Business and Philosophy

Large technology companies are a new type of industry. Their power and reach is resistant to a comparison of previous generations, such as big oil. Alex Kantrowitz is a journalist who has covered big technology for much of his career, and he currently runs Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast about the biggest technology companies The post Big Tech with Alex Kantrowitz appeared first on Softwa...

Originally published April 7, 2017 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 The post Complacency with Tyler Cowen (Repeat) appeared first on Software...

Originally published August 28, 2019 Kent Beck is a legendary figure in the world of software engineering.  Kent was an early advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and popularized the idea of writing unit tests before writing code that would satisfy those unit tests. A unit test isolates and tests a small piece of functionality within The post Facebook Engineering Process with Kent Beck (Repe...

Originally published May 14, 2018 The Kubernetes ecosystem consists of enterprises, vendors, open source projects, and individual engineers. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was created to balance the interests of all the different groups within the cloud native community. CNCF has similarities to the Linux Foundation and the Apache Foundation. CNCF helps to guide open The post Cloud Native C...

DevOps practices are shared via community, and community manifests at conferences. Unfortunately, conferences are not possible right now due to COVID-19. The world has turned to virtual conferences. All Day DevOps is a 24 hour conference sharing learnings and software strategies around DevOps, starting November 12th. Derek Weeks and Mark Miller are organizers of the The post DevOps Community with...

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the The post Staff Engineering with Will Larson appeared first on Software Eng...

Developer tooling and infrastructure is a fruitful area for investing. A wide variety of technologies can have large investment outcomes based on the fact that there are lots of engineers and businesses are willing to pay for products that give those engineers a higher degree of leverage. Lee Edwards is a partner with Root Ventures. The post Developer Investing with Lee Edwards appeared first on S...

Investing in enterprise software has become a competitive business. Lots of venture capital firms compete for the good deals at every stage. This level of competition has driven more capital into the early stages.  Ed Sim is a partner with Boldstart, an early stage enterprise investment firm. He joins the show to talk about modern The post Enterprise Investing with Ed Sim appeared first on Softwar...

After working at VMware for 10 years, Jerry Chen developed an expertise in technology companies. Today, he works at Greylock, where he looks at deals in the infrastructure and developer tooling space. Jerry is an expert in go-to-market strategy and makes investments in technologies that have a good chance at becoming large and profitable businesses. The post Modern Venture with Jerry Chen appeared...

As software permeates our lives, there are an increased number of situations where the legal system must be designed to account for that software. Whether the issues are open source licensing, cryptocurrencies, or worker classifications, software overlaps heavily with the law. Just as software is crafted by engineers, the legal structure around software is crafted The post Software and the Law wit...

The US Army Cyber School is a training program which trains cyber soldiers and leaders to be adept in cyber military strategy and tactics. In order to teach these skills, the cyber school uses a system they call “courseware as code”, a workflow that allows updates to the curriculum in a reversion-friendly fashion similar to The post Gitlab Courseware as Code with Ben Allison appeared first on Soft...

Acquisitions are part of the technology industry. A successful corporation will often have an “exit”, either going public or becoming acquired. And with each of these corporations, there is a set of stories that narrate the company from beginning to end.  Acquired is a podcast that tells the stories of companies such as YouTube, Instagram, The post Acquired Podcasting with David Rosenthal and Ben...

Software companies can be funded in a variety of ways: venture capital, self-funding, and debt, among others. In order to receive financing, a company is evaluated on its ability to generate future cash flows. After all, a valuation is a number that summarizes the present value of future cash flows. Determining that valuation number is The post Capital Allocation with Blair Silverberg and Chris Ol...

Originally published December 20, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. freeCodeCamp was started five years ago with the goal of providing free coding education to anyone on the Internet. freeCodeCamp has become the best place to begin learning how to write software. There are many other The post freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson (Summer Break Repeat) appea...

For the last five months, we have been working on a new version of Software Daily, the platform we built to host and present our content.  We are creating a platform that integrates the podcast with a set of other features that make it easier to learn from the audio interviews.  Software Daily includes the The post Software Daily appeared first on Software Engineering Daily .

We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal The post Isolation with Courtland Allen and Anurag Goel appeared first on...

Serverless tools have come a long way since the release of AWS Lambda in 2014. Serverless apps were originally architected around Lambda, with the functions-as-a-service being used to glue together larger pieces of functionality and API services. Today, many of the common AWS services such as API Gateway and DynamoDB have functionality built in to The post Serverless Development with Jeremy Daly a...

Facebook Messenger is a chat application that millions of people use every day to talk to each other. Over time, Messenger has grown to include group chats, video chats, animations, facial filters, stories, and many more features. Messenger is a tool for utility as well as for entertainment. Messenger is used both on mobile and The post Facebook Messenger Engineering with Mohsen Agsen appeared fir...

Modern web development involves a complicated toolchain for managing dependencies. One part of this toolchain is the bundler, a tool that puts all your code and dependencies together into static asset files. The most popular bundler is webpack, which was originally released in 2012, before browsers widely supported ES Modules. Today, every major browser supports The post Pika Dependency Management...

Food delivery apps have changed how the restaurant world operates. After seven years of mobile food delivery, the volume of food ordered through these apps has become so large that entire restaurants can be sustained solely through the order flow that comes in from the apps. This raises the question as to why you even The post Cloud Kitchen Platform with Ashley Colpaart appeared first on Software...

Remote engineering work makes some elements of software development harder, and some elements easier. With Slack and email, communication becomes more clear cut. Project management tools lay out the responsibilities and deliverables of each person. GitHub centralizes and defines the roles of developers. On the other hand, remote work subtracts the role of nuanced conversation. The post Remote Team...

Over the last fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of new software tools. This is true at the infrastructure layer: there are more databases, more cloud providers, and more open-source projects. And it’s also true at a higher level: there are more APIs, project management systems, and productivity tools. ClickUp The post ClickUp Engineering with Zeb Evans and Alex Yurkows...

Infrastructure-as-code allows developers to use programming languages to define the architecture of their software deployments, including servers, load balancers, and databases.  There have been several generations of infrastructure-as-code tools. Systems such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Ansible provided a domain-specific imperative scripting language that became popular along with the early growth...

Software investing requires a deep understanding of the market, and an ability to predict what changes might occur in the near future. At the level of core infrastructure, software investing is particularly difficult. Databases, virtualization, and large scale data processing tools are all complicated, highly competitive areas. As the software world has matured, it has The post Infrastructure Inve...

Cloud computing caused a fundamental economic shift in how software is built. Before the cloud, businesses needed to buy physical servers in order to operate. There was an up-front cost that often amounted to tens of thousands of dollars required to pay for these servers.  Cloud computing changed the up-front capital expense to an ongoing The post Cloud Investing with Danel Dayan appeared first on...