Software Engineering Daily

GitLab is a company that builds an open source platform for managing git repositories.

GitLab was started in 2012, and has grown to have a large enterprise business with additional products such as continuous integration and security tooling. GitLab is also known for being a large, entirely remote workforce. GitLab does not have any offices, and the employees mostly communicate through Slack, email, and GitLab itself.

Marin Jankovski was the first full-time engineer to join GitLab after the company was started. Marin joins the show to talk about the early days of GitLab, the evolution of the remote culture, and how product development works at GitLab today. He also talks about the experience of being a fast-growing company in the public spotlight of the software industry.

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Automation has the potential to eliminate rote jobs such as call center workers and truck drivers.

The downstream effects of automation also leads to new jobs, such as data labeling and robot operations. The net effect of modern automation technology is unclear, but it is likely to cause some disruption in the job market. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an economic policy idea in which a government sends money to every person living in the country.

The goal of UBI is to reduce the impact of dramatic changes to the economy that are resulting from accelerating technological change. 

Floyd Marinescu is the CEO of C4 Media, the company that produces the QCon conference series and the InfoQ website for software engineers. Floyd has worked in the software industry for decades and in recent years has become an advocate for basic income. He is a friend and supporter of Andrew Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate who is running on a platform centered around a basic income policy. 

Floyd joins the show for a discussion of the future, and the potential positive and negative consequences of implementing a basic income.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Offices have historically been the place where most knowledge work takes place.

An office is a central meeting point for everyone in an organization. Offices allow for high bandwidth, in-person communication. Employees have access to shared resources, such as food, tables, and quiet working space. Offices provide a means of encouraging a common culture within a given workplace.

There are also significant downsides to offices–most notably the commute. Employees often spend between one and four hours per day driving to the office. Office work creates a huge restriction for parents with a young child to take care of. Many employees feel more productive when they are working at home, or working from a coffee shop.

Remote work is becoming an increasingly popular mode of work for knowledge workers. Remote work has been made possible by increased bandwidth, more powerful computers, and new communications software such as Slack and Zoom.

Remote work is a powerful trend that is reshaping how knowledge workers spend their time. It is also changing how companies are structured. A “remote first” culture impacts hiring, human resources, engineering, sales, work-life balance and every other aspect of operations. The downstream impacts of remote work will change the labor market even more thoroughly, and cause us to rethink contracting, equity structures, and the traditional five day workweek.

Philip Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of Moonlight Work, a marketplace for software engineers who work on contract projects full-time or part-time. Philip is also the co-author of the Remote Work Encyclopedia, which is a collection of strategies and tactics for knowledge workers and companies that are looking to adapt successfully to the changes that remote work is bringing to the world.

Philip joins the show to discuss remote work and his experience building Moonlight. Full disclosure: I am an investor in Moonlight Work.

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Originally published July 14, 2016

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 2006 and it was a central point of inspiration for what Software Engineering Daily has become. On this episode, we talk about how software impacts the world economically, from bitcoin’s promise of zero cost transactions to the opportunities and regulatory challenges of the software-enabled gig economy.

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Crash monitoring emerged as a software category over the last decade.

Crash monitoring software allows developers to understand when their applications are crashing on client devices. For example, we have an app for Software Engineering Daily that people download on Android or iOS. Users download the app to their smartphone. When the user is playing an episode, and the app crashes, the details of the crash are sent to a server that collects all of these crash reports.

Crash reports allow a company to understand where their application is breaking on client devices. This is important, since there are so many client surfaces to test, from iOS to Android to browsers.

As a business, crash monitoring is a category that has some similarities to log management. There are lots of companies that offer crash monitoring. At first glance, it seems like a simple problem to solve. It seems like a market without winner-take-all or winner-take-most dynamics. But at scale, crash monitoring becomes a deeply complex engineering problem. From indexing to database choices to complex distributed systems tradeoffs, crash monitoring is not a simple business, and it promises to provide an extremely good business for the few companies who are able to out-execute the crowded market.

James Smith is the CEO of Bugsnag, a company that makes crash monitoring and application stability tools. James returns to the show to discuss the growth-stage engineering challenges of error monitoring, and the business opportunities that come with them.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Drones will deliver food to us. Drones will be able to extinguish fires. Drones will be used to relay Internet signals and make the world more connected. 

These all sound like great ideas, so why aren’t there more drones in the sky today? There are many answers to that question, some of which relate to engineering and some of which are about the regulatory barriers. 

Chris Anderson is the CEO of 3D Robotics, a drone company which he started seven years ago. Before 3DR, Chris worked for many years as a journalist writing about technology and science. He was the editor-in-chief at Wired for 11 years, a writer for The Economist for 7 years, and spent 3 years at both of the leading scientific journals, Nature and Science. Chris also wrote The Long Tail, the influential 2004 book which described a set of emergent Internet trends.

