Software Engineering Daily

Software engineering can be a surprisingly grueling career. It is both physically and mentally demanding to sit in front of a screen for hours on end producing code. During the pandemic, the strains of being an engineer became even more acute, as we were secluded in our homes, in some cases alone. Gabe Greenberg and Michelle Bakels work at G2i, a company that manages a large number of developers. G2i has a focus on developer health, which they believe is an underappreciated topic. They are also helping organize React Miami, a conference that takes place April 18-19, 2022. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Puppet:You can join Puppet for the conversation by registering at https://events.puppet.com/fireside. Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at https://rudderstack.com/SED. Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: https://strongdm.com/SEDaily CODA: Head over to https://coda.io/sedaily

Crypto companies have cemented themselves as a company category that is not going away. Bitski is a company that makes web3 tooling and infrastructure, including a wallet and a collection of tools for creating and selling NFTs. Patrick Tescher joins the show to talk through the engineering behind crypto infrastructure and APIs. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Doppler: Sign up via https://doppler.com/sedaily. Cox Communucations: Go to https://cox.career/techjobs to find out more about career opportunities at Cox Communications. RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at https://rudderstack.com/SED. Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: https://strongdm.com/SEDaily CODA: Head over to https://coda.io/sedaily

Running a database company requires expertise in both technical and managerial skills. There are deeply technical engineering questions around query paths, scalability, and distributed systems. And there are complex managerial questions around developer productivity and task allocation. Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale, which is building modern relational database infrastructure. Before PlanetScale he spent several years on infrastructure at GitHub. He joins the show to talk about his work at PlanetScale and the vision for the company Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Puppet:You can join Puppet for the conversation by registering at https://events.puppet.com/event/fireside/ Cox Communucations: Go to https://cox.career/techjobs to find out more about career opportunities at Cox Communications. RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at https://rudderstack.com/SED. Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ New Relic: Sign up at https://newrelic.com/sedaily

GitOps is a deployment and infrastructure management strategy based around continuous delivery and Kubernetes, with Git at the center of deployment workflows. Policy management can be used to define permissions and rules around who can deploy and what constitutes safe deployment. There is a synergy between GitOps tooling and policy management tooling. Alexis Richardson is the co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks. Mohamed Ahmed founded Magalix, a security and compliance company that was acquired by Weaveworks. They join the show to talk about GitOps and Policy Management. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Puppet:You can join Puppet for the conversation by registering at events.puppet.com/fireside. Influx Data: . To learn more and get started for free, visit https://influxdata.com/sedaily Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: http://strongdm.com/SEDaily RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at http://rudderstack.com/SED. New Relic: Sign up at https://newrelic.com/sedaily

A company’s response to an incident defines how that company responds to an adverse, unexpected scenario. Kintaba automates the incident management process so teams can quickly report, respond, resolve, and reflect on major incidents collaboratively. Kintaba's incident response platforms gives you instant access to incident management processes based on the practices of companies like Facebook, Google, Stripe, and other successful and resilient organizations. John Egan is Cofounder & CEO at Kintaba and joins the show to talk about Incident Response. Attend The Incident Response Conference April 1, 2022 Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Influx Data: . To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: strongdm.com/SEDaily RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at rudderstack.com/SED. New Relic: Sign up at newrelic.com/sedaily

SingleStore is a multi-use, multi-model database designed for transactional and analytic workloads, as well as search and other domain specific applications. SingleStore is the evolution of the database company MemSQL, which sought to bring fast, in-memory SQL database technology to market. Jordan Tigani is Chief Product Officer of SingleStore and joins the show to talk through the architecture and engineering of the SingleStore platform. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Influx Data: . To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Cox Communucations: Go to cox.career/techjobs to find out more about career opportunities at Cox Communications. New Relic: Sign up at newrelic.com/sedaily

Compute resources continue to trend towards being cheaper, easier to use, and faster. Despite these positives, more compute demands more energy and therefore an increasing carbon footprint. With many companies committing to controlling their net carbon emissions, tools are required for engineers to not only measure their cloud infrastructure, but to make informed choices about how to set up the infrastructure. Steren Giannini is a senior product manager. He works on Google Cloud Carbon Footprint. In this interview, we discuss how Google Cloud collects and exposes this data to users and how those users are responding in their infrastructure approaches Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Influx Data: . To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: strongdm.com/SEDaily RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at rudderstack.com/SED. New Relic: Sign up at newrelic.com/sedaily

