Building Software for Millenials with Anthony Sessa
“Millenials deeply care about software, in the sense where if something doesn’t work as it should, it’s forgotten immediately – if you build an app and there are bugs, you’re done.”
Mic.com is a media company focused on news for millennials. Anthony Sessa is the VP of product at Mic.com, and he joins us to talk about the engineering of a modern news organization tailored to young people. We discuss data engineering, frontend technologies, and how to migrate away from WordPress. We also explore how to build a successful media company today, and how millennials want to consume news and software.
Questions
- To what degree is Mic a technology company?
- What were the technological issues with WordPress and why could you not build Mic using the platform?
- Why do millennials seem to prefer the “append-only” style of news, which has less of an emphasis on fact checking?
- How do the different teams within Mic including journalists and technologists work together?
- What are the toughest engineering challenges at Mic right now?
- How do you decide which software products to build or buy?
- What is the relationship between millenials and software?
- How do millennial engineers differ from other generations of engineers?