Chris joins the show for a discussion about drones, journalism, and his perspective on modern technology.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Photo credit: Elisabeth Fall

Ben Horowitz started Loudcloud with Marc Andreessen in 1999. He ran the company for eight years and chronicled his experience in his first book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

In his time running Loudcloud, the dotcom bubble burst, but Loudcloud needed cash so badly that he took the company public in 2001. Loudcloud went through layoffs, downsizing, and a difficult strategic maneuver in which Loudcloud sold its cloud provider business for cash, then used the core competency it had developed to create new software for building and running cloud services. This new software was the core product of the company Opsware, which was sold to HP in 2007 for $1.6bn.

The Loudcloud story looks like a rational, straightforward execution in retrospect, but at many points in the timeline, Ben was unsure he was making the correct decision. As the subtitle of his first book states “there are no easy answers.” 

The Hard Thing About Hard Things tells the story of Loudcloud and Opsware in harrowing detail. Most founders of software companies will end up reading the book at some point when they are building their company, because there are so few books which capture the granular details of what it feels like to run a company.

A CEO is completely alone in their understanding of the company. Nobody else has nearly as much information as the CEO–not the board, not the market, and not the employees. When you are a CEO, there is simply nobody to turn to who can give you the actionable advice that you wish you could have access to. And because there is nobody else, it means that the CEO’s own psychological state is extremely important.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things provides a CEO with solace: while the CEO is alone within their company, they are not alone in the world. Every CEO has a set of issues which they have never faced before, and the CEO can learn to face those issues confidently and competently. 

Like any influential book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things presents the reader with useful answers, but also raises many questions. How can a normal person foster the mentality of a leader? How can a leader convince smart people to follow their direction? How can a seemingly crazy direction be framed as completely rational?

The second book by Ben Horowitz is called What You Do Is Who You Are. This book surveys a set of case studies in leadership, including a Haitian slave revolt, the Mongol empire, and a dominant prison gang. By studying violent environments, Ben frames leadership in the context of the highest stakes. 

These stories are about life and death. When a leader’s performance is measured in blood, it frames the true nature of leadership in the starkest resolution. Ben uses each distilled example as a base case which inducts into broader applications: the cultures of Netflix, Facebook, Uber, and McDonalds are explored alongside editorials about Hillary Clinton and hip hop culture.

Throughout all of these stories, the most important thread is continually reinforced: the leader creates the culture. The culture is the leader. What you do is who you are.

Ben joins the show to discuss his writing, and how he has applied these beliefs to Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm he co-founded and leads today.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Facebook leadership has a significant amount of engineers in its ranks, and engineers understand how to create an environment that appeals to other engineers. 

Engineers do not like working on projects that they are not interested in, so Facebook optimizes for matching engineers to enjoyable work. Engineers do not like taking orders from managers, so Facebook optimizes for a collaborative relationship between engineering and management.

Arturo Bejar was a director of engineering at Facebook for more than five years. Arturo managed a team that built site integrity tools, as well as the Product Infrastructure team, which created the groundbreaking React and GraphQL open source tools. Arturo has a deep understanding of what engineers want from a manager, and this is apparent in the results of the teams he has worked with.

Arturo also cares deeply about the human side of technology. When he was at Facebook, he started the Compassion Project, which looked at ways that technology could help support people through difficult times, and alleviate suicide and bullying.

Arturo joins the show for a conversation about engineering management, humanity, and the ethos of Facebook.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Articles by Arturo Bejar

Managing Your Manager

Challenges and Opportunities in Communication Online: Summary and Full Version

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Chaos Monkeys is a book about Silicon Valley startups and Facebook. It is one of the most accurate books written about the modern technology industry, and captures both the negatives and the positives of software companies.

Antonio Garcia Martinez is the author of Chaos Monkeys. He wrote the book after going through a gauntlet of prototypical Silicon Valley experiences. Antonio founded an adtech company called AdGrok. His company was funded by the startup accelerator Y-Combinator, and during his time at the company there were many dramatic events that Antonio tells in great detail. AdGrok was acquired by Twitter, and Antonio went to work at Facebook on its ads platform.

Antonio is a fantastic writer. What makes Chaos Monkeys special is that it reads like a book written by an author who accidentally found himself in a technology career, rather than a technologist who opportunistically wrote a book.

Note: This episode contains explicit language.

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Facebook engineering is unique. Software is built at Facebook in a way that is distinctly different than any other company. In our series of shows about Facebook engineering, we have mostly covered the positive side of Facebook’s practices. In today’s show, we explore the downsides. 

Facebook moves fast. Engineers within the company must move fast, which can reduce the time spent on formal process and documentation. A fast pace can lead to a chaotic environment. In this kind of environment, not every employee thrives, and product development can sometimes suffer. But there are clear benefits to moving fast, and many software organizations could benefit from moving faster.

Pete Hunt was an engineer with Facebook who worked on Facebook Video, Instagram, and React. Nick Schrock worked on core infrastructure at Facebook and was the co-creator of GraphQL. Pete and Nick helped create the Facebook culture, and are aware of the best and worst aspects of it. They join the show to reflect on their time at Facebook, and the downsides of moving fast.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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