Software Engineering Daily

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. His focus is on hard problems within software, and he joins the show to talk about the thesis of his firm, as well as his personal beliefs on what makes a good investment.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 enterprise investment strategy and his own varied personal experiences in working at funds.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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.

In today’s episode, Jerry and I talk through the dynamics of modern infrastructure investing, including examples of deals such as Chronosphere and Rockset, both of which have been featured in previous episodes of the podcast. Jerry gives his perspective on deal terms, board dynamics, and everything else that goes into a smart investment.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 by lawyers. There are large law firms that have built their business by knowing how to navigate these software and business questions.

Mark Radcliffe is a lawyer who has been working with software companies for decades. He joins the show to talk about the intersection of software and the law, which we discuss from multiple points of view.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 infrastructure-as-code.

Ben Allison teaches at the US Army Cyber School and has put work into developing the training program and ongoing lesson plans. Ben joins the show to talk about how the US Army manages curriculum through courseware as code, and the work he has done to improve this workflow over time.

Ben is also speaking at GitLab Commit 2020, GitLab’s upcoming conference. You can register for GitLab Commit yourself by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com/gitlabcommit.

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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, and PayPal. During each episode, the life of a company is explored from its beginning til the end. Media companies, chip companies, and software companies all take the center stage on various episodes.

David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are the hosts of Acquired, and they join today’s show to talk about the podcast they started, a few business stories, and the podcast industry itself.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 a complicated, subjective process. If the valuation can be determined more intelligently and objectively, then smarter financing decisions can be made. This is the reasoning behind the company Capital, which aims to build a better modeling system for evaluating companies.

Blair Silverberg and Chris Olivares are founders of Capital, and they join the show to explore the modeling process for valuations, and their strategy for doing this with their software models.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Capital Allocation with Blair Silverberg and Chris Olivares appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 places that a software engineer should visit on their educational journey, but freeCodeCamp is the best place to start, because it is free, and there are no advertisements. 

For most people learning to code, the price of that education is important, because they are learning to code to build a new career. It’s also important that a new programmer learns from an unbiased source of information, because an ad-supported environment will educate the new programmer towards products that they might not need.

freeCodeCamp has not been easy to build. Building freeCodeCamp has required expertise in software engineering, business, media, and community development. The donation-based business model of freeCodeCamp doesn’t collect very much money. Why would somebody build a non-profit when they could spend their time building a highly profitable software company?

Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp, and he joins the show for a special episode about his backstory and the journey to building the best place on the Internet for a new programmer to begin.

The post freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson (Summer Break Repeat) appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 following features:

If the podcast is a useful resource for you to learn about software, then Software Daily might also provide you with value. This post (and episode) is a brief description of the features that we have built into Software Daily.

If you want to listen to Software Engineering Daily without ads, you can become a paid subscriber, paying $10/month or $100/year by going to softwaredaily.com/subscribe. We now have an RSS feed that paid customers can add to a podcast player like Overcast (on iOS) or Podcast Addict (on Android). You can also listen to the premium episodes using our apps for iOS or Android.

Whether you are a listener who is fine with listening to ads, or you are a listener who pays to hear episodes without ads, we are happy to have you tuning in.

Apple podcasts limits the number of episodes in an RSS feed to 300. The feed with the last 300 episodes is available by searching for Software Daily. In total, we have more than 1200 episodes in our back catalog.

Listeners often want to find all our episodes on React, or Kubernetes, or serverless, or self-driving cars. We have been covering these topics for years, and much of the old content has retained its value. Software Daily allows you to easily find all the episodes relating to a subject that you are interested in.

You can also find our most popular episodes, ranked by how people interact with them.

Additionally, episode transcripts have interactive features with highlighting, commenting, and discussions. We want to create a Medium-like experience for the episodes.

Software Daily is a place where listeners can write about the topics they are listening to. When you are listening to lots of episodes about a topic such as GraphQL, you may find it useful to write about that topic as a form of active learning. The topic pages also have a Q&A section. Post questions about a topic, or post an answer. Engage in the community dialogue surrounding a topic you are passionate or curious about. If there is a topic you want to write about, check out softwaredaily.com/write.

We will be turning the best written content into short podcast episodes published on the weekends where we will read your contribution and mention your name. If you write something awesome, we want to turn it into audio for larger distribution. 

Every topic on Software Daily has a Q&A section. We have covered lots of niche software companies and open source projects, and on Software Daily we want to collect more information about the world of software with Q&A.

If you want to write about a specific company or topic that you heard about on Software Daily, Q&A is also an option. Our goal with Q&A is to provide a companion experience to listening to the podcast. It is not always easy to retain what you hear in a podcast episode. Answering some questions after you listen to an episode can help with that retention.

Are you looking to hire someone specific in the world of software? Post a job on the Software Daily jobs board. We will be announcing some of these jobs on the podcast, especially the more interesting postings, and ones that align with content we are producing.

We appreciate you tuning into Software Daily. We would welcome your feedback, and hope you take the time to check out SoftwareDaily.com.

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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 way for humans to live. We are social animals, and we need social interaction. We’ve changed how we use Internet products. There has been an evolution of trends in online shopping, social networking, and video communication software.

Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers and Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, a new cloud provider. Both Courtland and Anurag are friends of mine, and join this episode to talk about how their lives are changing as a result of social isolation.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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