Greatest Hits Archives - Software Engineering Daily

Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes The post Amazon and Uber with Brad Stone appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without The post Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

If you wanted to build a machine learning model to understand human health, where would you get the data? A hospital database would be useful, but privacy laws make it difficult to disclose that patient data to the public. In order to publicize the data safely, you would have to anonymize it, so that a The post Where Machines Go to Learn with Auren Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service The post Service Proxying with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning The post The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine. When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity The post Reality with Donald Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering The post Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky. The post Startup Engineering with Mike Wolfe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a human passes away, we create a tombstone as a memorial. Friends and family visit a grave to remember the times they had with that person while they were still alive. Memorial bots are another way to celebrate the life of someone who has passed away. A memorial bot is created by taking the The post Bot Memorial with Eugenia Kuyda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When you are deciding who to marry, you are using an algorithm. The same is true when you are looking for a parking space, playing a game of poker, or deciding whether or not to organize your closet. Algorithms To Live By is a book about the computer science of human decisions. It offers strategies The post Algorithms to Live By with Brian Christian appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

You have probably received a parking ticket that you felt was unfair, but instead of fighting it, you paid the expensive price to get rid of it quickly. Fighting a parking ticket sounds like it would be so time consuming that it is a better decision to just pay for it. When Joshua Browder was The post Robot Lawyer with Joshua Browder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever. The post Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to The post Winning With Data with Tomasz Tunguz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become The post AWS Open Guide with Joshua Levy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able The post Reflections of an Old Programmer with Ben Northrop appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely? Andrea Goulet The post Legacy Code with Andrea Goulet appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When Uber’s engineering team published a blog post about moving to MySQL from Postgres, Markus Winand started receiving lots of email. Markus writes about databases on his blog “Use The Index, Luke,” a guide to database performance for developers. The people emailing Markus wanted to know–if Postgres doesn’t work well for Uber, is it safe The post Database Choices and Uber with Markus Winand appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bot fraud, the New York tech scene, RethinkDB and open source; these topics and more are discussed in today’s episode. Two of the most popular guests return to the show to explore a variety of topics. Ben Halpern is the creator of The Practical Dev, a massively popular Twitter account and blog that you may The post Topic Roundtable with Haseeb Qureshi and Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a user of a social network updates her profile, that profile update needs to propagate to several databases that want to know about such an update–search indexes, user databases, caches, and other services. When Neha Narkhede was at LinkedIn, she helped develop Kafka, which was deployed at LinkedIn to help solve this very problem. The post Kafka Event Sourcing with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

