 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., my next guest is Bruce Arthur, who's the Vice President of Engineering at banter.ai, good friend. We've known each other for years, VP of Engineering, developer. Formerly at Apple, worked on all the big products, the iPad, had the tinfoil on your windows back in the day during Steve Jobs' awesome run there. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, it's good to be here. Yeah, great, you've got a ton of experience. I want to get your perspective as a developer, VP of Engineering, entrepreneur, you're doing a startup around AI. Let's have a little banter. Sure. Banter.ai, it's a little bit chatbots, but the rage is DevOps. Software really models change, infrastructure is code, cloud computing, really a renaissance of software development going on right now. It is, it's changing a lot. What's your view on this? Well, so years and years ago you would work really hard on your software, you'd package it up in a box and you'd send it over the wall and you hope it works. And that seems very quaint now because now you write your software and you deploy it the first day and you change it six times that day and you're A-B testing it, you're driving it forward, it's so much more interactive. It does require a different skill set. It also doesn't, I want to say this carefully, it used to be very easy to be craft, have high craft and make a very polished product but you didn't know if it was going to work. Today you know if it's going to work but you often don't get to making sure it's high quality, high craft, high value. So the iteration piece. Exactly, the iteration now runs so fast which is highly valuable but you sort of, just a little bit of you miss the, is this really something I'm proud of and I can't really work with it because now the product definition can change so quickly, which is awesome. But it is a big change. And that artisan crafting thing is interesting but now some are saying that the UX side is interesting because if you get the back end working and you're iterating you can still bring that artisan flavor back. We heard that cloud computing vendors like Amazon and I was just in China for Alibaba they're trying to bring this whole design artisan culture back. Your thoughts on the whole artisan crafting software because now you have two stages, you have deploy, iterate, and then ultimately polish. So I think it's interesting, it used to be engineering is so expensive and time consuming, you have to design it upfront and you make one version of it and you're done. That has changed now, now that engineering's gotten easier you have better tools, we have better things. You can make six versions and that used to be so back to the day at Apple you would make six versions, five of which Steve would hate and throw out and eventually they would get better and better and better and then you'd have something you're proud of. Now those are just exposed. Now everybody sees those, it's a very different process. So I think the idea that you, engineering used to be the scarce resource it's becoming easier now to have many versions and have more engineers working on stuff. So now it is much more, can I have three design teams and can they compete, can they make all good ideas and then who's gonna be the editor who evaluates them and decides I like this from this one, I like that and now let's put this together and make the right product. So at Apple you mentioned Steve would reject it that's well documented, it's publicly out there that he would really look at the design side. Was it waterfall based, was it agile, scrum that you guys, was it like, you lay it all out in front of him and he points at it? What was some of the workflows like with Steve Jobs? So when he was really excited about something he'd want to meet with every week. He'd want to see progress every week he'd give lots of feedback every week there'd be new ideas. It was very Steve focused. I think the more constructive side of it was the design teams were always thinking about what can we build, how do we put it in front of him and I remember there was a great quote from a designer who said it's not that Steve designs great things is you show him three things and if you throw him three bad things he'll pick the least bad. Show him three great things, he'll pick the most great but it's not, it was more about the you've got to iterate in the process you've got to try ideas you take ideas from different people and some of them like they sound like a great idea when we talk it sounds really good you build it and you're like that's just not, it's just not right so you want, you want it, I would say this you don't want to lock yourself in up front you want to imagine them, you want to build them you want to try them. And that's, I mean I've gotten to know that the family over the years too through some of the Palo Alto interactions and that's the kind of misperception of Steve Jobs was that he was the guy, he enabled people he had that ethos. He was the editor. It's an old school journalism metaphor which is he had ideas, he wanted, he wanted but he also he ran the team he wanted to have people bring their ideas and come in and then he decided this is good this is not, that's better you can do better, let's try this or sometimes this whole thing stinks it's just not going anywhere so like it was much more of that now it's applied to software and he was a marketing genius about sort of knowing what people were going to go for but yeah there was, and there was a there's a little bit of a myth for it that there's one man designed everything that