Building Software for Millenials with Anthony Sessa

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?

Links

Software Daily

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