Software Engineering Daily

Mars is a cold, inhospitable planet far from earth. It presents one of the most complex challenges faced by engineers: how can we create a new world?

To create a new world, first we have to get there. We can build new rockets with improved propulsion systems. We can build ships that allow us to survive the long, grueling trip from Earth to Mars. We can build robots that will help us construct our new home. And this is just the beginning. Mars could be warmed, and could develop a hydrologic cycle like the system of clouds and oceans on earth. Mars could be a place for new ideas and new cultures, unfettered by the conventions of Earth.

Mike Solana is the host of Anatomy of Next, a podcast about technologies and philosophies of the future. He’s also a vice president at Founder’s Fund. In a previous episode, Mike joined the show to talk about artificial intelligence, genetics, and robotics. Today, we discuss Mars.

The latest season of Anatomy of Next explores the science that is bringing us closer to exploring other planets. On his podcast, Mike speaks with engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs about the state of the art of space technology–as well as the challenges that remain unsolved.

Mike returns to the show to discuss this dream of a new world. Why should we go to Mars? And why should the software engineers listening to this podcast even care?

To find all 900 of our old episodes, including past episodes with venture capitalists, futurists, and philosophers, check out the Software Engineering Daily app in the iOS and Android app stores. Whether or not you are a software engineer, we have lots of content about technology, business, and culture. In our app, you can also become a paid subscriber and get ad-free episodes–and you can have conversations with other members of the Software Engineering Daily community.

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Social media has transformed our lives. It has also transformed how wars are fought. P.W. Singer’s new book “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media” describes the far-reaching impact of social media on the tactics and strategies used by military, business, and everyday citizens.

We have all read about stories such as Russian bots and Cambridge Analytica, but Likewar covers many more cases that are surprising and mildly frightening. From the Gaza Strip to the streets of Chicago to Taylor Swift’s Instagram feed, Likewar describes just how pervasive the effect of social media has been on warfare.

Likewar also provides historical context. For software engineers, the repurposing of social media as a weapon is disconcerting. Many of us are working on products with a social networking component. Does this make us complicit in building weapons?

We can find some reassurance in the fact that this has happened before: from the newspaper to the television, every new invention has been used repurposed for war.

In a war, a new piece of technology always presents a new vector to gain an advantage in a conflict. Because the stakes are so high in a war, there is a large incentive to find creative ways to use technology to undermine your adversaries and to help your allies.

P.W. Singer has written about robotics, cybersecurity, and modern warfare for a decade. In a previous episode, we discussed subjects like Stuxnet, drones, and social media manipulation. In today’s show, P.W. returns to talk about his book Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media.

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Infrastructure software can be a great business.

An infrastructure software company sells core technology to a large enterprise such as a bank or insurance company. This software has near zero marginal cost and generates a large annuity for the infrastructure software company. Once a bank has purchased your infrastructure software, the bank is likely to renew every year and never remove the software.

Selling infrastructure software is like selling concrete or steel, except the software is cheaper to produce, easier to distribute, and generates an annuity rather than being a one-time sale.

The fundamental economics of enterprise infrastructure software are extremely appealing, and every year more businesses enter the space–but few businesses ever leave. If you are starting an infrastructure software company, you can expect a complex battle for market share. There is no easy trick to get it into the hands of your target customer.

Martin Casado studied computer science at Stanford before founding Nicira, a company that pioneered software-defined networking and virtualization technology. In 2012, Nicira sold to VMware for $1.26 billion. Martin now works as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Martin writes about the modern strategies of building a successful infrastructure software company. He describes two methods of selling into an enterprise: bottoms-up and top-down.

In a bottoms-up model, engineers within an enterprise start using your product to solve a well-defined problem, such as API management. As more and more employees within the organization start to use your product, you can begin to engage the enterprise about becoming a paying customer for your product. Since the enterprise is already using your product, the sales conversation is much easier.

In the top-down model, you engage the CIO, CEO, or CTO directly and try to convince them that your product is worth paying for. When the senior leadership of a bank buys into your product idea, you can count on that senior leadership to convince their developers to use your product within the bank.

It is a rare occurrence that your infrastructure software company will be able to fit cleanly into either of these models–bottoms-up or top-down. More often, there will be some bottoms-up usage, and some top-down buy-in for your product. But you will have to evangelize the product on all fronts. You will have to convince both the engineers and the senior leadership.

Your product probably won’t speak for itself. You will have to develop expertise in sales, marketing, and consultancy. And in many cases, you might end up in an unending chasm.

The unending chasm describes a mode in which an infrastructure company must function as both a product company and a consultancy. Your consultancy is necessary to integrate your product into the enterprise, and ensure that your software actually gets used. But it reduces the appealing economics of a pure software company.

