Africa-focused technology, digital and innovation ecosystem insight and commentary.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Internet Radio Done Right
98 subscribers
Checked 1+ y ago
Added eight years ago
Content provided by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ppacc.player.fm/legal.
Similar to Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Show notes are at https://stevelitchfield.com/sshow/chat.html
…
continue reading
Download This Show is your weekly guide to the world of media, culture, and technology. From social media to gadgets, streaming services to privacy issues. Each week Rae Johnston and guests take a fun, deep dive into how technology is reshaping our lives.
…
continue reading
The power of Data is undeniable. And unharnessed - it’s nothing but chaos. Making data your ally. Using it to lead with confidence and clarity. Host Jess Carter is solving problems in real-time to reveal what’s possible. Helping communities and people thrive. This is Data Driven Leadership, a show brought to you by Resultant.
…
continue reading
Flash Forward is a show about possible (and not so possible) future scenarios. What would the warranty on a sex robot look like? How would diplomacy work if we couldn’t lie? Could there ever be a fecal transplant black market? (Complicated, it wouldn’t, and yes, respectively, in case you’re curious.) Hosted and produced by award winning science journalist Rose Eveleth, each episode combines audio drama and journalism to go deep on potential tomorrows, and uncovers what those futures might re ...
…
continue reading
WSJ’s Bold Names brings you conversations with the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Hosts Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak to CEOs and business leaders in interviews that challenge conventional wisdom and take you inside the decisions being made in the C-suite and beyond.
…
continue reading
Android Backstage, a podcast by and for Android developers. Hosted by developers from the Android engineering team, this show covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google. Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs
…
continue reading
The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
…
continue reading
We help founders make something people want.
…
continue reading
Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Go offline with the Player FM app!
))
Daily Deals
Podcasts Worth a Listen
SPONSORED
T
Tickets to Travel
1 Ep. 42 - RevPar Problems, Real Talk: When Memes meet Metrics with Calvin Tilokee 47:59
47:59 
Play Later 
Play Later 
Lists 
Like 
Liked47:59
Play Later
Play Later
Lists
Like
LikedEp. 42 - RevPar Problems, Real Talk: When Memes Meet Metrics with Calvin Tilokee How do revenue managers really think? What makes hotel rates spike during Taylor Swift concerts—or Bigfoot conventions? And why do memes about ADR hit harder than your star report? In this episode of Tickets to Travel: The Business of Travel Experiences , we sit down with Calvin Tilokee of RevPAR Media, the sharp mind behind the viral @RevPARProblems Instagram account. Calvin pulls back the curtain on hotel pricing strategy, compression events, influencer marketing, and what event producers often get wrong when pitching to hotels. Whether you’re trying to block rooms for a major festival, fill your hotel over a soft week, or just want to understand the secret language of revenue managers, this episode is packed with insight and humor. This episode is a must-listen for hotel sales and revenue teams, meeting and event planners, festival promoters, and hospitality marketers. Follow @RevPARProblems on Instagram for daily hotel truths and satire. And subscribe now to hear why Calvin says: “We don’t need your group when we’re already full. Call us the week after Christmas.” For more insider conversations at the intersection of travel, ticketing, and live experiences, follow us on all socials @Tix2TravelPod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you haven’t listened yet, head to www.tttpod.com to catch up on past episodes.…
Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi
Manage episode 179030966 series 1436861
Content provided by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ppacc.player.fm/legal.
Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever.
The post Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
104 episodes
ShareManage episode 179030966 series 1436861
Content provided by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ppacc.player.fm/legal.
Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever.
The post Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
104 episodes
All episodes
×
1 Making React 70% faster with Aiden Bai of Million.js 45:10
45:10 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked45:10
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedReact is an immensely popular JavaScript library that is used to build website user interfaces. A key feature of React is that it uses a virtual Document Object Model, or DOM, to selectively update the desired regions of the web page, which provides major performance advantages. Million.js is an open source project that provides an optimized virtual DOM. Remarkably, these optimizations make React up to 70% faster and the code weighs in at less than 4 kilobytes in size. Aiden Bai is the creator of Million.js and he joins us in this episode. Mike Bifulco is CTO and co-founder of Craftwork . He’s also a developer advocate, writer, podcaster and serial startup founder. In past lives, Mike worked for Google, Stripe, Microsoft, and Gymnasium. Mike is also co-founder of APIs You Won’t Hate , a community for API Developers on the web. Mike’s publishes a weekly newsletter for product builders called Tiny Improvements at mikebifulco.com . Mike is on Mastodon at https://hachyderm.io/@irreverentmike Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Please click here to view this show’s transcript . The post Making React 70% faster with Aiden Bai of Million.js appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 Cross-functional Incident Management with Ashley Sawatsky and Niall Murphy 50:38
50:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIncident management is the process of managing and resolving unexpected disruptions or issues in software systems, especially those that are customer-facing or critical to business operations. Implementing a robust incident management system is often a key challenge in technical environments. Rootly is a platform to handle incident management directly from Slack, and is used by hundreds of leading companies including Canva, Grammarly, and Cisco. Ashley Sawatsky leads Developer Relations at Rootly and previously led Shopify’s Incident Communications team. Niall Murphy is Co-founder and CEO at Stanza . He has written extensively about reliability engineering and is the co-author of the best-selling book, Site Reliability Engineering. Ashley and Niall join us in this episode to discuss how engineers and their non-technical counterparts can successfully approach incident management together. Jeff is a DevSecOps engineer with experience in security, the software development life cycle, and cloud technologies. His advanced expertise in HashiCorp technologies places him as one of the most sought after trainers in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions and beyond. Jeff has worked for a range of different companies – from small startups to some of the biggest financial institutions. He now successfully runs his own consultancy that provides services in DevSecOps, Cloud and Security. You can find Jeff at hemmen.lu . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Please click here to view this show’s transcript . The post Cross-functional Incident Management with Ashley Sawatsky and Niall Murphy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
APIs are ubiquitous and critical to building modern software, and developers must frequently develop custom APIs to streamline user access to their services. However, making an API that provides a great developer experience can be a time-consuming endeavor. As a result, API teams often leave the final mile of integration up to their users. Speakeasy aims to provide a product and a pipeline that makes it easy to create and consume any API. Sagar Batchu is the co-founder and CEO of Speakeasy and he joins us in this episode. Paweł is the founder at flat.social the world’s first ‘flatverse’ start-up. Pawel’s background is as a full-stack software engineer with a lean and experimental approach towards product development. With a strong grounding in computing science, he spent the last decade getting early-stage products off the ground – both in startup and corporate settings. Follow Paweł on Twitter , LinkedIn and his personal website – pawel.io . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Please click here to view this show’s transcript . The post SDKs for your API with Sagar Batchu appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Feature flags also known as feature toggles, release toggles or feature flippers are a way to enable or disable a particular feature from your app without making any changes to the source code. You can turn on or off a particular functionality without deploying new code. Feature flags can also be used to serve different features to different subset of users. The company Flagsmith provides you a platform for developing, implementing and managing your feature flags. Ben Rometsch is the Co-founder and the CEO of Flagsmith and he joins us today. The post Shipping Features with Ben Rometsch appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 Modern Robotics Platform with Eliot Horowitz 40:48
40:48 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked40:48
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedProgramming robotics software has traditionally been a specialized field. The software industry has seen rapid progress, the operating system that provides the foundation for our software applications is taken care of by companies like Google, Microsoft, and other players like Canonical, Amazon, etc. The robotics industry still needs that OS layer that handles the complexities so that engineers can build robots that serve their business needs. VIAM aspires to be the Operating System for robotics that makes it easy to turn great ideas into production robots. Eliot Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of VIAM and he joins us today. Eliot was previously the CTO at MongoDB , a database company. We discuss with him the different challenges one faces when trying to build a robot and how VIAM is trying to solve that. Paweł is the founder at flat.sociaI the world’s first ‘flatverse’ start-up. Pawel’s background is as a full-stack software engineer with a lean and experimental approach towards product development. With a strong grounding in computing science, he spent the last decade getting early-stage products off the ground – both in startup and corporate settings. Follow Paweł on Twitter , LinkedIn and his personal website – pawel.io . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Modern Robotics Platform with Eliot Horowitz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 Bug Reporting is Broken and how Jam is Fixing that with Dani Grant & Mohd Irtefa 34:39
34:39 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked34:39
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedBug reporting hasn’t changed since the 1990’s. Despite all the technological advancements we’ve made in the rest of software development, the way we handle bugs has stayed the same. It is common practice for non technical teams to provide bug reports that are missing vital information for developers to identify and quickly fix code, such as: network requests, console logs, HAR file, device information, video or screenshot replication, and more. Providing a comprehensive bug report requires logging into many tools and time spent context switching, creating an environment where people are less likely to report bugs, which is not an ideal scenario for any founder or builder. Dani & Irtefa , co-founders at Jam.dev set out to build a tool that will enable anyone, no matter their technical background, to capture rich contextual technical data about bugs, so that developers can quickly identify and resolve issues. Jam is a browser extension that will instantly replay a bug while automatically attaching diagnostics: network requests and speed, console logs, device, and more – all in one easy click. You don’t have to log into a new tool or disrupt workflows, as Jam has direct integrations with all the first class bug reporting tools to seamlessly drop diagnostics into a ticket. In this episode, Dani & Irtefa share their experience building greenfield products for Cloudflare’s Emerging Technology and Incubation team, how bug reporting was the common pain-point that impacted their product velocity, and the technology decisions they made when building Jam. Test it out for free at: Jam.dev Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is Head of Marketing and Developer Relations at Skyflow and host of the podcast Partially Redacted, a podcast about privacy and security engineering. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer . Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Bug Reporting is Broken and how Jam is Fixing that with Dani Grant & Mohd Irtefa appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Whether you love them or hate them, share them or ignore them, you encounter memes all over the internet. Those that are popular can often take off and spawn a long history of remixes, variants, derivatives, and inspired works. In this episode, we interview Johan Unger, the founder of meme.com. They’re creating a platform for Meme Explorers to track these Memes and earn rewards along the way. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Meme.com with Johan Unger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Roblox is a gaming platform with a large ecosystem of players, creators, game designers, and entrepreneurs. The world of Roblox is a three-dimensional environment where characters and objects interact through a physics engine. Roblox is multiplayer, and users can interact with each other over the Internet. Roblox is not one single game—it is a system where anyone can design and monetize their own games within Roblox. Over the last 14 years, Roblox has grown to be massively popular. As the product has grown, the software has evolved to meet changes in consumer demands and engineering constraints. Client devices include mobile phones, desktop computers, and virtual reality. All of these clients must have a consistent experience in graphics and functionality. The backend platform has to support a high volume of concurrent players who are accessing a high volume of content. The networking needs to support multiple players operating in an environment that demands high bandwidth. Claus Moberg is a vice president of engineering at Roblox. He joins the show to discuss the engineering of Roblox and the future of gaming. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Roblox Engineering with Claus Moberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen Holiday Repeat 1:04:07
1:04:07 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:04:07
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally published November 4, 2016 Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, and interviewer behind Indie Hackers. For each business that is profiled by Indie Hackers, Courtland conducts a short interview with the founder. Courtland joins the show to discuss the changing trends that are making it easier to bootstrap a software business if you are a capable developer–or even if you are a nontechnical person who understands how software works. Since Courtland and I are both in the business of interviewing engineers, we had a lot to talk about, and this is a fantastic episode. The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Key Values is a platform where companies are profiled with descriptions of their company values. These profiles describe features such as work-life balance, company culture, daily routines, and strategy. Lynne Tye created Key Values with the goal of building a small business that would make money through connecting job seekers to companies with a culture that matched their own personal values system. Key Values has become highly successful, and Lynne is making enough money from the business to live comfortably. In a previous episode, Lynne and I discussed her founding story and the engineering of Key Values. Today’s episode picks up a few years later, with Lynne having found significant success with her own company. Lynne’s software business is an example of a growing trend: “Indie Hackers”. This trend was identified by Courtland Allen, founder of the Indie Hackers platform . Courtland is close friends with Lynne, and Lynne’s desire to start her own software company was influenced by her conversations with Courtland. At a certain point, Lynne was considering raising money and growing Key Values. She was accepted into Y-Combinator. But she decided to stick with the Indie Hackers route, and grow the business independently. Lynne joins the show to talk about the process of starting a software business, and the pivotal decisions she has made around financing, growth, and her own psychology. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. We will be at KubeCon San Diego 2019, and AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. We are planning a meetup at re:Invent on Wednesday December 4. The post Indie Hack or Venture Back with Lynne Tye appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 FindCollabs Hackathon Winners: Kitspace and Rivaly 1:00:53
1:00:53 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:53
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFindCollabs is a platform for finding collaborators and building projects. Three months ago we had our first hackathon, with lots of projects being created and collaborated on. In an earlier episode, we showcased the first place winner ARhythm. Today’s show features two more interviews with winners from the first FindCollabs hackathon. Kitspace is an open source hardware registry, and Rivaly is an app for informal ranked leagues, such as ping pong games at work, or board game clubs among your friends. The second FindCollabs hackathon is going on today. Check it out by going to findcollabs.com/open . ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes . If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast , so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS . It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe . Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC , Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post FindCollabs Hackathon Winners: Kitspace and Rivaly appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Gaming is becoming mainstream. Popular multiplayer games such as Fortnite and Minecraft present players with a massive virtual world to explore, build, and compete within. Turn-based games such as Hearthstone and Magic are breeding a new generation of board game and card game aficionados. Social media networks like Twitch and YouTube have turned gaming into a voyeuristic sport that is outcompeting many physical sports games for attention. Guilded is a platform for managing gaming teams. On Guilded, there are teams for games like League of Legends, Fortnite, and World of Warcraft. These teams use Guilded to manage calendars, Discord bots, forum software, documents, statistics, and recruiting. This might sound confusing–why does a gaming team need document management, calendars, and analytics? Are we talking about a video game team or a software company? To understand Guilded, you need to understand the rapidly changing modern gaming ecosystem. Eli Brown is a founder of Guilded.gg. He joins the show to talk about the world of gaming, its intersection with social media, and the fascinating engineering problems involved in building a platform for gaming teams. RECENT UPDATES: The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open! The FindCollabs Podcast is out! We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ The post Gaming with Eli Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Africa is rapidly adopting the same software and hardware technologies that have transformed the western world over the last few decades. But access to computers and technology education is still uneven. Where there is access to computers, smartphone adoption often comes before access to laptops or desktop computers. Nelly Cheboi is the founder of TechLit Africa, an organization that works to connect schools and families in Africa with computers and software. Nelly studied computer science, and worked as a software engineer before leaving her career to focus full-time on building a scalable model to take refurbished computers and give them to Africans who can make good use of them. TechLit Africa is also building a software stack to equip schools in Africa without an Internet connection with an internal subnet including Wikipedia and other educational resources, so that people in the school can get an Internet-like experience despite a lack of access to the full Internet. RECENT UPDATES: The FindCollabs Open has started. It is our second FindCollabs hackathon, and we are giving away $2500 in prizes. The prizes will be awarded in categories such as machine learning, business plan, music, visual art, and JavaScript. If one of those areas sounds interesting to you, check out findcollabs.com/open! The FindCollabs Podcast is out! We are booking sponsorships for Q3, find more details at https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/sponsor/ The post Emerging Markets: Kenya with Nelly Cheboi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
