Move Fast, Break Things & Win: How Facebook Builds Software w/ Jeff Meyerson

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
To become the behemoth that it is today, Facebook moved fast, and they broke things. Now, they move fast with stable infrastructure. And Jeff Meyerson, founder of Software Daily and author of the book Move Fast, How Facebook Builds Software, is here to tell us how.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
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**Dan Lines** (0:31)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted.
I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by the founder of Software Daily and author of the new book, Move Fast, How Facebook Builds Software, Jeff Meyerson. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Jeff Meyerson** (0:48)
Thank you for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:50)
So before we dive into your new book, you got an awesome new book, super excited to talk about it. I love the premise, but I want to give our audience a chance to get to know you a little bit better, talk about software daily a bit. You've been everything from a poker coach to a long time software engineer. You're a founder, a few companies here, and you're also an author.
Can you tell us a bit about your career journey?

**Jeff Meyerson** (1:18)
Yeah, so it really starts with playing collectible card games when I was 11 or 12 I started playing magic professionally when I was 15 I played poker professionally from the age of about 16 to 19 And then I got very heavily into software engineering for about four or five years. And then probably around age 23, I started to focus more on entrepreneurship and started to study entrepreneurship, really exploring what makes the intersection of creativity and technology useful and cutting edge at any given time.
And how can we potentially profit from that intersect? Really my career progression has been about exploring the intersection of creativity and technology and finance.

**Dan Lines** (2:03)
That's awesome. I'm not a poker player myself, but I would think there's a lot of math involved in that.
Did anything in your poker career journey help you with software engineering?

**Jeff Meyerson** (2:14)
Yeah, and I actually wrote a pod blog about this. You can find it, so I think it's called Poker and Software Engineering. You can listen to the interviews I did with Haseeb Qureshi, who is a good friend of mine. I've done probably five or six interviews with him on the show. So poker teaches you effectively modal logic applied to aggression. If you think about the A and B statements, like the binary logic that starts in the, if you're taking a computer science curriculum, you take this modal logic stuff, and then the modal logic advances into applied modal logic, which is the EE courses. So the electrical engineering stuff like Carnot maps.
And as you're designing these abstracts, like gates and Carnot map things, you're defining modal logic applied creatively.
But if you look at poker, poker is first of all, how do you apply modal logic to financial situations in a very simple economy, I would say. It's like a, poker is an economy that is so simple, yet the simplicity shows that a simple economy is really all you need to have NP complete problem space exploration. In poker, you're exploring this NP complete problem space and you're trying to exploit your opponent. That's really all you're doing there. And really the expansiveness of that problem space is what makes poker eternally interesting to me. We're seeing just how much unexplored problem space there is in the work of Noam Brown, who's doing the most cutting edge poker artificial intelligence research that I'm aware of, unless there's something going on in ALFGO or DeepMind. But yeah, there's a whole lot there at the intersection of poker and software.

**Dan Lines** (3:43)
Yeah, that's awesome. I always like these stories and you got a bunch of data stuff probably going on with poker and it translates really well to engineers and people that are interested in software engineering.
On top of all of this, you started Software Daily in 2015 Today, it's one of the best podcasts, email lists, tech media sources out there for software engineering leaders, technical leaders. Can you share the founding story of Software Daily? How did that even come about for you?

**Jeff Meyerson** (4:17)
Sure.
I started podcasting with Software Engineering Radio when I was in college. That was probably in 2013 They taught me in software podcasts. The whole reason I started to volunteer for them was because I listened to the show and I found that I was learning more during the show than I was in my academic computer science curriculum. And then when I graduated and I was doing volunteer work for Software Engineering Radio, it continued to be the most reliably interesting and skill-intensive work that I was good at. I was doing Software Engineering Radio when I was working at Peak Six Investments and I was struggling there. I left Peak Six. I worked at this ad tech company. I was struggling there. I worked at Amazon. I was struggling there.