Software Engineering Daily

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able to disrupt everything, and he has relentlessly been keeping up as best he can with the latest trends.

Of course, Ben is all of us. Nobody can keep up. As a daily software podcaster, I think I am as well positioned as anyone to be tuned into the breadth of the software engineering ecosystem–but I am constantly behind as well.

In his blog post “Reflections of an Old Programmer”, Ben theorized about the causes of this feeling of fatigue, and the constant struggle to keep up with the world of software engineering. His post contains enduring lessons that will be of value to new programmers and will feel familiar to programmers who have been around for a while.

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Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely?

Andrea Goulet is the CEO of Corgibytes, a consultancy that specializes in remodeling legacy codebases. Andrea’s company developed out of an observation that there are developers who actually love working on legacy code. Since founding Corgibytes, she has become an expert on legacy code and published a recent article about Building Technical Wealth. The article presents ways that companies can confront the realities of legacy code.

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Online advertising is heavily affected by a set of delusions and fraudulent practices that few people in the adtech industry have an interest in stopping. This is the curious, perverse nature of the world of online media. Some of the online advertising we see fulfills its job, when an ad successfully conveys a meaningful message from a marketer to a consumer.

But there are reasons to be extremely skeptical of the way that online advertising works. In this episode, and several more to come, Software Engineering Daily will be diving deep into the adtech business to understand the bot fraud and mass psychosis that bolsters our tech media giants.

Bob Hoffman is the author of The Ad Contrarian, a long-running blog about advertising. After selling the advertising agency he was running, he left the industry. In today’s episode, Bob discusses his experience in the ad industry, and the delusions he saw when he was working in it.

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Bot fraud, the New York tech scene, RethinkDB and open source; these topics and more are discussed in today’s episode. Two of the most popular guests return to the show to explore a variety of topics.

Ben Halpern is the creator of The Practical Dev, a massively popular Twitter account and blog that you may recognize from its parody O’Reilly book covers. Haseeb Qureshi is an engineer at Airbnb, and a blogger who is well known for his writings on salary negotiation and coding boot camps.

This episode was an experiment–if you like it, please let me know what you think.

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Software teams are traditionally composed of roles such as project manager, developer, QA, and manager. What happens if you throw out all of those titles, hire mostly engineers, and ask them to do whatever they think is best? That is the core idea behind Fred George’s idea of Developer Anarchy.

In today’s episode, David Curry guest hosts an interview with Fred George. They talk about the structure of teams and the idea of developer anarchy. For a great complement to this episode, check out the Software Engineering Radio episode about developer anarchy.

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