no dogma podcast

Summary Dennis Mortensen and I discuss x.ai, an AI personal assistant for scheduling meetings. Details Dennis and I discuss his background, traditional analytics products, predictive analytics; x.ai, it “schedules meetings”, how it works, invisible software, people don’t have control panels or sliders, tuning Amy multiple calendars; humanizing Amy, pain does not have a syntax, democratizing having a personal assistant; scheduling nirvana, Amy work with Emily, elastic calendar; human speed; psychology of Amy, Amy is not an “it” and does not have features, Amy has skills and receives education; invisible interface; accepting Amy and stigma around AI PAs; is Amy dehumanizing, or is a control panel dehumanizing; why now for Amy, 1019 meetings and 672 reschedules in one year, not Turing ready; no app, maybe location awareness; audience of 87 million US knowledge workers, spreading word; when it will be available, thousands of users, tens of thousands meetings a day; backend, improving understanding, context; Amy’s truth, cultural differences, irony; architecture, no scaling problem, AWS, Scala, mongo; data and privacy; future of x.ai, flights, hotels, other languages, voice integration.

Summary Linus Olsson of the Hemlis project discusses what Hemlis is, why they are building it and how it works. Details Linus I and discuss his background, what is Hemlis, why build it; open source; need for security and privacy, does encryption make you a target, good encryption vs bad encryption; why trust Hemlis, legal requests for data, would he go to jail to protect users; how it works, public key encryption, easier than PGP, type of encryption, back door on phone, base band hacking; open source vulnerabilities; servers, just for relaying, graphs, peer-to-peer not viable; scaling; release date, usability; how to promote your software; pricing, premium features, enterprise solution.

Summary Piero Toffanin is a software engineer and user experience designer who left his job this year to travel around North America, coding as he goes. Details Why give up the day job, inspired by Live on the Margin, preparation to travel, selling stuff and buying necessities, camper van vs hostels/hotels; practicalities of working on the road, charging laptops, getting internet, working offline; finding work, referrals; where Piero has travelled; splitting the day between work and adventure; compromises in the wandering life, meeting other travellers; remote working; how long will he keep going; challenges on the road; books choices and how to perform a tracheotomy.

Summary Christopher Marston is the founder and CEO of Exemplar Companies, Inc, we discuss the legal aspects of going out as a consultant and getting a startup running. Details Christopher and I discuss what Exemplar Law does, fixed pricing; going out as a consultant, protecting against personal liability, LLC’s, SCorp, CCorp; startups, vesting, roles and responsibilities; equity in startups, dilution, removing a member of the team; protecting intellectual property while promoting yourself; patents vs trade secret; raising capital, business plans and other paperwork; growth of venture capital firms in Boston; shutting down a startup, common reasons for failure, under-capitalization, founder disputes, lawsuits; closing down a business.

Summary Part two of my two part conversation with Sean Blanchfield of Page Fair. Details Sean and I discuss how adblockers work, easylist block list, how Page Fair works, cooperation with easy list, using Page Fair on a site; backend technology, python, Redis, twisted, Linux, Amazon Web Services, server load and traffic patterns; serving ads, bids, speed, Page Fair auction, no tracking of users, panopticlick and fingerprinting, tracking across devices and locations, data management platforms; noscript and Page Fair; Youtube and ads; not always showing an ad; ad block walls; book choices, The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Elements of Style, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Thinking, Fast and Slow; social networking and playing on expectations, trust in relationships, meeting customers.

Summary Part one of my two part conversation with Sean Blanchfield of Page Fair. Details Sean and I discuss his past at Demonware, multiplayer networking layer; Scalefront startup incubator, cycling through startup ideas; Page Fair beginnings; innovation life cycle, finding the good idea, determining the size of the market, Sean and I are old!; Destructoid and going viral during a bachelor party(!), popularity of adblockers, popularity by site type, by age; YouTube preroll ads and the spread of blocking, Google ads white listed; non intrusive ads, Page Fair ads can be turned off, click through rates, discrete ads; better ads from Page Fair, competition; The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive technology, big companies can’t change, culture in companies; ad blocking on mobile, FireFox on Android supports adblock, adblock browsers are on the way, Adblock Plus app removed from App Store, Disconnect tracker and ad blocking for mobile and desktop; supporting free content through ads, publishers reaction to ad blockers. Part two goes into the technical workings of Page Fair.

