software

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Jay Trimble, mission operations manager, ground data system manager, and resource prospector for the Lunar Rover Mission at NASA. We talk about applying Agile, adopting design thinking and user-centered design, and what he and his team rely on to design and build software for mission control.

Jay Trimble on User-Centered Design, Agile, and Design Thinking at NASA

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a two-day course on product strategy as part of the upcoming O'Reilly Design Conference.

Ben Yoskovitz on Lean Product Development Using Metrics to Build Successful Products and Companies

This week, I sit down with Matt LeMay, product coach and consultant, and author of "Product Management in Practice." We talk about the four guiding principles of product management, what he has learned about himself as a product manager, and how to conduct meaningful research.

Matt LeMay on the Four Principles of Product Management

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Ken Kousen, an author, instructor, and consultant who is presenting the live online training courses Functional Programming in Java 8 and Getting Started with Spring Boot in September and October. He is also the author of the newly published O’Reilly book Modern Java Recipes: Simple Solutions to Difficult Problems in Java 8 and 9.

Ken Kousen on Java, Spring, and Groovy

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Christine Hung, head of data solutions at Spotify. Prior to joining Spotify, she led data teams at the NY Times and at Apple (iTunes). Having led teams at three different companies, I wanted to hear her thoughts on digital transformation, and I wanted to know how she approaches the challenge of building, managing, and nurturing data teams.

I also wanted to learn more about what goes into building a recommender system for a popular consumer service like Spotify. Engagement should clearly be the most important metric, but there are other considerations, such as introducing users to new or “long tail” content.

Machine Learning at Spotify: You Are What You Stream

Somewhere between the media hype and command line interfaces, machine learning and AI do represent the opportunity to build better products. Fergal Reid, machine learning strategist at Intercom, chats with Des Traynor about what we can expect from this technology in the next few years, which realities are far away, and the considerations you must make if you choose to build in this space.

Fergal Reid, Machine Learning Strategist at Intercom

A product designer at a growing company has two key constituents: their users and their business. In his recent blog post “Subverted Design”, GitHub Senior Product Designer Joel Califa reminds us that if we gear too far to toward the latter, we can lose sight of our all-important users in the process. He joins Intercom's Adam Risman to talk about the root cause of subverted design, the shifting responsibilities of a designer, how to make a big impact with small design changes and much more.

Joel Califa, Senior Product Designer at GitHub

In this episode of the O’Reilly Podcast, I talk about issues surrounding stateful containers and services with Tobi Knaup, CTO and co-founder of Mesosphere, whose DC/OS is a platform for deploying stateful and stateless applications on any combination of infrastructure, and Gou Rao, CTO of Portworx, a provider of persistent storage for containers.

Tobi Knaup and Gou Rao on Stateful Containers

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk about Kubernetes, containers, and more with Bridget Kromhout, a principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, and a frequent speaker at tech conferences. She will be leading the workshop "Kubernetes 101" at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose, June 11-14, 2018, and at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), July 16-19, 2018.

Bridget Kromhout on Kubernetes

Will Larson has managed infrastructure teams for some of the biggest names in software. Today, he’s leading Foundation Engineering at Stripe, where his group builds the tools that support every Stripe engineer and keep Stripe reliable and performant. In this chat with Intercom engineering manager Todd Royal, Will shares how he keeps his team innovating, when to hire generalists vs. specialists, the nuances of managing in a high growth environment, and more.

Will Larson, Foundation Engineering at Stripe

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at ThoughtWorks. She will be leading the workshop Building Evolutionary Architectures Hands-On at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), July 16-19, 2018, in Portland, Oregon. Parsons also is co-author (with Neal Ford and Patrick Kua) of the book Building Evolutionary Architectures.

Rebecca Parsons on Evolutionary Architecture

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke Jesse Anderson, managing director of the Big Data Institute, and my colleague Paco Nathan, who recently became co-chair of Jupytercon. This conversation grew out of a recent email thread the three of us had on machine learning engineers, a new job role that LinkedIn recently pegged as the fastest growing job in the U.S. In our email discussion, there was some disagreement on whether such a specialized job role/title was needed in the first place. As Eric Colson pointed out in his beautiful keynote at Strata Data San Jose, when done too soon, creating specialized roles can slow down your data team.

We recorded this conversation at Strata San Jose, while Anderson was in the middle of teaching his very popular two-day training course on real-time systems. We closed the conversation with Anderson’s take on Apache Pulsar, a very impressive new messaging system that is starting to gain fans among data engineers.

What Machine Learning Engineers Need to Know

In this episode of the O’Reilly Podcast, I talk with Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, co-founder of the Mozilla Project and Foundation, and CEO and founder of Brave Software. Eich will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming O’Reilly Fluent Conference, July 11-14, 2018, in San Jose.

