Building vs. Buying Software with Ayan Barua

Podcast Thursday, March 17 2016

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?