By Business and Philosophy
Business, philosophy, and culture episodes of SE Daily
Jeff Rothschild was one of the earliest engineers to join Facebook. In the 1990s, Jeff had co-founded Veritas Software and helped it to its IPO in 2004. After Veritas, Jeff worked on several other of his own companies. He was...
Cryptocurrencies are a fundamental computer science invention. Cryptocurrencies crashed in 2018 but the technology remains as promising as ever. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, and a plausible end state that is implied by Bitcoin’s current trajectory is a permissionless, decentralized...
We are republishing a podcast from the freeCodeCamp Podcast as a weekend episode. Jeff Meyerson is the creator and host of the Software Engineering Daily podcast. Jeff grew up in Texas. He spent most of his childhood playing competitive strategy...
The ability to create software is a superpower. But software education is not evenly distributed. Ryan Carson started Treehouse to provide a high quality education system for anyone to learn how to build software. On a previous episode, Ryan and...
Indie Hackers is a platform for independent software businesses to discuss strategy and find inspiration. Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers with the goal of sharing the stories of these businesses, and the company has become a thriving community of entrepreneurs,...
Scott Belsky founded Behance in 2006. Behance is a social platform where designers and creators share their work. Scott was motivated to start Behance due to his desire to combine his love for creativity with his desire to create a...
Investors often use the term “moat” to describe the durable competitive advantage of a company. When an investor puts money into a company, they are making that investment based on a valuation. That valuation is subjective–it is how much the...
Software engineering is a new field. There are theories about how we should be building our systems, but these theories might change over time. The same is true for engineering management. There are many successful examples of companies scaling with...
Host: Charles Max Wood of JavaScript Jabber Joined by Special Guest: Jeffrey Meyerson Jeffrey Meyerson, founder of FindCollabs and host at Software Engineering Daily joins Charles Max Wood for a discussion about latest trends in the developer world, ways of monetizing podcasts, and finding...
Ilya Sukhar founded Parse in 2011 to make cloud services for mobile developers. Parse was a newer kind of cloud provider called “backend-as-a-service”, built to simplify the complexities of Amazon Web Services and the complexities of the mobile ecosystem. During...
Parse was a backend-as-a-service company that started in 2011 with the initial focus of making the cloud easier to use for mobile developers. Parse had several novel engineering challenges. In 2011, it was not easy to build on top of...
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...
When Chuck Rossi joined Facebook in 2008, he was one of the most experienced release engineers at the company. As he began to explore the engineering practices of the organization, he was surprised, confused, and impressed by the release engineering...
When a new employee joins a software company, it is often unclear where that employee should begin. Do they have a mentor? What are they working on? What are the expectations for how fast that employee should be contributing? The...
Insurance is an old business. Individuals and businesses have been buying insurance policies for decades. These insurance policies can cost hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per year. Software is remaking the insurance industry. One way new software...
Software engineers often work as a contractor for some duration of their career. A contractor earns a fixed hourly salary for a defined period of weeks, months, or years. Contract work can be more flexible than full-time work, and often...
The PlayStation is a line of game consoles created by Sony. PlayStation devices include the PS2, PS3, PS4, and the PSP mobile system. Tony Godar worked as an engineer in the PlayStation ecosystem for 15 years, and he joins the...
Large software companies have become a target for criticism. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other prominent technology giants find themselves under a kind of scrutiny that is reminiscent of banks in 2008 and oil companies in the early 1900s. Across the...
In this episode Will Larson, author of An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, speaks with Uma Chingunde of Stripe and Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily about engineering management. Will was also featured on SE Daily recently. An Elegant Puzzle is an...
The a16z Podcast is a show that is produced by Andreessen Horowitz, an investment fund based in Silicon Valley. The a16z Podcast covers topics including software engineering, biology, media, cryptocurrencies and entrepreneurship. A16z is one of the most popular podcasts...
Coding bootcamps allow anyone to become a programmer at a faster pace than the traditional computer science education system. In the last five years, coding bootcamps have grown rapidly in popularity, with thousands of people gaining the necessary skills to...
A hackathon is an organized event where participants work together to build a product or tool. Hackathons are about creativity, learning, and exploration. A developer that is participating in a hackathon is often working on something that is outside of...
Videos play a key role in the continuing education of a software engineer. Video can capture many different types of content that is useful for engineers: conference talks, tutorial videos, and podcast-style interviews are all popular formats of online video....