1 SPIFFE: Zero Trust Workload Identification with Evan Gilman 52:34
52:34 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked52:34
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedModern software consists of sprawling international networks of servers. Users contact these servers to access applications. Microservices talk to each other to fulfill complicated requests. Databases and machine learning frameworks crunch terabytes of information to provide complicated answers. Across this infrastructure, there is a lot of different activities–and a lot of vulnerabilities. Without a reliable model for security and trust, software can be easily compromised. In the past, systems were often protected by a “firewall”, which is a security system around the perimeter of the network. A problem with this model is that if the attacker is able to penetrate the firewall, they can compromise anywhere in the network. Firewalls can be penetrated, so a much better security model is to assume that your network has already been compromised, and to require every internal system to identify and authenticate with each other. “Zero-trust security” is a security model that requires internal systems to communicate with each other as if they were potentially compromised. Evan Gilman is the author of Zero Trust Networks: Building Secure Systems in Untrusted Networks . He also works on SPIFFE, a system for managing identity and trust within a zero-trust network. In a previous episode about Google BeyondCorp , Max Saltonstall talked about zero-trust networking in the context of user and device authentication. In today’s episode, Evan discusses another side of zero-trust networking: workload identity and authentication. Just as Google BeyondCorp outlines an architecture for allowing devices to communicate with the network, the SPIFFE project outlines a system for workloads to identify and authenticate themselves. Workloads can range from MapReduce jobs to microservices to frontend application servers. The post SPIFFE: Zero Trust Workload Identification with Evan Gilman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Apple operating systems are closed source. This closed source nature gives Apple an extremely successful business model–and a very different software developer ecosystem than Linux-based systems. Since Linux is open source, the information on how to manipulate the system at a low level is very public. The lack of information about low-level programming in Apple operating systems has led to a large community of “jailbreaking”–where people try to reverse engineer how the closed source systems function. In today’s episode, Max Bazaliy joins the show to describe how he reverse engineered an Apple Watch. It’s a complex security challenge to jailbreak an Apple Watch, as he describes in detail. Max is a security researcher at Lookout, a mobile security company. The post Jailbreaking Apple Watch with Max Bazaliy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store. Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do you need to unlock an additional entrance? Should you open another store? Do you really need a building this big? This might sound like a simple question, but how do you solve the problem of counting people inside of a building? A naive approach to counting people is to use video cameras and count the number of people entering and exiting the building. Machine learning algorithms are good at classifying humans. But the downside of this is that you have to put cameras anywhere you want a people-counter. There are many situations where you would want to count the number of people where a camera is not acceptable. What if you wanted to count people in a privacy preserving way? What if you wanted to obscure any identifiable traits of a person that you were counting? Density is a device for counting people. It sits above a doorway and counts the people who are entering or exiting the building. Andrew Farah is the CEO at Density, and in today’s episode he explains why the problem of counting people is harder than it sounds, and how the Density people counter functions. The post Counting People with Andrew Farah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Kademlia: P2P Distributed Hash Table with Petar Maymounkov 51:31
51:31 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:31
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedNapster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In these P2P systems, nodes need to find each other. Users need to be able to search for files that exist across the system. P2P systems are decentralized, so these routing problems must be solved without a centralized service in the middle. Without a centralized service that has all the information in one place, how can you solve these problems of node discovery and file lookup? This is the central question that Petar Maymounkov sought to answer with Kademlia. Kademlia is a peer-to-peer distributed hash table. Kademlia implements the “put” and “get” operations of an efficiently scalable hash table without using any centralized service. Each node in the system maintains its own routing table. When a user queries the system (a “get” operation), that query is serviced by the nodes coordinating with each other to intelligently route the user to their target location. When a file is stored (a “put” operation), that update to the file system can propagate through the network in a decentralized, uncoordinated way. Petar joins the show to give a brief history of P2P networks, why he created Kademlia, and what he is working on today. The post Kademlia: P2P Distributed Hash Table with Petar Maymounkov appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Crocodile Browser is a fast browser built by Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. I interviewed them 3 years ago, and in this episode I caught up with Osine to learn what he and his brother have been working on since then. Osine and Anesi have become friends of mine since we had a conversation several years ago. I met Osine for the first time at the Facebook F8 conference last year, and it was one of the first times I had met someone from another continent on the Internet, then got to hang out with them in person. There were some issues with network connectivity, so I decided to release this show on the weekend with no ads. The post Browser Building with Osine Ikhianosime appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
In the tech industry, we have all grown to fear “lock-in.” Lock-in is a situation in which you have no choice but to pay a certain provider for some aspect of your computer services. Since computers are so fundamental to our lives, we sometimes have no choice but to pay the provider of that lock-in service. Think of a few service providers in your life who have no serious competition. What is your relationship to that service provider? Do you feel like you are paying too much money? Do you wish that you could switch? This is how many people feel about their Internet service provider. An Internet Service Provider is a company that provides you with the “last mile” of physical infrastructure that connects you to the rest of the Internet. Different forms of ISP include cable ISPs, satellite ISPs, fiber ISPs, and copper/DSL ISPs. The medium of delivery varies, but the functionality is the same. This company is crucial to your Internet access. In many geographic locations, there are very restricted options for which ISP you could use. Why is that? Many people assume that there is some physical or regulatory barrier to starting an ISP. In fact, there are fewer barriers than you might think. Adam Montgomery is a co-founder of Necto, a company that provides an ISP starter kit. If you want to start your own ISP in an apartment building or in your neighborhood or wherever you are, the Necto ISP starter kit can help you get off the ground. That might sound like a crazy idea, but in this episode, Adam explains why it is not so crazy–why the technology around ISPs is more broadly accessible than many people believe. The post Necto: Build an ISP with Adam Montgomery appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Pi Hole: Ad Blocker Hardware with Jacob Salmela 46:53
46:53 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked46:53
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAd blockers in the browser protect us from the most annoying marketing messages that the Internet tries to serve to us. But we still pay a price for these ads. We pay the bandwidth costs of requesting these pages. Our browsers are slowed down by these extra requests. Pi Hole is a hardware based ad blocker. Pi Hole acts as a DNS server for all of the traffic that makes its way onto your network. Pi Hole has a blacklist of all the URLs to block–including tracking systems and ad networks. Pi Hole stops these URLs from communicating with all the devices on your network–including your cell phone. Jacob Salmela is the developer of Pi Hole, which he describes as a black hole for advertiser traffic. In this episode, we explain how traditional ad blocking in the browser works, and how things are improved with a piece of dedicated hardware doing the ad blocking. It was also a useful review of the relationship between URLs, IP addresses, your home network, and the broader Internet. The post Pi Hole: Ad Blocker Hardware with Jacob Salmela appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Design Principles From Functional Programming with Runar Bjarnason 35:11
35:11 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked35:11
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFunctional programming can improve the overall design of application architecture. Runar Bjarnason has been exploring how writing in a functional style increases the modularity and compositionality of software for many years. He is co-author of Functional Programming in Scala , a book that explores the relationship between functional programming and software design. In this interview with guest host Adam Bell, Runar explains how writing in a functional style involves limiting side effects, avoiding exceptions, and using higher-order abstractions. Writing in this style places constraints on what a module in a software system may do, but by constraining modules in this way, the software modules themselves become endlessly composable. Show Notes Functional Programming In Scala Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain The post Design Principles From Functional Programming with Runar Bjarnason appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Language Design with Brian Kernighan Holiday Repeat 1:07:28
1:07:28 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:07:28
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedOriginally published January 6, 2016 “The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.” Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including The Go Programming Language and The C Programming Language , a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. Questions What are the timeless characteristics that define a successful programming language? How did people categorize languages 50 years ago? What would people have been posting on Hacker News in 1965? Why is Java so popular, and why do you think it’s strongly hyped? Computers have become more powerful over time – how has this affected language design? What are your thoughts on JavaScript? What did you learn while writing a book about Go? What did you learn about programming and life from working with Dennis Ritchie? Links How to succeed in language design without really trying JavaScript: The Definitive Guide JavaScript: The Good Parts The Go Programming Language Plan 9 The C Programming Language (K&R) Brian’s professor page The post Language Design with Brian Kernighan Holiday Repeat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a condition that inhibits movement, and this wearable allows the Parkinson’s patient to write and draw again. Haiyan explained the research process and the technical aspects of how it works. Edaena Salinas of The Women in Tech Show interviewed Haiyan for this episode. They talked about the Internet of Things, the components of these systems and the technical challenges. Haiyan also explained her path from software engineering to design and the process of commercializing products that come from research. The post Health Wearables with Haiyan Zhang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Professional hackathon programmers travel around the hackathon circuit, winning merchandise and small cash prizes. There are enough hackathons that some programmers actually do this as a full-time job. For example, Peter Ma, a programmer who describes himself as a “rapid prototype specialist.” Peter is a great programmer, and he has received lots of offers to work at big tech companies. What drives him to stay independent and work on hackathon projects? There are other types of corporate hackathons. Many of us are familiar with the hackathon where a manager orders pizza and suggests that everyone stays at the office late fixing bugs. Some hackathons are held for kids, to get them exposed to technologies early on. Lizette Chapman is a reporter at Bloomberg, where she writes about technology, business, and news. I was fascinated by her story about hackathons, and it was great to have her on the show to talk about the characters of the hackathon circuit, and why corporations sponsor hackathons. Lizette has co-hosted the Bloomberg Decrypted podcast in an episode about hackathons. Decrypted is one of my favorite podcasts and I recommend checking it out. Show Notes These Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living from Corporate Coding Contests The post Hackathons with Lizette Chapman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a company brokering that relationship. Andre Staltz works on Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer system for social graphs, identity, and messaging. Scuttlebutt is used by a group of open-source hackers, many of whom live off-grid and do not have constant access to the Internet. In this episode, we discuss why someone would want a peer-to-peer social network, how to build one, and the progress that has been made on Scuttlebutt by some of the most talented open-source engineers in the world. The post Off-Grid Social Network with Andre Staltz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Relay Modern with Lee Byron and Joe Savona 1:00:20
1:00:20 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:20
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRelay is a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications. Facebook open sourced Relay around the same time they open sourced GraphQL, and Facebook expected Relay to be the more popular of the two projects. However, the reality was reversed. Open source companies like Meteor quickly began to build GraphQL tools and a few businesses were started around GraphQL. One year later, the excitement for GraphQL had completely surpassed the excitement for Relay which had aged poorly in a newborn ecosystem of GraphQL tooling. At the same time, Facebook was also starting to integrate Relay into their React Native apps. But Relay was performing poorly on low-end Android devices. This led the Relay team to the conclusion that they needed to rewrite Relay. Both to better fit into the growing GraphQL ecosystem, and to be built with performance in low-end React Native environments at the top of mind. Relay Modern is the new version of Relay. It was released to the open source community at this year’s F8. In this episode Caleb Meredith is joined by Lee Byron, the co-creator of GraphQL, and Joe Savona, a founding member of the Relay team, to discuss Relay Modern. The discussion includes a conversation about the commercial GraphQL ecosystem, the story of why Facebook decided Relay needed to be rewritten, and a look at the future of UI development from some trends seen in Relay Modern. The post Relay Modern with Lee Byron and Joe Savona appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts. Before I used Zencastr to record my podcasts, like most podcasters, I used a Skype plugin. There were a number of inconveniences in the podcaster workflow from Skype. Zencastr solved all of these by creating a podcast recording tool in the browser and presenting a simple user interface. Josh Nielsen joins the show to talk about the challenges of building a podcasting tool in the browser, and the new technologies that make it easier, such as WebRTC. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey . Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup . The post Zencastr with Josh Nielsen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it. Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive. Peeqo is a robot assistant similar to Amazon Echo or Google Home. It was built by Abhishek Singh as part of his thesis. Abhishek wanted to explore the border between inanimate electronics and the electronics we personify. Peeqo is a cylindrical tube that bends slightly, like the human neck. At its head, it has a smartphone-sized screen that displays gifs to reflect its feedback visually. Abhishek also has a company called Svrround , which makes 360 degree video experiences. We explore the changes to engineering that allow someone to be involved in two cutting-edge projects at once despite having very few employees working with him. This was an energizing conversation, and I greatly enjoyed meeting Abhishek. I hope to have him on again in the future. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey . Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup . The post Robot Assistant with Abhishek Singh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen 51:20
51:20 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:20
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedEngineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering Daily a few months ago, when he discussed Indie Hackers , a platform he built to share the stories of engineers building business on their own and making money. We only touched the tip of the iceberg in our conversation, so I was excited to invite him to the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, which occurred earlier this month. Today we are republishing his talk, and I would love to hear your feedback on this format. We will be experimenting more with new hosts and formats throughout 2017, and if you have ideas for the show or you are interested in hosting a show, please send me an email . Also–the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup was fantastic–there were ~200 people showing up so we may have to cap attendance on the next one. Please join the Meetup group if you are interested, and we will let you know when we schedule our next event. Show Notes Courtland Allen slides in PDF. The post Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Robots for the Elderly with Itai Mendelsohn 54:55
54:55 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:55
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMany elderly people live with unhealthy levels of isolation. Social isolation is a problem for anybody, but younger people can use technology to alleviate their isolation with tools like Skype and Facebook. How can we bridge the generational gap and give elderly people access to the same technological tools that younger people find easy to use? Voice interfaces are an important new medium for communicating with computers. Amazon and Google are at the forefront of the voice interface movement, but many other devices are emerging. One of these devices is Elliq, from Intuition Robotics. Elliq consists of a microphone voice interface that sits on a table next to a small tablet computer. An elderly person can talk to the voice interface and have it start a voice call with someone on Skype, or see new Facebook photos or YouTube videos. The discussion of Elliq’s hardware is as interesting as that of its backend software. As Itai Mendelsohn of Intuition Robotics explains, Elliq got to market very quickly as a result of the company’s adoption of high-level managed services, like Firebase and Google’s managed machine learning. Show Notes ELLIQ – The active aging companion The post Robots for the Elderly with Itai Mendelsohn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
