Business and Philosophy

When you are deciding who to marry, you are using an algorithm. The same is true when you are looking for a parking space, playing a game of poker, or deciding whether or not to organize your closet. Algorithms To Live By is a book about the computer science of human decisions. It offers strategies The post Algorithms to Live By with Brian Christian appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Many programmers listening to this podcast are working at a big company, and they would prefer to be running their own software business. Patrick McKenzie has been writing about this topic for several years on his blog Kalzumeus.com. Almost a decade ago, he was working as an enterprise developer at a large company in Japan. The post Software Small Businesses with Patrick McKenzie appeared first on...

Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to The post Winning With Data with Tomasz Tunguz appeared fir...

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able The post Reflections of an Old Programmer with Ben Northrop appeared first on Software E...

Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely? Andrea Goulet The post Legacy Code with Andrea Goulet appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

Online advertising is heavily affected by a set of delusions and fraudulent practices that few people in the adtech industry have an interest in stopping. This is the curious, perverse nature of the world of online media. Some of the online advertising we see fulfills its job, when an ad successfully conveys a meaningful message The post Ad Industry with Bob Hoffman appeared first on Software Engi...

Bot fraud, the New York tech scene, RethinkDB and open source; these topics and more are discussed in today’s episode. Two of the most popular guests return to the show to explore a variety of topics. Ben Halpern is the creator of The Practical Dev, a massively popular Twitter account and blog that you may The post Topic Roundtable with Haseeb Qureshi and Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared...

Software teams are traditionally composed of roles such as project manager, developer, QA, and manager. What happens if you throw out all of those titles, hire mostly engineers, and ask them to do whatever they think is best? That is the core idea behind Fred George’s idea of Developer Anarchy. In today’s episode, David Curry The post Developer Roles with Dave Curry and Fred George appeared first...

Africa has a huge reservoir of untapped technical talent. Tech companies have a huge amount of work they need skilled employees for. Andela recruits the most talented technologists across Africa, shapes them into world-class software developers, and places them with tech companies worldwide such as Google and Microsoft. Brice Nkengsa is the director of engineering The post Andela with Brice Nkengs...

After nine years at Microsoft, Scott Berkun left to become an author. One of his books on project management was read by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging tool that runs a large percentage of the internet (including Software Engineering Daily). Scott became friends with the WordPress founder, who is also the CEO The post Remote Work with Scott Berkun appeared first on Software...

The role of “tech lead” is a combination of a software engineer, a project manager, and an architect. A tech lead might spend 30% of her time coding and 70% managing a project, resolving conflicts, and planning.   In today’s episode, we discuss the structure of software teams, and when it might make sense to The post Tech Leadership with Jeff Norris appeared first on Software Engineering Dail...

A previous episode of Software Engineering Daily called “You Are Not A Commodity” received a lot of feedback, both negative and positive. The episode was a monologue I wrote about why engineers should build products on their own as a default career path, rather than work at a large corporation as a default career path. The post Commodity Discussion with Preethi Kasireddy appeared first on Software...

Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform.   This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competitio...

Learning to program is about self-driven exploration. Universities help guide you, coding boot camps provide a rigorous environment to work in, and online coding courses provide content for you to study. But none of this will turn you into a great programmer unless you have the drive to improve and the curiosity to explore.   The post The Recurse Center with Nick Bergson-Shilcock appeared fir...

Flexport is a technology company that makes logistics, supply chain management, and freight forwarding software. Shipping freight across the world requires container ships, airplanes, trains, warehouses, and trucks. Flexport’s software integrates with many of these different shipping companies, and provides a dashboard for the end user to understand how their products are being shipped around The...

The technology underlying podcasts is simple–a podcaster publishes mp3 files to an RSS feed, and the listener subscribes to that feed, receiving mp3s whenever the feed is updated. Unfortunately, the simplicity of podcasts makes it difficult to build automated advertising infrastructure on top of that simple RSS model. This lack of rich automated advertising has The post Podcast Infrastructur...

Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Occasionally I write editorials, and also record them as a podcast. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers, the second was about how poker relates to software engineering, and the third was about music and software engineering. Today’s episode The post You Are Not A Co...

Alec Ross worked in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor to Hillary Clinton. His book Industries of the Future explores the biggest technological opportunities and threats to our society. The industries addressed in his book include robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity. Technological familiarity is increasingly correlated with an individual’s optimism. Cyberwarfare presents attack vectors T...

EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics.   Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since The post Economics of Software with Russ Roberts appeared first...

Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from negotiating at all. Today, Haseeb Qureshi returns to the show The post Salary Negotiation with Haseeb Qureshi appeared...

Transferring money from one country to another is expensive, and the banks that facilitate money transfer have tricked us into believing that it should be expensive. On today’s show, Harsh Sinha explains the peer-to-peer system of transferring money with TransferWise, where he works as VP of engineering. Harsh also discusses the larger picture of FinTech The post P2P Money Transfer with TransferWi...

Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction. Open source software succeeds or fails The post Death and Distributed Systems with Pieter Hintj...

Google researcher Jennifer Wang co-wrote a paper called “Gender Differences in Factors Influencing Pursuit of Computer Science and Related Fields”. The paper focuses on a survey of 1700 high school and college students, and takes a statistical approach to understanding why women are not pursuing computer science. In our conversation, Jennifer talks about the two The post Female Pursuit of Computer...

Engineering managers start out as engineers. Eventually, there is a fork in their career road where an engineer can choose to move up into management or continue on as an engineer in a more senior role. Changing to management involves an increase in responsibilities, a different set of goals to focus on. Jon Emerson was The post Management and Hiring with Jon Emerson appeared first on Software Eng...

The software industry has a severe lack of women. There are numerous root causes of this diversity problem. Families do not encourage women to enter math and science. The media portrays most programmers as white males. Our industry often picks up on the signals of the broader society and perpetuates them. Reversing this trend of The post Tech Girls Movement with Jenine Beekhuyzen appeared first on...