The unending chasm does not prevent you from being successful. Companies who have had very successful IPOs remain in the unending chasm. But it’s useful to know whether you are heading for an unending chasm–or if you are already in one.

Martin Casado joins the show today for a discussion of product development, software engineering, and go-to-market strategy.

To find all 900 of our episodes, including past episodes with a16z partners, check out the Software Engineering Daily app in the iOS and Android app stores. Whether or not you are a software engineer, we have lots of content about technology, business, and culture. In our app, you can also become a paid subscriber and get ad-free episodes–and you can have conversations with other members of the Software Engineering Daily community.

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Augmented reality glasses will let us walk through a world where the digital blends together with the physical. 3-D objects will be rendered and superimposed onto our field of vision, creating an environment for people to build applications we can hardly dream of today.

These augmented reality glasses are probably three to five years away from being ready for consumer use. But developers are already building augmented reality applications for smartphones using Apple ARKit and Android ARCore. These augmented reality toolkits use powerful smartphone processors and computer vision to give developers simple primitives for placing and manipulating 3-D objects.

Most of these AR applications are made for a single phone, and AR is useful for a single phone–for example, you could hold your phone up in front of an empty room, and see on your phone how it would look if you had an IKEA couch sitting in the middle of that room.

But shared augmented reality experiences are much more exciting.

Shared augmented reality can allow us to play a game of virtual basketball, both controlling the game that is synchronized between us. Shared AR would let me go to a restaurant, and create a virtual billboard in front of the restaurant that only you could see when you walked up to the restaurant and held your phone in front of you.

Ubiquity6 is a company with the goal of enabling shared AR experiences. Ankit Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Ubiquity6, and he joins the show to explain why building shared AR is a challenging technical problem. It requires building a digital model of the real world, and mapping that model to coordinates in space, so that users can reliably persist augmented reality objects that each other can see.

We discuss computer vision, digital mapping, the increasing power of phone processors, and the potential of shared AR.

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Originally posted on 1 May 2018.

Technology is pushing us rapidly toward a future that is impossible to forecast. We try to imagine what that future might look like, and we can’t help having our predictions shaped by the media we have consumed.

1984, Terminator, Gattaca, Ex Machina, Black Mirror–all of these stories present a dystopian future. But if you look around the world, the most successful technologists are mostly guided by a sense of optimism. Technologists themselves are mostly idealistic–they see the future through a utopian lens. Popular media largely tells a different story: that we are headed for a dystopian world.

Why is there such a gulf in the level of idealism between technologists and the media?

Mike Solana found himself asking that question on a regular basis during his work at Founder’s Fund, where he is a vice president. Founder’s Fund has a bias toward funding difficult, cutting-edge technology like gene editing, robotics, and nuclear energy. This technology that Mike was seeing made him excited about the future–which led to his creation of the podcast “Anatomy of Next.”

“Anatomy of Next” has explored biology, robotics, nuclear energy, superintelligence, and the nature of reality. Soon the podcast will be exploring how our civilization will explore and settle the solar system–specifically Mars.

I’ve listened through the entire first season of the show twice and enjoyed it so much because Mike explores questions that are on the border of philosophy and technology–questions about the nature of reality, and what makes us human–and nobody can give perfect answers to these questions. But Mike interviews top experts on the show, which provides us with a framework. Guests on “Anatomy of Next” include Nick Bostrom (the author of Superintelligence), George Church (a pioneer in gene editing), and Palmer Luckey (the founder of VR company Oculus).

Mike joins the show to talk about why he started “Anatomy of Next,” and his own perspective on the future.

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Market strategy defines how a company is positioning itself to be successful. This strategy encompasses engineering, sales, marketing, recruiting, and everything else within a company.

Herb Cunitz has led teams at Hortonworks, VMware, SpringSource, and several other companies over his 30 year career in software. After working as president of Hortonworks, Herb started AccelG2M. AccelG2M works with software companies to define their go-to-market strategy.

Software companies require a great deal of long-term strategic thinking. Engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership must work together to build a plan that will allow the company to reach an exit: either an acquisition or an IPO.

Executives at a software company must create a clear strategy and communicate it to the employees throughout the organization. The strategy must be implemented, meeting deadlines and hitting milestones. New team members must be recruited, and unsuccessful workers must be let go.

In today’s show, Herb provides some invaluable strategic wisdom for anyone working in software–whether you are an engineer, salesperson, or investor.

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A bank account is a platform for apps to be built on top of.