Software companies such as Slack, Zoom, and Uber have recently gone public. When a company goes public, they issue a document called an S-1. Within the S-1, there is a wealth of information about the company, providing a detailed story...
In the developed world, it is easy to take for granted that we grew up with computers. Technology is so pervasive in the United States that we have debates about how early in child development a human should be given...
From Africa to India to Asia to South America–computer science and programming are rising in popularity in every emerging market. Each of these markets has regional needs for technology. Just like every culture develops its own food and television, every...
Facebook moves fast because of vision, collaboration, and trust. The fast pace of development is enabled by constantly improving infrastructure and a sense of unity throughout the company. In Facebook’s early days, there was an emphasis on rapidly deploying new...
Software engineers have a wide variety of media to choose from, including podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, conferences. The amount of software engineering media that is available is growing and accelerating. Eight years ago, there were not as many options for...
Creating a software company has never been easier. Software engineers are increasingly seeing entrepreneurship as a viable career path. But the path to being an independent software developer is not always clear. Most engineers spend some of their career working...
Today’s episode is a keynote I gave at Full Stack Tech Radar Day in Tel Aviv. The talk is called “You Are Not a Commodity”. This talk is also available as a YouTube video. The slides can be accessed here....
Programmers are in high demand, and software engineering is a career path that is fun, creative, and lucrative. There are many people who want to transition into a career in software and are looking for the right path toward writing...
Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists. Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You...
The software market changes every year. As individuals and enterprises become more willing to buy software, there are new markets for entrepreneurs to sell software to. Good software has high margins and high retention, so even a niche software business...
Cloud computing, open source, and mobile computing are trends that affect every organization. When a large organization adapts to these trends, it is commonly referred to as a “digital transformation”. Digital transformation causes many companies to reframe their business as...
Facebook’s strategy is shaped by long term goals, short term requirements, and the available resources of the company. Long term goals are necessary for thinking through big decisions such as acquisitions, hardware product investments, and open source software ecosystems. To...
Facebook engineering is designed to self-assemble. When an engineer joins Facebook, the engineer goes through boot camp, where they are exposed to multiple projects to find a good fit in terms of technical skills and personal preferences. Since there are...
When Facebook was scaling in its early years, the company developed engineering practices that were unlike any other organization before it. Early Facebook engineering developed unusual practices because the problem set was unusual. Facebook was a highly detailed, highly interactive,...
Facebook engineering is commonly described by two words: move fast. Building products quickly has been a differentiating characteristic of the company since its inception. From the longtime engineers to the summer interns, Facebook instills a sense of immediacy and opportunity...
Growing a software business requires an understanding of engineering, sales, and marketing. As we learn software engineering, we also pick up some knowledge about how a business should operate. We know that there are customers, and that our product needs...
RECENT UPDATES: Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses New version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Software Daily is looking for help with Android engineering, QA, machine learning, and...
RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs $5000 Hackathon Ends Saturday April 15th, 2019 New version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Software Daily is looking for help with Android engineering, QA, machine learning, and more Haseeb Qureshi is an entrepreneur...
Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Jad Naous is an investing partner with Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on infrastructure and analytics. Eight years...
Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. He co-wrote Blitzscaling with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Blitzscaling is...
Advertising fraud occurs when a brand pays for an advertisement online and that advertisement is shown to an automated bot account that has been created to view ads. Advertising fraud is rampant on the Internet. It’s not possible to know...
The Internet has transformed humanity. The Internet is the result of a long series of innovations from military, academia, business, and the open source community. In his book, How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, Brian McCullough tells...
Advertising fraud steals billions of dollars every year. BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman reports on advertising fraud and its impact on the Internet. In one investigation, Craig uncovered a mobile advertising fraud scheme in which four people stole millions of dollars...
Podcast listeners usually find out about a new podcast in one of two ways: either a friend recommends that podcast or the Apple podcast charts rank that new podcast highly. The Apple podcast charts are created using an algorithm that...
Real estate is an asset that is not straightforward to invest in. Real estate can generate excellent returns for investors, but can require much more time and expertise than stocks. Cadre is a company that allows users to invest in...
Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments outlines a framework that individuals can use to make decisions grounded in economic philosophy. In his previous books, Tyler examined recent economic history. Stubborn Attachments gives his perspective for navigating the future. Tyler is a...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable planet far from earth. It presents one of the most complex challenges faced by engineers: how can we create a new world? To create a new world, first we have to get there. We can...