A biologist wants to study the genetic makeup of an organism. A pharmaceutical researcher wants to test the effects of an experimental drug. These types of experiments require a deep knowledge of the scientific domain as well as the lab techniques to produce the data that will eventually yield a result. Transcriptic is a robotic biology laboratory that allows you to make requests for experiments to run remotely. Scientists who use Transcriptic do not have to perform wet lab experimentation. The robotic laboratory process has the potential to do for biology what Amazon Web Services did for computing. Max Hodak is a cofounder of Transcriptic and joins me today to explain how a robotic laboratory works. There are a wide variety of challenges, from hardware integration to software reverse engineering–but we also talk about why it is worth it to overcome these challenges, including a discussion of the “reproducibility crisis” that is undermining faith in our scientific experiments. Sponsors MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit . SparkPost provides email delivery services for apps and websites with offerings from free, self-service start-up accounts to sophisticated enterprise support and services. Try SparkPost and send 100,000 emails/month for free at http://pages.sparkpost.com/sedaily The post Robot Cloud Lab with Max Hodak appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Every song you hear on the radio is written with a computer. Computer musicians mostly use synthesizers and samples to compose these songs. A sample is a snippet of recorded sound, sometimes taken from a songs, a movie, or another source. The more samples a musician has access to the better. SampleFocus is a platform where musicians upload and download samples to build songs with. Daniel Trostli is the engineer who is building SampleFocus, and he joins the show to discuss how people use samples to write music and how he built SampleFocus. I met Daniel at the Launch Scale event, a conference about building businesses, and when I was having lunch with Daniel, he told me about working on this personal project full-time, and some of the different business models he was exploring. It’s a great episode for anyone who is thinking about turning a side project into a business. Sponsors Braintree makes it easy to accept payments in your app or website. Select from a range of client and server SDKs and integrate payments ASAP. Go to braintreepayments.com/sedaily to check out Braintree and support Software Engineering Daily. Build apps that communicate with everyone in the world. Voice & Video, Messaging, and Authentication APIs for every application. Start your Free Trial today and get an additional $10 credit account with account upgrade. Learn more at go.twilio.com/podcast MongoDB Atlas is the easiest way to get access to MongoDB without having to run the database yourself. To try MongoDB Atlas today, go to mongodb.com/sedaily and use code goAtlas25 to get $25 in free credit . The post Sampling with Daniel Trostli appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Over the next few years, bots will pervade our lives more and more. These smart, conversational text interfaces provide a new way of engaging with the computer systems that we have been mostly interacting with through web and mobile app interfaces for the last decade. Bots are a necessary complement to the voice interfaces of the future, because we don’t always want to talk to the computer, and natural language processing is not yet good enough to always translate our vocal request accurately. Bots are not toys, they aren’t trivial, and they aren’t going away any time soon. Jon Bruner is the host of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, a show that has quickly become one of my favorites because it covers both theoretical and applied artificial intelligence, while remaining approachable to listen to. Jon hosts it with Pete Skomoroch, who works on a bot startup full time. Jon and Pete were also organizers of O’Reilly Bot Day, which I enjoyed tremendously and got a lot of knowledge from. The post Bots with Jon Bruner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Software Engineering Daily was started a year and a half ago, based on what I learned from my podcasting experience on Software Engineering Radio. Last week, I interviewed Robert Blumen, the editor of Software Engineering Radio, about how that podcast is produced. In today’s episode, Robert interviews me about this podcast. If you are thinking about starting a podcast about software engineering, this podcast will be useful to you. We discuss the processes behind preparing for a show, how to conduct an interview, why people listen to podcasts, and advertisers. I also give some of the history behind Software Engineering Daily–why I started it and what my goals are. The post How Software Engineering Daily Works appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
When a human passes away, we create a tombstone as a memorial. Friends and family visit a grave to remember the times they had with that person while they were still alive. Memorial bots are another way to celebrate the life of someone who has passed away. A memorial bot is created by taking the messages sent by a deceased person and passing it through a machine learning model in order to make a bot that replicates the deceased person. Eugenia Kuyda is the CEO of Luka, a company that builds AI products. When her friend Roman Mazurenko suddenly died, she worked with her team to make a bot that replicates his speech patterns. In our interview, we discussed memorial bots, deep learning, and the product Luka is working on–Replika, a personal AI friend for anyone. The post Bot Memorial with Eugenia Kuyda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
There are multiple paths to constructing a piece of software from start to finish. An individual programmer can build an entire product from scratch in a couple days. A giant corporation can commission a project and delegate responsibilities to hundreds of people. An open source community can use the wisdom of the crowds to efficiently build an operating system. Today’s episode is about another path for building software, and my own experience traveling that path. I designed and contracted an app called Adforprize that is now available on the iOS app store. Designing an app and contracting it out to an engineer to build is a worthwhile exercise for most people in the tech industry–whether you are an engineer or not. This post has two main arguments: the process of designing and prototyping an app is useful and educational for anyone it is now cheap and effective to hire a contractor to build a working version of your prototype As with the previous monologue episodes such as 10 Philosophies for Engineers and You Are Not a Commodity , there are no advertisements on this episode. Please email me any feedback you have–jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com Why This Matters To You Everyone has an app idea, and many of them are pretty good. You have probably had a conversation with a friend where one of you says “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a 2-sided marketplace for bacon?” Or “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was an app where users could take a selfie and instantly see what celebrity they resemble the most?” These things would be cool! But most ideas end with the ideation. Who has the time to implement these things? Most of us are busy at work, where we spend our time and mental energy dealing with the technical complexity of our jobs. If you are a “ smart creative ”, when you get home from your job, you probably don’t want to spend your leisure hours reading iOS documentation and slowly learning to write the necessary code for your bacon marketplace app. Smart creatives who have a busy full-time job often have a hobby with more immediate gratification, like playing an instrument or blogging. Some of us also write apps on the side, but if you don’t already have all the requisite skills for writing an app, the prospect of reading tutorials and documentation can make the feeling of ever publishing an app seem so distant. There are many people listening to this who are better at sales, marketing, design, or product management than they are at programming–they want to build an app. One common narrative is that if these people want to see something built, they need to learn to program, and that’s not true. There is a more fun, fulfilling way to build an app than learning to code in Swift or React Native–contracting out the programming to someone else. Designing an app is a fun exercise. Building a prototype with tools like Sketch, InVision, and Keynote is free and frictionless. Most people listening to this probably spent some time drawing in KidPix or Microsoft Paint or PhotoShop when they were a kid. Most of us know how to draw at some basic level, because we spend all day seeing and understanding images–drawing is second nature to anyone who can understand shapes. Similarly, we all know how to design apps because we spend all day using them. We understand the purpose of a button or a slider or a swipe. But most of us have no idea how to configure the code around this user experience–the buttons and sliders and TextViews. Along with the design process, the business ideation process is also fun. It’s fun to imagine business models and viral loops and ways to drive user engagement. But without the capability to build the app that embodies your business ideas, it is less fun to think about those ideas. And again–most of us don’t relish the idea of struggling through the compiler errors and Stack Overflow posts that an app implementation requires. We’ve all become product designers. We are using our phones all day–most of us have naturally developed a good intuition for how an app should function. Product design ability is naturally acquired by being steeped in technology all day. If you are an employee in marketing, sales, or design (and certainly engineering) at a tech company, you will naturally learn how to think about product. Importantly: you probably even have a few good product ideas yourself! This article is about why and how to prototype your own ideas and communicate your intent as a product designer–which is an incredibly fun process. If you can afford it, you can then hand off your prototype to a contractor for engineering implementation. Working at a tech company, you might have accumulated some excess cash. You can invest that $5,000 that you have sitting around by contracting a product in your spare time. This can be a much better investment than something like stocks or ETFs, and it is more satisfying and durable than taking an expensive vacation. The experience of contracting a product teaches you skills that might not be stressed in your 9-5 job: management, product design, user experience, budgeting, communications, and engineering limitations. Why Now? The first version of Uber was written by a contractor. The Uber founders clearly communicated the specification for their product to the contractor, and they got what they asked for. Contracting Uber was easy for the founders. They had millions of dollars from their earlier startups, they had a network of contractors to choose from, and they had experience hiring people. There is now a set of technologies that are enabling this for the average person. Reputation marketplaces : Upwork, Fiverr, and other talent marketplaces have a rating system that holds workers accountable in the same way as Uber and Airbnb. Contractors who have maintained a high reputation through hundreds of hours will do your job well. These marketplaces also provide massive accountability and price transparency. A contractor who screws over naive customers cannot sustain a high rating. Some people have had bad experiences with Upwork and Fiverr, but that happens with all marketplaces. Better communication tools and behaviors : InVision lets you easily convey your product idea. Slack, Trello, Campfire, etc make it easy to communicate with your contractor on a regular basis. Minimal-effort scalability infrastructure : Heroku, Amazon S3, and other autoscaling products remove complexities. This makes it much more straightforward to architect a typical application for a single contractor. App mechanics : Our expectations and intuitions for how certain types of apps should work are becoming refined. From a recent NY Times Popcast discussion: “ Musical.ly is a social app. It feels a little bit like Vine. A lot of familiar mechanics . You like things, you follow people, it has a timeline. ” The last point deserves further emphasis. Cool new apps are often interesting remixes of well-defined mechanics. Mechanics such as newsfeeds, likes, photo sharing, map-based ride-sharing overlays, swiping interfaces, and social media integration are a palette of interesting ingredients that have lots of new-product mileage left. These types of features are so widely used that their implementation is well-understood and documented. You don’t need to find an expensive contractor who specializes in swiping or newsfeed architecture–you will be paying a reasonable market rate. “Wantrepreneurs” Programming ability is not a prerequisite for being a good product designer and operator. And yet–the negative term “wantrepreneur” is used to describe someone who has ideas but has not built/shipped anything substantive. If you listen to Silicon Valley type of podcasts , you will occasionally hear a venture capitalist or angel investor use the word. It’s offensive and shame-inducing and should be removed from our lexicon. But–it does accurately describe many people in the tech industry (albeit in a condescending and discouraging manner). Oftentimes, this same type of person wants to know what to do if they cannot find a “technical co-founder” (someone to build and iterate on a product). Contemporary product development literature mostly advises against contracting, but it can be a good strategy if you have a product idea you really want to get out the door into the hands of users. The conventional reasoning against hiring a contractor to build your product (and why it is mistaken) : A contractor has no vested interest and might do sloppy work (the vested interest is the rating system that allows them to keep working on their platform like Upwork–where they will have 100+ hours of prior work if you are discerning employer) If you decide to iterate, the contractor can raise the price for subsequent iterations (again, a contractor on a reputation platform is unlikely to do this and if they do you can find someone else; switching cost is not that high) If the contractor does sloppy work, you won’t know if it’s sloppy because you are not technical (you can ask a friend who is a developer to look over the finished code base; if your friend says it is sloppy then you can find a new contractor for future iterations) Even if the MVP works, it will fall over if you hit any amount of scale (unlikely to happen if you deploy to Heroku/AWS) In today’s tech scene, there are tons of people without the ability to code who nonetheless have excellent product design abilities. Whether you are in sales, marketing, or customer service, if you want to build a product someday, or even if you just want to move from your current role to a role in product management or design–consider designing and prototyping an app, and having a contractor build it. If you have specific ideas for what you want built, and you have some extra cash lying around, contracting an experimental app is awesome. Engineers Too There are plenty of programmers whose job roles do not require them to think about product design. I spent three years engineering backend Java systems, and there was rarely an interesting decision to be made about the end user’s experience with the product itself. It was all about implementation. You can spend a whole career like this, never grappling with problems higher up the stack. If you are planning to do that, then you will make a lot of money–why not spend $5k of it delegating an app to a contractor? You might find out that you love product design and development even more than backend engineering. I’ve been thinking about contracting an app ever since I heard the story of Uber’s prototype. More recently, when Seth Godin came on this podcast , I asked him about the engineering challenges of building Squidoo, the second company he sold. As it turns out, the minimum viable product for Squidoo was also written by a contractor. My biggest takeaways from that brief discussion with Seth: have your deliverables as well-defined as possible and you won’t have to iterate in order to get the product out the door as you imagined it in your head. The Uber and Squidoo examples are interesting because Kalanick and Godin both studied computer science, but they still opted not to write their apps . They decided the work would be done faster and more effectively if they delegated. As an engineer, I have been building janky minimum viable products for the last five years because I assumed that was the way it had to be done. Each time I designed and built an app, the end result was unimpressive. Because I wasn’t focused entirely on the product design OR the engineering, I did a poor job trying to do both. This is one of the most common fallacies that keeps programmers in a position where they have to take orders. The programmer is conditioned to believe that delegating something means admitting that you are incapable of doing it. Programmers are taught that it is more valiant to spend hours reading documentation and doing something on your own than to delegate your work to someone who won’t have to read as much documentation, and will do it faster and more cleanly. After hearing about several stories of contracted products that turned into successful companies, I decided to experiment with the contracting process myself. I would focus on product design and hire a contractor to write the software. Ideation and Prototyping When we think of product designers, we often think of a bolt of inspiration coming to an inscrutable genius like Jack Dorsey or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. The reality is that effective product design can be learned by anyone who is willing to put in the hours, study the craft, and iterate. From Airbnb to Facebook to the wide range of products on IndieHackers.com–successful products come from people are constantly experimenting and toying around with new ideas. A product designer lives and breathes research and development. The effective product designer is constantly studying the world and running experiments in her own life. She crafts her environment to be conducive to new ideas, and keeps her calendar peppered with blank space where she can reflect and let new ideas come to the surface of her consciousness. I keep whiteboards around my apartment to write down product ideas and other fleeting moments of inspiration. Back in college, I was on a diet of homemade Soylent and I was having awful fever dreams due to related indigestion. I had misread the recipe for Soylent that I found online, and had accidentally put three times the amount of fiber in my mixture as the recipe called for. I woke up at 2 AM from these Soylent induced fever dreams. I have heard that people often think up their best ideas when they wake up at 2 AM, because the boundary between your consciousness and your unconsciousness retreats a little bit. In this case, I was struck by an idea for a user-generated advertising platform, where companies would offer contests where people could compete to make the best ads. I sketched it on one of my whiteboards and went back to sleep for a few fitful hours. When I woke up, I copied the idea from my whiteboard to a spiral notebook, and then forgot about it. Years later, I was working at an advertising technology company, and I started to see some of the inefficiencies in the advertising industry. I realized that my idea from back in college might actually have merit. I started building a prototype called Banner Warhol, and I completed it in a few weeks. Along the way, I seeded it with some fake ads I made (thanks to Michael Rosenthal and Josh Stewart for helping with the design). This was a decent idea, but fraught with mistaken execution: There was no concrete hypothesis; once I launched, how would I define success and failure? There was no target user base–how would I get distribution? Who cares about banner ads? I didn’t know what I was building or why. I had a vague sense that user-generated advertising could be cool, and I started hacking on the idea without thinking further. I have no