book or a class, because it was real world and tangible. Something this person had done for 20 or 30 years, given back to a youngster like me. That has stayed with me. I always told myself, when I become an enterprise architect, I'll dedicate time to do that. And it's actually one of my favorite things about the role I have now.

[00:14:20] FROM DOT-COM BUST TO POWER UTILITIES

Matt Klein: So you were at startups, first doing IT things, then networking. Tell us about the path that got you to where you are now.

Dillon TenBrink: It's been more stumbling into things through curiosity. At that time, bigger economic forces were at play, so the dot-com bust came along, and I learned about how hard it was to hold onto those jobs. I'd never been unemployed in my life. I was always in demand as a kid who knew IT and technology, of course I'd have a job, and then I found myself in 2001 with no prospects, lining up with hundreds or even thousands of other candidates. I have a lot of empathy for folks who are looking right now, because it's tough.

Matt Klein: This industry is cyclical, and those of us who've lived through it a few times have seen these boom and bust cycles.

Dillon TenBrink: That got me into roaming around a bit, and I did contract work for a while, which is a typical path in our industry. I have a lot of appreciation for folks who do that work, because I was that guy for a while. I was the guy the company leaned on when they said, "We need staff augmentation with this skill. Go to a staffing agency and find somebody who knows this thing." I marginally knew it, they hired me, and I started learning about the business they were in. That business turned out to be a utility, a fascinating place to learn about legal and regulatory systems. I spent seven or eight years at the power company and learned about being regulated by eight different regulators, SOX, FERC, NERC, and everything else where you couldn't just sling changes into the environment. Changes had to be orchestrated, well-explained, and you had to have investment plans that made sense for the ratepayers.

That was a fantastic education for me as a technologist, because I started to understand there are real constraints on what we can do, and there are things you have to do the paperwork right on, plan right on. That's where I started learning about enterprise architecture and how we needed roadmaps that led to outcomes. You don't build a power plant overnight. You build it over a couple of years, and it's a 50-year investment. Learning about long-term planning, and about working effectively within regulatory and financial constraints, was another really formative experience.

[00:17:11] JOINING THE HOME DEPOT

Matt Klein: Take us to your current role. How did you wind up at Home Depot? A lot of people would aspire to your position, and given you didn't take the traditional college route, I think it's a great story. What was the path that got you here?

Dillon TenBrink: It's such a cool role. If you asked 19-year-old Dillon what he wanted to do in this technology world, I'm right where I wanted to be. I always imagined how I could affect big change in the world and in technology, and I feel like I'm in a marvelous position to do that. I'm thankful every day that I get to put on the orange apron for a brand that everyone loves and recognizes, and I can see our technology at work out in the stores. But the path to distinguished engineer, or to enterprise architect if that's your track, is really about innate curiosity, a level of intensity around the work, being persistent, and showing up every day thinking, I'm going to do this amazing thing.

We can all feel a little powerless at times, whether you're in a large company or a small one, and you think, "I've got my role, but there's all this red tape, there's a hierarchy, there's an org structure." I try to remind myself and others that we are just individuals working together to create something amazing for each other. When you boil it down to that simplicity, you can sit at your desk in the morning and ask, "Who do I need to connect with? Who are the humans I need to work with to make this amazing thing happen? I have an idea, I want to go bounce it off someone, I want to prototype something, I want to explore this new space." Those avenues are available to you regardless of what your title is on the org chart. Between that and really focusing on the humans involved and giving back, that's what set me up for where I am today.

[00:20:16] TECHNOLOGY AT THE PACE OF RETAIL

Matt Klein: Let's shift into your day-to-day focus. I've been surprised by how much technology permeates businesses I wouldn't have assumed. I'll admit I was naive about how much technology is involved in retail, food service, banking, so many vertical businesses. I know technology permeates Home Depot in many, many places. What are the biggest challenges you're facing right now, or the most impactful things you've been working on the past few years? Bonus points for anything in mobile or IoT, but no pressure to force it in.

