Software Engineering Daily

Engineering managers face a different set of problems than engineers themselves. Whether they are hiring new employees, firing underperformers, or guiding a team of existing engineers, engineering management is all about people. Empathy is paramount because management is like being a professional therapist for the members of your team.

Mike Borozdin has been managing engineers for more than a decade and blogs about engineering management. In this episode, we cover the core responsibilities of an engineering manager and some strategies around how to do it right.

This episode is useful for anyone looking to improve their relationship with their manager, move into management, or improve as a manager.

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Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server.

As machine learning proliferates, the current model of cloud computing will become too slow. A small difference in the time it takes to refresh a machine learning model for a drone or car could be the difference between life and death.

Computation will move to the edge. The same drones, cars, and IoT devices that need their models updated quickly will form a peer-to-peer network with which to distribute time-sensitive tasks. One bellwether for this real time peer-to-peer network might be Uber’s Ringpop, a fault-tolerant application layer sharding system.

In such an edge computing model, your device could federate a complex request out to other nearby devices that have spare processing capacity, pay for those compute cycles using Bitcoin, and receive a response without any request to a centralized cloud server. The cloud servers would still be around, but they would be responsible for doing offline computation across large data sets.

This prediction was described by Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz in his talk “The End of Cloud Computing”. In this episode, Peter discusses the pressures that our pushing toward edge computing and away from the cloud.

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What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine.

When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity has driven him to his current work–building a mathematical framework which we can use to model consciousness.

Humans would like to believe that evolution selects for traits that allow us to understand the world as it is. From his experimental simulations, Hoffman has shown the opposite–that evolution pushes us towards a mistaken version of reality.

For listeners who are interested in theories about whether we live in a simulation, this episode is for you. If you are skeptical of the simulation theory then this episode will also be useful for you, as Hoffman gives one of the most nuanced, comprehensive explanations of reality that I have heard.

TED Talk

The Case Against Reality

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Software developers succeed by combining technical ability, communication skills, and well-reasoned philosophies to craft information systems. Where this podcast focuses on the information systems, Developer On Fire focuses on the engineers who built them.

Dave Rael started his podcast as a way to overcome fear and access an entrepreneurial side of himself. In his interviews with prominent engineers, Dave identifies patterns and strategies that have enabled his guests to succeed. He also finds the human side–namely the fallibilities and failures–of legendary developers, which makes it easier to imagine ourselves accomplishing the feats of his guests.

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Product managers are responsible for guiding the design and overall functionality of software. The relationship between product managers and engineers is complimentary: a PM is viewing the product from a perspective that is closer to the customer, so the PM often has the responsibility of navigating high-level tradeoffs in the functionality of a product.

Suzie Prince is the head of product at ThoughtWorks and she joins the show to discuss how she navigates tradeoffs as a PM. We also explored communication strategies for how PMs can work productively with engineers, and the overall product development process. Full disclosure: SnapCI is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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