Software Engineering Daily

The Kubernetes ecosystem consists of enterprises, vendors, open source projects, and individual engineers. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was created to balance the interests of all the different groups within the cloud native community.

CNCF has similarities to the Linux Foundation and the Apache Foundation. CNCF helps to guide open source projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem–including Prometheus, Fluentd, and Envoy. With the help of the CNCF, these projects can find common ground where possible.

KubeCon is a conference organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I attended the most recent KubeCon in Copenhagen. KubeCon was a remarkably well-run conference–and the attendees were excited and optimistic. As much traction as Kubernetes has, it is still very early days and it was fun to talk to people and forecast what the future might bring.

At KubeCon, I sat down with Chris Aniszczyk and Dan Kohn, who are the COO and director of the CNCF.  I was curious about how to scale an organization like the CNCF. In some ways, it is like scaling a government. Kubernetes is growing faster than Linux grew, and the applications of Kubernetes are as numerous as those of Linux.

Different constituencies want different things out of Kubernetes–and as those constituencies rapidly grow in number, how do you maintain diplomacy among competing interests? It’s not an easy task, and that diplomacy has been established by keeping in mind lessons from previous open source projects.

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Starting an Internet business is harder than it should be. You need to incorporate, create an operating agreement, set up a system to accept payments, and many other straightforward tasks.

In the 1990s, this was how it felt to set up anything on the Internet. You always had to stand up a web server on your own infrastructure, before you could get to the interesting part–which was building an actual product. With the popularization of cloud computing, it became massively easier to stand up a server. Because of that lower activation energy, millions of applications and thousands of software businesses got started.

But the activation energy required to start a business remains higher than necessary. It feels like standing up a web server in the 90s–lots of tedium and reinventing the wheel that has been done by people before you. This is the motivation behind Stripe Atlas, a project to simplify the process of starting an Internet business.

Patrick McKenzie works on Atlas at Stripe. He was previously on the show to discuss his experience leaving a large corporation to work on his own small software companies. And his name has become synonymous with the modern phenomenon of the small software company–he has been writing about this topic for over a decade at Kalzumeus.com.

It was great to talk to Patrick once again about Internet businesses, and I’m excited to see Stripe Atlas become something huge.

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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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Laura Shin is the host of Unchained, a podcast about cryptocurrencies and decentralized technology. For every episode, Laura does significant research and preparation, so the content turns out polished and high quality. Her enthusiasm for the subject of cryptocurrencies comes through in her reporting.

Podcasting about cryptocurrencies requires walking a fine line. Cryptocurrencies have a mixture of drama and exciting technology–which are both great for a journalist. But you can’t get too deep in the drama, because the podcast will feel like a tabloid. And you can’t get too deep in the technical weeds, because the listener will fall asleep.

Laura joins the show to discuss how she got into reporting on cryptocurrencies, why she got so obsessed with the subject, and her experience as a solo entrepreneurial journalist.

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Sue Loh is a software engineer and author of a book with the goal of breaking developer stereotypes. Stereotyping among developers leads to bad outcomes. When incorrect assumptions are made about certain populations, those populations feel marginalized and engineering resources get misallocated.

From the perspective of Sue, the main problem is about how children are socialized. Young girls in particular are discouraged from programming, leading to a steady decline in the percentage of women in the computing workforce. With her book, Sue is hoping to create a piece of literature that will expose young female and minority students to the world of technology, and help them realize how cool engineering can be. Sue created a Kickstarter around her book and has raised more than $40,000.

Sue also describes her experiences as an engineer who has risen through the ranks at Microsoft, and how her perspective on engineering has evolved as she has become a principal engineer. For more information about her project, see http://EvilPlanToSaveThe.World

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