Tech League

#18 EuroStack

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian dive into EuroStack, an industry-led lobby initiative pushing for European digital sovereignty. Krisztian breaks down what EuroStack is, what it proposes, and why it matters now. They cover the scale of Europe's dependency on non-European tech (260 billion euros per year flowing out), what it actually means to be a "European" company, how public procurement could bootstrap a European tech ecosystem, and why trust in US hyperscalers has finally broken. They also explore the companion site euro-stach.com [https://euro-stack.com], a directory of 1620+ European alternatives across 64 categories. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ [https://techleaguepodcast.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/] Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP [https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP] Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:30 What is EuroStack and why Krisztian is excited about it 4:00 The scale of the problem: 260 billion euros/year leaving Europe 7:00 Europe as a fragmented market vs the US and China 10:00 The three pillars: Buy European, Sell European, Fund European 13:00 How public procurement can generate demand and bootstrap growth 17:00 The 1-to-10 ratio: every public euro attracting 10 private 20:00 Risk of government focus pulling cloud providers away from innovation 24:00 Startup acquisition culture: why European exits go to US companies 28:00 Defining "European": jurisdiction, control, supply chain, no extra-EU restrictions 33:00 AWS sovereign cloud: smoke and mirrors 37:00 Timeline to 2030 and the gradual transition approach 40:00 Geopolitical risk: Ukraine, Starlink, and the dependency reality 44:00 European openness vs American/Chinese protectionism 48:00 Why trust in US tech has finally broken 52:00 Opportunities for European engineers and companies 55:00 Wrap-up Technologies and Initiatives Mentioned EuroStack initiative: https://eurostack.eu/ [https://eurostack.eu/] Solution directory: https://euro-stack.com [https://euro-stack.com] Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com [https://www.scaleway.com] OVH Cloud - https://www.ovhcloud.com [https://www.ovhcloud.com]

#17 Testing in the AI era

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian welcome their first proper guest: Alan Richardson, a 30-year software veteran and testing specialist known as Evil Tester. They dig into testing in the AI era: how to test AI-generated code, whether TDD still makes sense with AI, why self-healing tests are a red flag, and how AI is opening up security and adversarial testing. Alan makes the case for architecture-first development as the key to getting good test output from AI agents. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ [https://techleaguepodcast.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/] Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP [https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP] Chapters 0:00 Introduction and guest intro: Alan Richardson (eviltester.com [http://eviltester.com]) 2:00 Why testing matters more in the AI code generation era 5:30 Architecture-first: good code leads to good tests 10:00 Does TDD work with AI? Why it mostly doesn't 14:30 Playwright and UI tests: the abstraction problem 23:00 Information theory and what testing actually is 27:00 Adversarial AI testing: using AI to exploit your own CVEs 33:00 Security scanning tools vs penetration testing with AI 38:30 Domain expertise still matters 43:00 Generalist vs specialist in the AI era 47:00 The junior developer pipeline problem 51:00 Will AI homogenise software and design? 54:00 Wrap-up Links: Evil Tester https://eviltester.com [https://eviltester.com] Playwright: https://playwright.dev/ [https://playwright.dev/] Agentic EQ: https://agentic-qe.dev/ [https://agentic-qe.dev/] Vite: https://vite.dev/ [https://vite.dev/] Claude : https://claude.com/ [https://claude.com/] Snyk: https://snyk.io/ [https://snyk.io/] Aikido: https://www.aikido.dev [https://www.aikido.dev] Hacker One: https://www.hackerone.com/ [https://www.hackerone.com/] Wiz: https://www.wiz.io/ [https://www.wiz.io/]

#16 Bunny CDN

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian continue their EU cloud deep dive with a hands-on look at Bunny CDN (bunny.net). Toby used it to launch the new TechLeague podcast website on a static Astro site in under 10 minutes, with Terraform infrastructure, built-in DNS, automatic SSL, and GitHub Actions deployment. They cover the full product offering including CDN, object storage, video streaming with free transcoding, edge scripts, magic containers, and BunnyShield security. They also touch on Tangled.sh, a Helsinki-based distributed git platform built on the AT Protocol that recently raised 3 million euros. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ [https://techleaguepodcast.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/] Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP [https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP] Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:21 Building the TechLeague website with Astro and Bunny CDN 2:57 Built-in DNS and automatic SSL 4:46 Deploying static files: FTP now, S3 compatibility coming 5:28 Sign-up experience and free credits 6:00 Standard vs Volume network tiers 7:00 Company background: Slovenian, EU-based, 120+ PoPs globally 8:28 Full product overview: storage, stream, DNS, edge, containers 10:18 Video streaming with free transcoding 11:00 Pricing: $0.01/GB storage, $0.01/GB egress 12:27 Limitations: not a full cloud provider 14:30 Magic containers: serverless with anycast IP 17:00 BunnyShield: WAF, DDoS protection, rate limiting 18:49 BunnyOptimizer: on-the-fly image resizing via URL params 19:46 SLA and EU sovereignty 22:00 Can it replace CloudFront? 23:00 getdeploying.com for comparing CDN providers 24:00 Could we host podcast videos on Bunny? 26:50 Reflection: EU cloud is better than we thought 28:05 Tangled.sh: a distributed EU git platform on the AT Protocol 31:14 Wrap-up Technologies Mentioned Bunny CDN - https://bunny.net?ref=v8cfwfmh3r [https://bunny.net?ref=v8cfwfmh3r] Astro - https://astro.build [https://astro.build] Terraform - https://www.terraform.io [https://www.terraform.io] Tangled.sh - https://tangled.sh [https://tangled.sh] getdeploying.com - https://getdeploying.com [https://getdeploying.com] Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com [https://www.scaleway.com] AT Protocol - https://atproto.com [https://atproto.com]

