CTO Connection Podcast

Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software

February 06, 2021 peter@pbell.com (CTO Connection) Episode 112
CTO Connection Podcast
Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software
Show Notes

Building vs buying software
Building vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time to market, but then you have the potential of vendor lock in and being constrained by the limitations of the tool that you chose. And in the engineering world, it’s even harder. While Not Invented Here syndrome is becoming less prevalent, you still need to pick between a ground up implementation or leveraging open source, professional open source and commercial offerings. And then to think about how to incorporate low code APIs and no code solutions into your tech mix in a way that reduces build and maintenance costs without limiting the quality of your final solution. Join us to hear how James thinks about this balance - both as a CEO of a company that buys other peoples software and as the founder of a company that sells its own SaaS solution.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
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