Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights

What do you do when the project you prepared for is no longer the priority? In our first Honest Answers segment, Erika and Bethany respond to a listener's question about a last-minute change of plans. They discuss how communication can make a change feel less arbitrary, why context switching leaves unfinished work on your mind, and how stopping notes, handoff documentation, and an AI-assisted morning routine can help you pick work back up. They also cover keeping a record of contributions when projects don't ship, separating your identity from your assigned work, and the loss of autonomy that can come with a reorg. The conversation turns to disagree and commit, the psychological safety it requires, and recognizing when it may be time to find a different team or role. To close, they translate some familiar corporate memos into plain language.

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev
Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead

Show Links
Molly Graham, Work Whiplash: https://mollyg.substack.com/p/work-whiplash
John Cutler, TBM 31/52: Why Does Our Strategy Keep Changing?: https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-3152-why-does-our-strategy-keep
ShiftMag, Do managers shift priorities to make engineers miserable?: https://shiftmag.dev/shifting-priorities-development-business-886/
UW Bothell, Sophie Leroy on attention residue and ready-to-resume plans: https://www.uwb.edu/news/2019/02/12/task-interrupted
Sophie Leroy's faculty page and research publications: https://www.uwb.edu/faculty/sophie-leroy/
Jellyfish, Mitigating Context Switching in Software Development: https://jellyfish.co/library/developer-productivity/context-switching/
Masicampo and Baumeister, Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024192
Hello Interview, Handling a project priority change: https://www.hellointerview.com/community/questions/project-priority-change/cmlj4w9bn01yq08adp1vva9ot
David Rock, A sense of autonomy is a primary reward or threat for the brain: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-at-work/200911/a-sense-of-autonomy-is-a-primary-reward-or-threat-for-the-brain
Bordia and colleagues, Uncertainty during organizational change: Is it all about control?: https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320444000128
Glavin and Schieman, Control in the Face of Uncertainty: https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272514546698
NASA, Managing the Trauma of a Terminated Project (PMHut reprint): https://pmhut.com/managing-the-trauma-of-a-terminated-project
Disagree and commit, Concept overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit
Amazon's leadership principles, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

What does Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey reveal about software engineering, career insights, and engineering culture? The Overcommitted hosts unpack the findings, discuss what they mean for developers, and share the trends they’re watching across the profession.

Links
Developer survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2026 
Ed from Polytoken: https://youtu.be/YrmR6EZ5Y1U

Hosts
Overcommitted: ⁠⁠https://overcommitted.dev⁠ 
⁠Bethany Janos: ⁠⁠https://www.trustyduck.dev
Brittany Ellich: ⁠https://brittanyellich.com 
Erika Eggemeyer: ⁠⁠https://github.com/eggyhead

Roxy Rodriguez-Becker taught middle school math, moved into the school library after earning a master's in library and information science, and then taught herself to code while raising three kids. She is now a developer community manager at Torc and the host of the She Ships podcast. In this episode she walks through what that transition actually required: the four AM club, waking up to study until she rushed out the door to a five AM gym session, working through 100Devs, and treating the job search as a numbers game with fifty to sixty outreach messages a week. She is candid about the burnout that followed and what it took to come back from it.The conversation also digs into networking as a skill rather than a personality trait. Roxy describes going to her first conference and barely speaking, then meeting her future colleagues at the second one, and shares tactics that work for socially awkward people. We also talk about the Tube Feed Tracker, the web app she built after watching ICU nurses struggle with feed rate math for her medically complex son. It grew to roughly four thousand users and now includes BMI based rate suggestions and a calorie tracker covering seventy verified formulas. Roxy closes with why career switchers cannot go it alone, and why community matters more than any single course. Plus a tiny internet troll lightning round covering course playback speeds, salmon shirtgate, and conference karaoke.

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev
Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com

Guest
Roxy Rodriguez-Becker: https://linktr.ee/roxyrodbeck
She Ships on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@roxyrodbeck
Roxy's blog: https://foxyroxy.dev/
Roxy on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roxyrodbeck.bsky.social
Roxy on X: https://twitter.com/RoxanaCodes
Roxy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roxana-rodriguez-becker

Links
Tube Feed Tracker: https://tubefeedrate.com/
About Tube Feed Tracker: https://tubefeedtracker-about.vercel.app
Torc: https://www.torc.dev/
100Devs: https://100devs.org/
Scrimba, Learn JavaScript: https://scrimba.com/learn-javascript-c0v

Closed That Tab is back. Erika finally read Richard Cook's How Complex Systems Fail, an 18 point paper Cook wrote with patient safety and medical systems in mind, but one that is frequently discussed in web development and software engineering since the foundational principles apply universally. Erika and Bethany work through what holds up in practice.

They cover the difference between normal failure and catastrophic failure, why knowing your system's baseline is its own skill, and why fixes are never free: every change adds complexity, knowledge gaps, and new risk. They get into safety as a set of defensive actions, including rate limiting, caching, rollback plans, feature flags, backups, playbooks, and watching for drift. Then they take on Cook's most contested claim, that root cause analysis is fundamentally wrong for complex systems, and where they agree and disagree. Bethany makes the case that incident reviews are still one of the best learning tools available, as long as psychological safety comes first.

The conversation also digs into hindsight bias and self-blame, the difference between taking accountability and taking blame, practitioners as both the risk and the defense in a system, why training and safety work are chronically undervalued, where AI helps during an incident and where you still need a human expert, practicing failure through game days and shadowing, and keeping on-call sustainable so you do not burn out the people holding the pager.

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Bethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.dev
Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead

Links
How Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/HowComplexSystemsFail.pdf
Thinking In Systems: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/thinking-in-systems/

Brian Okken, lead engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, creator of the pytest book and course, and author of the new book Lean TDD, joins us to rethink test driven development. His core argument: write tests at the highest level that still makes sense, so you can refactor, restructure, and hand work to an agent without rewriting your suite every time. We dig into why function-level tests with heavy mocking are often harder to write than system-level tests, why the "TDD takes too long" complaint usually comes from testing at the wrong level, and why old rules about test speed no longer hold up on modern machines and CI.
The conversation also covers the lean side of Lean TDD: what counts as waste in a test suite, when to delete tests you wrote on the way to a better one, and why a thousand tests is not automatically better than twenty. Brian shares how caring about the whole system rather than just his slice of it changed his career, how he works with AI agents while still reading every line they produce, the stigma around test engineering roles, and what he learned self-publishing a 100 page book and recording the audiobook himself. He closes with advice for newer engineers on large codebases and why everyone is winging it more than you think.

Lean TDD Book: https://leantdd.com/

Free sample chapter (chapter 1): https://leantdd.com/downloads/lean-tdd-chapter-1-sample.pdf

Brian’s Blog: https://pythontest.com/

Brian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/okken/

Brian on GitHub: https://github.com/okken

pytest course: https://pythontest.com/courses

Test & Code podcasthttps://pythontest.com/testandcode

Hosts
Overcommitted: https://overcommitted.dev
Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com
Erika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyhead