Software Engineering Daily

At KubeCon, I had the chance to catch up with Adam Stacoviak of the Changelog, a podcast that was an inspiration for starting Software Engineering Daily. Changelog has long been one of my favorite podcasts about engineering, thanks in part to Adam’s personality.

This was a spontaneous conversation, but it was a good one.

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Creating a podcast is still too difficult. One of the main barriers to entry is the editing process. After recording a podcast, the podcast producer needs to line up soundwaves in a digital audio workstation and clip the raw audio files to remove sections that need to be removed. As someone who has edited a lot of podcasts, I know that this is difficult and tedious.

One way of simplifying the editing process is to use speech-to-text to produce a transcription of an audio file, and align the text output with the audio. After that alignment, you have a mapping between the text and the audio–so you can delete text and have the corresponding audio be deleted as well.

SpeechBoard is a project by Craig Cannon and Ramon Recuero Moreno. SpeechBoard is an easy way to edit podcasts by deleting transcribed words that are mapped to an audio interview. In this episode, Craig, Ramon and I discuss how SpeechBoard is built and why this product hasn’t existed until recently. We also discuss the podcast world, which Craig is deeply familiar with as the host of Y-Combinator’s podcast. The YC podcast is one of my favorite shows, and if you like SE Daily, you will probably like the YC podcast, so check it out.

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Originally published November 18, 2015

Seth Godin is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of many books, including most recently, What To Do When It’s Your Turn.

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Originally published November 10, 2015

Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming paradigms.

Stephen Wolfram is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and also the author of A New Kind of Science.

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“Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance. To make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” That quote is from Peter Drucker.

It is one of the many useful quotes collected in Ron Lichty’s book “Managing the Unmanageable”—and it illustrates why we work in teams. When we collaborate with each other, we make each other’s strengths effective, and our weaknesses become irrelevant.

To collaborate effectively, we need leaders. We need management.

Ron Lichty spent 6 years managing engineers at Apple, and many more years in management and director roles elsewhere. In his book, Ron lays out the lessons he learned in 30 years of engineering management. Ron also describes concrete strategies for how to manage engineers productively.

An engineer who becomes a manager needs to learn new skills. And the hardest skills to master have nothing to do with technology.

Prioritizing the right projects, allocating engineering resources, making architectural decisions—all of those skills are important. But the art of relationships—of diplomacy and language—is harder to learn than any technical skill.

How do you motivate an engineer to do something that is boring? How do you have a difficult conversation with an engineer who needs to improve?  When a conflict between engineers comes up, do you confront the conflict head-on, or do you wait for those engineers to resolve it among themselves?

These questions do not have easy answers. The best way to learn how to react to these situations is to live through them. The second best way to learn is to read and listen to people who have seen so much of the management dynamic that they can distill it into anecdotes and aphorisms.

In today’s show, Ron shares several stories that changed how I think about management.

Ron and I did not have time to discuss everything I wanted to, and I recommend checking out his podcast episode on Software Engineering Radio for more detail. And also check out his book—Managing the Unmanageable.

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