professional experience writing front-end apps, and it shows with Banner Warhol. Consequently, the code base quickly became a disaster. I got sick of the project, and I quit: the classic abandoned side project. As I said above, in this case the engineering was a distraction from thinking about the product . I was afraid to think too deeply about the product I wanted to build because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to engineer it. If you are trying to play both product designer and engineer, there can be inherent cognitive dissonance. I abandoned the idea for a year and a half, going to work at Amazon and then focusing on building this podcast. But–the idea of user-generated advertising has stuck with me, and when I read futurist Kevin Kelly talking about it in his recent book The Inevitable I knew there was something yet unexplored: “With a peer-to-peer system, these ads would be created by passionate (and greedy) users and unleashed virally into the blog wilds, where the best ads would evolve by testing and redesign until they were effective.” If you replace the word “blog”, with “social networking”, the idea for peer-to-peer advertising becomes quite compelling. Social networks are where advertising is most effective today–so the question became, how can you build user-generated advertising into the social network ecosystem? Snapchat has added features around user-generated advertising and Instagram models make deals with advertisers . These ideas scratch the surface–but user-generated advertising is not just a feature, or an idea that you patent. It is an entire medium of expression. We need an entire platform for making ads. People should be able to make advertisements for products, ideas, and movements. They should be able to see each other’s advertisements, to Like and Comment on them, and connect with brands who want to use those advertisements. This would lower the cost to the brands who currently work with overpriced agencies to make their ad campaigns. Armed with this hypothesis, I thought about the minimal way to run an experiment. Who is a user base that is most likely to latch on to a product that lets you make ads? I was thinking about this question when I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a cache of people who are making their own ads already–Instagram fitness instructors and models. Many of these people are trying to build a personal brand, and in doing so they advertise for products like protein shakes, meal plans, and fitness programs. They may have 2000-5000 followers, which is respectable but not highly monetizable. Most big brands will not do business with this type of person. Nonetheless, they are “influencer marketers”. This mid-level amount of “influence” is going largely uncaptured. It is like blogging before Google AdSense. From Instagram to Vine to YouTube to Facebook, there exists the challenge of connecting influencers to brands they should be representing, but on Instagram this problem seemed most acute. My idea for a workflow was: User takes a picture or video User attaches a brand to the media, turning it into an advertisement User posts the advertisement to Instagram It would have the familiar mechanics of a photo sharing app so that people felt like they were using something they had used before. I took out a notebook and started drawing diagrammatic ideas. When I had the idea fleshed out on paper, I moved to Sketch, a Mac OS tool that is like Photoshop. Stitching together pictures from Google Images, I made the design as crisp as I could. I had no prior experience with Sketch. It is an awesome piece of software and is more intuitive than I expected. After creating screenshots for the workflows I wanted, I put together an Invision to further describe the functionality of the app. Invision is a fantastic product for communicating UX and design. I like Invision because it is easy to share your prototype. At Apple, product designers use Keynote to create prototypes that feel like apps, so that is a viable choice as well. When I finished the prototype, I wanted to get it into the hands of users. But, I was working on Software Engineering Daily full-time. I already had a lot on my plate, so it was important that I used my spare time efficiently. For a few weeks, I tried to learn modern iPhone programming. My pace of learning was so slow and I was not motivated by learning the syntax and the design patterns of mobile development. Thinking back to how Uber and Squidoo were made, I decided to contract my advertising platform–which I was then calling “Adstagram”. Contracting I logged onto Upwork and searched for iOS developers with experience on photo sharing apps, quickly finding someone who was top rated and worked for $66/hour. I asked him for a demonstration of his work and he showed me a photo sharing app he had built in the past, which he could reuse some of his code from. I sent him the prototype and asked him for a quote as well as a description for how he would build the app. His price was reasonable and the architecture he proposed was simple, so we got started with a first, simple set of milestones to hit. As a software engineer, it was easier for me to evaluate that his estimations of time and cost were reasonable. If you are not an engineer, you can check with an engineer friend to see if what a contractor is offering you is fair. Upwork creates an escrow transaction for each set of milestones you define. I defined milestones in terms of high-level functionality and capabilities that were a subcomponent of that functionality. For example, the following list of user story functionality requirements could make up a milestone: Taking and editing a picture/video, or uploading from library I can take a photo or select one from my library I can shoot a video using different segments, like Vine/Instagram I can use brand search with autocomplete to select a brand for my picture/video and it will add a logo I can move the logo to different locations in the picture Sharing the photo I can share a photo in my Adstagram feed I can share the photo to Instagram I can share the photo to Facebook and Twitter Each milestone was a small amount of money, and gave me a feel for the pace at which the contractor worked, and helped me predict what the final budget might be. After each milestone, he sent me a working version of the application thus far. I was testing the app after each milestone, and this put me in the shoes of the user. During testing I identified an issue with an image search feature within the app. I made a flow chart in Gliffy to be clear about how I thought it should work. Four months after initially contracting the app, the functionality is complete and the price tag is under budget–it took $3100 to build, and I gave the contractor a $400 bonus for doing a great job and being responsive. You can now download Adforprize in the iOS app store. I use the app on a regular basis, and I’m looking forward to seeing how people respond to it. If you have an iPhone, I would love if you checked it out, and if you like it then rate the app on the app store. I didn’t ask for ratings on the iTunes store very often for this podcast–because I’m not convinced ratings matter that much for podcasts. But they definitely matter for apps. Epilogue For many people, the most coveted job in tech right now is “product”, whether that means product design, product engineering, or both. We dream about drawing something on a whiteboard in a conference room during a meeting, and then seeing a finished product come across our desk a week later, so we can evaluate it, critique it, and send it back for another iteration. How do those whiteboarding product phenoms get such an awesome job? By practicing and getting good. Why else would anyone talented follow their lead? One way or another, these “product” people have accrued experience and are rewarded with responsibility. Adforprize has gone from being Soylent-induced nightmare idea to a reality that you can download from the app store. Now begins the long, cyclical slog of getting people to try it out, realizing that numerous UX issues make it confusing and terrible, and paying a contractor for continued alterations. My hope is that the app gets some traction, and it will make sense to hire someone full time to work on it. If Adforprize falls completely flat, and nobody cares about it–that’s OK too. I have had a ton of fun building it, and the education was worth twice the price. I’m happy to pay the cost of tuition. The post Adforprize appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
You have probably received a parking ticket that you felt was unfair, but instead of fighting it, you paid the expensive price to get rid of it quickly. Fighting a parking ticket sounds like it would be so time consuming that it is a better decision to just pay for it. When Joshua Browder was faced with this situation, his response was different. He decided there should be an automated solution to fighting parking tickets, and he made the user interface a chat bot. It’s not obvious why a chat bot interface for fighting parking tickets makes sense, but in my discussion with Joshua, he explained that a chat bot interface is actually useful for a wide variety of legal services. The way that a lawyer interacts with a client is often so mechanistic as to be similar to a robot. This episode was a fascinating episode that serves as a great follow-up to the recent shows on chat bots–ChatOps, Bot Day, and Slack Bots. Thanks again to O’Reilly for giving me a ticket to Bot Day last month, as it really got me thinking about chat bots as an important user interface. The post Robot Lawyer with Joshua Browder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Software Podcasting with Robert Blumen 1:02:59
1:02:59 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:02:59
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFour years ago, I started volunteering for a popular podcast about software–Software Engineering Radio. For the next two years, I learned about the process of making a quality podcast about engineering. With its emphasis on preparation, timeless engineering principles, and attention to the listener, Software Engineering Radio continues to be one of the most popular shows about engineering. Software Engineering Daily is my effort to bring the quality of SE Radio on a daily basis. In today’s show, I talk to Robert Blumen, the editor of Software Engineering Radio. Robert is responsible for guiding SE Radio, and without my experience producing shows alongside him, Software Engineering Daily probably wouldn’t exist. If you listen to SE Daily, you should definitely subscribe to SE Radio. I still produce content for SE Radio because the process and the community help me get internal feedback. The post Software Podcasting with Robert Blumen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Biology research at Microsoft is focused on three main areas: molecular programming, synthetic biology, and stem cell biology. At the intersection of biology and computing there are implications for health, medicine, and efficient computing techniques. The field of Biological Computation is in its early days, and there is still lots of work to be done. Colin Gravill works in the computational science group at Microsoft Research, and today he explains how Microsoft is investigating biology with the same curiosity and pragmatism that Microsoft investigates computer science. I’d love to do more shows at the border between software and biology–if you have suggestions, please send me an email. jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Biological Computation with Colin Gravill appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email , Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain , and My Hardest Bug Ever . The post Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Bot Day was an O’Reilly conference featuring talks from some of the leading figures in the bot industry. Before I attended Bot Day, I knew there were lots of applications for chatbots, but I didn’t realize how good the tooling has gotten–it’s very easy to get started with chatbots today so if you are a developer and you have a basic idea, I suggest checking out the videos from Bot Day, as they are a great resource for how to get started. When I was at the conference, I had a number of conversations with Edaena Salinas, who hosts The Women In Tech Show . We also caught up a few weeks after the conference to discuss our reflections on Bot Day. The post Bot Day appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, and interviewer behind Indie Hackers. For each business that is profiled by Indie Hackers, Courtland conducts a short interview with the founder. Courtland joins the show to discuss the changing trends that are making it easier to bootstrap a software business if you are a capable developer–or even if you are a nontechnical person who understands how software works. Since Courtland and I are both in the business of interviewing engineers, we had a lot to talk about, and this is a fantastic episode. The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Music collaboration software that works over the Internet is a software challenge that has not been fully tackled. On today’s Internet, users collaborate intensively on programming projects, journalism, and other projects, but the tools for collaborating on music online have not yet become popular. Blend.io is a social music collaboration tool–a github for musicians. I have been using it myself and enjoying it tremendously. Today’s guest Alan Grow joins the show to talk about how to build a social version control system for musicians, as well as where music is headed. The post Musicians’ GitHub with Alan Grow appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Simpsons Data Science with Todd Schneider 1:00:16
1:00:16 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:16
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Simpsons is a classic, beloved television show. The scripts of The Simpsons have been made publicly available, and include dialogue, location, and character information. Todd Schneider used these scripts and other information sources as a corpus to analyze The Simpsons and find interesting statistics–such as who the most important supporting characters were, and how the ratings of the show have trended over time relative to other TV shows that have declined in ratings. Todd works at Genius in New York, and I took the opportunity to ask him other questions about pop culture, given that Genius is a place where pop culture and data collide. If you haven’t seen the site, it started out as a wiki for rap music, and quickly grew to more aspects of pop culture. Todd also has a variety of other side projects, involving betting markets, analysis of taxis vs Lyft and Uber, and a systematic study of the wedding section of the New York Times . The post Simpsons Data Science with Todd Schneider appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Zuckerberg Files with Michael Zimmer and Nick Proferes 55:29
55:29 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:29
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMark Zuckerberg may be the most powerful person in the world. At no other time in history has a single human had such fine-grained control over the most influential tool for media. Today’s guests are Michael Zimmer and Nick Proferes, the creators of The Zuckerberg Files, an index of every recorded word that Mark Zuckerberg has said in text, video, or audio. Why would someone create this? I was partly expecting Michael and Nick to be anti-Facebook, because The Zuckerberg Files sounds like a tool to hold the Facebook CEO accountable. In reality, Michael and Nick have a nuanced view of Facebook and Zuckerberg–they are Facebook users themselves, and they initially built The Zuckerberg Files as a way to portent product directions that Facebook might lean towards–particularly those related to privacy. The post Zuckerberg Files with Michael Zimmer and Nick Proferes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Facebook Relationship Algorithms with Jon Kleinberg 57:25
57:25 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:25
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedFacebook users provide lots of information about the structure of their relationship graph. Facebook uses that information to provide content and services that are expected to be important to users. If Facebook knows who the most important people in my life are, Facebook can use that knowledge to serve me content that is more relevant to me. Jon Kleinberg studied Facebook network structures together with Lars Backstrom, creating a paper called “Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook”. The goal of this study was to find a metric that could help rank the strength of relationships on Facebook, and the results have implications for sociology as well as the way that we think about building social networks. Jon is a professor of Computer Science at Cornell, and wrote the textbook “Algorithm Design” which I used in college, so it was a privilege to get to talk to him. The post Facebook Relationship Algorithms with Jon Kleinberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Drones will become a central part of our lives. Drones are delivering packages, surveying cell phone towers, providing wi-fi, or fertilizing crops. Drones are assisting humans in dangerous work, and serving as an entirely new computing platform, providing services that were previously nonexistent. Airware is a company that is building a full-stack drone platform. In this episode, Buddy Michini takes us through the software architecture of a drone. Airware’s drones have two operating systems–one for the real-time flight critical aspects and one for application developers who want to build their own software for drones. The post Drones with Buddy Michini appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
MobyCraft is a client-side Minecraft mod to manage and visualize Docker containers. MobyCraft was created by Aditya Gupta. I met him at DockerCon, where he gave a presentation about his project. He also discussed his interaction with the Netflix team, who integrated MobyCraft with their container management tool called Titus. You can watch a video online of Titus managing hundreds of 3-D containers within MineCraft. In this episode, we discuss how and why Aditya built MobyCraft, and how he got started programming at such a young age. The post Mobycraft with Aditya Gupta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Pixar has made some of the most successful movies of all time: Toy Story, WALL-E, Monsters Inc, and many others. These movies are made with cutting-edge computer animation techniques that Pixar often has to invent in order to tell the story it wants to tell. Pixar has teamed up with Khan Academy to teach anyone who wants to learn the basics of computer animation–Pixar-style. The collaboration with Khan Academy is called “Pixar in a Box”, and Kitt Hirasaki joins the show to talk about it. Kitt has worked two stints at Pixar, starting in 1996 and again in 2008, and today he works at Khan Academy–so we also get into his experiences at Pixar, and how the software engineering at Pixar works. The post Pixar in a Box with Kitt Hirasaki appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Finally–the Android operating system has been put on an iPhone, and today’s guest is Nick Lee, who accomplished that feat. Nick works at Tendigi, a design and engineering firm. In the past, Nick has put Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. Why would you do something like this? In today’s interview with Nick, we talk about the technical challenges of bringing Nick’s bizarre sense of technological irony into reality. The post Android on iPhone with Nick Lee appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 KubeCloud: Tangible Cloud Computing with Kasper Nissen and Martin Jensen 56:50
56:50 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:50
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAt most universities, there is not a course titled “cloud computing”. Most students leave college without an understanding of distributed systems, cloud service providers, and the fundamentals of how a data center works. Kasper Nissen and Martin Jensen are changing that with KubeCloud, a small tangible cloud computing cluster that runs on Raspberry Pis. Kasper and Martin started KubeCloud as a masters thesis, and it is grown to a textbook-sized treatise on cloud computing. KubeCloud is both software and a curriculum to teach students microservices, containers management, and the real-world problems of distributed systems. The post KubeCloud: Tangible Cloud Computing with Kasper Nissen and Martin Jensen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Apache Guacamole and Remote Desktop with Mike Jumper 49:43
49:43 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked49:43