Vantage is a system for optimizing cloud costs. It provides tools and interfaces for developers to analyze how they are spending on AWS resources, and has recently expanded into GCP as well. Vantage users gain an easy interface into their costs that would otherwise be hard to analyze via the raw AWS console. Ben Schaechter is the founder of Vantage. In a previous show he gave an overview of Vantage. In today’s episode he returns to discuss the engineering internals of Vantage and provide a macro perspective on where people are wasting money in the cloud. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] New Relic: Sign up at newrelic.com/sedaily Influx Data: . To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at rudderstack.com/SED.

At Lyft, Ketan Umare worked on Flyte, an orchestration system for machine learning. Flyte provides reliability and APIs for machine learning workflows, and is used at companies outside of Lyft such as Spotify. Since leaving Lyft, Ketan founded Union.ai, a company focused on productionizing Flyte as a service. He joins the show to talk about the architecture and usage of Flyte, as well as how he is formulating the company around it. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Cox Communucations: Go to cox.career/techjobs to find out more about career opportunities at Cox Communications. Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Strong DM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: strongdm.com/SEDaily RudderStack: Software Engineering Daily listener at rudderstack.com/SED.

DuckDB is a relational database management system with no external dependencies, with a simple system for deployment and integration into build processes. It enables complex queries in SQL with a large function library, and provides transactional guarantees through multi-version concurrency control. Hannes Mühleisen works on DuckDB and joins the show to talk about query engines and OLAP system Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Rudder Stack:Visit datastackshow.com/live to register today. Influx Data: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. Cox Automotive: Visit COXAUTOTECH.COM to find career opportunities at Cox.

Substack is a platform for subscription-based content, covering newsletters, podcasts, and soon video. The design and speed of the platform are notable–with a minimalistic format that simply gets creators paid for its work, Substack has gained massive popularity. Chris Best is the CEO of Substack and joins the show to talk about the platform, architecture, and engineering of Substack. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Private Internet Access: .Go to https://privateinternetaccess.com/SEDaily InfluxData: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily GetStream:Check it out at https://getstream.io/ MonteCarlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. CoxAutomotive: visit COXAUTOTECH.COM to find career opportunities at Cox.

Customer data pipelines power the backend of many successful web platforms. In a customer data pipeline, data is collected from sources such as mobile apps and cloud SaaS tools, transformed and munged using data engineering, stored in data warehouses, and piped to analytics, advertising platforms, and data infrastructure. RudderStack is an open source customer data pipeline system that pulls together this disparate functionality. In a previous episode, we covered the basics of RudderStack. In today’s show, we dive deeper into the engineering of RudderStack with returning guest CEO Soumyadeb Mitra. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] InfluxData:To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily StrongDM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: strongdm.com/SEDaily GetStream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. Cox Automotive: visit COXAUTOTECH.COM to find career opportunities at Cox.

Managing Kubernetes nodes leads to operational complexity, security issues, and nodes that are perhaps more expensive to run than necessary. Deferring the node management to an underlying platform abstracts away these problems and can improve operations. Madhuri Yechuri runs Elotl, a nodeless Kubernetes platform. She joins the show to talk about the architecture and purpose of her company. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Rudder Stack: Sign up today... or just get a free t-shirt for being a Software Engineering Daily listener at rudderstack.com/SED. Influxdata: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. Getstream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos

Retool is a company that allows customers to build complex internal tools using a high level GUI. Users configure the relationships between these different tools, giving them the ability to build applications even without much background in engineering. Of course, having some engineering expertise helps, as users can write JavaScript to interact with the higher level components. Snir Kodesh is the head of engineering at Retool, and he previously worked at Lyft as a director of engineering. He joins the show to talk about his work at Retool, how it compares to Lyft engineering, and the lower level challenges of building the platform. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Cox Automative: Visit COXAUTOTECH.COM to find career opportunities at Cox. Influx Data: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Private Internet Access: .Go to https://privateinternetaccess.com/SEDaily Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos

