The Leanpub Podcast 🎙️ Feat. Matthew Hawthorne, Author of Push to Prod or Die Trying: High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos

Episode Details

In this episode of the Leanpub Podcast, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp interviews software engineer and consultant Matthew Hawthorne, author of Push to Prod or Die Trying: High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos.

They discuss Matthew’s journey through high-scale systems, life inside big tech, and why production incidents are the greatest teachers in engineering. Matthew explains the realities of outages, human error, systems design, and navigating organizational chaos. The conversation also explores writing candidly about tech culture, balancing transparency with discretion, and helping engineers grow through real-world failure..

This interview was recorded on November 13, 2025.

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About the Book

The world of software engineering is filled with challenges:

• Choosing problems to solve. How do you decide whether a problem is worth solving, or which problem to solve among many?
• Building for scale. How do you ensure that the systems you build can withstand the volume of traffic and data that they’ll encounter?
• Launching things in production. How do you launch new things with tight timelines, minimal risk, and maximal impact?
• Operating through chaos. How do you maximize uptime, comprehension, and sanity in an environment that relentlessly pushes you toward the opposite?
• Optimizing personal goals and team interactions. How do you balance pursuing your personal goals with supporting your colleagues while also enforcing sensible boundaries?

In Push To Prod Or Die Trying, veteran engineer Matthew Hawthorne discusses these topics through the lens of Neurafilm, a fictional San Francisco Bay Area tech company inspired by his real-world experiences at Netflix, Twitter, and other companies.

Split into 50 lessons across 8 chapters, you’ll learn about technical topics such as:

• HTTP traffic shaping.
• Multi-region failover.
• Building data pipelines and tooling for AI/ML personalization models.

You’ll also get a window into the day-to-day grind of working for a big tech company during the boom years, including:

• Dealing with overly ambitious colleagues.
• Battling burnout and severe work/life imbalances.
• Debugging an endless barrage of gruesome production incidents.

By the end of the book, you’ll have laughed, you’ll have cried, and you’ll have acquired a lengthy list of lessons and techniques to apply in your daily work.

About the Author

Matthew Hawthorne is an independent software engineer, consultant, and advisor.

His focus areas are distributed systems, AI/ML infrastructure, and pushing things into production.

He has previously worked at Twitter, Netflix, Comcast, and a handful of other companies.

Follow the author here!

Leanpub Book LAUNCH 🚀 Push to Prod or Die Trying: High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos by Matthew Hawthorn

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