is a very saliable marketing story. The mythical man. Right, I mean it's powerful but no it's a lot of people and getting the best work of all those people. I mean he said on some of the great videos I've watched on YouTube over the years hire the best people only work with the best and they'll bring good stuff to the table. Now I want to bring that kind of metaphor one step for his great learning lesson again it's all Will Dockman on YouTube plenty of Steve videos there but now when you go to DevOps you mentioned the whole quality thing and you got to ship fast, iterate you know there's a lot of moving fast break stuff as Zuckerberg would say at Facebook although he's edited his tone to say move fast and be reliable welcome to the enterprise welcome to software and operations this is now a scale game at the enterprise because you start seeing open source software grow so much now where a lot of the intellectual property might be only 10% of software you might be using other pieces you're packaging it so when you get it to the market how do you bring that culture how do you get that innovation of okay I'm iterating fast how do I maintain the quality what's your thoughts on that because you've got machine learning out there you've got these cool things happening So you want, you really need to leave time to schedule it it needs to be on your list there's a lot of figuring out what are we going to build and you have to try things iterate things see if they resonate with consumers see if they resonate with people want to pay see if they resonate with investors you have to figure that out fast but then you have to know that okay this is a good prototype now I have to make it work better because the first version wouldn't scale well now it has to scale now it has to work right for people now we have to now you have to have like now you have to have a review of here's the bugs here's the things that are not working why does this chatbot stop responding sometimes what is causing that now the great story is with good DevOps you actually have a system that's very good at finding and tracking those problems in the old world so the old world of shrink-wrapped software you throw over the fence if it misbehaves you will never know today you know you've got alerts you've got pages going off you've got you've got laws it's instrumented big time yeah exactly you can find that stuff so in a certain sense you can actually make you can make very high quality software because you have so much more data about what's going on with it it's it's it's nice actually chatbot software has this fascinating little side effect with because it's all chats and it's all text there are no irreproducible bugs you can go back and look at exactly what happened I have a recording I know exactly what happened I know exactly what came in I know what came out and I know this failure happened so it's very reproducible it's sort of it it's nice you can doesn't always work this way but it's very easy to track down problems so vent base is really easy to manage and it's just text you can just read it it's not like I have to debug hex it's like oh it's just it's just these things were said and then this thing died no core dumps no there's no nothing that requires sophisticated analysis well the code is one thing but like the sequence of events is very human readable very understandable all right so let's talk about the younger generations so we've been around the block you and I we've talked certainly many times around down about the shifts we love these new waves a lot of great waves coming in we've seen many waves what's going on in your mind with the younger generation because this is a some exciting things happening decentralized internet yep see blockchain getting all the attention outside of the hype alpha vcs alpha engineers alpha entrepreneurs are really honing in on blockchain because they see the potential sure early people are seeing it then you get cloud obviously unlimited compute potentially the new you know kind of agile market while these young guys they never shipped actually never loaded Linux on a server so to them so like so what are you seeing for the younger guys and what can what do you see as someone who's experienced looking down at the next you know 20 20 year run we see so I think what I see that's most exciting is that we now have people solving very non-technical problems with technology I think it used to be you could build a computer you could write code but then like your space was limited to the computer in front of you like I can do inputs and outputs I can put things on the screen I can make a video game but it's it's in this box now everyone's thinking of much bigger solving bigger problems yeah healthcare we've seen health care is a massive one you can operation things shipping products I mean Amazon who would have thought Amazon is going to be delivering things space I mean they're using technology to just solve the physical delivery of objects that is it's the space of what people are tackling is massive it's no longer just about silicone and programming it's sort of any problem out there there's someone trying to apply a technology which is is awesome I think it's because these people these younger these youngsters they're digital natives they've just they've come to expect that of course video conferencing works of course all these other items work that I just need to figure out how to solve problems with them and I'm hopeful we're going to see more human-sized problem solved I think you know we have technology has maybe exacerbated a few things and you know dislocated