In this episode, we speak with Steven Sinofsky, currently a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz and previously of Microsoft. We discuss what it was like shipping code at Microsoft in the early days, what he learned from Bill Gates, how it applies to software development today, what the big Windows 8 rewrite was like, and why the Copilot AI naysayers are completely wrong. Although the software landscape has changed dramatically since Steven’s early days at Microsoft in the 80s, he shares some of the lessons he learned along the way which are still as relevant today as they were back then. Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).Things mentioned:MicrosoftWindows 8Copilot Cornell UniversityIBMHalt and Catch FireAppleJon DeVaanWebflowMythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software EngineeringBill Gates“A Hard Line on Software” (Video)Jensen HarrisHardcore SoftwareChatGPTBingChatGPT on 60 MinutesM2 Mac MiniMacBook AirOne Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision MakingSubstackABOUT STEVEN SINOFSKYSteven Sinofsky is an investor, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a general advisor, and a self-described “person-about-town” in Silicon Valley. Shortly after he graduated from Cornell University, he became a software design engineer at Microsoft back in 1989. In his time at the company, he oversaw six major releases of the full range of Office apps and servers in his role as a senior executive. He also worked on Windows 7 and the Windows 8 rewrite as the president of the Windows division. He is a co-author of the book One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, as well as the writer of Hardcore Software, a Substack newsletter about the rise and fall of the PC revolution.Highlights:Steven Sinofsky: Bill was super interesting. He was, in a sense, this very interesting combination of business strategy, product strategy, and technology strategy. And whenever he would really push it, he was most comfortable trying to be a technology strategist. And to him, that was all about architecture. And so architecture, if you read a book like Fred Brooks, Mythical Man-Month, architecture is everything. Architecture in software is like this Nirvana.— [0:22:37 - 0:23:08]Steven Sinofsky: And the beauty of how Apple managed their operating system was they just didn't add a lot of features. But we had a team five times as big, adding features every release, and it was just not getting— My measure of success is not “Did we get the release done?” but “Was it making people do new things with the product?” And Windows had long stopped doing that. The ecosystem of software and hardware had probably died around 2000. And so when it came time to do Windows 8 — and obviously Hardcore Software has the whole timeline and all this stuff — but the thing we really wanted to do was take the product and build on it and all the things that were great about it, but bring it into a new era of computing from top to bottom or what we said was “from the chipset to the experience".— [0:28:43 - 0:29:34]Let us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/jeanqasaurOr by email: hello@console.dev

In this episode we speak to Meri Williams an experienced CTO at scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. We discuss the role of technology leadership, what engineering managers can do to help their teams, how to best go about recruiting engineers, and whether engineering performance can be measured. About Meri WilliamsMeri Williams is an experienced CTO from scaleups like Moo, Monzo, and Healx. An experienced CTO who has led and scaled technology organizations across a range of sectors including medtech, neo-banking, government, ecommerce, telco and manufacturing.A published author, international speaker and chair (co-curator & host) of The Lead Developer conference series which has expanded from starting in London in 2015 to now running in London, New York, Berlin and Austin, Williams regularly trains the Be a Brilliant People Developer workshop to level up technologists into excellent managers & coaches. Other things mentioned:MooMonzoHealxKindredDriveCate HustonDORA metricsreMarkableMacBook AiriPad ProLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/geek_manager  Or by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-22.

In this episode we speak to Connor Hicks, Founder of Suborbital, a serverless platform powered by WebAssembly. We discuss how WebAssembly works, when you’d use AssemblyScript rather than other languages which compile to WASM, the use cases for deploying WebAssembly on the backend, and how the dev, test, build, deploy, and observability cycle works when creating code in WebAssembly. About Connor HicksConnor Hicks is based in Ottawa, Canada, and is the founder of Suborbital Software Systems. Connor works primarily on security and distributed systems projects including the Suborbital family of open source projects, and formerly led research and development at 1Password. Connor is a strong believer in building security and privacy into the core of all software, and is exploring the next iteration of web service development with technologies like WebAssembly.Other things mentioned:SuborbitalWebAssemblyOne passwordWordpressBytecode AlliancewasmtimeRustGoShopifyCargoTrunkTinyGoSwiftOpenTelemetryHashicorp NomadGoReleaserCaddyElgatoVS CodeDiscordNotionFirefoxMiroLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/cohix  Or by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-11.

In this episode we speak to Elena Kokkinara, CTO at Inflight VR, a VR platform developer for in-flight entertainment. We discuss how VR has developed over the last decade, how the body ownership illusion can make you feel like you have an entirely different physical body, whether developers can code in VR environments, and whether AR is in competition with VR. About Elena KokkinaraElena Kokkinara is CTO at Inflight VR, the first company that provides a VR entertainment solution for airplane passengers. Having completed a PhD in VR and published numerous papers on VR and computer vision, she is passionate about creating new experiences for Virtual Reality users and gamers. Her scientific interest is to explore the necessary parameters to design a flight-specific VR ecosystem.Other things mentioned:Inflight VRUnityUnreal EngineOculusCaveHTC FlowPicoLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/redarahel  Or by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-26.

In this episode we speak to Sergei Egorov, CEO of AtomicJar, the company behind TestContainers, a library that helps with integration testing for containerized applications. We discuss the challenges of developing container-based applications, how to orchestrate containers for testing, the future of cloud development environments, and whether the Apple M1 chip has come too late. About Sergei EgorovSergei Egorov is CEO & co-founder of AtomicJar - the company behind Testcontainers on a mission to make integration testing easy and enjoyable for developers. He is a Java Champion, an active member of the Open Source community, member of the Apache Foundation, and Reactive Foundation TOC.Other things mentioned:DockerKubernetes  Google Cloud RunHerokuJosh WongTwelve-Factor AppWeb AssemblyScaffoldBuildpacksKO for GOLocalStackLambdaDynanoDBQuarkusGitHub Code SpacesMacBook Pro M1NotionLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/bsideupOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-07.

In this episode we speak to Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, a developer of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies. We discuss how ML and NLP work behind the scenes, how developers should think about applied NLP, the common languages and frameworks used to build ML and NLP applications, and the challenges that come with running them at scale. About Ines MontaniInes Montani is co-founder and CEO of Explosion. A software developer working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, her company Explosion are makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models. In 2020, Montani became a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation.Other things mentioned:ExplosionspaCyProdigyTensorflowHugging Face PythonCypressHyperSlackLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/_inesmontani Or by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-06

In this episode we speak to Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of Socket.dev, a software supply chain security company. We discuss the risks of using third party dependencies, how JS and NPM could improve their approach to security, whether trust in open source is eroding, and how to improve the overall security posture of your application. About Feross AboukhadijehFeross is the founder and CEO of Socket, where he's working on a new approach to open source supply chain security. Feross is the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and 100s of other open source projects which are downloaded 500+ million times per month. Feross is a lecturer at Stanford University where he teaches CS 253 Web Security. Socket, the company Feross started, is auditing every package on npm to detect suspicious changes and block software supply chain attacks. Hundreds of companies use Socket to protect their software applications and critical services from malware and security threats originating in open source code.Other things mentioned:SocketWebTorrentStandard JSnpmJSTypescriptPrettierDependabotMacBook Pro M1Studio displayLogitech mouseLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/ferossOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-06.

In this episode we speak to Cate Huston, Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo. We discuss why developers should care about privacy, what technologies and tools are available for building privacy-driven features, how DuckDuckGo manages performance when doing lookups against tracker lists, and the full stack of privacy tools, from search to the browser to email.About Cate HustonCate Huston is Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo and an advisor at Glowforge. She previously worked at Automattic, where she led the mobile, Jetpack, and Developer Experience teams. Huston admins the New-(ish) Manager Slack and writes regularly for Quartz.Other things mentioned:DuckDuckGoAutomatticSmart EncryptionTracker radar1PasswordDuckDuckBotVisual StudioGlowforgeMacBook Pro M11PasswordSpotifyLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/catehstnOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://twitter.com/catehstn Recorded: 202-04-14.

In this episode we speak to Joseph Jacks, founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a venture fund specializing in open source software. We discuss why open source is such an important differentiator for all software development, the philosophy behind open source, open core, and building a community around open source software, whether open source should be the default for all software.About Joseph JacksJoseph Jacks is founder and general partner at OSS Capital, a fund that invests in Open Source projects. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Technology Strategy of Kismatic which provided services for running Kubernetes at scale for enterprises. It was one of the top 0.01% of projects on GitHub and was acquired by Apprenda in May 2016.Jacks also founded the KubeAcademy, the parent organization of the official Kubernetes community conference KubeCon, and was the co-Founder and CEO of Aljabr which builds cloud-native data pipelines.Other things mentioned:OSS capitalGitHubSourceForgeSignalRichard StallmanSatoshi NakamotoLinus TorvaldsGitHubGitLabRed HatRodeSony A600Let us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/josephjacks_Or by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-04-04.

In this episode we speak to Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, the company behind the open source eBPF product Cilium. We discuss why it’s such a revolutionary approach to developing low-level kernel applications, how BPF can be used for observability, networking and security, how developers should think about application security, and why all of these technologies are open source.About Liz RiceLiz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer at eBPF pioneers Isovalent, creators of the Cilium project, which provides cloud native networking, observability and security. Prior to Isovalent she was VP Open Source Engineering with security specialists Aqua Security. She is also Chair of the CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee, has co-chaired the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon and is an Ambassador for Open UK.Other things mentioned:IsovalentBerkeley labDave ThalerKubernetesFirecrackerLambdaM1 MacbookVS CodeLet us know what you think on Twitter:https://twitter.com/consoledotdevhttps://twitter.com/davidmyttonhttps://twitter.com/lizriceOr by email: hello@console.devAbout ConsoleConsole is the place developers go to find the best tools. Our weekly newsletter picks out the most interesting tools and new releases. We keep track of everything - dev tools, devops, cloud, and APIs - so you don’t have to. Sign up for free at: https://console.devRecorded: 2022-05-05.