The software supply chain consists of packages, imports, dependencies, containers, and APIs. These different components each have unique security risks. To ensure the security of their software supply chain, many developers use tools to analyze and scan their infrastructure for vulnerabilities. Barak Schoster works at Bridgecrew, a DevSecOps cloud security platform. He joins the show to talk about the risks of the modern software supply chain and what his company does to alleviate it. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Get Stream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ Private Internet Access: .Go to https://privateinternetaccess.com/SEDaily Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Influx Data: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Cox Automotive: visit COXAUTOTECH.COM

The data lake architecture has become broadly adopted in a relatively short period of time. In a nutshell, that means data in it’s raw format stored in cloud object storage. Modern software and data engineers have no shortage of options for accessing their data lake, but that list shrinks quickly if you care about features like transactions. Apache Hudi is a platform for building streaming data lakes that is optimized for lake engines and batch processing. In this episode, I interview Vinoth Chandar, creator of the Hudi Project and Founder and CEO at Onehouse. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for the show comes from StackOverflow stackoverflow.com/teams/sedaily Coda coda.io/sedaily Private Internet Access privateinternetaccess.com/SEDaily RudderStack datastackshow.com/live

National Instruments develops software and hardware for engineering in a wide variety of domains, from aerospace to government technology to application testing. The interface between hardware and software presents a variety of difficult engineering challenges. Luke Schreier is a Senior Vice President at National Instruments and joins the show to discuss the engineering and management of the company. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for the show comes from StackOverflow stackoverflow.com/teams/sedaily Coda coda.io/sedaily Private Internet Access privateinternetaccess.com/SEDaily Honeycomb softwareengineeringdaily.com/honeycomb RudderStack datastackshow.com/live

Automating video search requires a data pipeline that extracts metadata from videos and allows users to annotate the video with information that correlates with that metadata. The video needs to be segmented into intervals that define the search space, and the search space needs to be queryable by a user. Sieve Data is an automated video search platform that enables developers to add video search and analytics to internal tools and applications. Mokshith Voodarla is the CEO of Sieve Data and joins the show to talk about video search and what he and his team have built. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] GetStream: Check it out at https://getstream.io/ CapitalOne: Visit capitalone.com/ML Mparticle: Visit mparticle.com MONTE CARLO: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. TotallyBio: To learn more go to TotallyBio.io.

Increasingly, technology groups need to be strategic about the cloud services they adopt to ensure their vendor’s pricing is both fair and measured exactly right for the application’s unique access pattern. Definitely answering questions like these can take a significant amount of time and energy from your most valuable engineers. Taloflow is a company trying to make this decision making process easier for object storage and cloud cost management. In this episode, I interview LV Jadavji about the key questions companies are asking and how Taloflow helps people navigate them. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Totally Bio: To learn more go to TotallyBio.io. Influx Data:To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily CapitalOne: Visit capitalone.com/ML StrongDM: Start your free 14 day trial today at: strongdm.com/SEDaily WorkOS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos

A data catalog provides an index into the data sets and schemas of a company. Data teams are growing in size, and more companies than ever have a data team, so the market for data catalog is larger than ever. Amundsen is a data catalog that came out of Lyft. We have previously explored the basics of Amundsen. In today’s episode, Mark Grover returns to the show to talk about the art and science of data catalogs. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] MONTE CARLO: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more. Mparticle: Visit mparticle.com CapitalOne: Visit capitalone.com/ML TotallyBio: To learn more go to TotallyBio.io. WorkOS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos

Splunk is a monitoring and logging platform that has evolved over its 18 years of existence. In its modern focus on observability, it is focused on open source and AIOps. Observability has evolved with the growth of Kubernetes, and Splunk’s work around OpenTelemetry has kept parity with the open-source community of Kubernetes. Spiros Xanthos is the general manager of observability at Splunk. He joins the show to talk about Splunk’s modern product portfolio and his work on his own company prior to being acquired by Splunk. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for the show comes from: Totallybio: To learn more go to TotallyBio.io. Influx Data: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Mparticle: Visit mparticle.com Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more Doppler : Sign up via doppler.com/sedaily.

