Episode 29

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Published on:

30th Apr 2025

Snyk’s Danny Allan on Making Security Developer-Friendly

Security often feels like a roadblock to developers, but what if it could be seamlessly integrated into the development process? As software delivery becomes increasingly automated and self-service, the traditional approach to security needs a major overhaul.

Danny Allan, CTO at Snyk, shares practical insights on transforming security from a bottleneck into an enabler of developer productivity. Drawing from his extensive experience at IBM, VMware, and Veeam, Allan discusses how security teams can shift left effectively without creating friction.

Key topics covered:

  • Building successful security champions programs that cultivate curiosity rather than relying solely on senior developers
  • Practical approaches to embedding security controls into development pipelines, from IDE integration to PR checks
  • Strategies for measuring security team success beyond just vulnerability counts
  • The role of pre-hardened containers and infrastructure-as-code scanning in platform security
  • How AI is transforming both code generation and security tooling, including Snyk's approach to vulnerability detection

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About the Podcast

Platform Engineering Podcast
The Platform Engineering Podcast is a show about the real work of building and running internal platforms — hosted by Cory O’Daniel, longtime infrastructure and software engineer, and CEO/cofounder of Massdriver.

Each episode features candid conversations with the engineers, leads, and builders shaping platform engineering today. Topics range from org structure and team ownership to infrastructure design, developer experience, and the tradeoffs behind every “it depends.”

Cory brings two decades of experience building platforms — and now spends his time thinking about how teams scale infrastructure without creating bottlenecks or burning out ops. This podcast isn’t about trends. It’s about how platform engineering actually works inside real companies.

Whether you're deep into Terraform/OpenTofu modules, building golden paths, or just trying to keep your platform from becoming a dumpster fire — you’ll probably find something useful here.