Greatest Hits Archives - Software Engineering Daily

In the 1960s, advertising agencies were high-dollar creative producers. A client would come to an ad agency and pay millions of dollars for artistic messaging that would convince a consumer to buy a product. How could you measure the success of these advertising campaigns? Maybe you could see success in the sales data. Maybe people The post Bad Men with Bob Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In America, the tech companies we focus on are commonly known as FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. We all know what these companies do because they impact our daily lives. In Asia, there are three giant tech companies that have similar scale: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, otherwise known as BAT. Technology within a location The post Analyse Asia with Bernard Leong appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machines understand the world through mathematical representations. In order to train a machine learning model, we need to describe everything in terms of numbers. Images, words, and sounds are too abstract for a computer. But a series of numbers is a representation that we can all agree on, whether we are a computer or a The post Word2Vec with Adrian Colyer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services. The post Serverless Startup with Yan Cui appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but The post Quantum Computing with Vijay Pande appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Self-driving cars are here. Fully autonomous systems like Waymo are being piloted in less complex circumstances. Human-in-the-loop systems like Tesla Autopilot navigate drivers when it is safe to do so, and lets the human take control in ambiguous circumstances. Computers are great at memorization, but not yet great at reasoning. We cannot enumerate to a The post Self-Driving Deep Learning with Lex Fridman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Culture fit” is a term that is used to describe engineers that have the right personality for a given company. In the hiring process, “lack of culture fit” is used to turn away engineers who are good enough at coding but just don’t seem right for the company. As today’s guest Ammon Bartram says, “lack The post Culture Fit with Ammon Bartram appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The history of computing can be thought of as a series of ideas rather than objects. From Aristotle’s formalization of the syllogism, to Alan Turing’s model for an all-purpose computing machine, to Satoshi Nakamoto’s distributed transaction ledger–these breakthroughs did not come in the form of polished, tangible objects. In fact, the objects which end up The post Computer Logic with Chris Dixon appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Search engines run our lives. The path we take to information is dictated by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other forms of search. Search engines feel objective and truthful, but are built through ongoing experimentation and subjective decision making. That’s what has kept Danny Sullivan writing about search engines for twenty years. The content Google prioritizes, The post Search Engine Land with Danny Sullivan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture The post Google Early Days with John Looney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a The post Off-Grid Social Network with Andre Staltz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It The post Poker Artificial Intelligence with Noam Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

CRISPR is a technique for altering the human genome. It might be the most powerful tool for biological modification that we have ever discovered. In this episode, we explore CRISPR: how it works, why it exists in the natural world, and the implications for being able to modify DNA so easily. Geoff Ralston is a The post CRISPR with Geoff Ralston appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts. Before I used Zencastr to record my The post Zencastr with Josh Nielsen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward. The applications we are building today The post Data Intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it. Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive. Peeqo The post Robot Assistant with Abhishek Singh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild. The post Facebook Open Source with Tom Occhino appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, The post Complacency with Tyler Cowen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the The post WebAssembly with Brendan Eich appeared first on 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.