Dillon TenBrink: There's a ton in the mobile and IoT space, so we'll touch on it. But what a time to be in this industry, and I'm not just talking about AI. When I started in this industry, IT and technology was treated as a cost center to the business. A toll of doing business. With the corner we're turning now, with new AI and agentic AI capabilities, with mobile in everyone's hands, with the interconnectedness we have, technology has exceeded any aspirational level of synchronicity with the business. We're now core to the business. We're seen as an equal partner. Our planning has to come together with the business planning. That's not just a Home Depot statement, that's a statement for everyone listening.

The shift in our industry has to move from talking about the really cool technology to talking about the really cool outcomes we're creating with technology. It's not enough to have the coolest AI agent on the block. How is it improving someone's life? How is it improving an interaction with a customer? We've never had this level of intensity and intimacy with the customer connection as we do right now, and that's something I'm excited about.

Matt Klein: You said something that resonates with me: we can spend a lot of time building technology for technology's sake, but it doesn't have any real business impact. Before we get into specifics, I'd imagine you spend a lot of time figuring out what will actually move real business needles. Some of those things can be difficult to measure impact on until you implement them, but implementation is costly. You're going to build some amazing new mobile app for doing inventory or whatever, and you have to spend a lot of engineering before you know whether it makes anyone's life better. In this physical world of retail, you can't A/B test something super quickly, you have to invest a lot up front. How do you think about what to invest in?

[00:24:39] CHOOSING WHERE TO INVEST

Dillon TenBrink: It's a really good question, because you would love to invest in every great idea out there, and there's an almost limitless bucket of them. But as a retailer, one of our core ideas is to deliver value to the customer. For Home Depot, that means being the lowest-cost provider in home improvement, so as you're building your home or improving it, you get the best products and the best value, and the best services on top of that. One challenge for us as technologists, especially in a distinguished engineer or enterprise architect role, is trying to figure out ahead of implementation how big an impact something is going to have.

There's been a really positive change in our industry through the introduction of product, UX, data science, and AI: these all give us signals that help us make the decision. We get feedback from product and UX teams on how to improve the customer experience and on what the customer really wants. Then on the technology side, we're figuring out how to make that real for the customer, the associate, or the person running that business process. And we have a tremendous selection of technology available, nearly limitless, whether you're a small company or a big one. One of the biggest jobs someone in this role can do is help reduce the solution space. If you tell me, "I want to develop a new agentic AI solution to interact with a customer," great, there are 30, 40, 50, 100 different solutions in the market to pick from. Part of the role is asking which ones align to our overall technology strategy best, which ones we have great partnerships with, which ones are cost-effective, and which fit our operating model. Once we narrow that solution space down, we can iterate quickly, prototype, validate assumptions, and bring product and UX along for the ride.

It's a great time in that we have so many tools available, but that also creates a lot of work in constraining the solution space to something practical and implementable cost-effectively.

Matt Klein: Even thinking about it as a customer, I could pitch you on the thing I want most from Home Depot or a store like it: I want to walk in the door, and I want the app to be a map for me and take me to where the thing is that I need. Because like a lot of people, the amount of times I've walked in circles looking for a particular thing is real. I'm sure you have a million ideas like that. If you had that, I'd go to Home Depot over Lowe's every single time, because it would make my life so much easier.

Dillon TenBrink: You are in luck, because our app is second to none and has that map. As someone who was working in the store a week ago, I have to credit this: one of the greatest things about the culture of Home Depot, and I've been here 15 years now, is that every quarter I work a day in the store. I was just down at my store, store 509 in Austin, on Friday. My number one tool in the store is the Home Depot app, with the map, the guide, the AI assistants saying, "Hey, you're looking at this, you might want to consider these other things for your project too." Massive kudos to the teams that put that together, because the experience is second to none.

When I started at Depot 15 years ago, I had no appreciation for how fast things move in consumer retail. I thought, "I've been at startups, I know fast, retail is going to be a walk in the park." I walked in the door and the technology here was moving incredibly fast. The pace of innovation and the demand on the customer side are relentless, exactly for the reason you just said: if I have a terrible experience, I'm going to the other guys across the street, and that sticks with me. Everything all of us in retail technology are doing is trying to delight the customer. That's the end goal with all the technology. We're behind the scenes wiring up everything we can to create an experience you want to come back to, whether you want to be in the stores or you want the thing delivered to your front door same-day, next-day.

