Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?

This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.

As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.

We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?

Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.

We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.

Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.

A tech and science minded individual, Chris Slowe has spent 9 years with Reddit. Beyond being a tech executive with the company, he is a Dad and likes to work with his hands in the machine shop. When he put roots into the product as the first employee, he and the co-founders wanted to build a place to discuss interesting topics. Fast forward many years, Reddit is now the premier place for news aggregation, content rating and online discussion around interesting information.

Links

• http://reddit.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisslowe/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Slowe

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Topics covered in this episode:

• Meditations on the Zen of Python
• * nginx raided by Russian police*
• I'm not feeling the async pressure
• codetiming from Real Python
• Making Python Programs Blazingly Fast
• LocalStack
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/163

This brief firelighter conversation was taped live on-stage at SPARK’s 7th Annual IGNITE Conference in Amsterdam (https://spark.ngo/ignite-conference-2019/). It was a discussion provocatively themed “Shift The Power” – for which Andile Masuku (moderator) was joined by the Dutch Ambassador for Youth, Education and Work in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tijmen Rooseboom, Evelijne Bruning, who is the Netherlands Country Director of The Hunger Project and the Executive Director of INJAZ Lebanon, Samar Dani. Tijmen is a recently-appointed Dutch policymaker whose mandate is to ensure that The Netherlands is optimising the use of public funds earmarked for advancing youth education and employment. Evelijne Bruning is a self-proclaimed “dragon and driver of change” whose high-profile #ShiftThePower activism efforts within Dutch NGO circles often puts her at odds with policymakers and even fellow practitioners in the space. And prior to inhabiting a senior role at one of Lebanon's most well-respected youth-focused NGO’s, Samar Dani led a storied career in her country’s consumer and retail industry. Listen in as the panel addresses growing calls to change power dynamics within development cooperation between the Global North and the Global South – this, in order to deliver on effective, market-relevant educational and entrepreneurship interventions. Editorial Disclaimer: While SPARK (https://spark.ngo) is the presenting sponsor of this series, African Tech Roundup maintains complete editorial oversight. Opinions expressed by the host, Andile Masuku, and his guests, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the presenting sponsor, SPARK. Image credit: SPARK

In this podcast, Andile Masuku chats with Dr Salam Said, a seasoned Middle Eastern economics researcher who specialises in Arab economies, Arab trade policies and the political economy of Syria. Andile taps Dr Said's extensive professional and lived experience as he attempts to wrap his mind around some of the ways Arab identity and geopolitical dynamics (past and present) inform the socio-economic policies of nations that tend to dominate the global news cycle for all kinds of complex reasons. Listen in to hear Dr Said factor in candidly on how to properly gauge the economic empowerment of everyday citizens, particularly women, of Arab nations. Editorial Disclaimer: This podcast is part of a seven-part podcast miniseries interrogating the progress being made in advancing entrepreneurship and job creation in some of the world’s most fragile regions. The series was taped at the fringes of SPARK’s 7th Annual IGNITE Conference in Amsterdam (https://spark.ngo/ignite-conference-2019)— a premier gathering of refugees, entrepreneurs, educators, private sector actors, government leaders, academics and NGOs. While SPARK (https://spark.ngo) is the presenting sponsor of the series, African Tech Roundup maintains complete editorial oversight. Opinions expressed by the host, Andile Masuku, and his guests, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the presenting sponsor, SPARK. Image credit: Florian Wehde

African Tech Roundup and SPARK (https://spark.ngo) have partnered to produce a seven-part podcast miniseries interrogating the progress being made in advancing entrepreneurship and job creation in some of the world’s most fragile regions. The series uncovers pragmatic first-hand insights about the challenges of deploying market-relevant approaches to entrepreneurship, economic policy design and implementation, education interventions and the provision of business support. The first episode of the series features a relaxed diary session with Yengi Lokule, Co-founder and CEO of Rural Finance Initiative (RUFI), a South Sudanese microfinance and cross-border remittance firm which serves South Sudanese refugees in Uganda as well as rural and peri-urban residents in his fragile home country. Yengi holds degrees in Agriculture and Development Studies specializing in Micro-finance and has over 20 years’ of professional experience gained in post-conflict environments. This thoughtful conversation casually addresses some of the oversimplifications related to promoting financial inclusion in post-conflict environments while offering useful insight into displaced people are defiantly building futures for themselves and others in South Sudan and neighbouring Uganda. Editorial Disclaimer: This podcast was taped at the fringes of SPARK’s 7th annual IGNITE Conference in Amsterdam (https://spark.ngo/ignite-conference-2019) and is an independent African Tech Roundup production. The opinions expressed by the host, Andile Masuku, and his guest, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the presenting sponsor, SPARK. Image credit: SPARK

For many years Matt worked on defending the quality of Google's web search results, and you may know him as the creator of the first version of SafeSearch.As Paul noted on the show, he was seen as one of the few people  with whom ordinary folks could communicate about the often inscrutable world of Google search results and rankings.  You can read his blog here.

In 2016 Matt joined  USDS, initially at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, Matt has served as the USDS Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for projects.  He has worked on everything from Healthcare.gov to online services for veterans to fraud prevention at the IRS. 

Topics discussed on this episode: 

The 1993 comedy film Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a presidential body double who manages to fix government and melt the steely heart of Sigourney Weaver. 

Open source as an ever growing trend, even inside of big government. 

Which organization has more meeting and process, Google, or the US federal government?