cost a lot of people jobs disconnected some people from other sort of stabilizing forces fake news you know we need consequences side effects I hope we get people solving those problems and because fake news should not be hard to solve yeah I they'll figure it out I think but like the idea is we need to technology does have a bit of a response of it to solve I fix some of the the crap that it broke yeah actually there's things that need like old structures journalism is an old profession and it used to actually have all these wonderful benefits but when the classified business went down the tubes it took all that stuff down and there needs to be a venue for that there needs to be new new outlets for people to sort of do research look things up and hold people to account yeah hopefully some of our tools will be I hope I'm holding out on silk and ink we see some new stuff let's talk about like just in general some of the fashionable coolness around engineering machine learning AI obviously tops the list something that's not as sexy or is is internet of things sure because you got machines and industrial manufacturing plant and equipment to people's devices as you work at Apple so you understand that piece of watch and everything so you got that's an internet we're things people are things too so machines and people are at the edge of the network so you got this new kind of concept what gets you excited talk about how you feel about those trends so there's a ton going on there I think what's amazing is the idea that all these sensors and switches and all the remote pieces can start to have smarts on them I think the downside of that is some of the early IoT stuff you know it has a whole open SSL stack in it and you know that can be out of date and when you have security problems with that now your light switch has access to your tax returns and that's not really what you want so I think there is definitely there's there's a world coming I think at a technical level we need to make operating systems and tools and networking protocols that aren't general purpose because general purpose tools are hackable I need to have a I need to have a sensor and a switch that know how to talk to each other and that's it they can't they can't rewrite code they can't rewrite their firmware they can't like I want to be able to know that you have a nice office here if somebody came in and tried to hack your switches would you ever know and the others like I don't know you have no idea but when you when you have things that are you know on your network and that serve you if they're a general if they're a little general purpose computing device they're a mess they like you know a switch is simple a microphone a microphone is simple it has there's an output from it it needs so differentiated software for device but let's get back to old school you studied operating systems back in the day a process can do whatever the hell it wants it can read from memory it can write disk it can talk to all these buses it's a very it can do it's very general purpose I don't want that on my switch I want my switch to be sort of much more of these little microcontrol yeah it's in a little box I mean so the phone and the Mac have something called sandboxing which sort of says you get a a smaller view of the world you get a little piece of the disk you can't see everything else and those are parts of it but I think you need even more you need sort of this really I don't want a general purpose I want a very specific thing that says I'm allowed to do this and I'm allowed to talk to that server I don't have access to the internet I've got access to that server you mentioned operating systems I mean obviously I grew up in the computer science genre of the 80s and you did as well that was a revolution around UNIX and then Berkeley BSD and all that stuff that happened around the systems man systems world operating systems was really the pioneers in computing at the time it's interesting with cloud it's almost a throwback now to systems thinking true you know people are looking at and you're discussing it this is a systems problem it's just not on a box right I think we witness the let's get everyone a general purpose computer and see what they can do and that was amazing but now you're like I don't want everything to be a general I want very specific I want very little dedicated things that do this really well I don't want my thermostat actually tracking when I'm in the house you know I wanted to know man maybe there's someone in the house but I don't want to know it's me I don't want to report to Google what's going on I want I want it to track my temperature and manage that our Wikibon teams calls the term unigrid I call it hypergrid because essentially it's grid computer there's no difference between on-premise and cloud it's one pool of resource of compute and things processes although I think and that's interesting you want that but again you want it I would say this I get a little nervous when all of my data goes to some cloud that I can't control like I would love if I have a camera in my house and it's imagine I put security cameras up I want that to sort of see what's going on I don't want it to publish the video to the to anywhere that's out of my control if it publishes a summary that says oh like someone came to your door I'm like okay that's that's a good reasonable thing to know and I want to get that like so Palo Alto recently added there's traffic cameras that are looking at traffic and they record video but everyone's very nervous about that fact they don't want to be recorded on video so