The Web Is Broken; Lets Fix It

In this episode of the O’Reilly Media Podcast, I talk with JP Phillips, platform engineer at IBM Cloud. IBM is driving development in the container space, as shown through last year’s launch of Istio, an open cloud service that allows developers to connect, manage, and secure networks of different microservices. Istio, a joint collaboration between IBM, Google, and Lyft, (in conjunction with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), is platform agnostic and runs on Kubernetes platforms, such as IBM’s Cloud Container Service. Interest in the platform is growing. IBM's Daniel Berg, who is giving a talk on Istio at the upcoming OSCON conference in Portland, recently led a hands-on workshop at KubeCon in Copenhagen to help developers learn how Istio can solve common challenges with microservices deployed within Kubernetes.

Kubernetes and Containers for Enterprise Developers

There are over 20 million programmers out there -- and double that, if you count everyone else coding in other ways -- but where are the next 100 million developers? How do we get to a billion developers? The answer, observes a16z general partner Peter Levine in conversation with GitHub co-founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath (based on a Q&A recorded at our last a16z Summit event) lies in changing the very definition of a "programmer" and "programming".

It might even mean the end of code, argues Levine (who apparently loves arguing the end of things!), and the beginning of a future where data isn't just "the new oil", but one where we all become our own "oil wells". With everyone is manipulating data -- the new programming, in a sense -- expertise can be scaled (especially with new tools) so everyone gets the answers and solutions they need. So what does this mean for open source developers? CIOs and organizations that have lots of different data streams, as well as domain experts? This episode of the a16z Podcast covers all this and more, including touching briefly on what's ahead...

---

The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
 
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

a16z Podcast: The End (and Beginning) of Programming

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Jarrod Overson of Shape Security about the reason for and the content in the Beyond Being an Individual Contributor track at QCon San Francisco, and he offers advice for current and aspirant technical leaders. 

Why listen to this podcast:
•	Many technologists get the opportunity to move into leadership roles but receive no training or guidance about what skills such a role needs 
•	Solving other people’s problems as quickly as possible is an important aspect of a leadership role – this is very different to being an individual contributor where the focus is on solving your own problems
•	Advice for aspirant leaders: assume you are in the role you want and practice doing everything you think should be done in that role
•	There is a bias among software developers against what is perceived as “old” knowledge – practices that have been around for decades and centuries – this is very wrong
•	The problems of software engineering have not yet all been solved so there is still a lot of learning to be done, you can’t just repeat what has been done elsewhere before and expect it to work
•	Software engineering is a creative, artistic skill done by creative, artistic people and a leader needs to understand how such people are motivated
•	Culture and motivation comes from the top of a company and spreads all the way down

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HXSIXF

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2HXSIXF

InfoQ Podcast

Show Notes

Jarrod Overson Offers Advice for Aspirant and Current Technical Leaders

<p>For more than 20 years, Lili Cheng has been shaping the way we chat — first with Comic Chat, a graphical IRC built into Internet Explorer in the mid ’90s and now as Microsoft’s VP of AI and Research, where she oversees the companies Bot Framework. In conversation with Intercom's Adam Risman, she explains how bots and humans complement one another, when to give your chatbot a personality, and much more.</p>

Lili Cheng, VP of AI and Research at Microsoft

<p>When he first joined Reddit, VP of Engineering Nick Caldwell's mandate was to grow the team from 35 people to 100. But he had no managers. In this episode, Nick talks with Darragh Curran, VP of Engineering at Intercom, about the hallmarks of excellent engineering leadership and the importance of preserving culture and building trust as a new leader.</p>

Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering at Reddit

Business growth unlocks all sorts of good things, but it also introduces increasing complexity. How can leaders prevent complexity from negatively impacting their products and teams? Intercom's Director of Product Design, Emmet Connolly, explains how thinking in systems has helped him manage change effectively.

Design in interesting times with Intercom's Emmet Connolly

Wes Reisz sits down and chats with Uncle Bob about The Clean Architecture, the origins of the Software Craftsperson Movement, Livable Code, and even ethics in software. Uncle Bob discusses his thoughts on how The Clean Architecture is affected by things like functional programming, services meshes, and microservices.

Why listen to this podcast:

* Michael Feathers wrote to Bob and said if you rearrange the order of the design principles, it spells SOLID.
* Software Craftsperson should be used when you talking about software craftsmanship in a gender-neutral way to steer clear of anything exclusionary.
* Clean Architecture is a way to develop software with low coupling and is independent of implementation details.
* Clean Architecture and Domain Driven Design (DDD) are compatible terms. You would find the ubiquitous language and bounded context of DDD at the innermost circles of a clean architecture.
* Services do not form an architecture. They form a deployment pattern that is a way of decoupling and therefore has no impact on the idea of clean architecture.
* There is room for “creature comforts” in a code base that makes for more livable, convenient code.
* “We have no ethics that are defined [in software].” If we don’t find a way to police it ourselves, governments will. We have to come up with a code of ethics.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Nebspj

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2Nebspj

software

brendan dunleavy