Software Engineering Daily

The cloud has delivered amazing benefits like on-demand infrastructure that’s easy to use, pay-as-you-go subscription plans, and effortless scaling of applications. This flexibility minimizes the growing pains for businesses and explains why today’s startups and established companies are both building apps on the cloud. 

However, the costs of using the cloud stack up once companies reach large scale. Dropbox, for example, shifted away from the cloud in 2016 to opt for a custom built infrastructure in co-location facilities. They saved $75 million over 2 years and increased their gross margins from 33% to 67% due to this change. Actually, recent research suggests major companies spend 75%-80% of cost of revenue on their cloud bills. Should large companies shift away from the cloud like Dropbox did? Is it too late for some companies to untangle themselves from it?

In this episode we talk with Martin Casado, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and an expert in IT Infrastructure. We discuss the costs of cloud for small and large companies, and the financial implications of cloud infrastructure at scale.

Martin Casado’s article on cloud costs

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In this episode we discuss software investing, business, and the future with David Rosenthal, co-host of the Acquired podcast.

This interview was also recorded as our very first video podcast. Check out the video on the Software Daily YouTube channel.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Yelp.com is a crowdsourced review platform focused on restaurants and local businesses. Originally created as an email-based recommendation service, Yelp re-launched in its modern form in 2005. At the time, its focus on user-created reviews and social interactions was fairly novel, and made it stand out from competitors such as Angie’s List and CitySearch. Since then, Yelp has become a worldwide brand, and as of 2021 it has over 171 million reviews on its site.

The mid- to-late 2000s represented a time of explosive growth and profound change in the web application space. Industry leaders like Yelp had to adapt their technology stacks for the unprecedented scaling they were experiencing. At the same time, the rise of smartphones led Yelp and many others into the mobile application space. 

Michael Stoppelman was an engineer at Yelp during this turbulent time. He left Yelp in 2015, and now works as an angel investor. He joins the show today to talk about the engineering challenges Yelp’s team faced during this time, the profound changes that the industry as a whole went through, and how the history of Yelp can help us contextualize the startup landscape today.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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For startups that are still seeking product/market fit, pre-seed investments are critical to funding initial investments in the product and in the infrastructure needed to scale. Afore Capital is a pre-seed fund that invests in innovative companies across a wide variety of verticals. Afore focuses on startups with unique product insights and novel distribution approaches.

Gaurav Jain is a co-Founder and Managing Partner at Afore Capital. Before that, he worked with the Android team at Google. Gaurav joins the show today to talk about the risks and rewards of pre-seed investing, and about how founders and investors can find opportunity in the current venture environment.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 in the world. He’s also the author of Always Day One: How The Tech Titans Plan To Stay On Top Forever. Alex joins the show to talk about his work and share his thoughts on big tech.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled into complacency, what does that say about the rest of the United States?

American exceptionalism has faltered and complacency has risen in its wake.

Today’s guest Tyler Cowen is an economist and author. His new book The Complacent Class is the final book in a trilogy that describes a decline of American output and a decline in American mindset.

Complacent America has lost its ability to assess risk. Children are prevented from playing tag for risk of injury. College students protest against speakers who might present challenging ideas. The number of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65% since the 1980’s–millennials are too busy going to business school to start businesses.

In his books, Tyler weaves together history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. He presents hard data about many different fields, and theorizes about how the trends in those fields relate to each other.

He also has a podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and in this episode I tried to mirror his interview style. If you like this episode, you should check out his show–he has interviewed people like Ezra Klein, Peter Thiel, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 a large piece of software. Practitioners of Test-Driven Development write tens or hundreds of tests in order to cover a large variety of cases that could potentially occur within their software.

When Kent Beck joined Facebook in 2011, he was 50 years old and thought he had seen everything in the software industry. During Facebook Boot Camp, Kent started to realize that Facebook was very different than any other company he had seen. Facebook Boot Camp is the six-week onboarding process that every new hire learns about the software practices of the company.

After graduating Facebook Boot Camp, Kent began to explore Facebook’s codebase and culture. He found himself rethinking many of the tenets of software engineering that he had previously thought were immutable.

Kent joins the show to discuss his time at Facebook, and how the company’s approach to building and scaling products thoroughly reshaped his beliefs about software engineering.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem–including Prometheus, Fluentd, and Envoy. With the help of the CNCF, these projects can find common ground where possible.

KubeCon is a conference organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I attended the most recent KubeCon in Copenhagen. KubeCon was a remarkably well-run conference–and the attendees were excited and optimistic. As much traction as Kubernetes has, it is still very early days and it was fun to talk to people and forecast what the future might bring.

At KubeCon, I sat down with Chris Aniszczyk and Dan Kohn, who are the COO and director of the CNCF.  I was curious about how to scale an organization like the CNCF. In some ways, it is like scaling a government. Kubernetes is growing faster than Linux grew, and the applications of Kubernetes are as numerous as those of Linux.

Different constituencies want different things out of Kubernetes–and as those constituencies rapidly grow in number, how do you maintain diplomacy among competing interests? It’s not an easy task, and that diplomacy has been established by keeping in mind lessons from previous open source projects.

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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 conference and they join the show to talk about modern DevOps.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 expectations and obligations of staff engineer? Will Larson is an experienced engineer who has worked at Stripe and other prominent tech companies. He joins the show to talk about the role of staff engineering, and the material he has written about it.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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