#15 Agentic Engineering

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian share their hands-on experiment building a real group management app using Claude Code and agentic engineering. Toby spent roughly a month's worth of hours prompting Claude to build a cross-platform mobile and web app with Expo, a Node/Express API, Postgres on Scaleway, Hanko authentication and Terraform infrastructure — all without looking at the code. They discuss what worked surprisingly well, what fell apart, the token costs, how agentic engineering compares to managing juniors, and what they would do differently next time. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ [https://techleaguepodcast.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/] Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP [https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP] Chapters 0:00 Introduction: the experiment 1:15 Why Expo for cross-platform mobile and web 2:54 The architect document approach 5:50 How the initial prompt and brainstorming worked 7:45 Not looking at the code 9:05 Context7: giving Claude access to latest API docs 10:35 First pass results 12:46 API and database quality: better than expected 14:40 UI issues: the weak spot 17:20 The bug list testing session 24:23 How sub-agents and parallel work played out 26:07 The Claude usage limit dark pattern 28:15 What it cost: 247 euros for roughly 100 hours of work 31:30 Code quality and lessons from the spec 38:48 The testing problem: agents writing tests for their own code 45:20 The 80/20 rule: great at the fun stuff, weak on the boring 50:30 SaaS disruption: custom software at commodity prices 57:25 How to build LLM memory and learning loops 1:00:25 Summary and what we would do differently Technologies Mentioned Claude Code - https://claude.ai/code [https://claude.ai/code] Expo - https://expo.dev [https://expo.dev] Scaleway - https://www.scaleway.com [https://www.scaleway.com] Hanko - https://hanko.io [https://hanko.io] Terraform - https://www.terraform.io [https://www.terraform.io] Playwright - https://playwright.dev [https://playwright.dev] Context7 - https://context7.com [https://context7.com] Node.js - https://nodejs.org [https://nodejs.org] PostgreSQL - https://www.postgresql.org [https://www.postgresql.org]

#14 EU Cloud Alternatives - Scaleway

In this episode, Toby and Krisztian kick off an ongoing series exploring the EU cloud and software stack. Following a previous episode on EU digital sovereignty, they have set themselves a challenge: build their side projects entirely on EU-based services. This episode covers hands-on experience with Forgejo for source code management, Scaleway as a cloud provider, and Hanko for authentication. They share honest feedback on what works, what doesn't, and where the gaps are compared to the big American hyperscalers. https://techleaguepodcast.com/ [https://techleaguepodcast.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/ [https://www.linkedin.com/company/techleague-podcast/] Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/ [https://www.instagram.com/techleaguepodcast/] Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-league/id1852602975] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP [https://open.spotify.com/show/1zx8UIe2EjawuVU3I31fdP] Chapters 0:00 Introduction and the EU sovereignty challenge 1:48 Finding EU alternatives: european-alternatives.eu [http://european-alternatives.eu] 3:47 Looking for a GitHub replacement 5:50 Forgejo: the open-source Gitea fork 8:27 What works in Forgejo and what doesn't 10:46 Hosting Forgejo on Scaleway 13:48 The gap between self-hosting and a managed service 15:18 Scaleway overview: regions, services and Terraform support 20:35 Scaleway serverless functions and containers 25:02 Service-to-service authentication 28:34 Deploying Forgejo, databases and runners on Scaleway 36:04 Logging, metrics and Cockpit observability 40:27 Scaleway regions: Amsterdam, Paris, Warsaw 42:25 IAM limitations and enterprise considerations 44:14 Hanko: EU-native user authentication 48:32 Comparing EU stack total cost vs AWS plus Datadog 50:05 What's next: OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak Technologies Mentioned - EU alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu [https://european-alternatives.eu] - Codeberg: https://codeberg.org [https://codeberg.org] - Forgejo: https://forgejo.org [https://forgejo.org] - Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/ [https://www.scaleway.com/en/] - OVHcloud: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/ [https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/] - UpCloud: https://upcloud.com [https://upcloud.com] - Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com [https://www.hetzner.com] - Elastx: https://elastx.se/en [https://elastx.se/en] - Hanko: https://www.hanko.io [https://www.hanko.io]