Matthew Hawthorne, Author of Push to Prod or Die Trying
Matthew Hawthorne - In this episode of the Leanpub Podcast, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with software engineer Matthew Hawthorne about his book Push to Prod or Die Trying, war stories from working on high-scale systems, learning from production incidents, and the culture of big tech and high pressure software engineering.
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. 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.
The full audio for the interview is here: [episode-audio-url]. The Frontmatter podcast is available on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/leanpub, in Apple Podcasts here https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/frontmatter/id517117137, and almost everywhere else people listen to podcasts.