the cameras this is actually really good the camera only reports number of cars number of bikes number of pedestrians just raw numbers you're pushing the processing down to the end and you only get these very anonymous statistics that I mean like that's that's the right model I've got I've got a I've got a device it can do a lot of sophisticated processing but it gives nice summary data that is very public I don't think anyone's really there's a privacy issue there that they've factored into the design exactly it's privacy and it's also it's the appropriateness of the data you don't want you don't yeah people don't want a camera watching them when they go by but they're happy and they're like oh yeah that street has a big increase in traffic and there's a lot of there were accidents here and there's people running red lights that's valuable knowledge not the fact that it's it's you and you're Tesla and you almost hit me now yeah or speeding it's slow down exactly yeah or actually if you recorded speeders the fact that there's a lot of speeding is very interesting who's doing it okay people get people get upset if that's recorded so I'm glad Palo Alto's sobbing there traffic problem Palo Alto problems as we say in general security has been a huge issue we were talking before we came on about just the security nightmare yes a lot of companies are out there scratching their heads there's so much of digital transformation happening that's the buzzword in the industry what does that mean from your standpoint because engineers are now moving to the front lines and developers engineering because now there's a visibility to not just the software it's an end goal they call it outcome you talk to customers a lot around through your entrepreneurial venture around trying to back requirements into a product and yet deliver value and you get the insight from the field of you know kind of what kind of problems businesses are generally trying to solve with tech so that's interesting I think when we try to start tech companies we usually have ideas and then we go test that premise on customers perhaps I'm not as adaptable as I should be we're not actually going to customers and asking what they want we're asking them if this is the kind of thing that would solve their problems and usually they're happy to talk to us the tough one is then are they going to become paying customers there's talking and there's paying and those are different lines paying certainly is validation exactly that's when you really know that they care it is it's a tough question I think there's there's always there's a there's a category of entrepreneur that's always very knowledgeable about a small number of customers and they solve their problems and those people are successful and they're often they often are more services based but they're solving problems because they know people they know a lot of people they know what their pain points are so here's the real question I want to know have you been back to Apple in the new building have I been I've not been in the spaceship I have not been in the spaceship yet I actually understand that the in order to have the event there they actually had to stop work on the rest of the building because the construction process makes everything so dirty and they did not want everyone to see dirty windows so they actually they halted the construction they scrubbed down the trees they had the event and now it's but now it's back so I'll get there at some point Bruce Arthur he's a vice president engineer banter.ai entrepreneur formerly of Apple good friend final question for you just what are you excited about these days and you know as you look out at the tooling and the computer science and societal impact that seeing with cloud and all these technologies and open source what are you what are you excited about? I'm most excited I think we actually have now enough computing resources and enough tools at hand we can actually go back and tackle some harder computer science problems I think there's things that used to be so big that you're like well that's just not that's too much data we could never solve that that's too much that would take you know that would take 100 computers 100 years to figure out and those are problems now that are becoming very tractable and I think that it's been the rise of yeah it starts with Google but some other companies that sort of really made these these very large problems are now tractable and they're now solvable and open source your opinion on open source these days? I open source is great who doesn't love more code? well I should back this up open source is the fastest way to share and to make progress there are times where you need what's called proprietary but in other words valuable when you need valuable engineers to work on something and you know not knowing the providence or where something comes from is a little sticky I think there's there's going to be space for both I think open source is big but there's going to be time if you have core competency you really want to code it exactly you want to write that up and you still participate in the communities right and I think open source is also it's awesome when it's following if there's something else in front it follows very fast it does a very good job it's very thorough sometimes it doesn't know where to go and it sort of meanders and that's when you know other people have advantages yeah collective intelligence exactly Bruce thanks for coming on really appreciate it get to see you there's a cube conversation here in the Palo Alto studio I'm John Furrier thanks for watching