Francesco Cesarini founded Erlang Solutions in 1999 with a mission to help companies adopt Erlang. In this interview, I speak with Francesco and Gabor Olah from Erlang Solutions. We discuss the Erlang language, it's ecosystem, and features like concurrency, resilience, and scalability that motivate adoption. We use Java and the Java Virtual Machine as a comparison point for Erlang and it's virtual machine the BEAM. Lastly, we explore where Erlang fits best in contemporary software engineering projects. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for the show comes from: New Relic: Sign up at newrelic.com/sedaily Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata to learn more Mparticle: Visit mparticle.com Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Strong DM: Sign up at strongdm.com/sedaily.

Serious software projects require several environments. Your production environment is obviously mission critical. A staging environment is also necessary to perform validation and regression testing before taking the risk of pushing an update to production. Best practices and approaches for managing these and other environments vary from organization to organization. In some sense, different software systems should be expected to have unique needs. Yet certain commonalities and wisdom can be gained from observing high scale success stories. In this episode, I interview Senthil Padmanabhan about how eBay turned around an impeding staging environment into its biggest asset for developer productivity. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for the show comes from: Influx Data: To learn more and get started for free, visit influxdata.com/sedaily Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata WorkOS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Totallybio: To learn more go to TotallyBio.io. Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML

In contrast to other IDEs, the notebook interface offers software developers a unique environment idealized for data professionals. Despite the growth in popularity, a surprising learning curve still exists for setup and configuration. A siloed notebook offers no native collaboration tools. While one can connect to a SQL database programmatically, if you’re looking for an ideal ergonomic environment for some heavy duty SQL queries, many developers seek an external tool for that job. In this episode, Kyle interviews Barry McCardel and Caitlin Colgrove from Hex. Hex is a collaborative data workspace that makes it easy to go from idea to analysis to sharing. We talk about Hex’s offering and the evolving space of notebook solutions for going beyond some of the issues noted above. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@ softwareengineeringdaily.com Totally Bio : To learn more go to TotallyBio.io. Honey Comb :Use Honeycomb for free at softwareengineeringdaily.com/honeycomb. Mparticle : Visit mparticle.com Doppler : Sign up via doppler.com/sedaily. Monte Carlo : Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata

When writing code, test driven development is a common accepted methodology to ensure the development of high quality software. Your organization’s data, on the other hand, is an entirely different challenge. Data can be missing due to human error, a failure with a 3rd party provider, a botched release, or dozens of other issues. When not missing, data can still become corrupted or start exhibiting a trend in the wrong direction that isn’t obvious to notice. Anomalo is a complete data quality platform. It can monitor your enterprise data and alert you to problems that are automatically detected. In this episode, I interview Jeremy Stanley about the ways in which teams are using the platform to monitor and improve their data quality. Sponsorship inquiries : [email protected] MAGIC MIND: Go to magicmind.co MPARTICLE: Visit mparticle.com DOPPLER: Sign up via doppler.com/sedaily. STRONG DM: Sign up at strongdm.com/sedaily.

When you visit a web page, the creator’s intent is to present you a seamless experience that fills your browser window. That web page or web application is generally divided up in some meaningful way across navigation elements, content, ads, header, footer, and other components. Those components may represent the work of independent teams. Typically a web app is built in a single code base, pulling all those components into a monolithic software application. For backend software development, these monoliths are often split up in a refactoring towards microservice architecture. In this episode, I interview Luca Mezzalira, author of Building Micro-Frontends. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for this show comes from Cox Automotive: visit COXAUTOTECH.COM Influx Data: visit influxdata.com/sedaily Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML Work OS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos MParticle: Visit mparticle.com

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 an application scales, it becomes significantly more complicated while at the same time receiving more traffic. The intersection of these two problems leads to a variety of discussions around availability, risk management, and microservices. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for this show comes from: Monte Carlo: Visit softwareengineeringdaily.com/montecarlodata mparticle: Visit mparticle.com Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML strongDM: strongdm.com/sedaily Honeycomb: Use Honeycomb for free at softwareengineeringdaily.com/honeycomb.

