no dogma podcast

Summary Lisa Nielsen and Daniel Kador of Keen IO tell about their approach to business, decision making, managers and building software. Details Who they are; what Keen IO does, types of analytics; type of organization, going their own way, hiring and firing, voting, holacracy; ideas that didn't work and the response from staff; developing people, coaching program, who trains the coaches, non violent communication training, sharing with the community; specific hiring criteria; no bosses, self directed employees, trusting your employees, feedback without managers, conflict mediation, the most talkative engineers I've heard of, group therapy in the weekly "anxious, excited", changing teams; the Keen.io operating system; removing a person from a team.

Summary Scott Allen, author, Pluralsight author, podcast host and consultant tells me all about the upcoming release of ASP.NET 5. Details Who he is; is ASP.NET 5 a rewrite; lightweight, better for SPAs; Scott's favorite new features ; don't need vs 2015, works on Linux; more modular; cross platform, core (subset) CLR; lighter on resources; inbuilt dependency injection; new configuration system; middleware, its history and how it differs from handlers and filter, middleware sees more; combining MVC and Web API; tag helpers; web forms are gone; is Microsoft providing better documentation and examples; front-end improvements, angular, bootstrap, Grunt, Gulp, Bower.

Summary Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft talks to me about the private cloud and why it has failed. Details Definition of private cloud, virtualized data centers, getting value from the cloud; enterprise scale, web scale and hyper scale; differences between private and public cloud, daytime and nighttime workloads; cultural change is needed when adopting cloud; same software problem, different decade; companies expected cost reduction, but didn't get it; vertical scale doesn't work anymore, start small in cloud and grow; we got it wrong so often why would you expect anything different now; current state of private cloud; private cloud is failing; bringing in the skills to deploy private cloud, need exec buy-in; how to get buy-in; agility, complexity and cost example of success at Lowe's; wrap up.

Summary Andrei Simionescu of the now closed Lavaboom talks to me about the encrypted email service they wanted to make. Details Who he is; a little about Lavaboom; PGP is unfriendly, why did they make it, connection to Lavabit; "but I've got nothing to hide", do I make myself a target by using it; other PGP email initiatives; lawful legal requests; open source for core features, verifying the builds are from the source; how Lavaboom works; is there any clear text ever; losing a password; what kind of encryption is in use; open source problems; hosting; scaling; making money; raising money.

Summary Nicholas Blumhardt discusses Seq, Serilog and structured event logging with me. Details Who he is, what is serilog, Event Tracking for Windows (ETW) and Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB), structured event streams, no more regex; finding events in your log, navigating from one type of event to another; what feedback he gets; datastore; seq, use cases, filtering by type; seq data storage, Microsoft Extensible Storage Engine; making money; releases and new versions; simple install and usage instructions.

Summary Trevor Stricker of Disco Pixel tells me all about indie game development. Details Who he is and what he does; what is an indie game developer; skills needed to be an indie dev; protecting your work; platforms to develop on, naming your child Unity, learning about Unity, technical limitations; importance of partnerships as a game developer, corporate and developer partnerships; learning non games skills to scale your game; making money; book recommendations, Creativity, Inc.

Summary Justin Mills, software engineer at Yesware tells me about their flat organizational structure and development practices. Details Little about Justin and Yesware; team structure, no test team, no defined team leads; no cohesive architecture; shared infrastructure, hierarchy might be needed; getting approval to reduce technical debt; assigning teams to tasks, trying open allocation, ending open allocation; no titles in engineering but other departments have titles; no one in a position to make a tough decision; struggling with agile, speed of development is the goal. **extended interview** SDLC, frequent releases probably break often, Justin's hopes for the company's future.

Summary Eliot Knudsen, field engineer at Tamr talks to me about their machine learning tool and a new way of examining data. Details Who he is and what he does; what is Tamr; working with data sources, the traditional way, the Tamr way, machine learning combined with human guidance;data quality and foreign languages; Thompson Reuters example, curating data, increasing speed; deploying Tamr; how Tamr works, db, java, web client; competitors; future work.

Summary Jason MacInnes, CTO of Draft Kings tells me about their architecture and scaling demands. Details A little aabout Jason; what Draft Kings is, why it's not gambling, how Draft Kings started; controlling growth, SDLC, Agile growing pains, aligning skills; software stack (MySql, RabbitMq, MassTransit), choice of ASP.NET; scaling the system; transitioning to micro-services, dev ops; service level agreements, dealing with unpredictable events; where the statistics and data come from, customer privacy, future work.

Summary Boston was host to the first ever Open Data Science Conference over the weekend of May 30th and 31st 2015. I spent the days wandering around talking to people with interesting stories. I hope you enjoy this episode, it was fun making it. My next podcast will be back to the normal interview format.