The Library

Aleks Rudzitis joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to make the case that the operational review is a human backstop that matters more as AI accelerates how fast teams ship. They discuss why a standing meeting holds where an asynchronous report tends to atrophy, why the review's authority comes from who's in the room rather than the meeting itself, and how the principle Aleks calls "human-driven infrastructure" persists through the shift to agents. Aleks closes on the concept of ‘creating space’: a good ops review exists to begin the right conversation rather than to review graphs for their own sake. He writes about reliability on his blog, Bits and Being. The opinions expressed in this podcast are his own.

July 2, 2026

In this episode of Braintrust, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex. Shawn has led operational excellence efforts at Microsoft, Uber, and SoFi, and brings a practitioner's playbook for how to actually run these weekly reviews, from automating red/green reports, including senior leadership, and engaging in relentless follow-through on action items.

June 18, 2026

Watch Fred Calvez (Senior Director of Product & Engineering Operations, Smartly) and Rachel Magasweran (Director, Product Operations, Staffbase) in conversation about what AI means for the people responsible for how engineering organizations plan, execute, and scale.

June 17, 2026

Anish Dhar's manifesto argues that AI-generated code has outpaced engineering organizations' ability to manage it, creating a new discipline called Engineering Operations. The piece positions Cortex as the platform for EngOps: the connective tissue between platform engineering, SRE, DevEx, and DevOps that turns operational excellence into a competitive advantage.

March 16, 2026

A pointed defense of "ops" as a term of pride, this article argues the industry's obsession with rebranding operations (DevOps, SRE, platform engineering) as anything but ops has eroded the craft and made most engineering orgs bad at it. The core thesis: dev vs. ops is a separation of concerns, not a hierarchy, and you can't build operational excellence while running away from the word.

January 19, 2026

Lauren Hamberg introduces engineering operations as a discipline within engineering management that focuses on the effective planning, execution, and optimization of engineering processes, systems, and resources.

May 13, 2025

Aaron Upright argues that engineering orgs are drowning in data and tools but lack the "nervous system" to connect them. He predicts 2025 is the year it goes mainstream, driven by metrics overload, budget constraints, and tool sprawl forcing orgs to extract more from existing teams rather than just hiring.

December 13, 2024

A practical breakdown of where EngOps ends and Product Ops begins, covering responsibilities, how they intersect at the SDLC and quarterly planning, and why both become critical as companies scale.

January 21, 2024