Software Engineering Daily

You have heard the phrase: every company is becoming a software company. An insurance company is now supposed to turn into a software company that sells insurance. A clothing retailer needs to reinvent itself to be able to build software to manage the production and distribution of its clothing.

Software applications provide so much leverage to an organization, it seems smart to develop in-house software teams to build those applications. But does it really make sense? Is there a better alternative?

In the 90s outsourcing was a common solution to this problem. If you didn’t have software expertise at your company, you would hire a large consulting firm. These firms would often hire inexperienced offshore developers, and the resulting code quality was not so great.

Because of the bad experiences of the first Internet boom, companies became more cautious about outsourcing their engineering work–which led to today, where the standard is to hire your own software team.

The world has changed in ways that have made outsourcing a more viable solution.

Programming best practices are more widely understood. There is an international community of software engineers that share information on places like Stack Overflow, Quora, and Twitter.  Off-the-shelf collaboration tools make it much easier to communicate the requirements of a project to a team of developers.

Gigster is a company that is working to optimize the engineering of software projects. Large enterprises come to Gigster to build new projects from scratch–whether that project is a marketplace, a mobile application, or a machine learning model. Roger Dickey is the CEO of Gigster, and he joins the show to describe how Gigster works, and why it often makes sense for companies to focus on their core competency and outsource software engineering.

Some of our most popular episodes of Software Engineering Daily describe how leading software companies are being built–we have covered Giphy, Netflix, Digital Ocean, Stripe, and many others.  Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android to hear all of our old episodes. They are easily organized by category, and as you listen, the SE Daily app gets smarter, and recommends you content based on the episodes you are hearing. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by using the recommendation system.

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Digital Ocean Spaces gives you simple object storage with a beautiful user interface. You need an easy way to host objects like images and videos. Your users need to upload objects like pdfs and music files. Digital Ocean Spaces is modern object storage with a modern UI that you will love to use–it’s like the UI for Dropbox, but with the pricing of a raw object storage; I almost want to use it like a consumer product. To try Digital Ocean Spaces, go to do.co/sedaily and get 2 months of Spaces plus a $10 credit to use on any other Digital Ocean products–and you get this credit even if you have been with Digital Ocean for awhile. It’s a nice added bonus just for trying out Spaces. If you become a customer, the pricing is simple:  $5 per month price and includes 250GB of storage and 1TB of outbound bandwidth. There are no costs per request and additional storage is priced at the lowest rate available: $0.01 per GB transferred and $0.02 per GB stored. There won’t be any surprises on your bill. Digital Ocean simplifies the cloud–they look for every opportunity to remove friction from a developer’s experience. I love it, and I think you will too–check it out at do.co/sedaily.

Spring Framework gives developers an environment for building cloud native projects. On December 4th-7th, SpringOne Platform is coming to San Francisco. SpringOne Platform is a conference where developers congregate to explore the latest technologies in the Spring ecosystem and beyond. Speakers at SpringOne Platform include Eric Brewer (who created the CAP theorem), Vaughn Vernon (who writes extensively about Domain Driven Design), and many thought leaders in the Spring Ecosystem. SpringOne Platform is the premier conference for those who build, deploy, and run cloud-native software. Software Engineering Daily listeners can sign up with the discount code SEDaily100 and receive $100 off of a Spring One Platform conference pass. I will also be at SpringOne reporting on developments in the cloud native ecosystem. Join me December 4th-7th at the SpringOne Platform conference, and use discount code SEDaily100 for $100 off your conference pass.

Thanks to Symphono for sponsoring Software Engineering Daily. Symphono is a custom engineering shop where senior engineers tackle big tech challenges while learning from each other. Check it out at symphono.com/sedaily. Thanks to Symphono for being a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily for almost a year now. Your continued support allows us to deliver content to the listeners on a regular basis.