Software Engineering Daily

42 is tuition-free developer school for students from 18-30. It was started by Xavier Niel, a French billionaire who wanted to encourage a new model of software education. 42 has campuses in France and Silicon Valley.

42 has very high standards for the students it admits, because the students that get in are not paying tuition, but they have 24/7 access to high quality computers and a beautiful campus. Unlike coding bootcamps, 42 lasts 3-5 years. Students who graduate are equipped with both computer science theory and the practical ability to see projects through on their own.

Brittany Bir is the chief operating officer of 42 Coding School in Silicon Valley.  She joins the show to talk about how 42 works and the future of programming education. At 42, the focus is on peer-to-peer learning. Students complete projects of their own choosing, and are also required to take on internships and get real world work experience.

Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about building your brand brought to you by Indeed Prime.

If you like listening to this podcast, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and Android to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by looking at the recommendations in the app.

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The underlying cause of failure for many startups is that the founders are afraid of discomfort. An environment where everyone is comfortable is unlikely to be an environment where personal growth and value creation is occurring.

When you are in a startup, calibrating the right amount of discomfort is often about calibrating risk.

What are your risks? Can you quantify them? Can you enumerate them? Multiplying out the probability of surviving each of those risks, then multiplying that number times the sum of the discounted future cash flows of your business will give you the expected value of your business.

Under the right circumstances, entrepreneurship has much higher expected value than a stable engineering job. The important difference is variance. Your business needs to be able to withstand the variance that bad luck can provide. And entrepreneurs themselves need to be able to withstand the variance implied by the fact that their business can completely fail and go to zero.

Leo Polovets is a partner with Susa Ventures. He worked as an early engineer at Linkedin, Google, and Factual, and he blogs at Coding VC. In this episode we talked about the proper mindset for founding a company–how to think about risk, mistakes, discomfort, and finance.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about venture capital, including interviews with Chris Dixon and Tomasz Tunguz. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

Coding VC blog

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Moat is one of the most successful advertising technology companies in history. After building a business from measurement of ad impressions, Moat was sold to Oracle for $850 million.

Advertising powers the free content on the Internet. Measurement makes it easier for publishers to monetize their content. At Software Engineering Daily, we know this from firsthand experience. The podcast ecosystem has barely any ability to measure success–and that can make it hard to entice advertisers. In podcasting, it is very difficult to understand if an advertising campaign is a success.

This illustrates why Moat is important. Improving the analytics on advertising helps publishers, brands, ad agencies, and adtech companies decide how to allocate their capital.

Why is it hard to measure advertising success? Why is this a difficult engineering problem? Because there are so many players in the space with conflicting incentives.

A brand wants to show ads to people who will buy a product. A publisher wants to display an ad that will maximize revenue. Adtech companies and ad agencies want to take the biggest cut possible from the transactions between brands and publishers. In the midst of all of this, fraudulent traffic providers offer cheap services that drain money from anyone who is not keeping a close eye on their deal flow.

In this fog of war, Moat’s goal is to provide transparency where possible. Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart joins this episode to talk about advertising analytics, viewability, and fraud.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about adtech and advertising fraud. You can check out our back catalog by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com or by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS, where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

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Software gives us new ways of communicating with each other. Engineers build scalable systems for e-commerce, helpdesk, and video sharing–and these systems do scale, to millions of people. But software alone cannot serve all of the demands of all the users and customers on these platforms.

We need customer service representatives to address unexpected demands. We need design specialists to evaluate the interface that made sense to the engineers but not the users. We need sales people to connect our strange software to an impatient prospective customer.

Engineers sometimes joke about firing all the non-engineers in the company. As engineers, it is easy to discount all of the work that non-engineers do–it can seem unscalable, or non-quantifiable, or mechanical. But most companies would fall over immediately without support, sales, design, operations, and the multitude of other non-engineering roles.

More to the point–people in non-technical roles can drive the success of an en organization. Some of the most influential leaders in tech came from a non-technical background: Stuart Butterfield of Slack; Brian Chesky of Airbnb; Sheryl Sandberg of Google and Facebook. A liberal arts education can foster the perfect set of skills to thrive in a technology company.

George Anders is an author whose most recent book is called You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education. George is one of my favorite business writers, and some of his past writing includes pieces about Sequoia Capital, Amazon, Linkedin, and a ton of other topics on Quora.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about business with guests like Seth Godin and Tyler Cowen–indeed many of the shows on Software Engineering Daily are not deeply technical. You can check out our back catalog by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS, where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

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We write code in a language that looks like English. Whether it is JavaScript, Fortran, or assembly language, that code is an abstraction on top of layers of intermediate languages, binary, transistors, and physics. 100 years ago, this would have seemed like magic.

Most of us know about Alan Turing, who described the vision of a multipurpose computer with the concept of the Turing machine. Less well known is the scientist Claude Shannon, who laid the groundwork of information theory. With information theory, we can compress data and communicate it efficiently.

Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman are the authors of “A Mind at Play,” a biography of Claude Shannon. Claude’s unique insights about information were made possible by his willingness to involve himself in lots of different areas–science, art, juggling, warfare. This interview gives insights for how we can think of new ideas by synthesizing disparate subjects.

There are 600 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, and it can be hard to find the shows that will interest you. If you have an iPhone and you listen to a lot of Software Engineering Daily, check out the Software Engineering Daily mobile app in the iOS App Store. Every episode can be accessed through the app, and we give you recommendations based on the ones you have already heard.

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