The Software Agents Podcast

Most of our Software Agents focus on remaking one field. Marina Harrell has made a career of creating software that empowers people on many fronts to build, deploy and maintain software solutions that once would have been out of reach. She also launched a nonprofit, Code Edge, that brings free coding classes to kids in underserved communities.

How do you take an entire conference or trade show online during a pandemic? How has the future of events been changed overnight? We interview two front-line veterans who work together—Ken Madden, VP of Digital Engagement at GPJ, the original innovator in auto shows, and John Sampogna, CEO of online brand builder Wondersauce.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is bringing modern software to the ever-growing task of watching for online hate speech. VP for Technology and Society Dave Sifry explains the open platform the ADL is building to apply machine learning to identify hate speech of all kinds across all social media networks.

GitHub is the go-to site for many of the software developers and supporters adapting to working without shared office space. VP Engineering Dana Lawson explains how GitHub itself is adapting to a distributed remote work world along with the company’s customers.

Redox provides an API to healthcare companies for the thousands of legacy systems on which healthcare records are stored and must be processed. The ongoing boom in telemedicine and at-home testing has spiked a new demand for Redox’s services. Their engineers must be dually proficient in both APIs and event queue management, both to ensure accuracy and meet HIPAA regulations on patient privacy.

The career landscape was already changing before the pandemic. Now, Quizlet is developing study guides for high-stakes certifications like EMT or CompTIA, while also supporting an explosion in home-learning content graded with the help of machine learning. Natalie Rothfels talks about Quizlet’s new prep packs, and recounts her journey from language nerd to software product lead.

Zippi gives gig workers in Brazil a way to make ends meet without being sucked into snowballing debt. One missed payment and they’re barred from the financial system. CTO Ludmila Pontremolez explains how software made it possible to provide working people with a stable financial base that the credit industry isn’t built to deliver.

Philanthropic foundations donate $75 billion per year to nonprofits on the front lines. Yet in this time of urgency, outdated systems for managing grants slow everyone down and miss potential connections. Fluxx CEO Madeline Duva explains how their software brings foundations and nonprofits together to get the right money into the right hands at the right time.

The ability to predict demand surges and slumps in demand in real time has gone from an efficiency-booster to a necessity in a pandemic world, for everything from Uber drivers to the food supply. PredictHQ founder Campbell Brown explains how timely data–from protests to paydays–can be crunched to forecast sudden shifts in demand.