Software Engineering Daily

Peter Deng has worked on most of Facebook’s major products: Newsfeed, Instagram, Oculus, and Messenger. These different products have different requirements, but are all part of the same ethos of connecting people through social networks. 

Facebook is a consumer product company that is powered by a strong engineering workforce. The relationship between product managers and engineering are two parts of a three-legged relationship: product, engineering, and design. Every major product within Facebook is built with the teamwork of product, engineering, and design.

After almost ten years at Facebook, Peter joined Uber as the Head of Rider. At Uber, Peter works on a very different platform: a real-world, two-sided marketplace. Every change to the Uber platform has an impact on the economic relationship between riders and drivers. This creates a set of product development constraints that contrast with the social network of Facebook.

Peter joins the show to share how he thinks about product management, and how the core competencies of a business inform product strategy.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Facebook Products with Peter Deng appeared first on Software Engineering 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 working with Accel Partners on investments when he started to learn about Facebook.

Accel was an investor in Facebook, having made a large investment in 2005. After the investment, Jeff was helping the company with hiring. As Facebook built out its senior engineering leadership, Jeff realized that he would enjoy working with the company in a more active role.

For the next ten years, Jeff Rothschild worked as a VP of infrastructure software at Facebook. He helped scale the company’s infrastructure and architect the technical strategy. By 2005, Jeff’s entrepreneurial background included software companies ranging from storage management to gaming. His diverse skill set was useful for setting product direction as well as solving novel engineering problems.

Jeff joins the show to discuss the early days of Facebook and his philosophy of entrepreneurship.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Facebook Entrepreneurship with Jeff Rothschild appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 financial system.

This idea of decentralized finance or “DeFi” begs numerous questions: who will build the companies that provide the infrastructure for decentralized finance? Who will be the lenders? Who will be the credit agencies? Who will be the escrow services? How big will the teams need to be? Will these systems be built on smart contracts, or can it be done with centralized cloud providers?

Haseeb Qureshi is a managing partner with DragonFly Capital and a frequent guest on SE Daily. He returns to the show to discuss his thesis on what kinds of crypto companies make sense, and how he thinks about investments into crypto startups. Haseeb recently wrote an article about how to build a crypto startup.

The post Crypto Businesses with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 games like Magic: the Gathering. This lead him to making a lot of money – and losing a lot of money – during the Golden Age of Poker of the early 2000’s.

Poker distracted Jeff from his academics, but he was able to transfer into University of Texas at Austin after attending another school for a year. There he studied computer science and did internships at companies like eBay.

Jeff struggled with software engineering as a career. His first job was in Chicago at a finance company. He says of the experience:

“The way that trading companies work is very different than Silicon Valley style product companies. It’s kind of a petri dish. There’s so much money at stake that the people they bring in are amazing engineers, but they’re just like cut from a very different cloth.

“I remember this day when I opened up Hacker News and I saw a bunch of cool things people had been building, and then I tabbed over to the unit tests I was writing for the options trading system. And it just sounded cooler to be building stuff. And I became disillusioned pretty quickly.”

Next, Jeff moved to Seattle to work in advertisement technology. Ad-tech wasn’t the field for him, but he did learn a lot about how advertising works. And that would prove instrumental later when he created Software Engineering Daily as an ad-supported podcast.

Before he got to that point, though, Jeff decided to apply for an engineering job at Amazon. He says of his time at Amazon:

“Amazon was like a museum to me. It was a place where I wanted to observe. I wanted to see the things that were on offer at the museum. But I quickly discovered that I did not want to work there.”

Jeff says his time at Amazon just happened to coincide with his growing interest in entrepreneurism. He says:

“I was talking with a coworker and I was saying to him ‘Hey man, did you see the new AWS service? It’s really cool. Imagine all the money you could make if you did like this business with this AWS service together with this other API, and then you’ve got Stripe, and then you could just make your own business. Wouldn’t that be cool?’ And he was like ‘Hey man, I’ve got to go work on my own service’ doing some kind of very subtle element of the infrastructure.

“And thank God we have people like that where that’s what they want to be doing. Those people are putting together the systems that allow you to get same-day delivery. That’s awesome. I like same-day delivery. But I don’t want to be the one that builds the back end infrastructure to keep that thing running.”

While he was in Seattle, Jeff became a heavy listener to technology podcasts.

“This is one thing I realized is so magical about podcasting. Because the consumption format is such passive communication between people, it keeps you company a weird “Her” kind of way. Instead of this voice assistant I have this cadre of characters that I listen to in podcast form.”

These podcasts gave Jeff a glimpse into how developers actually built software in different fields.

“It was shocking to me how different podcast conversations about applied computer science were from conversations that would take place in the ivory tower. And that disconnect has stuck with me for a long time.”

Around this time, Robert Blumen, who runs the Software Engineering Radio podcast, put out a call for volunteer hosts.

Jeff said he wrote to Blumen saying:

“I’m just a terrible software engineer. I’ll do whatever you tell me. Just let me interview people.

“I did the first 5 interviews and he let me stay on, and I kept getting slightly better. I just never stopped doing it.”

Jeff later got Blumen’s blessing for creating the Software Engineering Daily podcast. His goal was to take the Software Engineering Radio format daily, and with a consistent host each each time.

