Outliers 42: Viral B. Shah on why engineers need empathy about users

Pankaj Mishra December 1, 2017 1 min

The American civil aviation regulator’s next-generation collision avoidance system is built on a relatively new programing language called Julia.

You can thank Viral, who along with Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi, built the language the next time you have a safe flight in the U.S. airspace.

Like every profession, engineering is also defined by some awesome coders and architects who are known for the battles they pick and the ones they ignore.

Shah, who was one of the key architects behind Aadhaar payments system, prefers to stay away from the controversies surrounding India’s biometric-based citizen identity program, as I record this episode of Outliers podcast.

If you are someone who believes our future will be shaped by next-generation software and machine learning, listen to this conversation. And here’s a video story my colleague Jayadevan PK had done last year on Julia.