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedIn order to use a remote desktop experience, software engineers have a limited number of options, and most of them are proprietary, like VMWare or Oracle. Remote desktop is a functionality that many engineers use every day, so it is surprising that the open source world has taken awhile to displace the functionality of proprietary software. In 2010, Mike Jumper started working on Guacamole, a way to access remote desktops through your browser. Over the last six years, Mike has worked continuously to create a simple, open-source software tool to access desktops remotely, and this year Guacamole joined the Apache Incubator and became Apache Guacamole. In this episode, we discuss the past, present, and future of remote desktop, and the technical internals of Apache Guacamole. The post Apache Guacamole and Remote Desktop with Mike Jumper appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
18F is an organization that is building the 21st century digital government. In order to build online government services that have the high quality of modern cloud applications, 18F built Cloud.gov, a platform-as-a-service that can be used to stand up web applications for divisions of the government. Aidan Feldman helped build Cloud.gov, and on today’s episode he dissects its architecture. Cloud.gov is built on CloudFoundry, which sits on top of a special version Amazon Web Services built specifically for the US government. We also explore how application development works at 18F, and how 18F has built a culture that reflects an ideal mix of public service and fast-moving innovation. The post Cloud.gov with Aidan Feldman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Algorithm Marketplace with Diego Oppenheimer of Algorithmia 55:41
55:41 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked55:41
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedAlgorithmia is marketplace for algorithms. A software engineer who writes an algorithm for image processing or spam detection or TF-IDF can turn that algorithm into a RESTful API to be consumed by other developers. Different algorithms can be composed together to build even higher level applications. Diego Oppenheimer is the CEO of Algorithmia, and he joins the show today to explain how Algorithmia works. The company has developed its own container orchestration and management service, and operates similarly to the serverless computing paradigms that we have discussed on recent episodes of Software Engineering Daily. Diego also talks about the marketplace dynamics of building a platform for developers to sell algorithms to each other. The post Algorithm Marketplace with Diego Oppenheimer of Algorithmia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Internet of Things with Azure’s Steve Busby 51:30
51:30 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:30
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Internet of Things is becoming a reality. Factories are being outfitted with sensors, temperature monitors, and other data gathering devices. In agriculture, farms are becoming more efficient thanks to soil monitoring devices and automated pesticide regulation. In our homes, refrigerators, alarm clocks, and mirrors are becoming “smart”. Steve Busby joins the show today to talk about the big picture: how the Internet of things works, from data ingestion to processing to feedback. Steve works at Microsoft in the Azure IoT division, and he discusses the problems which companies are having and the solutions that are available today–and where we are going in the future. The post Internet of Things with Azure’s Steve Busby appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Over the past year I have done a few experiments that are more editorial in nature, and both were very popular. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers , and the second was about how poker relates to software engineering . Today’s episode is an editorial about the creative process of writing computer music, and how it relates to software engineering. Since it is a departure from the normal format, I am releasing it on a weekend, and there are no ads on this episode. If you don’t like this episode — don’t worry. On Monday, Software Engineering Daily will be back to the usual highly technical rigor. In any case — please send your feedback on Twitter or email. A year ago, I was working at Amazon as a software engineer. Much of my spare time was spent writing music on the computer. I would wake up at 6 AM, work on music for three hours, and then walk to work through downtown Seattle. The great tragedy of working at any giant tech company is that most employees are completing menial tasks that make the company millions of dollars and make the employee a small fraction of that financial windfall. In the past, these economics made sense for the employee. The employer used to be a source of leverage for talented workers. Today, our tools are so cheap and powerful that we can succeed on our own, without a giant corporation. Unfortunately, this is such a recent development that most employees remain trapped within the story of corporatism. Employees dutifully believe that the corporation is doing them a favor. The last song I wrote while I was at Amazon is called Zeroes . It is about people who are not aware of the fact that they have much more power than corporations want them to believe. Writing music is similar to writing software. The digital audio workstations that music producers use are similar to IDEs that we use to step through a debugger, or detect errors in code. Just as an IDE will help you organize your code and manage your abstractions, a digital audio workstation can be used to coordinate instruments. The workstation can tell you what keys to play in what order, so you don’t need to know anything about music theory. Despite all of this help, the music software still doesn’t write the song for you. Much like the human-machine teams that currently dominate competitive chess, the best music today comes from the musicians who are best able to work in harmony with the most sophisticated technology. This has always been the case — from The Beatles to Max Martin to Skrillex. What the human brings to the table in human-machine music creation is an understanding of contemporary tastes. This is why I listen to pop music. Top 40 radio stations and Spotify playlists are not perfectly democratic, but they are close enough. I pay attention to the trends of the most popular music, and try to replicate them. This next song was written because I was copying the bass lines that became popular from the Iggy Azalea song Fancy , which was #1 for seven weeks straight in the Summer of 2014. Even after trying to copy the bass line, I ended up with a very different song than Fancy. Open source allows software quality levels to reach new heights. With open source, new software builds compounding interest on previously written software. The software spreads and replicates freely around the internet thanks to open repositories that new users can pull from. In music, this easy replication of information has led to a sampling revolution. Sampling is the act of cutting a snippet of sound from a song, or a TV show, or simply any random noise that you find interesting, and turning that snippet of sound into its own instrument. In 2009, I was studying hip hop production techniques. On uTorrent, I found a download of hip hop acapellas — samples of rappers rapping without instrumentals. I stitched some of these acapellas together and made a lyrical sample with 50 Cent, Eminem, and Nas. Underneath that vocal, I sliced up a sample from 24-Carat Black, a soul and funk band from 1970s that has been sampled by lots of hip hop artists. As a warning to sensitive listeners, these lyrics contain some harsh and sexist language, and do not represent my views as a podcaster. This next song is called Chicago, written when I was in Chicago at my first job out of college. The creation of that song was driven more by raw emotion than a logical approach, or a specific musical concept. I was working as a software engineer at an options trading company called PEAK6. The people at the company had fascinating, extreme personalities and brutal honesty was encouraged more than anywhere else I have worked. At PEAK6, building options trading software that could directly translate into profits for the company, I also had the feeling that if I did something important that made the company a lot of money, I would be compensated fairly. In this sense, a trading company can be more of a meritocracy than other tech companies. Working at a trading company, if you build a software feature for the traders in your company, you can walk over to the traders and ask them how much money it is making them. If they say it has increased their profits by 10%, it is very straightforward to ask your boss for a raise of at LEAST 10%. In contrast, at most tech companies, if you build a tool that improves productivity for your coworkers or your customers, it is often harder to quantify whether you deserve a raise based on building that software. Furthermore, at big tech companies there is so much office politics, and so many rules of propriety and servility and respect of your superiors — if you do something that you think is impressive, but it doesn’t positively impact your manager, that action might actually have negative consequences for you as an employee. On the trading floor, the atmosphere of healthy debate, brutal honesty, and lots of money flying around reminded me of my roots as a poker player , and in that sense I felt at home. In college, I was so obsessed with the intersection of finance and technology that I wrote a piece of fiction about an artificial intelligence that gets built at a hedge fund. The AI gets so smart that it eventually divests itself from the hedge fund and starts its own company, calling itself simply “Bank”. This next song is about that financial AI that awakens within the hedge fund — the song is called BANK. Most software engineers have written a game at some point in their career. I spent much of my time in college thinking about games that reflected the absurd financial fluctuations that I experienced as a poker player. The greatest games provide the player with a sense of drama. A game should be designed to be able to turn your stomach or fill you with elation and adrenaline. One game I worked on in college with a few friends is called MoonStocks . I built it with a few friends — Josh Stewart and Pong Tam — in this game, you can buy and sell fictional stocks that fluctuate in price based on Fourier transforms of songs I wrote. On the Android Play Store, you can download MoonStocks if you are interested. MoonStocks gave me great pleasure, because it allowed me to combine my niche interests of games, finance, music, storytelling, and programming. This is a lesson in creativity that is preached often these days in our long-tail economy: if you can’t be a 10,000 hour master of one specific thing, try to master the intersection of a few niche topics. The more unusual the topics that you pursue, the greater a chance you have at developing a deeper understanding than anyone else. Another game I built in college was called “ RatMarket ”. The setting of the game is a post-apocalyptic world where the only organisms left are rats and humans. Rat meat has become the only commodity that is traded in the world, and human arbitrageurs create bizarre financial instruments out of the rat meat commodity trading market. This was yet another dead-end project, but after working on it for awhile, I was so engrossed that I wrote a song based on it. So I hope you enjoy this next song, “RatMarket”. Absurdity is at the heart of the projects I work on. Playing with absurd concepts lets you stay unpredictable as a creator. When you combine absurdity with a relentless work ethic, you end up exploring more ideas with more tenacity than anyone else. People who respond to absurdity with shame and condemnation are repressed. They have never discovered the utility of the absurd because they have never experimented outside of local maxima of what makes sense. This is not to say that absurdity should be adopted as a way of life. Absurdity taken too far is embarrassing and unproductive. A pleasant, intellectual conversation with a hint of absurd humor can be ruined by a sarcastic person, a drunk, or a stoner who takes the absurdity too far. Absurdity is a tool to explore the edges of what has not been clearly delineated by science and reason. It is with a taste for the absurd that Airbnb was dreamed up. I’ve seen enough videos of Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky telling the Airbnb story to know that absurdity is deeply ingrained in the DNA of the company. How else would you come to the conclusion that having strangers sleeping on air beds in your apartment would be a billion dollar business? Not to mention the cereal box fundraising story . When I try to reason about how intelligent machines will think about the world, my sense of logic fails me. When we are speculating about how machines will think, we instinctively turn to the way that humans think, and try to imagine robot cognition relative to the human model of cognition. This is almost certainly wrong. But still, this topic inevitably comes up in conversation. Vacillating between the ideas of the serious, and the absurd, the next two songs explore two sides of how I speculate about the evolving artificial intelligence. The first song is simply called Robots , and it represents the absurdly alien sense of how robots might come online with self-awareness. The second song, Roger the Robot Janitor , explores the human-relativistic view of how robots might think to themselves. Roger the Robot Janitor is more about humans than it is about robots. Most of us have had a job that we don’t like. Roger has been designed with cutting edge artificial intelligence technology, and his job is to clean toilets at an elementary school. If you are a well-educated American listening to this, you were probably raised with the belief that you could do anything. You jumped through all of the right hoops, you went to college, you got a high paying job. And yet, somewhere along the way, the ideals that you felt growing up turned into a desperation in the pit of your stomach. It seems like something happened along the way and you are no longer looking at the world as an opportunity, but as something to insulate yourself from and relentlessly hedge against. It is an all-American seduction that many of the best and brightest computer scientists are seduced from college into crappy, dead-end jobs at giant software companies. They are dead end jobs because they seduce you into a mindset that is not true. The mindset is that you need a giant corporation to survive, and that it is noble and validating to go work at a job with minimal creativity and maximal servility. In this sense, we are all Roger the Robot Janitor. We have all woken up to realize we have been programmed with the peculiar desire to keep ourselves from doing anything substantial, for fear of disrupting the safe but blase life that we have established for ourselves. If you have had this realization, you have either suppressed it, or experienced a dramatic internal transformation. Or — if you are like me when I was at Amazon — you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. You are suppressing yourself from acting out because you are in preparation mode. You are preparing to escape your cloistered environment, saving up money and willpower. You are on the Career Track, but soon you will be on your own. And there is great drama in this moment. In the Summer of 2010, the cassette-to-iPod connecting cable in my car broke, and I could no longer play podcasts and music while I was in the car. On the commute to and from my Summer internship, I had an hour and a half of time driving. So I started listening to radio, and during this time I discovered the beauty of contemporary pop music. The melodies in pop music are extremely simple, and this makes songwriting extremely simple. In software engineering, when you have the simplest abstractions, programming is exhilarating. Studying pop music was like studying functional programming — the abstractions make creativity unexpectedly easy. Also, both pop music and functional programming have rabid fan bases. In order to fully adopt the mindset of a pop musician, I had to write a song about love and relationships and heartbreak, because almost every pop song is about romance. During this time, I was becoming so obsessed with pop music that I decided at some point I was going to become a pop music producer. With this in mind, I needed to learn to collaborate, so I convinced my friend Genevieve to sing what I wrote. The song is called “Letdown”. At this point, I have talked through an hour’s worth of songs. This topic is too self-indulgent and far removed from the core idea of Software Engineering Daily to go much further today, but if you listened this far I sincerely thank you. I always want to know what you think of this show. Send me an email at editor@softwareengineeringdaily.com , or tweet at me. It is a huge privilege to have people who listen to this show — so let me know what you want to hear about. I’m going to close with a song that I wrote for my cat Scout. The song is called Scout. Thanks again for listening. The post Music appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern 53:37
53:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedMost programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is the creator of Practical Dev, and he joins the show to discuss software editorialism. The goal of the Practical Dev to help developers grow and learn, and Ben is working towards that goal by providing a platform for engineers to write long-form content. The post Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran 53:49
53:49 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked53:49
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedCoding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran attended one coding boot camp, then spent some time living at home absorbed in his personal projects. Eventually, he went to second coding boot camp–his form of graduate school. During his second boot camp, Kenny worked on PurifyCSS, a module that can reduce the size of front-end projects by 60%. Today, Kenny works at the groundbreaking company Mesosphere–completing a career arc that proves coding boot camps are enough of an education to rival traditional university learning. The post Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Minecraft is a sandbox video game in which players build constructions out of 3-D cubes in a procedurally generated world. Minecraft is the best-selling PC game of all time. But Minecraft is not just a game. It is a platform for creativity, used by players within the game as well as programmers outside of it. Gabriel Simmer is a 16-year-old programmer who build NodeMC, a tool that wraps around the Minecraft server process. NodeMC can be used to build dashboards for Minecraft, and spin up additional Minecraft servers. In our conversation, Gabriel explains why people are so excited about Minecraft, how people are hacking Minecraft, and what the future of Minecraft is now that Microsoft has acquired it. The post Minecraft Programming with Gabriel Simmer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 The Changelog with Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo 58:51
58:51 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked58:51
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedThe Changelog is one of the most popular Software Engineering Podcasts in existence. Open source software moves fast, and The Changelog helps developers keep up with that rapid pace by publishing consistent podcasts and newsletters. When I started Software Engineering Daily, Changelog was one of the shows that I looked at for inspiration on how to succeed as a software podcaster. Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo are the hosts of The Changelog, and they join me today to talk about how open source has changed since they started the podcast in 2009, and how it will change in the near future. The post The Changelog with Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Virtual Reality Best Practices with Andreia Gaita 50:12
50:12 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:12
