Future Architecture with Chad Fowler

Chad Fowler was the CTO of Wunderlist prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Since the acquisition, Chad has become the general manager of developer advocacy at Microsoft. He also works as a venture capitalist at BlueYard Capital, an early stage investment firm.

I’ve had a lot of fun talking to Chad, because he can move seamlessly between talking about disparate subjects like cloud computing, investing, cryptocurrencies, and music composition. And he has novel things to say about all of them!

When Chad joined Wunderlist, he helped start a large refactoring of the software architecture. He then helped the company navigate to the successful Microsoft acquisition. We started off the conversation with the story of this rearchitecture, and how he sees the current opportunities in front of Microsoft. Chad gives his perspective on Kubernetes, functions-as-a-service, and how developer tooling might evolve in the near future.

After talking about near-term developer tooling, we talked about the distant future: bug bounty marketplaces on the blockchain; using Github repositories to train machine learning models about how to write code; the comparison between music collaboration and software collaboration. This was a wide array of topics, but Chad was equipped to discuss all of them–since he works at Microsoft, makes large investments in the future, and studied music when he was in school.

Transcript

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