Software Engineering Daily

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 this time, Facebook was in the middle of its shift toward becoming a mobile application company. Ads on the smartphone were not yet a proven business model. Facebook was exploring other business lines, and decided to purchase Parse for $85 million, with the intention of building a cloud developer platform.

Shortly after the acquisition, Facebook’s mobile ads business started to see considerable success. With the mobile ads business finding traction, Facebook shifted all available resources towards supporting that business model. In 2017, Parse was shut down.

Ilya joins the show to give his experience starting Parse, selling the company to Facebook, and then seeing the company he had built get shut down as it became an unfortunate casualty of Facebook’s advertising success. We talked a lot about the experience of building a backend-as-a-service company, as well as what makes Facebook special as an organization, and how the success of Facebook’s mobile business happened to coincide with the Parse acquisition.

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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 AWS, nor was it easy to build within the young mobile ecosystem.

Charity Majors was an early engineer at Parse, and stayed with the company through its acquisition by Facebook. Charity joins the show to discuss her experience at Parse and her reflections on being part of Facebook after the acquisition. Parse was shut down in 2017, which was a disappointing outcome for Charity.

Charity currently works as the CTO of Honeycomb. In a previous episode, Charity gave some background on her career in software, as well as her perspective on modern problems in observability and DevOps. In this episode, Charity tells the story of joining Parse, working through novel engineering problems, and the feeling of being acquired by a company where she did not feel like a great cultural fit.

It is a useful conversation for anyone interested in engineering culture, company philosophy, and the realities of acquisitions–which can be both painful and profitable for the acquired employees.

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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.

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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 system that he encountered.

Release engineering is the process by which software is released to users. As software is being developed, it moves through a series of testing environments. In these test environments, the software can be studied using simulated inputs that can help developers discover software bugs.

Chuck had come to Facebook from Google. At Google, the crown jewel was Google web search which had a regimented release process. At Facebook, the crown jewel was facebook.com. Chuck found that the release process for facebook.com was much different than Google web search.

Chuck joins the show to talk about release engineering at Facebook, and how the company constantly evolved its code deployment process. Chuck also describes Facebook’s pivot to mobile, and how the bottlenecks in the mobile app release process threatened Facebook’s ability to iterate and release quickly.

This show provided some amazing perspective on continuous delivery, and will be useful to anyone who is working on figuring out their “DevOps” process. Chuck has a wealth of knowledge and context about the modern software industry.

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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 early period of employment is often referred to as “onboarding.” During the onboarding period, an employee will learn the basics of the company they have just joined. These basics include the work procedures, meeting schedules, expectations, and technical tools that an employee needs to become productive.

A poor onboarding process can slow an employee down, and even cause them to quit the company entirely. Conversely, a good onboarding process can accelerate an employee towards rapid contribution within the organization. A scalable onboarding process can be a difference in millions of dollars in productivity per year across the organization.

Kristen Gallagher is the founder of Edify, a company that helps organizations define and implement their onboarding process. Kristen joins the show to talk about the ingredients of a successful onboarding process and what she is doing with her company Edify.

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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 can improve the insurance industry is through better brokerage technology. Insurance involves carriers and brokers, who work together on delivering insurance solutions to customers. The initiation and closing of an insurance transaction often involves lots of emails, PDF files, and antiquated software systems. Technology improvements will smooth out this process and reduce manual overhead.

Another way insurance can improve thanks to technology is through smarter pricing. The price of an insurance policy is offered to a customer based on how risky the insurance policy is, how large the customer pool is, and how much the insurance company could lose in the event that it would have to pay out an insurance policy. These risk profiles are calculated based on historical data.

Gordon Wintrob is the co-founder and CTO of Newfront Insurance. Gordon joins the show to discuss the insurance industry and how his company got started.

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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 pays more than full-time software engineering, because contract jobs can end at any time, and they do not have the added employee benefits such as health insurance and stock options.

Online contracting platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr have expanded the number of software contracting engagements that take place. Developers on Upwork and Fiverr have a wide range of skills and experience levels. The clients who come on Upwork and Fiverr looking for developers are sometimes unsophisticated at managing software projects, and in some cases they defraud the software developers who are making their living online, and trick these software developers into delivering free work.

Moonlight is a contracting platform for software engineers. Today’s guests Emma Lawler and Philip Thomas are the founders of Moonlight, and they join the show to explain why they started the company, and the gaps that exist in the world of software contracting. Moonlight’s model is different than most other contracting platforms, in that Moonlight requires clients to pay a $300 subscription fee to recruit engineers on the platform. This $300 subscription price lowers the rate at which clients take advantage of software engineers. This dynamic causes the software engineers to take their work more seriously and act more professionally.

Full disclosure: I am an investor in Moonlight. I have also been a paying client of the service, and our newest version of the Software Daily app was built by Mostafa Gazar, who is a talented Android engineer I met on Moonlight.

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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 show to give a retrospective on his time in the console industry.

Developing hardware and software for game consoles differs significantly from the world of web development. Tony describes the culture of the game development world, and the challenges involved in the domains of software tooling, custom operating systems, and streaming media. In 2010, the PS3 was hacked by notorious tinkerer George Hotz, a previous guest on the show, an event which Tony also discusses.

We also discuss the world of modern gaming and VR technology. Tony currently works as an engineer at MelodyVR, a company that makes virtual reality live music experiences.

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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 planet, there is a growing sentiment that “big tech” has too much power, and that they are abusing that power in order to dominate markets, censor speech, and manipulate politics.

Tyler Cowen is the author of Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. He is also the host of the popular podcast Conversations with Tyler and an economist at George Mason University. In Big Business, Tyler explores the modern relationships between consumers and businesses, including the large technology companies.

Tyler joins the show to discuss his new book. In previous episodes with Tyler, we also talked about his previous books as well as the effects of technology on American society and the philosophical approaches software engineers can bring to their careers.

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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 excellent resource on management techniques and strategies for scaling software organizations. Will’s writing draws from his experiences working at Uber and Stripe.

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