[00:30:16] INTERCONNECTED RETAIL AND THE EDGE PLATFORM

Matt Klein: What are some of the bigger things you've been working on the past couple of years?

Dillon TenBrink: The past couple of years at Depot have been really interesting, because we've been a leader in what we call interconnected retail. The idea is that you as a customer have needs for the products we sell, but you may want them delivered to you, or delivered to your job site if you're a pro, or curbside pickup in front of the store. You may want to walk in and have it ready for you, or just browse the aisles and pluck something off. You could order online, on the mobile app, or while you're standing in the store. Your contractor could order it on your behalf. How do we transact with the customer and get them the right product at the right time from any entry point?

The technology involved in that is essentially marrying capabilities across merchandising, logistics, front-end store operations, checkout, payments processing, and online and digital. It's the ultimate integration challenge, where each area has really deep, specialty knowledge. I marvel at my partners in supply chain and logistics. They're incredible technologists, data scientists, and business practitioners of the logistics game. How do you get a product from a manufacturer onto a trailer, onto a train, into a supply warehouse, and then onto a shelf? It's magic. What we have to do on the technology side is figure out how to connect that to you trying to order that part.

One of the most satisfying things over the last several years has been putting in place the technologies, standards, and practices that allow that interconnected experience. It was a massive change for the organization, one we worked on intently as a team, from enterprise architecture down to a software engineer 1, so we could build reasoned connections between all these systems.

Matt Klein: From a technology perspective, what does that actually mean? Is it connecting systems that had been siloed, standardizing on a shared data model? What were the technical changes that actually happened? What were the big unlocks?

Dillon TenBrink: Part of the big unlock was a massive effort to bring disparate data sources together. We're not just a large retailer, we're an older retailer. We've been around 47 or 48 years at this point, so systems have grown up and evolved over time, usually within their own domains. Lots of innovation happens inside a domain, but we needed to integrate between domains. So a lot of the innovation was focused on bringing together master data sources and consolidating. Instead of having eight different ideas of who a customer was, we had one. Instead of a store-based catalog and an online-based catalog, we had a single catalog of SKU information, so we could sell anything, anytime, anywhere to you.

A lot of this was enabled through cloud. We were able to expand our presence in cloud and use the growth in that technology as it was maturing. My particular piece was building an edge platform I'm particularly proud of, and proud of the team that built it. It runs in the back of all of our stores, helps power those experiences, gets data out to the edge, and makes those experiences come to life in real time. But it comes down to standing back and looking at the overall business architecture and technology architecture together, then putting in place well-standardized APIs, bringing data sources together, consolidating around platform and a platform mindset. Those are all elements of transformational change.

Matt Klein: That sounds like a pretty gnarly data problem. I imagine it took a long time to figure out how to normalize schemas, IDs, all of that.

Dillon TenBrink: In this industry we always use the analogy of changing the tires while the car is going down the road. It's that, but at a level where 2,300 stores across North America all have to open and close at the right time. Another transformational effort within the organization, and huge credit to everyone involved, has been our focus on site reliability engineering. It's a practice that came out of the cloud, and as you and I came up through this industry, SRE went from being this interesting thing Google did to an industry-standard practice. As we adopted it at the enterprise level, we saw the flywheel: focus on reliability engineering as a skill and a discipline, and you see availability go up, security go up, and you understand your systems better. That's been a huge advancement for us over the last few years.

[00:37:14] MOBILE, HD PASS, AND STORE MODE

Matt Klein: You mentioned that beyond the data migration work, you'd also invested in mobile and IoT. I obviously see it from the customer app side and the associates walking around with apps in the stores. What else can you share about what you've been doing there?