If that sounds like a weird idea, think about the features of a bank account. Most users only have a single bank account, making it a tool for identity and authentication. The series of transactions in a bank account provides a data set that can be used for analyzing payment history and issuing loans, or insurance.

But there are difficulties to building a platform on top of banking. There are thousands of different banks. If you want to build an application that integrates with a user’s bank, you need to be able to integrate with any bank that the user might use–whether it’s Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or Chase.

Plaid is a company that builds APIs for users to connect to banks. Applications such as Venmo, Betterment, and Coinbase use Plaid to connect with the bank accounts of their users. Jean-Denis Greze joins the show to explain how applications use Plaid, and how Plaid has scaled its infrastructure to handle a high volume of requests. He also discusses the potential of banking as a platform, and the strategy for expanding the APIs that Plaid can offer to developers.

Fintech Daily is a new podcast from Software Engineering Daily covering payments, cryptocurrencies, trading, and the intersection of finance and technology. We are looking for volunteer hosts for Fintech Daily, and if you are interested in working with us to conduct interviews, send an email to [email protected]. You can find the podcast on iTunes, Google, and everywhere else, and if you are interested in hosting, don’t hesitate to reach out.

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When a startup finds product market fit, the adoption of that product can grow rapidly, turning a startup into a high growth company.

All of a sudden, a startup that was struggling to find its first customer is bombarded with new challenges. The startup has to hire tens of new employees. This requires raising capital, so the startup has to meet with investors and lawyers. A rapid influx of new customers puts a strain on the engineering and customer service elements of the company.

There is too much to do, and there is only so much time in a day.

The CEO of the high-growth company is up late into the night, answering emails and losing sleep. But these are good problems to have, and the company is in a state of exuberance. The CEO must balance psychological health with the stressful task of scaling a company.

Elad Gil is an entrepreneur and author of “High Growth Handbook”, a book of lessons and guidelines about how to navigate a startup that has found product market fit, and is beginning to scale. High Growth Handbook includes interviews with experienced entrepreneurs such as Marc Andreessen and Patrick Collison, whom Elad met with as he wrote the book.

Elad joins the show to discuss his book, and his own personal lessons of working with companies such as Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Coinbase. Elad has worked at several high growth companies and invested in others, and he has gathered a lot of wisdom from these different experiences.

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Releasing software has inherent risk. If your users don’t like your new feature, they might stop using your product immediately. If a software bug makes it into production, it can crash your entire application.

Releasing software gradually has many benefits. A slow rollout to an increasing population of users allows you to test your software in multiple real-world environments before it goes live to everyone. A system of AB testing different versions of your software lets you see how different flavors of your software perform against similar audiences.

Edith Harbaugh is the CEO of LaunchDarkly, a system for feature management. LaunchDarkly allows developers to deploy new software releases in a controlled fashion. Edith joins the show to discuss how to implement feature flagging, and why an intelligent release process can lead to a more scientific, predictable environment for software development. Edith is also the host of To Be Continuous, a podcast about continuous delivery, software engineering, and DevOps.

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The Berkeley AMPLab was a research lab where Apache Spark and Apache Mesos were both created. In the last five years, the Mesos and Spark projects have changed the way infrastructure is managed and improved the tools for data science.

Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, Berkeley has become a university where fundamental research is blended with a sense of industry applications. Students and professors move between business and academia, finding problems in industry and bringing them into the lab where they can be studied without the day-to-day pressures of a corporation.

This makes Berkeley the perfect place for research around “serverless”.

Serverless computing abstracts away the notion of a server, allowing developers to work at a higher level and be less concerned about the problems inherent in servers–such as failing instances and unpredictable network connections.

With serverless functions-as-a-service, the cloud provider makes guarantees around the execution of serverless code–such as with AWS Lambda. With serverless backend services, the cloud provider makes guarantees around the reliability of a database or queueing system.

The cloud provider is operating servers to power this functionality. But the user is not exposed to those servers.

Today’s show centers around the serverless functions-as-a-service. This is a new paradigm of computing, and there are many open questions. How can the servers for our functions be quickly provisioned? How can we parallelize batch jobs into functions as a service? How can large numbers of serverless functions communicate with each other reliably to coordinate?

In production applications, functions-as-a-service are mostly used for “event-driven” applications. But the potential for functions-as-a-service is much larger.

Ion Stoica is a professor of computer science at Berkeley, where he leads the RISELab. He is the co-founder of Conviva Networks and Databricks. Databricks is the company that was born as a result of the research on Apache Spark. Ion now serves as executive chairman of Databricks. Ion joins the show to describe why serverless computing is exciting, the open research problems, and the solutions that researchers at the RISELab are exploring.

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