The creator economy has seen rapid growth, thanks largely to software solutions like Patreon that are enabling creators. As the creator economy grows, providers must be prepared for scalability issues and the challenges of maintaining and growing a software infrastructure and the team that evolves it. In this episode, I interview Utkarash Srivastava, SVP Engineering at Patreon. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] WorkOS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Influx Data: visit influxdata.com/sedaily Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML mparticle: Visit mparticle.com

Snyk is a platform for security that started with open source scanning and has expanded into container security, infrastructure as code, and other products. Snyk is a simple product to use, but has hidden complexities that build large data structures to manage and scan code dynamically. In a previous episode we discussed the core Snyk product. In today’s show, we talk about the engineering behind Snyk. CEO Guy Podjarny joins the show to talk through the architecture of Snyk and how the company has evolved to serve a variety of use cases. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] Support for this show comes from: Mergify: Visit www.mergify.com mparticle: Visit mparticle.com Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML WorkOS: Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Doppler: Sign up via doppler.com/sedaily.

Linkerd is a service mesh that runs efficiently with a low memory footprint. We have covered the details of Linkerd in previous episodes. Buoyant is the company that sells Linkerd as a service, and today’s show focuses on the engineering details of the company, and how Linkerd is architected in 2022. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant, and he joins the show to talk in detail about running a leading service mesh company. Support for this show comes from: mParticle: Visit mparticle.com StrongDM: Sign up at strongdm.com/sedaily Capital One: Visit capitalone.com/ML WorkOS: To learn more and get started, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/workos Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Online poker was deemed illegal in the United States ten years ago. Since then, poker has decreased in popularity, then found new invigoration thanks to live streaming and a large volume of bored gamers looking for something to do during the pandemic. Poker is a strategy game that can be played even without the financial element, and Clubs Poker is a free-to-play web-based poker client that grew significantly over the past year. Taylor Crane is the founder of Clubs Poker, and he joins the show to talk about the past, present, and future of online poker, as well as the engineering around the platform. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Database product companies typically have a few phases. First, the company will develop a technology with some kind of innovation such as speed, scalability, or durability. The company will offer support contracts around that technology for a period of time, before eventually building a managed, hosted offering. PlanetScale is a database company built around the Kubernetes-based Vitess technology. Sugu Sougoumarane is the CTO of PlanetScale, and formerly worked at YouTube, where he built large-scale SQL databases. In today’s show, he talks about building out the core PlanetScale technology, tuning PlanetScale’s consensus model, and the development of the hosted cloud service offering of the company. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Couchbase is a distributed NoSQL cloud database. Since its creation, Couchbase has expanded into edge computing, application services, and most recently a database-as-a-service called Capella. Couchbase started as an in-memory cache and needed to be rearchitected to be a persistent storage system. In this episode, I interview Ravi Mayuram, SVP Products and Engineering at Couchbase about the architecture and the history of Couchbase. To learn more about Couchbase, check out Couchbase.com/SEDaily. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Rackspace is a multi cloud solutions provider that has evolved beyond its cloud computing origins into a diverse set of services and support offerings. Customers work with Rackspace to adopt cloud application deployments, modern data analytics, and all the other opportunities offered by cloud computing. Much of this occurs through partnerships where Rackspace provides teams of engineers to work with the customer. Jeff DeVerter is the CTO of products and services at Rackspace. He’s also the host of the podcast Cloud Talk, a show about cloud trends and technologies. Jeff previously served as the CTO of Microsoft Technology at Rackspace, so our conversation began with a discussion of Microsoft-based migrations. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Historically, search engines made money by showing sponsored ads alongside organic results. As the idiom goes, if you’re not paying for something, you are the product. Neeva is a new take on search engines. When you search at neeva.com, you get the type of result you’d expect from a search engine minus any advertising. In this episode, I speak with Darin Fisher, Software Engineer at Neeva. We discuss the motivation, implementation, and mobile experience for searching with Neeva. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Tabnine is an AI assistant that helps software engineers write more efficient code. It’s been trained on a large corpus of source code or can be trained based on your specific codebase. Either way, the resulting model offers predictive completion of code that can make programmers more productive. In this episode, I interview Eran Yahav, professor at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and CTO at Tabnine. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Protecting your customers begins with best practices for securely capturing, storing, and protecting the data you collect for or about them. When an organization has a large enough dataset, needs typically arise for doing analytical workloads or training machine learning models on this data. If you use random or mock data to generate a report or train a model, you arrive at an output that doesn’t reflect the true use case of the organization. Success on tasks like this seems to require production data. Alternatively, perhaps production-like data is good enough. In this episode, I interview Alex Watson, co-founder and chief product officer at gretel. We discuss their solution for privacy preserving synthetic data that remains representative of the underlying dataset. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

