Software Engineering Daily

The a16z Podcast is a show that is produced by Andreessen Horowitz, an investment fund based in Silicon Valley. The a16z Podcast covers topics including software engineering, biology, media, cryptocurrencies and entrepreneurship. A16z is one of the most popular podcasts about technology.

Sonal Chokshi is the editor in chief at Andreessen Horowitz and the showrunner for the a16z podcast. For five years, she has been interviewing entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, and investors, exploring how software has increasingly impacted our lives and transformed society. 

The success of the a16z Podcast is largely a result of Sonal’s high editorial standards and her ability to ask the right questions and drive conversations in fruitful directions. Much of the content of Software Engineering Daily has been shaped by a16z, and I have listened to every single episode.

Sonal Chokshi joins today’s show for a conversation about podcasting and technology. Sonal shares her beliefs for why the podcast medium has taken off, and describes how her background in education, ethnography, and technology has shaped the completely distinct voice and flavor of the a16z Podcast.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Coding bootcamps allow anyone to become a programmer at a faster pace than the traditional computer science education system. In the last five years, coding bootcamps have grown rapidly in popularity, with thousands of people gaining the necessary skills to work as a software engineer.

Career Karma is a platform that allows individuals to find the best coding bootcamp. There are many coding bootcamps, and they are not all the same. Much like different schools have different cultures and focus on different disciplines, coding bootcamps vary widely in their teaching styles and acceptance path.

Reuben Harris and Artur Meyster are co-founders of Career Karma, and they join the show to discuss the changing nature of software engineering education and the frictions that new programmers encounter as they navigate the world of coding bootcamps. They also describe their journey to entrepreneurship and their own personal experience with coding bootcamps.

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A hackathon is an organized event where participants work together to build a product or tool. Hackathons are about creativity, learning, and exploration. A developer that is participating in a hackathon is often working on something that is outside of their normal day-to-day focus. 

Hackathons can provide significant value to the participants. Hackathons have led to friendships, new companies, and newly developed confidence that can be critical to a developer who feels uncertain in their ability to launch their own projects.

Jonathan Gottfried is a co-founder of Major League Hacking, an official student hackathon league that powers invention competitions. Major League Hacking is a B corporation that is focused on improving the education and community of technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and young hackers.

Jon joins the show to discuss hackathons–and how he has built and scaled an organization that is devoted to creating systematically successful hackathon experiences.

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Videos play a key role in the continuing education of a software engineer. Video can capture many different types of content that is useful for engineers: conference talks, tutorial videos, and podcast-style interviews are all popular formats of online video.

YouTube has become the predominant source for video content about software engineering. The open nature of YouTube’s format allows for a tremendous range of content. No matter what your preference is for how you like to learn and be entertained, YouTube has something for you.

TechPrimers is a media channel that is dedicated to sharing technical knowledge in the form of videos, GitHub repositories, and a thriving community. TechPrimers has over 300 videos on YouTube, and more than 48,000 subscribers who regularly watch content about subjects like AWS, Spring, and Kubernetes.

TechPrimers was founded by Ajay Kumar. Ajay has been in the software industry for fifteen years, and has been working in enterprise banking systems for seven years. He has deep experience in modern technologies and engineering practices.

Ajay joins the show to discuss the modern world of software engineering, and his experience building a media platform. He also talks about the technology culture of India. Ajay is based in Bengalaru, and it was exciting to learn how much our different societies have in common thanks to technology. Ajay also had me on his YouTube channel for an interview, which was a lot of fun.

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Software companies such as Slack, Zoom, and Uber have recently gone public.

When a company goes public, they issue a document called an S-1. Within the S-1, there is a wealth of information about the company, providing a detailed story about the company’s business model, economics, and future prospects. The S-1 describes the operating model and the philosophy of a newly public company.

Going public serves several purposes. Being public allows a company to gain access to the public capital markets. It allows previous investors to have a liquidity event, by selling the shares that they purchased from the company in private markets. Being public also puts some constraints and visibility on a company, which can be useful for a company that is trying to develop internal discipline.

In the software industry, it is useful for most people to understand the dynamics of going public. A technology worker who is earning equity at a private company needs to understand the roadmap to their company going public, or potentially getting acquired. Anyone who invests in public technology stocks is evaluating the different available options for investment, and considering the best software companies to place a bet on.

Tom Tunguz is a venture investor at Redpoint, and the author of a popular blog at tomasztonguz.com. In a recent series of posts, Tom has evaluated the S-1s and compared the growth dynamics between a variety of newer public software companies. Tom joins today’s show to discuss his writing, and offer reflections on what can be learned about company building from the recent series of IPOs and direct listings.