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedVirtual reality is a new platform for software engineers to work with. Best practices for VR development have not become widespread throughout the developer community. If you are developing VR software, you need to know how to avoid making the user sick, and this requires an understanding of the hardware limitations. Andreia Gaita is a software engineer at github. On today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, Andreia takes us through the developer experience of VR, and gives some analysis and predictions about consumer VR. For anyone who is looking for an introduction to virtual reality development–this episode is for you. The post Virtual Reality Best Practices with Andreia Gaita appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Patients with Type-1 diabetes need to frequently pump insulin into their bodies. In order to know when to pump insulin, these patients have a continuous glucose monitor alarm which detects incorrect levels of blood glucose. When the alarm goes off, the diabetes patient administers insulin manually through the pump. In an ideal world, the alarm would communicate with the insulin pump, creating a closed loop. But the world of outdated medical devices is not ideal. Dana Lewis is a developer of an open-source, closed-loop artificial pancreas called the Do-It-Yourself Pancreas system. Dana joins the show to discuss how she hacked together her artificial pancreas using a Raspberry pi plugged into these medical devices. This is a fascinating story of reverse engineering, internet of things, and the hacker mentality. The post Open Source Pancreas with Dana Lewis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
As software engineering gets more popular, the resources that we use to read and understand software are growing and improving. Scale Your Code is an organization that seeks to improve accessibility to the world’s programming knowledge, and today’s guest Christophe Limpalair joins me to discuss Scale Your Code. Christophe is a podcaster and blogger who runs Scale Your Code. The post Scale Your Code with Christophe Limpalair appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Reverse Engineering Facebook with Alex Hogue 50:56
50:56 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:56
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“ Graphing when your Facebook Friends are awake ” was trending at the top of Hacker News when Alex Hogue first posted it. Alex wrote a blog post about this piece of software he built that interacts with public Facebook APIs to detect when any of his friends are awake or asleep. As I read that post, I wanted to talk to Alex, because it was such a creative and technical piece of software–but it is surprising that someone would take the time to randomly inspect the elements of the Facebook page, reverse engineer the way Facebook sends data about statuses, mine data from that reverse engineering, and create a bunch of graphs about that data. Today, Alex joins me to explain how and why he built a tool to graph when people are awake or asleep using Facebook data. The post Reverse Engineering Facebook with Alex Hogue appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“I believe that there’s something deeply personal, natural, and human going on as we construct these abstract devices called computers.” Wiki technology was invented decades ago to improve how software developers communicate. Today, Wikipedia has taken the ideas of the wiki to a new level, creating a free knowledge graph for the world to learn from. Ward Cunningham developed WikiWikiWeb in 1994. He joins us today to discuss the first wiki, and how wikis have changed the way information propagates. Ward is not just an expert on how to write software–he is an expert on the software development experience, and we discuss how to build a community where software developers can overcome the fear of building something that has not been built before. Questions When you built the first wiki, what was your vision for the software? How did information move around communities before the web, and how has this improved? What are the canonical problems in developer communication? What are the successful properties of emergent systems relating to communities that share knowledge? Why aren’t more companies structured in a way to encourage experimentation? What are some ways to bootstrap and encourage a technical community? What were the things that Wikipedia did right that made it successful? What are you working on today, and what makes you excited? Links WikiWikiWeb PLoP conference Mosaic Kent Beck Imposter syndrome Smalltalk Xerox PARC New Relic Extreme Programming Federated Wiki Ward on Twitter The post Creating the Wiki with Ward Cunningham appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Our major teams are lead by two people which include one person who’s very strong in their own field, and then there’s a person who has a very good understanding of the cross-functional nature of product development.” GreyOrange Robotics builds robots for warehouse automation of logistics and ecommerce companies for quicker deliveries. Today’s episode features Akash Gupta, the CTO of GreyOrange. Questions Is sorting in the real world similar at all to sorting data on a computer? What are the common software features across your products? Why did you decide to use Erlang for your communication systems? What was the rationale behind using Riak? How often do you update the software on the machines that are running? Your vision for GreyOrange is to be a global company – how does starting your company in India affect this trajectory? What is unique about engineering culture in India? Links GreyOrange Robotics Video of the robots Erlang Riak The post Robots in the Warehouse with Akash Gupta appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“There are advantages in the newness of coding.” CodeNewbie is a community of programmers and people learning to code. There are so many people learning about software today, and CodeNewbie gives them a place to hang out, socialize, and become comfortable with the world of software. CodeNewbie has an excellent podcast, and if you like Software Engineering Daily you should check it out. Saron Yitbarek is the guest today, she is the creator of CodeNewbie. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Saron sits down to talk about learning to code after she had already had several careers, spanning biology, public radio, and marketing. Questions When and why did you learn how to code? What were your first steps in learning once you decided that you wanted to be a programmer? What are the biggest barriers to people who are learning to code? What inspired you to start CodeNewbie? What does the CodeNewbie community look like, and what makes it tick? What are the advantages to learning to code later in life? What are the backgrounds of the students in the Tech Jobs Academy? Is it still worth it to get a computer science degree? What’s next for CodeNewbie? Links CodeNewbie Tell Me More : NPR Tech Jobs Academy Floodgates of Assholery The Lean Startup Saron’s page The post CodeNewbie with Saron Yitbarek appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might 44:00
44:00 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked44:00
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“In many ways, nature is still the fastest computer we have when it comes to studying disease.” Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same cannot be said about biology. Matt Might is an associate professor with a PhD in computer science. When his son was diagnosed with an extremely rare illness, he was confronted with the uncertainties of human biology. In this episode, we discuss Matt’s quest to solve the puzzle of his son’s disease–computer science meets genetics, on this episode of Software Engineering Daily. Questions What do you mean when you say “science becomes the medicine”? What technical improvements are you seeing in the experimental process of searching for genetic clues? What are the different types of drug screening? Should people think of themselves more as a unique entity with sample size n=1? Are A/B tests over time on ourselves worthwhile? What are the similarities and differences between biologists, doctors, and computer scientists? Do you have a unique piece of wisdom from your experience with your son’s diagnosis? Links HOWTO: Get tenure Rare diseases The Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) CRISPR Matt’s page The post Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Software Journalism at GeekWire with Todd Bishop 51:38
51:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Our justice system in general – even if you look at things like our regulatory system, our patent system – I think it has a very hard time keeping up with the current pace of technology.” Microsoft and Amazon are the tech giants of the Pacific Northwest. These two companies shape Seattle technology, and Todd Bishop has been writing about them for over a decade. Todd is the co-founder of GeekWire, an online media company focused on technology in the Pacific Northwest. We talk about the past and present of Microsoft and Amazon, what it means for an engineering company to be good or evil, and what it’s like to be a software journalist. Questions Was there ever a point where there was a big engineering drain from Microsoft to Amazon? How do the cultures of the two companies compare and contrast? Do traditional media outlets have a bias against big tech companies? What do you think about Facebook’s Free Basics controversy? Do people take too hardline of an approach when it comes to Net Neutrality? Will Uber have to face a regulatory court battle in the future? Is it difficult to balance growing Geekwire while also maintaining journalistic integrity? Links Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace Washington Post closes sale to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Free Basics by Facebook Net neutrality GeekWire Todd on Twitter The post Software Journalism at GeekWire with Todd Bishop appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“If we don’t have all of the people represented in the creation activities, I don’t believe we’re going to end up with the solutions that we need for our society.” Technology careers are not as accessible to certain demographics, such as women. Sarah Allen is working to change that through education and outreach. Sarah Allen created RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, a pair of organizations working to make technology more accessible to people who are underrepresented in tech. RailsBridge workshops are a fun and free way to get started with Ruby, Rails or other technologies. RailsBridge was so successful that Sarah created Bridge Foundry, which has an even wider variety of free workshops, from Clojure to Go to Mobile. This is an inspirational episode of Software Engineering Daily, and is a great learning opportunity for anyone interested in building a community. Questions Why is it important to make tech more diverse? What are the first principles of education that we need to start baking into our educational processes? Why are women so underrepresented in tech? How did you go about scaling Bridge Foundry? How have you encouraged more engineers to take on leadership roles when there is an assumption that you can’t be technical and lead at the same time? Should every child learn to code? How can software change our culture for a brighter more diverse future? Links RailsBridge Bridge Foundry If Men Could Menstruate Sarah’s page The post Bridge Foundry with Sarah Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Applying Software Research to Industry with Amy Ko 57:09
57:09 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:09
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“It’s not just about tools, it’s also a lot about how you structure a team, how you structure the communication between engineers, how you facilitate decision making – all of those things.” University research produces numerous papers about software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the problems explored by these software engineering researchers have no actual application. These papers fall into The Black Hole of Software Engineering Research. Amy Ko is an associate professor at the University of Washington. When she worked as a CTO of AnswerDash, she experimented with some of the software engineering research coming out of academia and industry. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we discuss Amy’s results. Our conversation spans the topics of education, big companies, and startups. Since this interview, Amy came out as a transgender. Per her request, we’ve changed the name and pronouns above, but did not modify the audio recording. Questions What kinds of research were you trying to bring to AnswerDash? What were the challenges of actually implementing something that you read about in a research paper? What is the black hole of software engineering research? Do you think there is a strong distinction between theory and practice? What is the right form for disseminating software engineering knowledge? Why did you transition back to academia from your full-time role as CTO? What do you wish you could change about the university education system? Links The black hole of software engineering research Answerdash Human–computer interaction Amy’s professor page The post Applying Software Research to Industry with Amy Ko appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Just paying attention to clutter in general, makes things a lot better.” Design is more important than ever. There are so many websites being created every day, that it is not enough to differentiate your product with rock solid engineering. Your product has to be beautiful, intuitive, and tested for usability. You don’t want all of the hard work of the product and engineering teams to go to waste, so on this episode, the focus is design. Tracy Osborn is the creator of WeddingLovely, a beautifully designed two sided marketplace website, where people who are getting married connect with wedding vendors. Today, Tracy discusses “design for nondesigners”. Whether you are an engineer, a marketer, or a business analyst, just learning a few simple tactics about design can take you far. Questions Why is design important for engineers? What were the design mistakes you saw other wedding websites make when you founded Wedding lovely? How does mobile factor into your design strategy? What were the challenges designing to accommodate both sides in a two-sided marketplace? What are some “design hacks” that non-designers can implement easily? How can engineers and designers work more harmoniously together? Links Tracy’s talk at Fluent Tracy’s personal page WeddingLovely Google Material Design Bootstrap Foundation Hello Web App Dwarf Fortress with Tarn Adams ColourLovers The post Design for Non-designers with Tracy Osborn appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 JavaScript and the Internet of Things with Andrew Chalkley 1:00:20
1:00:20 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:20
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“The lessons that we’re learning on the front-end and on the server side are applicable to hardware. I don’t think that anything’s gonna arise out of hardware that we haven’t thought of yet.” JavaScript is everywhere, on the browser, the server, and now on hardware. Finally–the Internet of Things is upon us — and it is powered by JavaScript. Even if you consider yourself a web developer, and you have no interest in “maker” culture, keep your eye on this space. Factories in Shenzhen are making better, more modular parts, and the same supply chain economics that are driving down the cost of smart phones and smart cars, will give hobbyist engineers all the simple hardware components they could ever need. This will power a future of proliferated devices that have internet connectivity and “talk” to each other to enable user experiences we wouldn’t dream of today. And naturally, with this will come problems that we cannot anticipate as well. On today’s episode, Andrew discusses how JavaScript can be used on hardware. Jeff and Andrew talk about the players in the hardware space, as well as how the big cloud players like AWS and Azure are positioning themselves to be the data lakes for the internet of things. Andrew is giving a talk about this at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference . If you want to win a free ticket to Fluent, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily . Andrew Chalkley is a hardware hobbyist, software engineer and a full-time teacher at Treehouse. Questions Why are we writing JavaScript on hardware nowadays? Is JavaScript actually a good language for hardware, or is it more of an evolutionary outcome? Does the JS written for hardware look significantly different from JS on other platforms? Why is IoT coming to fruition now – what technology is enabling it? Why are embedded linux devices for IoT appealing? What are the software libraries used to program JavaScript hardware? How do you decide which cloud hosting platforms to invest in when building IoT devices? Links Andrew’s talk at Fluent http://www.marvell.com/kinoma/ Arduino Raspberry Pi Foundation Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer Espruino Pico JavaScript on Hardware with Kelsey Breseman Johnny-Five Adafruit Intel Edison Andrew on Twitter The post JavaScript and the Internet of Things with Andrew Chalkley appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Designing for Drunk Users with Austin Knight 47:13
47:13 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked47:13
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Your product or your website should be so simple and so well designed that even a drunk person could use it.” In today’s episode of SEDaily, Jeff and Austin discuss why designing for a drunk user is a competitive advantage. Austin also explains why engineers need to think about UX and how they can incorporate UX considerations into development workflows. Austin Knight is a designer and UX engineer at Hubspot. Austin will be speaking at the upcoming Fluent Conference , and Software Engineering Daily is giving away a ticket to Fluent, which will be held March 8-10 in San Francisco. To be entered in a random drawing for this free ticket, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily between now and February 22nd. Make sure to tag us @software_daily and Fluent @fluentconf so we see your tweet. Questions Why is UX design so important in 2016? How does UX testing drive modern UX design? Why should we consider the average internet user to be drunk when we design web products? What insights did you get from watching a drunk guy navigate your website? Why is there a conflict between what a user does and what a user says? How can you institutionalize harsh feedback into your tests? Is there any benefit in treating design like art, and intuiting how a product should be defined? Why should software engineers care about design? Links Austin’s personal page Austin’s talk at Fluent Hubspot The User is Drunk UX & Growth Podcast The post Designing for Drunk Users with Austin Knight appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Our field moves so quickly that learning is kind of a fundamental skill – not every field is that way.” Software engineering combines art, science, and philosophy. On the Developer Tea podcast, Jonathan Cutrell explores how engineers can improve their technical ability as well as their interpersonal skills and mental clarity. On this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Jeff and Jonathan about focus, career development, and software podcasting. Jonathan Cutrell is the founder and host of Developer Tea. He is also the Director of Technology at Whiteboard. Questions What are the most crucial soft skills that engineers should focus on improving? Is trying to multithread our physical tasks a mistake? How should people think about splitting their time between a full-time job and side projects? How can engineers learn to learn more effectively? What are the topics your listeners have wanted to hear about the most? What are your plans for the future of Developer Tea? Links Developer Tea Auren Hoffman on Quora Serial Podcast Ruby Rogues Shop Talk It Might Get Loud Spec Jonathan’s personal page The post Developer Tea with Jonathan Cutrell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“By the time I joined, people were already starting to have this microservice fatigue.” Software is changing every domain including Marketing, Healthcare, and even Agriculture. Government is one specific area where the potential for improvement is obvious. Governments are often defined by abstract rules, transactions, permissions and hierarchies, grounded on some fundamental principles – this is striking similar to the same tenets that software and computer science are based on. In that sense, could software be leveraged in this unique industry to create massive change? OpenGov is one company trying to find out through application of software in local city and state governments. The company currently offers a web-based financial visualization software that focuses on making government budget and financial data accessible by modeling and presenting it in a user-friendly way. But it is not farfetched to see the potential being greater and broader in scope. In this episode, Jeff discussed with Andrew how OpenGov is using technology to improve government. Their conversation focuses in on the front-end technologies used to create the webapp, as well as “microservice fatigue” and the other various architectural concerns within the team. Andrew Clark is a software engineer at OpenGov. Questions What is Opengov? What is the tech stack behind Opengov? How has the paradigm in which you write code changed? What is it about Elm and Ohm that are so appealing? What will your talk Back to React be about? In what ways have Ember and Angular changed post React? What is the big vision that OpenGov is working towards? Links OpenGov Flow, a new static type checker for JavaScript GraphQL and Relay with Nick Schrock GraphQL Relay React.js Conf Andrew Clark The post OpenGov with Andrew Clark appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Teaching Inmates to Code with Wes Bailey 1:00:14
