Building vs. Buying Software with 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

• Siftery
• Algolia
• Elastic search
• Blitz
• Redis
• CoreOS
• In a world of software overabundance, Siftery offers clarity
• Ayan on Twitter

Pranay