After nine years at Microsoft, Scott Berkun left to become an author. One of his books on project management was read by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging tool that runs a large percentage of the internet (including Software Engineering Daily). Scott became friends with the WordPress founder, who is also the CEO The post Remote Work with Scott Berkun appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform. This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competition, The post Microsoft Antitrust with Harry First appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right?   Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog The post Uber’s Postgres Problems with Evan Klitzke appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Facebook users provide lots of information about the structure of their relationship graph. Facebook uses that information to provide content and services that are expected to be important to users. If Facebook knows who the most important people in my life are, Facebook can use that knowledge to serve me content that is more relevant The post Facebook Relationship Algorithms with Jon Kleinberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Research in artificial intelligence takes place mostly at universities and large corporations, but both of these types of institutions have constraints that cause the research to proceed a certain way. In a university, basic research might be hindered by lack of funding. At a big corporation, the researcher might be encouraged to study a domain The post Artificial Intelligence with Oren Etzioni appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machine learning has become simplified. Similar to how Ruby on Rails made web development approachable, scikit-learn takes away much of the frustrating aspects of machine learning, and lets the developer focus on building functionality with high-level APIs.   Per Harald Borgen is a developer at Xeneta. He started programming fairly recently, but has already built The post Machine Learning for Sales with Per Harald Borgen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When you hear about massive data breaches like the recent ones from LinkedIn, MySpace, or Ashley Madison, how can you find out whether your own data was compromised?   Troy Hunt created the website HaveIBeenPwned.com to answer this question. When a major data breach occurs, Troy acquires a copy of the stolen data and provides The post Data Breaches with Troy Hunt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Occasionally I write editorials, and also record them as a podcast. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers, the second was about how poker relates to software engineering, and the third was about music and software engineering. Today’s episode The post You Are Not A Commodity appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Alec Ross worked in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor to Hillary Clinton. His book Industries of the Future explores the biggest technological opportunities and threats to our society. The industries addressed in his book include robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity. Technological familiarity is increasingly correlated with an individual’s optimism. Cyberwarfare presents attack vectors The post Industries of the Future with Alec Ross appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Breakthroughs in modern data research tend to come from companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with projects like MapReduce, Cassandra, and Dynamo.   Twenty years ago, this types of breakthroughs would be happening in academia, which causes today’s guest Peter Bailis to ask: is the academic data community having an identity crisis?   Peter is The post Peter Bailis on the Data Community’s Identity Crisis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics.   Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since The post Economics of Software with Russ Roberts appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from negotiating at all. Today, Haseeb Qureshi returns to the show The post Salary Negotiation with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly. As The post Scalable Architecture with Lee Atchison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network of computers. Adrian Cockcroft worked on The post Schedulers with Adrian Cockcroft appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction. Open source software succeeds or fails The post Death and Distributed Systems with Pieter Hintjens appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Six years ago, Twitter was experiencing outages due to high traffic. Back in 2010 Twitter was built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application. Twitter migrated to a microservices architecture to fix these problems. During this migration, the engineers at Twitter learned how to build and scale highly distributed microservice architectures. William Morgan was an The post Scaling Twitter with Buoyant.io’s William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is The post Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Coding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran The post Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom-built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer, The post Dropbox’s Magic Pocket with James Cowling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Seeing stuff happen is exciting in the early days. But when you try to be at the senior level, at the architect level, you have to understand that there is a cost to adopting a higher level abstraction.” Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know. The post JavaScript and Frontend Development with Marc Grabanski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The most important thing behind it is to think about developers in the way that product people think about consumers, and that the first time experience of your API needs to be ridiculously simple.” Software developers have been socializing on chat rooms for decades. In the nineties, we began using IRC and AOL instant messenger. The post Gitter Engineering with Mike Bartlett and Andrew Newdigate appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“In many ways, nature is still the fastest computer we have when it comes to studying disease.” Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same The post Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The geeks won because somehow we tricked everyone into carrying around a computer with them!” Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder The post State of Programming with Jeff Atwood appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is The post Distributed Systems with Leslie Lamport appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Its not just that we didn’t have git, we didn’t have Subversion, and before that we didn’t have CVS. Basically all that we had was RCS.” Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was The post Browser Wars with Eric Sink appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Following the successful experiment of History of Hadoop, we are doing another Saturday experiment: an editorial podcast. Let us know your thoughts via Slack, Twitter, or email! Our podcast errs on the side of technical rigor. Whether the topic is distributed databases, microservices, Soylent, Uber, or Dwarf Fortress, we try to separate hype from substance, deferring the The post 10 Philosophies for Engineers appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

This episode is different from the traditional interview format of Software Engineering Daily, and focuses on the history of Hadoop. Thanks to Marco Bonaci for allowing us to republish this in audio format. You can find the original post here: History of Hadoop If you like this podcast, check out Marko’s book Spark in Action (affiliate The post The History of Hadoop appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Actually it’s more work to turn a table into a chair, than it is to just make a damn chair.” Continue reading… The post The Evolution of Rails with David Heinemeier Hansson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.” Continue reading… The post Language Design with Brian Kernighan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. This episode is republished from The Quoracast. Questions: What will the world look like in 5 years? What are the biggest problems associated with rapid spread and development of the Internet? Does blockchain technology present The post Internet Future with Vint Cerf appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.