Dillon TenBrink: Mobile is increasingly how customers connect with us. We're seeing massive growth in the digital channel, and whether it's Home Depot or other companies, everyone is seeing this. We all want to work off our phones. I want to work off my phone every day. Some of the really great innovations there have happened more recently. There was an announcement in the last month about how pros can now see the status of their deliveries through the app. That seems fairly benign, but it's a massive improvement. If you're a pro sitting out on a job site and you've asked for a product to be there at a particular time, we can show you on a map exactly where that truck is and how it's rolling out to you. It takes the anxiety level down. You have confidence that Home Depot is there for you and is delivering the product.

Then there's store mode in the app, which I mentioned when I was on my store day last week. That's my survival guide. That's my Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the universal knowledge of everything. Store mode came about because we saw we needed a focused experience for people while they're in the store, giving them what they were looking for: maps, item locations, and everything else.

Matt Klein: Now I'm going to go check out store mode this weekend, because I didn't even know it existed. I actually feel like when you walk in there should be a giant sign that says, "You are missing out on store mode. Download."

Dillon TenBrink: Store mode is fantastic. The mobility aspect is going to continue to evolve and impact more and more capabilities. One example: on the side, we do some renovation work on our home, like everybody does, so I have a Home Depot Pro Xtra account. One of the great things about that is we introduced a capability called HD Pass. I can send someone down to the store and they can pull up the pass on their phone that works for me, delegated the responsibility to say, "I'm picking this up." Scan the HD Pass, and I don't have to send my credit card or any payment details with them. They roll in, scan the pass, it goes on my account, and they walk out with the product they need to keep the job moving. Delivering for the pros through the app is a big focus of Depot, and you're seeing more and more innovations along those lines every day.

[00:40:23] MEASURING WHAT MATTERS AT THE EDGE

Matt Klein: This gets into the topic that's near and dear to my heart for obvious reasons. From the stores, from all these systems, the amount of data you must be generating is tremendous. In a perfect world, cost doesn't matter and you ingest everything and query it instantly, but that's not the world we live in. So a two-part question. One, how do you think about what you actually measure, and how do you make sure you're getting value out of the data you collect? Two, since you mentioned reliability, I'd love to understand what data you're collecting and how you think about reliability across some genuinely complicated distributed systems: servers in the stores, mobile endpoints, cloud systems, all of it.

Dillon TenBrink: I'll talk about the principles rather than getting into internals. Take the edge, since that's an area we've recently been investing in, and we've shared some details about the edge platform at recent conferences. It's a constrained environment, very analogous to a mobile experience or a system out in the field. If we had unlimited bandwidth and unlimited cost, we'd just sling all the metrics and all the tracing all the time, but that's not our reality. Bandwidth and capacity really need to be reserved for serving business capabilities and serving customers.

When I think about measurement, we're constantly on the search for how to measure what matters, not just measure all the things. That's how we think about the edge experience. We've put in place technology that lets us summarize at the edge and look for certain signals at the edge, so we're not sending full-fidelity traces and metrics all the way up the pipeline. We're sending the things that really matter as signals. When you have constraints, they force you to make tough decisions that often lead to a much more efficient outcome. I'd actually use the same principle in the cloud and the data center: only ship what really matters.

Matt Klein: What I find so interesting about this space is that in the cloud, because bandwidth is quote-unquote free and things are on all the time, we make it easy to generate copious amounts of data. In the edge world, there are real physical constraints that prevent that, so you have to learn a mindset that's different. It would be great if we could apply some of these lessons back to cloud systems, but I don't think we're there as an industry yet.

Dillon TenBrink: The metric has no value if it's just noise, if it's a metric no one ever looks at. It doesn't really matter where in the stack you're operating: edge, cloud, data center, far edge. If nobody's looking at the metric, why are we collecting it? It's really a discussion on value. It's the Marie Kondo test: does it bring you joy? Is it something you can look at, or an AI can look at, or an automated system can look at, that indicates some idea of health?

