Inside the 3rd largest Rails monolith in the world with Cisco Tech Lead Ed Gibbs

Distributed.

How do you drive change in large engineering teams?

In this episode of the Distributed podcast, host Jack Hannah talks with Ed Gibbs, Software Engineering Tech Lead at Cisco Meraki, about his journey from physics to software engineering and how he’s championed better development practices over the years. Ed shares insights on navigating remote work, driving incremental adoption of engineering improvements, and fostering collaboration in large-scale teams.

Ed also discusses the role of experimentation in engineering culture, the benefits of meandering syncs over traditional standups, and the challenges of balancing refactoring with delivery in a complex codebase.

Highlights:

• Why Ed Gibbs wears a fez every Friday and how it helps him succeed
• Lessons from scaling change across 1,000+ dev organizations
• The engineering rituals that help his teams excel, like meandering syncs and mobbing Mondays

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) – Kicking things off with Ed Gibbs

(01:03) – The origin story of Fez Friday and making remote work memorable

(07:04) – Inside Ed’s fully remote team setup at Cisco Meraki

(09:26) – The early days of TDD and what made it stick

(12:04) – Introducing CI and getting buy-in for testing

(17:16) – How to drive consensus across a 1000-engineer company

(23:46) – Team habits Ed is proud of, from Kanban to mobbing Mondays

(30:06) – What meandering syncs are and how they work

References:

Blog post on meandering syncs: Stand-Up Meetings Are Dead (and What to Do Instead)

Where to connect further:

Connect with Ed Gibbs on LinkedIn and his website

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Want to hear more? Check out distributed.fm

Connect with Jack Hannah