Before Jeff launched his podcast, he calculated that he only had 4 months worth of living expenses left in his savings. But he was able to go out and find advertisers, and get the podcast to break-even within just 2 months. And the podcast has been profitable ever since.

I’ve known Jeff for about 5 years, and he and I had a lot of other topics to talk about.

For example, we talk about the right size of an organization. Software Engineering Daily, for example, is just two people – Jeff and Erika. And they’re able to publish 1-hour episodes each week.

We also talk about Jeff’s other entrepreneurial efforts – including FindCollabs – and how he’s managed to fund them Software Engineering Daily.

This interview is a 2 hour listen in your favorite podcast player app – just search for “freecodecamp” and you should find it.

If you have an Amazon Echo, you can just say “Alexa – play the freeCodeCamp podcast.”

Or you can listen to it right here in your browser.

And you can follow Jeff on Twitter here.

The post freeCodeCamp’s Quincy Larson interviews Jeff Meyerson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 I discussed the field of programming education. Ryan returns to the show for a conversation about building Treehouse, and the company’s expansion from an online programming school to a platform for technology apprenticeship.

Thousands of people learn to program on Treehouse. Ryan’s goal is to connect those new programmers to companies where they can learn to apply those software skills to working at a technology company. Treehouse’s apprenticeship program is used by Airbnb, Adobe, Mailchimp, and others.

By combining an online education platform with an apprenticeship program, Treehouse has created a business model that could allow it to grow significantly bigger even in an atmosphere where learning to program has been commodified to a large extent. The economic model of Treehouse contrasts with in-person bootcamps such as Hack Reactor and online income sharing platforms such as Lambda School.

It was a great conversation about modern technology, the future of education, and the strategy of building a successful business.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Treehouse: Business and Education with Ryan Carson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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, engineers, and creators.

Business is a creative medium. The definition of a successful business is as subjective as the rules for what makes a successful work of art. A business owner can be miserable running a company that generates millions of dollars a year, and a new entrepreneur can feel ecstatic from making their first $5 sale.

Indie Hackers is a platform that is impossible to define in relation to things you have seen before. It is a media company with a podcast that most SE Daily listeners will probably enjoy. It is a social platform for learning how modern software companies are built. And it is a place where makers post their own progress on their creative projects (I have posted mine here).

Courtland was on the show three years ago to discuss the Indie Hackers movement in its nascent stages. Courtland returns to the show to discuss the thriving platform as it exists today, and a wide ranging conversation about software, game theory, and podcasting.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Indie Hackers (3 Years Later) with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 business. After 6 years of work, Behance was acquired by Adobe for more than $150 million. Today, Scott works as the Chief Product Officer at Adobe.

Behance’s journey from idea to acquisition is told by Scott in his book The Messy Middle. His book chronicles the difficult, winding journey that an entrepreneur must take in order to succeed, and contains some harrowing stories. Scott has a gritty personality, which was required to endure the ups and downs of Behance.

Scott joins the show to discuss the story of Behance, and the lessons of his life as an entrepreneur. 

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post The Messy Middle with Scott Belsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 investor thinks the company is worth. A valuation is determined by the present value of future cash flows. What are the future cash flows of a company? In order to figure that out, the investor needs to know how the business will look in the future.

This is why moats are so important. If an investor looks at how much money a business made this year, it does not tell the investor very much information about how much money the business will make in the future. If the business has a durable competitive advantage, then that means that the cash flows of the company are also durable. It also means that any compounding of those cash flows will be durable growth.

It is easy to understand durability for some businesses. Why do we keep using Google? Because there is no substitute search engine that is so integrated with our daily lives. Why do we keep using Facebook? Because there is no other social networking company that has all of our friends and family.

But what about companies with substitutes? There are lots of cloud providers, log management companies, and analytics providers. These are crowded markets, and yet in each of the crowded markets there seems to be a dominant player who captures the most market share. Why is that? How do software companies in competitive markets develop a moat?

Astasia Myers is a venture investor with Redpoint, a software investment firm that makes large bets on technology companies. Astasia joins the show to discuss how software companies form competitive advantages, as well as several specific markets such as log management and cloud cost optimization.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Software Moats with Astasia Myers appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 the management hierarchies pioneered by Microsoft and Google, but since everyone knows that those techniques work, they get continually copied. Of course, there is tremendous risk in pioneering a brand new management structure. There have been examples of successful software companies that have suffered tremendously due to a trial of an exciting new management structure.

New software is much easier and safer to try than revolutionary new management structures. New software is easier to try in a company with a strong engineering team, because that team is equipped to assess the new software and figure out if it is actually solving a problem that the company has. 

Uma Chingunde is an engineering manager at Stripe on the compute team. Uma has worked in management for a decade, and has worked in virtualization in infrastructure for even longer than that. Uma joins the show to give her perspective on management of engineers as well as management of compute infrastructure. We discussed some timeless principles of engineering management, as well as contemporary ideas around virtualization and compute.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Stripe Infrastructure Management with Uma Chingunde appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 ads for podcasts. Jeffrey shares how he started to host podcasts and how he became a developer.

Jeffrey’s journey as a developer started out with his interests in music and poker. Jeff and Charles compare advertising through sponsoring a booth in a conference versus advertising through a podcast. Tune in for a fun chat that covers everything from Keto dieting to software buzz words.

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