That gets to your other point about reliability. The metrics you're collecting need to be tuned either to some reliability outcome or some customer experience outcome. We need to collect X because it will help us solve Y for our customer. That's a universal idea. Solutions over technology. I need to collect these metrics because I'm trying to provide a better refresh rate on a mobile app. I need to collect this metric because I need to understand why my server is going down in the middle of the night. Working from the problem backwards, working from the outcome you're trying to get to, leads you to the metrics you actually need. If you don't have an answer for that, throw it away. Or in some cases we do on the edge, collect it and store it for seven days. If we find a use for it, great, it's there, but otherwise it gets groomed and cleaned up, and it's better for everybody.

Matt Klein: It's also true that when you're in firefighting mode, you need signal out of the noise. If you reduce the amount of noise at the ingest point, you're going to find the signal much more clearly. It's just hard to have that discipline. I realize I'm extremely biased here, but I think in the future, the more we can dynamically turn things off and on, the more flexibility we get.

[00:47:36] AI, JUNIOR ENGINEERS, AND WHAT'S NEXT

Matt Klein: As we wrap up, I'd love to pick your brain on what excites you most right now. You don't have to say AI, you can say AI, entirely up to you. What technology trends are you tracking that you think will be most impactful going forward?

Dillon TenBrink: I'll say AI, but maybe not for the reason you'd think, and hear me out. I was talking to a junior engineer a couple of weeks ago who started in the industry around 2021. We were creating a lot of software engineers at that time and everybody needed them. He came to me and said, "Dillon, are we cooked? Do I need to go find a different career? Is software engineering kind of done at this point because of AI?"

I thought deeply about it, and my conclusion, at least right now, is no. This is actually a fantastic time to be in the industry, one of the most amazing times I've had in my career. AI is enabling us to have a Rosetta Stone between English, or human language, and code. Code was always its own language. It was locked behind the mind of practitioners. You had to be the translator, taking business requirements, turning them into code, and creating a model of the world. Generative AI tools are unlocking the ability for someone who doesn't know code to create some tangible thing. It may not be the final thing, but even getting that connection so someone can say, "Can you show me what you're talking about? I have this idea, mock it up for me," and then take that to a technologist and say, "Can you help me scale this? Can you help me make it robust and reliable?" That's a fantastic thing for our industry.

It's going to drive a lot of innovation and a lot of positive thought. It's going to let our software engineering teams work on new ideas that connect more closely to outcomes than maybe ever before. I'm trying to figure out how to get these tools into more people's hands. Somebody sitting at their desk right now with the next 10-billion-dollar idea for our company, I want them empowered with the tools to turn that idea into something real, so that as a technology organization we can take it, scale it, and welcome this brand new thing into the world together.

Matt Klein: I'm with you. We could do a whole other podcast on this. There are a lot of open questions for me. I don't think the cost of these tools is real yet, so there's a cost aspect. I'm also worried about the amount of code we're generating right now, where the debt is going to come due in a few years as technical debt people don't understand. But I'm a daily user of these tools too, they're very useful. I think it's a great time to be in technology, and we'll need as many engineers as ever, honestly probably to clean up some of the mess we're making right now, but that's a whole separate topic.

Dillon TenBrink: Today's vibe code is tomorrow's legacy, and that's fine. That's part of the natural progression of this industry. As long as we recognize that and understand it's not the end times, it's the beginning of a new cycle, how exciting that we can finally unlock capabilities to say, "That crusty old system in the corner? It would have taken months to build an integration and put a safe API on top, and now we can do it much more quickly." I've unlocked an additional capability for the business, and we can move faster together. Is it perfect? No. It still needs a technologist to come in, polish it up, make it scalable, make it robust. But it gets us so much further down the road than we could have gotten on our own.

Matt Klein: Dillon, that's a great place to wrap it up. Thank you so much for joining. This was a great conversation.

Dillon TenBrink: Thank you so much, Matt.

Matt Klein: That's a wrap for this episode of Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes. Huge thanks to Dillon for joining and sharing his story. You can find this episode and all past ones on the bitdrift YouTube channel. If you had fun, drop us a review, tell your friends, or yell your favorite hot take into the void, and make sure to tag us. I'm Matt Klein, and I'll see you next time.