The State and Future of Software Development with Christina Cacioppo and Amjad Masad

On this episode Erik is joined by Christina Cacioppo (@christinacaci) of Vanta, and Amjad Masad (@amasad) of Repl.it.

They discuss the reasons why developers tools are for the most part “primitive” and the cause of the mess of different technologies and utilities that a developer needs to know how to use in order to create an app. They talk about the concept of “end user computing” and the progress that’s been made in allowing non-developers to do more and more sophisticated things that were previously restricted to developers.

Amjad explains how the way developer tools work can be traced back to the early days of computing with punch cards and Christina talks about why there has been a lack of venture investment in dev tools, even as developers and CTOs have seen a huge rise in their status within large organizations. They talk about the idea that new businesses either involve bundling and unbundling and why although some companies moan about the fact that their product is being used by hobbyists, they are in fact a powerful group of users.

They also talk about some of their requests for startups in the space, which areas they are most excited about, and whether everyone learning to code will be the future or not.

Quotable Lines From This Episode:

“There’s still this artifact coming from an era where computing time was more valuable than human time. We write code in a way that we appease the machine more than we appease the human and this is reflected in our tools and everything we do.” — Amjad

“Software engineering has this weird attribute where people believe in leverage and changing the world and then they put up with just such bad tools for themselves.” — Christina

“If you really think about it, our tools really suck. Being a software engineer is one of the highest leverage things you can do… yet we don’t really invest in the developer tools that much.” — Amjad

“It’s mostly been hobbyists that have driven computing.” — Amjad

“Look, should everyone have to learn what a static class is in different languages? I hope not. There are more interesting things to think about.” — Christina

“Most of the good work that happens, happens in low-hype periods.” — Amjad

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg. Colin Campbell is our audio engineer and the show is produced by Brett Bolkowy.