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In the developed world, it is easy to take for granted that we grew up with computers. Technology is so pervasive in the United States that we have debates about how early in child development a human should be given a smartphone.

Across much of Africa, there is a shortage of access to computers. Children grow up without much exposure to computers at all. Smartphones are starting to proliferate the continent, but the bandwidth limitations prevent the sort of unrestricted mobile Internet usage that many of us have in the west.

Tyler Cinnamon is a software engineer and the co-founder of TechLitAfrica, an organization dedicated to improving technology literacy and reducing poverty in Africa. TechLitAfrica takes old computers from the United States which are no longer in use and repurposes those computers with educational software and a downloaded subset of the Internet. Then, TechLitAfrica takes those computers to Africa and sets them up as computer labs.

Tyler joins the show to talk through the technical and cultural challenges of building TechLitAfrica.

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From Africa to India to Asia to South America–computer science and programming are rising in popularity in every emerging market. Each of these markets has regional needs for technology. Just like every culture develops its own food and television, every culture needs different types of applications to run their lives.

In Vietnam, the day-to-day life of a citizen is different than it is in the United States. Yes, everyone needs Google and YouTube and Instagram. But the trends in messaging, food delivery, gig economy, and other B2C technology sectors are considerably different than the west.

Charles Lee is the founder of CoderSchool a coding school in Vietnam. Before moving to Vietnam to start CoderSchool, he worked as a software engineer in San Francisco for several years. In today’s show, Charles describes the difference between the US and Vietnamese technology sectors, from consumer applications to business software to coding education.

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Facebook moves fast because of vision, collaboration, and trust. The fast pace of development is enabled by constantly improving infrastructure and a sense of unity throughout the company. 

In Facebook’s early days, there was an emphasis on rapidly deploying new code to drive constant improvement and experimentation. 

Product quality was maintained by engineers closely checking each other’s code reviews, rather than writing detailed unit testing suites. Facebook engineers had a sense for how the product should operate, and they were able to evaluate whether a new feature was working properly by testing a live version of that feature.

At Facebook, the vision of the company is clearly communicated to the employees. Every employee within Facebook can articulate the vision for the company, and will use similar language in describing that vision. 

Since the employees are aligned on strategy, they can also align in their implementation of product features. This reduces conflicts across roles and between teams. 

Facebook has also shown a willingness to trust its engineers. Trust was exemplified by Facebook’s tolerance for failures in the early days. When an engineer broke a build, or shipped a feature that failed to gain traction, that engineer was usually not punished. They may have even been rewarded, if the company could learn significantly from such an error.

Raylene Yung was an engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2015. As she moved from individual contributor to manager to engineering director, Raylene worked on products including News Feed, Timeline, Privacy, and Sharing. 

Raylene joins the show to give her reflections on the Facebook product and engineering environment. She explained how Facebook’s culture of collaboration, vision, and trust drive fast product development and minimizes conflict.

Raylene left Facebook and joined Stripe, where she worked on payments systems and international expansion for almost four years.

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Software engineers have a wide variety of media to choose from, including podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, conferences. The amount of software engineering media that is available is growing and accelerating.

Eight years ago, there were not as many options for information about software. Charles Max Wood founded Devchat.tv to create a network of podcasts and other content for software engineers. Today, his podcasts include the popular shows JavaScript Jabber, Ruby Rogues, and Adventures in Angular.

Chuck joins the show for a conversation about software media. This was his second time on the show, with his first episode exploring his podcast JavaScript Jabber.

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Creating a software company has never been easier. Software engineers are increasingly seeing entrepreneurship as a viable career path. But the path to being an independent software developer is not always clear. 

Most engineers spend some of their career working at a software company. Even an engineer who intends to build a company someday can thrive within the right environment.

Lior Kanfi is a software engineer and the founder of Tikal, a company he started at the height of the dot com bubble in 1999. His initial vision for the company was to build a product around managing knowledge and people within a company. 

When the dot com bubble burst in the year 2000, it became much harder to run a product-focused business. Companies were not buying lots of experimental software, and investors were not aggressively funding new software companies. After the market collapsed, Lior shifted Tikal from a product-focused company into consulting, in order to have a more reliable income stream.

Today, Tikal is a successful software consultancy based in Israel and the Bay Area. Lior describes the engineers within Tikal as “free radical” software developers: independent people who want to learn about new technologies and build experience interacting with clients.

Lior joins the show to talk about his 20 year journey building Tikal and the differences between engineers in the Bay Area and those in Israel. Lior also hosted the Full Stack Tech Radar Day in Tel Aviv, which was a great conference I attended.

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