Software Engineering Daily

Chad Fowler was the CTO of Wunderlist prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Since the acquisition, Chad has become the general manager of developer advocacy at Microsoft. He also works as a venture capitalist at BlueYard Capital, an early stage investment firm.

I’ve had a lot of fun talking to Chad, because he can move seamlessly between talking about disparate subjects like cloud computing, investing, cryptocurrencies, and music composition. And he has novel things to say about all of them!

When Chad joined Wunderlist, he helped start a large refactoring of the software architecture. He then helped the company navigate to the successful Microsoft acquisition. We started off the conversation with the story of this rearchitecture, and how he sees the current opportunities in front of Microsoft. Chad gives his perspective on Kubernetes, functions-as-a-service, and how developer tooling might evolve in the near future.

After talking about near-term developer tooling, we talked about the distant future: bug bounty marketplaces on the blockchain; using Github repositories to train machine learning models about how to write code; the comparison between music collaboration and software collaboration. This was a wide array of topics, but Chad was equipped to discuss all of them–since he works at Microsoft, makes large investments in the future, and studied music when he was in school.

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Music collaboration has historically been accomplished by musicians gathering in bands. A band is usually an in-person, physical manifestation: a drummer, a guitarist, a piano player. Or, on a large scale, a symphony of classical instruments led by a conductor. Today, the most flexible instrument that anyone can play is arguably the computer, because a computer can simulate or replay any of the sounds made by any other instrument.

Another advantage of the computer is that it removes physicality as a constraint on the musician. A computer musician does not have to train their muscles to play piano, or guitar, or drums. The computer musician can imagine a sound and bring it to life inside a digital audio workstation (a program for composing and arranging music).

The rise of the computer musician has coincided with a change in the way popular music is created. Instead of bands needing to work together to create a piece of music, a single producer can simulate all of the members of the band by programming piano, drums, and everything else.

The rise of the solo producer has given birth to new kinds of music–but solo music production inherently limits the range of musical ideas that can be explored. The most important works of art have input from multiple people. And even the most successful solo producers love to work with other artists who have a complementary skill–such as vocals.

For the last twenty years, the model of solo producer working with pop vocalist has largely dominated the charts. Musical collaboration has stuck to a model that mimics its pre-Internet form, with very small groups of 1-5 people making the core of a song. The main tools that people use to collaborate are email and Dropbox.

Splice is a tool for music collaboration. Splice combines version control, revision history, social networking, sample discovery, synthesizer rental, and other features. Splice is changing the way that music is created, with a large percentage of top producers adopting it. The impact Splice has on music will be on par with what Github has done for software engineering.

Matt Aimonetti is the CTO and co-founder of Splice, and he joins the show to talk about the founding story, the product development, and the engineering of Splice.

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Howard Marks ran two video game companies in the 90’s: Activision and Acclaim. While running these companies, he developed a love for entrepreneurship that he maintains today. Howard is the CEO of StartEngine, a company that functions as an accelerator, a crowdfunding platform, and ICO launcher.

Howard joins the show to talk about his background as an entrepreneur, as well as some modern alternative funding mechanisms that he’s working on at StartEngine. Hearing Howard’s thoughts on building a video game company in the 90’s was particularly new information to me–it’s an era of software development that we have not covered much at all.

As a side note–some listeners have asked recently why we cover subjects such as ICOs, when there have been so many dubious companies that have launched ICOs.

There are two reasons why we cover this area. Firstly, cryptocurrencies are a breakthrough computer science construct. It’s important for us to try to understand their implications. The other reason why we cover ICOs is that some technology companies require high upfront capital costs. The amount of capital you have available affects the speed at which your engineering team can move. New funding mechanisms could mean more capital for certain types of software companies–and this could be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the company.

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Banking has been a part of the economy for 600 years. Banking has always been evolving.

The most recent evolution: the financial industry has been going digital. Newer “fintech” companies have created innovative ways of doing everything related to money–from friendly payments to budgeting; from business transactions to insurance. However, the traditional banks themselves have been relatively slow at adjusting to these digital changes, creating the opportunity for native digital banks–often referred to as “challenger banks.”

N26 is a digital first bank established in Berlin and is active in 17 European countries with a million users. Pat Kua is the CTO at N26.

Digital banks are hosted on the cloud, without a physical branch the user must go to to perform an operation. The user accesses their account through a mobile application, and can complete everything online from opening an account to performing transactions. This system has numerous advantages, like simplicity for the user, and higher scalability in terms of users from the bank’s perspective.

In this episode, we discuss the advantages of digital banks, the fintech industry and N26 as a itself. We also explore product development and how Pat manages his time as CTO–which is a useful discussion for anyone who is learning to be a technical leader or manager.

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Nubank was started in 2013 with a credit card that was controlled through a mobile app. At the time, it was the first service in Brazil that allowed customers to do banking without going to a physical bank branch. Since then, Nubank has expanded into additional financial services and currently has 850 employees working in Brazil.

Edward Wible is a co-founder and CTO of Nubank and in this episode he discusses his work growing Nubank from a small team of less than 10 people into a company with almost 1000 people.

We have covered two other banks in the past few weeks: Monzo and N26. In terms of software engineering and product management, Nubank is similar to Monzo and N26. One characteristic that stood out was Nubank’s use of Clojure, a functional programming language built on the JVM.

A question that came up during this show: what is the line between “fintech company” and “bank”? We hope to explore this more in future shows about the intersection of money and software.

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