Business and Philosophy

The Washington Post was acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2013. Since then, the newspaper has started thinking more like a software company, opting to build new software rather than buy off-the-shelf third party solutions. Arc Publishing is a CMS built by The Washington Post to produce and display content. When you visit washingtonpost.com, The post Washington Post Engineering with Jarrod Dicke...

Software Engineering Daily examines the world through the lens of software engineering. In most episodes, an expert in a particular topic joins the show as a guest, and we go into deep technical detail. Occasionally we like to do episodes where we survey a collection of topics. In today’s topic roundtable, Caleb Meredith and Courtland The post Topic Roundtable with Courtland Allen and Caleb Meredi...

Most people in Africa never had a desktop computer. The first computer they owned was a smart phone. This is why Africa is referred to as a “leap frog” place with regard to computers–Africa leapfrogged the desktop to the smart phone. The banking system in Africa also followed a trajectory that is different than the The post Kenya Mobile Payments with George Gachui appeared first on Software...

Bots on the internet can be malicious, helpful, and everything in between. A bot that responds to all of your tweets might call you a socialist–that is malicious. Google crawls the web to index Google search. That is helpful. Social media marketing bots schedule 200 Twitter posts to go out throughout the day. That is The post Political Bots with Samuel Woolley appeared first on Software Engi...

Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, The post Complacency with Tyler Cowen appeared first on Software...

In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include: How and when do you see yourself leaving SE Daily? What is your personal opinion on Facebook’s Internet.org initiative? How does the defense industry affect software engineering? How can a programmer learn to deeply understand The post Listener Q&A appeared first...

Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes The post Amazon and Uber with Brad Stone appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Developing a product requires careful balance between engineering, sales, design, and customer service. The founding CTO of a company often needs to take on each of these responsibilities, because when the company only has a few people there is nobody to delegate these different tasks to. Cullen Zandstra is the CTO at FloQast, a SaaS The post Product Development with Cullen Zandstra appeared first...

Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers and governments regulating the internet should treat all data on the internet the same. Debates around Net Neutrality can be as contentious as subjects like global warming, or tabs vs. spaces. To a hardcore free market economist, Net Neutrality sounds suspicious. Why would it be good The post Net Neutrality with Quincy Larson appeared...

Wearables have become more accessible to the public. Snap’s spectacles, Google Glass, FitBit, and Apple Watch suggest a future in which many people will be wearing a smart device. In this episode Asta Roseway, Research Designer at Microsoft Research, gives insights into other categories of wearables like tattoos, scarves, and cosmetics. Asta talked about her The post Wearables with Asta Roseway ap...

Making the right engineering choices in today’s wide landscape of cloud technologies is hard. Predicting the future in order to invest in companies in this space has the same level of complexity. The cost of cloud computing is going down but the volume of total required space and processing power is going up. The open The post Cloud Native Investing with Lenny Pruss appeared first on Software Engi...

Manufacturing electronics is not a simple task and because of its complexity it is also quite expensive. Companies like Apple are able to pull their costs down through economies of scale. Since Apple is always placing huge bulk orders on chips, sensors, and other components, the company can get lower prices for those components than The post Prototype Manufacturing with Jeff McAlvay appeared first...

When an engineer has offered a job at a tech company, their compensation is often partly in cash and partly in equity–shares of the company. How should an engineer evaluate that offer? How should they negotiate? In the world of equity compensation, costly and avoidable mistakes are routine, and this hurts both companies and employees. The post Equity Compensation with Joshua Levy and Joe Wal...

At the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, the speakers explored a range of topics. A few weeks ago, we published Courtland Allen’s talk about how to build a small software business. In today’s episode, we are publishing Haseeb Qureshi’s talk, called “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Why Engineers Disagree About Everything (And Why Fraudsters Do The post Convergence with Haseeb Qureshi ap...

The impact of artificial intelligence on our everyday lives will be so profound that our modern institutions will change completely. Employment, government, romance, social norms–all of these things will be upended. To see the signs of this coming, you no longer have to read science fiction. Every week, there are blog posts, news stories, and The post Technically Sentient with Rob May appear...

If you wanted to build a machine learning model to understand human health, where would you get the data? A hospital database would be useful, but privacy laws make it difficult to disclose that patient data to the public. In order to publicize the data safely, you would have to anonymize it, so that a The post Where Machines Go to Learn with Auren Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Da...

Data scientists need flexible interfaces for displaying and manipulating data sets. Data engineers need to be able to visualize how their data pipelines wire together databases and data processing frameworks. DevOps engineers need dashboards to understand their monitoring data at a high level. All of these programmers are building data applications. Data applications let us The post Data Applicati...

Engineering managers face a different set of problems than engineers themselves. Whether they are hiring new employees, firing underperformers, or guiding a team of existing engineers, engineering management is all about people. Empathy is paramount because management is like being a professional therapist for the members of your team. Mike Borozdin has been managing engineers The post Engineering...

Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning The post The End of Cloud Computing with Pete...

What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine. When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity The post Reality with Donald Hoffman appeared first on Soft...

Software developers succeed by combining technical ability, communication skills, and well-reasoned philosophies to craft information systems. Where this podcast focuses on the information systems, Developer On Fire focuses on the engineers who built them. Dave Rael started his podcast as a way to overcome fear and access an entrepreneurial side of himself. In his interviews The post Developer On...

Product managers are responsible for guiding the design and overall functionality of software. The relationship between product managers and engineers is complimentary: a PM is viewing the product from a perspective that is closer to the customer, so the PM often has the responsibility of navigating high-level tradeoffs in the functionality of a product. Suzie The post Product Management with Suzi...

Software engineers are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices. Every software company encounters situations where the line between right and wrong is not clearly drawn. Back in the year 2000 Bill Sourour was asked to code a project to help market a pharmaceutical product in a misleading The post Ethics of Software with Bill Sourour appeared fir...

Many people find themselves going down a career path that does not bring them satisfaction. A lawyer finds himself constantly working cases he doesn’t care about. A student in medical school gets completely burned out from hospital bureaucracy. An investment banker no longer finds joy in the accounting statements that she used to enthusiastically study. The post Breaking Into Startups appeared fir...

In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky. The post Startup Engineering with Mike Wolfe appeared first on S...