Building vs. Buying Software with Ayan Barua

siftery ayan barua

ayan-barua

“Even if you’re building, you’re building on top of existing open source architecture. You’re not really starting from scratch – all of us are standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Building a software business today requires lots of decision making. Building software isn’t just about choosing a programming language, or a framework, or a database. Developers have to choose the right cloud service provider, the best issue tracking service, the best hosted code repository, the clearest data visualization tools. We need a platform to compare the options between different products, all in one place.

In today’s episode, we talk to Ayan Barua from Siftery, a platform for software products and the companies who use them. Siftery’s mission is to help technologists find the best products for their job, whether they are a sysadmin or an advertising account manager. My discussion with Ayan covers the question of build versus buy, how to build a recommender system, and how software will be built in the future; this is also a great episode for anyone who is thinking of how to build a two-sided marketplace business.

Questions

  • How can engineers decide whether to build or buy software?
  • Do you know of any companies that are able to build software without having to write any code?
  • Is there an open-source fundamentalism in the developer community, and is it healthy?
  • Are there any plans to build comparisons for open-source software at Siftery?
  • How will you build a robust software recommendation system?
  • Why did you choose to go with AWS instead of Azure or Digital Ocean?
  • What are you focusing on at Siftery now?

Links

Software Daily

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