1:00:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“This is a group of people who largely have been told their entire life that they’re failures – we’re going in and we’re saying ‘Hey this is just about the most complex thing that humanity has ever done, why don’t you give it a try?’ ” Incarceration in the United States is often a punitive exercise rather than a rehabilitative one. As a consequence, recidivism is the norm – according to a 2012 report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, just over 65% of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. San Quentin State Prison in California is challenging this issue by trying to equip inmates with valuable skills while they are incarcerated. The Last Mile is a program that works with prisoners to help them build relevant skills in technology so that they can more easily transition to productive employment once they are out of prison. Specifically, it teaches inmates how to program, oftentimes starting at the basics like how to use a computer, and how hypertext works. In addition to the challenges of teaching students who may not know computer basics, the program has to work with the constraint of not having internet access. In this episode, Wes and Jeff discuss the realities of incarceration in the United States, and how teaching inmates how to code is a remarkably empowering way to combat and weaken the prison-industrial complex. Wes Bailey is the Director of Program Operations at The Last Mile, and a self-taught developer. Questions How did The Last Mile get started? Should everyone become an entrepreneur? How does the curriculum of a coding bootcamp compare to that of The Last Mile? What are the challenges to teaching programming without an internet connection? Do you notice imposter syndrome in the inmates at San Quentin who are part of The Last Mile? What motivates you to work on The Last Mile? What lies at the root of the prison-industrial complex? Links The Last Mile Chris Redlitz Mozilla Developer Network Healthy Hearts The post Teaching Inmates to Code with Wes Bailey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Digital Transformation of Government with Sarah Allen 1:00:14
1:00:14 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:00:14
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“When we say a ‘21st century government’, what we’re seeing is that people are using their smartphones, they’re online, and we have the potential to actually deliver better services to our people at dramatically lower costs.” Governments are often laggards in the adoption of new technology. Every aspect of life, from transportation to healthcare, are being affected by the convergence of several trends including connected mobile devices, cloud storage and distributed systems. Yet federal services are in many cases still incapable of delivering the best and most affordable services to citizens. The most visible instance of the U.S. government struggling to modernize was the implementation of Healthcare.gov. What was originally a modest budget for deploying the web marketplace of the Affordable Care Act ballooned into a costly implementation that required hiring external consultants and developers to fix. In response to this dysfunction, 18F was formed with the mission to simplify the government’s digital services. Sarah joins Software Engineering Daily to explain how and why 18F was formed, and how it plans to improve government from within in the years to come. Sarah Allen is a Presidential Innovation Fellow who serves as a developer and product manager for 18F. She is also a co-founder of Bridge Foundry, an organization that helps encourage and empower people who are learning to code. Questions What are the differences between building a successful company versus building a successful government organization? Can you combat government’s slowness with the spirit of “delivery as the strategy”? In an ideal world, what is the relationship between politics and software? Were the struggles associated with healthcare.gov important for the genesis of the USDS? How did Bridge Foundry get started? What was it like to build a technology product in 1995? Links 18F Presidential Innovation Fellows Bridge Foundry HealthCare.gov Shoes! Gender and Sex at Gogaruco Sarah’s personal page The post Digital Transformation of Government with Sarah Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“The BitTorrent DHT is an amazing engineering feat and one of the coolest ideas in computer science, I think, because it works without any central coordination.” WebTorrent is a streaming torrent client for the browser that can be used without any additional plugins, extensions, or installations. It is written entirely in JavaScript, and uses WebRTC to handle peer-to-peer communication. There are some limitations to making BitTorrent work over the web using WebRTC, including the inability for a browser-based WebTorrent client or “web peer” to communicate directly with a torrent client. However, the potential for every browser to contribute to the hosting and streaming of files is unprecedented. Imagine if large content sites like Netflix or YouTube did not have centralized hosting, and instead relied on its users to seed the content to each other using their web clients. This enables not only more efficient networks, but also the ability for each user to contribute to and be part of the content delivery network. Feross Aboukhadijeh is the creator of WebTorrent. Previously he built PeerCDN, a peer-to-peer content delivery network, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Questions Could you define what a peer-to-peer technology is? What is the model for the distributed hash table across the network? What were the problems with the traditional BitTorrent user experience? How does npm embody the best way to break components into small reusable parts? What is Browserify and why is it useful for WebTorrent? How does WebRTC play an important role in enabling WebTorrent? What are the engineering problems that are still unsolved in WebTorrent, and what are you working on now? Links WebTorrent BitTorrent Distributed hash table WebRTC UDP Magnet links Browserify Electron Feross’ personal page The post WebTorrent with Feross Aboukhadijeh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“We saw a really great opportunity to build a food company that takes technology seriously from the ground up, and have that be our competitive advantage as we grow and scale.” Soylent is a meal replacement beverage, available in both liquid and powdered forms. Soylent is designed with the goal of meeting all nutritional requirements for an average adult. John Coogan is the CTO of Soylent. Questions What is Soylent? Why are Soylent and the culture around it so appealing to engineers? Are you trying to replace food altogether? What is the difference between debugging our bodies and debugging our code? What were the engineering challenges you faced when scaling Soylent? When you released the beta version, how did you differentiate between novelty orders and true demand? If you had the data science infrastructure of your dreams, what are the questions you’d ask, and the answers you’d search for? Links Soylent How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent a16z Podcast: The Future of Food The Black Swan John on Twitter The post Soylent Engineering with John Coogan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.” Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including “The Go Programming Language” and “The C Programming Language”, a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. Questions What are the timeless characteristics that define a successful programming language? How did people categorize languages 50 years ago? What would people have been posting on Hacker News in 1965? Why is Java so popular, and why do you think it’s strongly hyped? Computers have become more powerful over time – how has this affected language design? What are your thoughts on JavaScript? What did you learn while writing a book about Go? What did you learn about programming and life from working with Dennis Ritchie? Links How to succeed in language design without really trying JavaScript: The Definitive Guide JavaScript: The Good Parts The Go Programming Language Plan 9 The C Programming Language (K&R) Brian’s professor page The post Language Design with Brian Kernighan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. This episode is republished from The Quoracast . Questions: What will the world look like in 5 years? What are the biggest problems associated with rapid spread and development of the Internet? Does blockchain technology present any solutions to these problems Why are cats so interested in blockchain? Are you worried about artificial intelligence like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk? What is the “digital dark age”? The post Internet Future with Vint Cerf appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Founding Digital Ocean with Moisey Uretsky 1:05:21
1:05:21 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:05:21
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“It’s a classic case where you have to be contrarian. It seems like the worst idea in the world to start a cloud hosting business. We didn’t know any better.” Moisey Uretsky is the cofounder of Digital Ocean, a leading cloud hosting provider based in New York. “It’s the usual immigrant story. My parents moved to America when we were four or five. We were poor and didn’t have much money so our parents focused on education.” Moisey told me about his early years, and how he started working on technology with his brother Ben. “I was bored during my first summer break and my brother had a job at a data center company and I just started reading books about it. Two weeks later he told me to take over as a sysadmin. From there we started our first company.” Prior to Digital Ocean, Moisey worked on ServerStack, a hosting business similar to Digital Ocean. He also tried to start a hedge fund analytics company, which he had difficulty making successful. “I did make one sale. I had some sales experience from ServerStack. The first year was just me working and pretending to be four people. But ultimately, product-market fit in that category is extremely complicated. It’s pretty much a nightmare. I don’t envy any financial services startup.” Moisey has built on the learnings from ServerStack and his financial services company. “It was tremendously formative. We made every single classic business mistake. This was a decade ago when there wasn’t much of a New York City startup community. We didn’t understand how to attract customers or market properly. We weren’t able to capture the success that was available in the space. It’s easy to start, but it’s hard to scale.” Digital Ocean was founded in a time when the field was rife with competition. Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Google App Engine, Rackspace, and others had created a market that seemed saturated. “It’s a classic case where you have to be contrarian. It seems like the worst idea in the world to start a cloud hosting business. We didn’t know any better.” “What was missing from all the other providers was simplicity. I have a background as a developer and a sysadmin, and yet they were still too complicated for me.” “With AWS, the learning curve is very steep. It could be a little daunting for people just starting out. There are a lot of things that are no longer relevant that you are forced to think about. These are carryovers from days when hard drives were counted in megabytes not gigabytes.” Everyone else was putting engineering first, and not product first. “If you get a bunch of engineers together, often times you are going to get an engineering-focused solution. We always went backwards from the product side instead of the engineering side.” Moisey found himself personally delighted by the product that Digital Ocean was building. “It took us about six months to build Digital Ocean. When we spun up that first server, I was like ‘this is amazing, all I want to do is build a Rails app and spin up some more servers.’ We knew that if we could deliver that feeling to other customers we were on to something.” He pointed out similarities and differences between Digital Ocean and Heroku. The two companies both allow easy onboarding for someone looking to deploy an application to a hosted environment. But Digital Ocean offers more options for simple yet advanced configuration–a huge upside for businesses that need to iron out small problems that magnify upon a business’s event of scale. “When you get past the point of hitting product-market fit, you can experience really fast dramatic growth. At that point, you want to be more hands-on. All of those 1% errors that you could ignore with 100 users, they begin to creep into the picture.” “With Heroku, it’s a bit more curated, but when it doesn’t fit your product, you might need to go find something else.” This spectrum between ease of use and configurability parallels the spectrum from small business use cases to large business use cases. “That’s why AWS is so large.” Large businesses require lots of knobs to turn, so those customers historically have had to turn to Amazon Web Services. Digital Ocean has found a sweet spot along that configurability/ease-of-use spectrum. Digital Ocean was started as a spinoff project from ServerStack. This strategy leveraged both the hardware and the domain expertise which the Uretskys already had. “If you look at start-ups that have hardware as well as software–it’s a lot harder. If you have never bled in a data center, you don’t know about the problems you are going to encounter.” “We ran two companies at the same time. Eventually, Digital Ocean had to acquire Server Stack. Server Stack was like the incubator for Digital Ocean. We learned from the mistakes we made. Without the experience of Server Stack, we would not have been able to build Digital Ocean into what it is today.” Digital Ocean’s customer service complements its easy-to-use product offerings. I asked if it was difficult to scale the support team. “The way to scale anything is you get a good product. If you have a good product, you get less support questions. If you hire aggressively, you get less support questions. It’s a thing you put into your mission statement early on. When we didn’t have much funding, there was probably a 50% chance that I would be answering a customer’s support question.” Moisey told me about his experience growing up with his eventual cofounder Ben. “We came to America, and we were always passionate about computers, but we were really poor. We got a computer when we were 13 and used AOL and a dial-up modem. My mom was starting to use Visual Basic, and I stole her book and printed out the huge Windows API because I wanted to make my own app. I got about halfway through. It was doing stupid stuff that kids do. Cracking software and whatnot.” “We always had a strong work ethic. One thing leads to another, I never had a resume, never worked a job. You never see things from the perspective of an employee if you’ve never been one. You always think about how you can push forward.” “For me and Ben, it was a situation where he had a job and I stopped by to learn stuff and he gave me a job. The company we were working for was going out of business. Working with family is a unique dynamic. One thing that I can say for certain is that whatever the dynamic is with the brothers, that will be the dynamic within the office.” Locating a tech company in New York has its perks as well as its hazards. “Ten years ago, it would have been [difficult]. But today, you have a large number of local VCs and Silicon Valley VCs with local offices. The thing is, the best people are always hard to find. The benefit to New York is that there are people that get burnt out on other cities. And there all of these offices for Twitter and Facebook and Google,” and employees are sometimes willing to leave those companies for Digital Ocean. “Technically speaking, we should be in San Francisco. But we love New York.” I asked a question about what sort of economic boom we are in, which he answered with subtlety. “The internet as a whole is still growing. Developers as a whole are growing more as a sector than any other degree. And we’ve been doing this for twelve years. Because we’ve already gone through a downturn, and it didn’t really affect what we were doing, we’re optimistic.” “Until you can stream HD right to your Oculus Rift, we haven’t reached peak internet usage. There’s still a lot of growth in the emerging markets. Globalization had a lot of negatives and a lot of positives. We can really be a part of that globalization of information.” The post Founding Digital Ocean with Moisey Uretsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“The main motivation for me was to gain more perspective on the world and my place in it.” Michael Rosenthal is a traveling programmer who gave up school and full-time job prospects in the U.S. to travel and freelance. This episode is a Christmas special because Michael is my younger brother, and his journey as a developer and a person has been inspiring to me. Questions When did you start bitcoin mining? Could you describe the transition where you decided to go travel? How does the remote job discovery process work? Have you ever taken a freelance job that you’ve regretted? What do you miss about being home in the States? Why did you switch from freelancing to consulting? Links Upwork Mango Chomp Michael on Twitter The post Digital Nomadism with Michael Rosenthal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“You’ve listened to podcasts where you gotta fast forward 8-9 minutes in before the actual meat happens.” Scott Hanselman is a technologist, teacher and podcaster who works for Microsoft on its web platform team. Scott hosts several podcasts including Hanselminutes and This Developer’s Life , which cover various topics in software. Questions When you started Hanselminutes, what was your goal for the show? What makes the shows by Charlie Rose and Terry Gross the gold standard? What are the most salient changes you’re seeing at Microsoft these days? What are the important levers to pull in order to improve developer experience? What problems are you working on day-to-day? What comes to your mind when you hear the word “audacity”? What’s the biggest piece of advice you can give to developers? Links Car Talk Open Source .NET – 1 year later Scott on Twitter Scott’s Personal Page Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Software engineering projects don’t fail because of a lack of technical ability, they fail because of a lack of communication.” Rebecca Garcia is the creator of GeekGirlWeb and founder of CoderDojo NYC. She spends much of her time educating people about the importance of STEM education, particularly in the domain of programming. Questions Why did you consider so important to further the cause of STEM education? When you’re introducing a young person to programming, what is the best way to approach it? What do you think about NYC’s initiative to teach CS in all public schools within 10 years? What are the biggest misconceptions about the conversation around women in tech? How do you balance tech evangelism and actual coding? What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned while teaching kids to code? Links CoderDojo NYC Scratch Hour of Code GHC GeekGirlWeb Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Teaching Kids to Code with Rebecca Garcia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 GeekWire Podcast with Software Engineering Daily 51:38
51:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked51:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“I would say that the vast majority of people see programming more as a science. But to get the best work out of yourself, you have to be thinking from an artistic perspective. So it makes sense to make your north star, as an engineer, some sort of artistic goal.” Todd Bishop from The GeekWire Podcast recently interviewed Jeff for a discussion on various topics including programming languages, coding bootcamps and the philosophical question of whether programming is an art or a science. Thanks to GeekWire for the opportunity! You can find the show and more at Geekwire: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/is-software-development-art-or-science-geekwire-podcast-with-software-engineering-daily/ The post GeekWire Podcast with Software Engineering Daily appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Software is this really unique field that is growing so rapidly that people are almost forced to specialize into one subdomain – and that kind of stratification is good for your job and for your employers, but it’s not necessarily good for you as an individual trying to grow in the field of software.” This is episode 100 of Software Engineering Daily, and is a behind the scenes episode on the show that explores the challenges and motivations behind building a daily software podcast. Pranay Mohan is the Producer of Software Engineering Daily. Questions What is the goal of Software Engineering Daily? Why did you start working on Software Engineering Daily? What is your background – what did you study? Where do you stand on the debate of college versus coding bootcamps? What is keeping Software Engineering Daily from being a go-to podcast for software engineers? What is your favorite episode? How have we made mistakes while working on Software Engineering Daily? Links Reconsider by DHH Lifestyle Businesses Product Hunt Podcasts Automated Trading and OCaml with Yaron Minsky Java and Developer Advocacy with Trisha Gee The post Episode 100 with Pranay Mohan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“We are at this moment where states and corporations are trying to restrict so much of what we can do on the internet because we have centralized the internet.” Popcorn Time was a free, open-source application that allowed for streaming of movie and television show torrents. Niv Sardi is an activist and developer based in Argentina, who previously worked on the main fork of Popcorn Time, popcorntime.io. Niv is also the founder of the Butter Project, a spin out project from Popcorn Time. Questions Did the MPAA shut down Popcorn Time? Why did the MPAA allege that Popcorn Time was illegal? What is specific about Torrent that makes it different from other P2P technologies? Why was the decision made to spin Butter out of Popcorn Time? How could Netflix improve by adopting P2P? What are the principles behind your activism? How has working on Popcorn Time affected your worldview? Links Popcorn Time MPAA says it shut down Popcorn Time Butter Project Niv on Twitter Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Popcorn Time with Niv Sardi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“It’s not obvious why programming is awesome – you can’t build anything at first, everything is really hard at first – what’s the point? And so we decided, lets make a game so that the engagement is there from the first moment.” CodeCombat is a multiplayer live coding strategy game where the players write code to control their characters. Nick Winter is the CEO and Co-founder of CodeCombat. Questions Where did you get the idea to build CodeCombat? How is this different from the gamification at other websites like Code cademy? How does multiplayer work? What level of programming skill will someone have when they finish playing through CodeCombat? How do you build and render the animations on the front-end? What games inspired CodeCombat? Why did you open-source all of your code? Links CodeCombat Kingdom Rush Why You Should Open-Source Your Startup Nick’s personal page Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post CodeCombat with Nick Winter appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“There was a need to create a space where mothers felt welcome, because our challenges – they’re very different from people who are learning who don’t have these types of caregiving responsibilities.” MotherCoders is a program that helps mothers gain technical skills with the support of a community and benefits like on-site childcare. Tina Lee is the Founder of MotherCoders, having created the program to meet her own need after trying to find existing support systems while learning how to code. Questions What inspired you to start MotherCoders? What do you mean by the “new economy”? Do you see imposter syndrome being an obstacle when people are starting to code? Why do mothers represent an ideal group to bridge the gap in tech employment? There is a saying – when you empower a woman, you empower the family. Why is this? How can people get involved with MotherCoders? Links MotherCoders MotherCoders Video Tina on Twitter Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post MotherCoders with Tina Lee appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Automated Trading and OCaml with Yaron Minsky 57:37
57:37 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked57:37
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Anyone who is really concerned about correctness should think twice about programming in a kind of free-thread model where everyone has to be very disciplined and put all the locks in the right place to make things work well.” Jane Street Capital is a quantitative trading firm known for its emphasis on technology and specifically functional programming. OCaml is the main programming language used at Jane Street, chosen for its performance, correctness and dynamism. Yaron Minsky is the Head of Technology at Jane Street and was responsible for introducing OCaml to the company and transitioning its architecture. Questions Jane Street is a trading company – how does that drive the technological requirements? Why is OCaml an appealing language for Jane Street’s use cases? What is the concurrency support for OCaml? What is the difference between a macro and a function? What are some unique principles at Jane Street? How has your definition of money changed? Links Jane Street Tech Blog Yaron’s talk on Caml Trading Yaron on Twitter Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Automated Trading and OCaml with Yaron Minsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Free Code Camp is my effort to correct the extremely inefficient and circuitous way I learned to code. I’m committing my career and the rest of my life towards making this process as efficient and painless as possible.” Free Code Camp is an open source community dedicated to teaching people how to code while also helping non-profits Quincy Larson is the Founder of Free Code Camp, and previously was the director of several schools in the U.S. and China. Questions Why did you start Free Code Camp? How does Free Code Camp compare to the experience of a paid coding bootcamp attendee? Why do you teach fullstack JavaScript instead of ruby on rails? What are the things that people have trouble learning in the all javascript stack? What are the rates of attrition? Do you think everybody should learn to code? Links Free Code Camp Cloud9 IDE Codepen Quincy on Twitter Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Free Code Camp with Quincy Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Turing School of Software and Design is a seven-month program that teaches software development in Denver. Steve Kinney is the co-director of academics at Turing School of Software and Design. Questions What level of experience is required to get accepted? How does Turing School compare to an academic computer science degree? How do the results compare to 3-month boot camps? What social injustices is Turing School seeking to amend? Links Turing School Steve Kinney on Twitter Steve Kinney Homepage Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Turing School with Steve Kinney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“The official motto that we have in our help manual is ‘Losing is fun!’ ” Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress. Tarn Adams works on Dwarf Fortress with his brother Zach. Questions What is the objective of Dwarf Fortress? Does the way you’ve designed the gameplay reflect any philosophy about life that you have? What language is Dwarf Fortress written in? Do people build constructs in Dwarf Fortress that you would never have expected? Did your studying complex math at Stanford affect how you’ve developed Dwarf Fortress? What advice would you give to developers listening that want to create their own game? Links Dwarf Fortress Infiniminer Tarn on Wikipedia Sponsors Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. The post Dwarf Fortress with Tarn Adams appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Accessibility Engineering with Léonie Watson 56:38
56:38 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked56:38
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedDesigning software and toolkits with accessibility in mind is important to ensure that everyone has equal access to the internet. Léonie Watson is an accessibility engineer and a director at the British Computer Association of the Blind. Questions What was your experience as a web developer in the late 90’s dot com boom? What is diabetic retinopathy? How does a screen reader work? What is a common design pattern to refactor inaccessible engineering to be accessible? Can you talk about how a webpage is converted to an audible format with accessibility APIs? How have smartphones affected what its like to be blind? Are there libraries, tools or best practices developers can use to improve accessibility? Links Losing Sight Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Web A11y Slack Léonie’s Webpage Sponsors Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. The post Accessibility Engineering with Léonie Watson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Creativity and Engineering with Derek Sivers 58:47
58:47 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked58:47
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“Creativity never comes to you – she will only meet you halfway.” Derek Sivers is a programmer, musician, and writer. He has created several companies and products, including CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music online. Questions As programmers, do we have an obligation to create new things? How did your interest in PostgreSQL evolve? Why does Active Record complicate things? What were the interesting engineering challenges at CDBaby? You wrote a post about loss in 2010 – can you talk a little bit about this and what you learned from this experience? What is the most counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in life? Links The War of Art Superhuman by Habit Simple Made Easy Simplify: move code into database functions Derek on Twitter Sponsors Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit. Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired. The post Creativity and Engineering with Derek Sivers appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“Everything has changed around our lives — the way we connect with each other, the way we communicate, the way we work, even the way we fall in love – except the way we govern ourselves, as a society.” DemocracyOS is an open-source application for online decision making. The organization’s goal is to enable more responsive and transparent communication with government using modern technology. Santiago Siri is the president of DemocracyOS. Questions What are the problems with democracy that could be solved with technology? How does the DemocracyOS app work? What are the P2P identity management solutions you’ve explored? Were there any previous nonprofits that went through YC whose path you were able to learn from? Is authority necessary in government? Links DemocracyOS Pia Mancini: How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era The Net Party Santiago’s Website The post Responsive Government with Santiago Siri appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Rethinking Documentation with Greg Koberger 1:07:53
1:07:53 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked1:07:53
Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked“If you focus on improving the developer experience, it will naturally translate into good documentation.” ReadMe is simplifying the process of writing documentation. The platform provides a readymade developer hub with the ability to integrate API endpoints into documentation. Greg Koberger is a developer and designer, and the founder of ReadMe. He previously founded a traveling incubator and worked for Mozilla. Questions What makes good documentation? Why did you choose Angular as your front-end framework? What design principles did you focus on when building ReadMe? What were your weaknesses when you applied to Y Combinator? Where do you want to be in five years time? Links ReadMe Five Years Time Phileas and Fogg – Traveling Incubator Greg Koberger on Twitter The post Rethinking Documentation with Greg Koberger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Robot-Human Interaction with Stefanie Tellex 50:47
50:47 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked50:47
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedRobots sometimes need help from humans when solving complex problems. Successfully solving a problem often demands a strong model for communication and well-trained robots. Stefanie Tellex is an assistant professor at Brown University whose research focuses on constructing robots that use natural language to communicate with humans. Questions The goal of your research is to construct robots that seamlessly use natural language to communicate with humans. How close are we to that goal? Why is communication between robot and human a problem that is rooted in both linguistics and philosophy? Why do we need a mathematical framework for communicating with robots? Do robots perceive our physical environment in the same way that people do? What is the future of human-robot interaction? With artificial intelligence, are we summoning the demon, as Elon Musk says? Links Stefanie’s Research Page Best Paper Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference Asking for Help Using Inverse Semantics Stefanie’s Talk at RSS 2014 The post Robot-Human Interaction with Stefanie Tellex appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Crocodile Browser with Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime 39:22
39:22 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked39:22
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedWhat is it like to be a young software engineer in Nigeria? Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime have a deep understanding of the startup tactics that have led to so many successful companies in the Web 2.0 boom. Their favorite podcast is a16z. Their role models include Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. They recently worked on a machine learning compression project, inspired by the show Silicon Valley. They are underestimated because of their age, but both of them view youth and naivete as assets. Osine believes it is counterproductive when older people look at him and his brother with condescension. “A young person thinks of about a million different ways to do something. An older person might think of just 500,000. A young person has more ideas, and more ways something can work. An older person should just help guide a younger person, rather than taking over the product.” He emphasized the importance of rapid product development. “Ignorance makes you [similar to] me. Push anything out. A product is stupid, disgustingly designed, ugly, half-baked. You just push anything out. You don’t have the standard,” said Osine. Our conversation reinforced my belief that the world is becoming smaller and that culture is becoming more homogeneous. This shift is driven by software. It was as easy for me to communicate with Osine and Anesi about technology as it is to converse with an American. Osine believes that engineering is more like art, saying “your application represents you.” Anesi sees software development more like a science, saying “design is an art, but software design is more like a science.” The post Crocodile Browser with Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
1 Venture Capital to Software Engineering with Preethi Kasireddy 54:40
54:40 Play Later Play Later Lists Like Liked54:40
Play Later Play Later Lists Like LikedChanging your occupation to a software engineer is easier today than ever before. Former Andreesen-Horowitz partner Preethi Kasireddy saw excited software engineers coming through the doors every day, pitching their ideas. This was her impetus to take the leap and make the career switch to software engineering. She is attending Hack Reactor , a 12-week coding boot camp. Questions Why did you leave the “ best job in the world “? Why are you becoming a software engineer? What is Hack Reactor? Is college a scam that overcharges and underdelivers? What is the most counter-intuitive thing you learned at Andreesen-Horowitz? Is it important to talk about the women in tech issue explicitly? Links Why I Left The Best Job In The World Coding Bootcamp vs. College Haseeb Qureshi: Why I’m Becoming a Web Developer Preethi on the Andreesen-Horowitz blog The post Venture Capital to Software Engineering with Preethi Kasireddy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
H
Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
“One of the problems is that people have become incredibly disconnected with the way that they feel.” Christopher Kelly is a computer scientist and a pro mountain biker who now works full-time as a health hacker. He is a co-founder of Nourish Balance Thrive, where he works alongside two medical doctors, a food scientist and a registered nurse to help people feel and perform better using biomedical testing together with diet and lifestyle hacks. At QCon San Francisco, he will be giving a talk called Debug Me . Questions Why are technologists getting sicker, fatter, and more tired? What is your story behind going from a programmer at a hedge fund to a health hacker? What tests do you do for patients? What are some ways technologists can improve their health? Links Christopher Kelly at QCon SF Nourish Balance Thrive Christopher Kelly: Is It Time for Your Midlife Crisis Yet? Entrepreneur on Fire: Christopher Kelly The post Health Hacking with Christopher Kelly appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .…
Welcome to Player FM!
Player FM is scanning the web for high-quality podcasts for you to enjoy right now. It's the best podcast app and works on Android, iPhone, and the web. Signup to sync subscriptions across devices.
Daily Deals
Daily Deals
Similar to Hackers Archives - Software Engineering Daily
Africa-focused technology, digital and innovation ecosystem insight and commentary.
…
continue reading
Show notes are at https://stevelitchfield.com/sshow/chat.html
…
continue reading
Download This Show is your weekly guide to the world of media, culture, and technology. From social media to gadgets, streaming services to privacy issues. Each week Rae Johnston and guests take a fun, deep dive into how technology is reshaping our lives.
…
continue reading
The power of Data is undeniable. And unharnessed - it’s nothing but chaos. Making data your ally. Using it to lead with confidence and clarity. Host Jess Carter is solving problems in real-time to reveal what’s possible. Helping communities and people thrive. This is Data Driven Leadership, a show brought to you by Resultant.
…
continue reading
Flash Forward is a show about possible (and not so possible) future scenarios. What would the warranty on a sex robot look like? How would diplomacy work if we couldn’t lie? Could there ever be a fecal transplant black market? (Complicated, it wouldn’t, and yes, respectively, in case you’re curious.) Hosted and produced by award winning science journalist Rose Eveleth, each episode combines audio drama and journalism to go deep on potential tomorrows, and uncovers what those futures might re ...
…
continue reading
WSJ’s Bold Names brings you conversations with the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Hosts Tim Higgins and Christopher Mims speak to CEOs and business leaders in interviews that challenge conventional wisdom and take you inside the decisions being made in the C-suite and beyond.
…
continue reading
Android Backstage, a podcast by and for Android developers. Hosted by developers from the Android engineering team, this show covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google. Subscribe to Android Developers YouTube → https://goo.gle/AndroidDevs
…
continue reading
The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
…
continue reading
We help founders make something people want.
…
continue reading
Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.
…
continue reading
Player FM - Podcast App
Go offline with the Player FM app!
Go offline with the Player FM app!