Summary Discussion with Alex Robbio and Silvana Gaia of Belatrix Software about outsourcing software development. Details Who they are, what they do, and what the company does, why they focus on software product development and qa; outsourcing vs offshoring, nearshoring; choosing an outsourcing partner, location, type of project, technology, collaboration; skills of devs in outsourced team; contract termination; size of team; scrum in an outsourced project, personal contact with client; cultural differences; team turnover, project governance, customer control over devs on project, better to be a big customer of an outsourcer; advantages of having multiple teams on a project; costs and benefits of visits; managing projects, planning; handling client complaints, catch early, provide training, improve communications, retrospective; customer buy in; customers who just want a job done; setting customer expectations, culture; customers moving away from far away outsourcing; global shortage of IT talent, training; breaking rocks vs building cathedrals.

Summary Grant Fritchey and I discuss database dev op and how it can anything to anyone. Details what he does; origin of scary DBA nickname; what is dev ops, day to day dev ops tasks; DBA and developer interactions, communications, DBA’s favorite word is “no”; dev ops and source control, putting a DB in source control, integration with dev, auditing; moving DB from production to source control, ssdt, red gate sql source control, DBA resistance to source control, changing methodologies and mindsets, teething pains; tooling; keeping DB source in same place as software source, merges; benefits of source control, auditing, legislative requirements, tight coupling with dev, versioning, commenting, labeling a version; shared dev DB server vs individual dev DB server; comparing production to source control; continuous integration and automated deployment, complete replace of DB vs incremental builds, breaking changes; maturity of tools for CI, automated testing, app code vs TSQL for testing, testing before check in; replication and automated deployment; Entity Framework Migrations, breaking changes, EF Migrations vs SSDT and Red Gate SQL Source Control, up and down migrations*; ORMs, dbas don’t like ORMs, performance, Glimpse to assess executed SQL; book choice – The Phoenix Projec, a parable on dev ops and making teams work together; Grant is presenting at the PASS summit full day seminar on query tuning, Grant’s book SQL Server Query Performance Tuning coming in Sept, wearing rainbow fuzzies for Argenis Without Borders.

Summary Designer Brian O'Neill tells me what it takes to make a well designed piece of software. Details who he is and what he does; role as a designer vs developer; how to find out what is needed, getting feedback, including engineers in feedback process; what is great design, invisible interface, task flow, google as an example of good design, good task flow example, db tables should not dictate the view; who is responsible for good design; bridging the gap between designers and developers, learning design; steps in making a good design from the perspective of a designer and an engineer, laddering, sketch on whiteboards rather than using fancy software, user testing; why not to start from the data model; flexibility vs usability; engineers should be involved in user testing, self reflection; agile, incrementing rather than iterating, lack of user representative is common, design runway – designers stay ahead of engineers by a sprint, validation loops, don’t worry about what people like about an interface only what they do; definitions of success from different perspectives; working as an insider rather than as an external contractor; conflicts between engineers and designers, justifying decision making and intuition, sum of design errors reflect on overall product, building respect between engineers and designers; just because the big boys do it doesn’t mean you should; Brian’s music; author recommendations, Edward Tufte, Stephen Few.

Summary Rebecca O'Dette of RunKeeper talks to me about their Agile development process. Details We cover Rebecca's role, company growth over the past few years, development structure, introduction of agile processes, moving from waterfall, choice of scrum over other agile options, first steps in agile, team size, current team structure, changes over past few years, scaling and syncing teams, scrum of scrums, QA and release processes, release bottlenecks, release cycles, missing Microsoft project, agile for marketing, support, business development and user experience, kanban, story points, planning poker, complexity and