When businesses share a common need such as payroll, commercial offerings can compete for market share with software solutions that easily adapt to a variety of businesses. Not all tasks can be easily commoditized or standardized. Take content moderation as an example. Every site that accepts user generated content is likely to have unique and nuanced processes that match their internal definitions of allowable content and procedures for what to do with non-allowable content. Many organizations create custom software solutions for their unique tasks. When they’re central to the core mission, that’s the right choice. When they’re not, such projects are often a distraction for an engineering team that is already stretched too thin. That’s where solutions like Flowdash come in. Flowdash is a low code / no code offering that enables businesses to rapidly develop custom solutions for tasks such as content moderation and others. In this episode, I interview Nick Gervasi, co-founder and CTO at Flowdash.

If you're working on a proof of concept which you hope will help you raise funding, it's fine to take a few shortcuts. Use the tech stack you know the best, don't fall in love with your code, and when you start to experience growing pains, hopefully you'll have the time to thoughtfully and carefully identify the bottlenecks and limits of your tech stack applied to the specific industry problem you are solving. Another great strategy is to simply copy the tech stack of a larger company with the confidence that what works for a bigger company will likely work for you. But if you're a company like Uber, there's no larger company to copy. Worse still in comparison to most businesses, even a few minutes of downtime is pretty damaging for Uber. To successfully deliver a solution like theirs, one must identify bottlenecks and growing pains in advance, find solutions, and deliver the plan in a way that's invisible to customers. In this episode, I speak with Uday Kiran Medisetty, principal engineer at uber about steps taken in their core state machine design.

Writing software is an absolute joy. Getting software to build is a chore. Thus, build systems emerged as a solution to automate this chore. At some point software engineers either use or hear legends about make and makefiles. While perhaps being the historically known tool, a great deal of thought has gone into approaches to build systems since 1976 when make was introduced. In today’s episode, we focus on a build system called Pants. Pants is a scalable, software build system. It can help you support all the modern challenges of a build system such as dependency resolution, testing, linting, and packaging. In this episode, I interview Benjy Weinberger, co-founder at Toolchain and contributor to the open source project Pants.

Infrastructure as code is a concept that has delighted software engineers, dev ops, and engineering management across the board. It’s neither fun nor efficient to configure the infrastructure and environments software teams require. Operating software at scale on a cloud, on-prem, or hybrid model is a problem of modernity that many enterprises find surprisingly challenging. Rob Hirschfeld is CEO and co-founder of RackN whose software helps IT teams maintain distributed, multi-vendor operations with consistent operational control. We discuss the approaches being adopted by modern enterprise teams for infrastructure management. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine people use to find ideas in home, food, style, beauty, and more. The service grew quickly after its founding in 2010 and the company has grown to be a global team of thousands of professionals spanning time zones and continents. To deliver the smooth experience Pinterest users have come to expect requires an engineering team to keep the system running while continuously improving it. In this episode, I speak with three engineering leaders about their decision to work at Pinterest, the contributions they’ve made, and what makes Pinterest engineering different from other companies. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Charlie Gerard is an incredibly productive developer. In addition to being the author of Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript, her website charliegerard.dev has a long list of really interesting side projects exploring the intersection of human computer interaction, computer vision, interactivity, and art. In this episode we touch on some of these projects and broadly explore how practical it is to bring interesting HCI concepts into one’s work.

TechLit Africa is a non-profit on a mission to lessen African poverty by leveraging the internet. Rural Africans lack digital skills and computers to gain from the digital economy, even though developed countries have an abundance of used computers. That’s where TechLit Africa comes in. They accept used computers, refurbish them with custom classroom code, ship them to Africa, and establish relationships with schools that provide space for the labs they create. In this episode, I interview Nelly Cheboi, one of the founders of TechLit Africa.

Getting a computer program to run the same in different environments has been a recurring problem since the earliest days of software systems. Software versioning, versions of dependencies, hardware configurations, and CPU instruction set differences are just a few examples of challenges engineers have faced to get their software to run in different settings. A core promise of the Java programming language has always been it's ability to run anywhere. If your system can run the Java virtual machine, it can run Java bytecode in a way that will be invariant to other factors. Java was created long before the modern mobile era and the JVM doesn't run on iOS devices. For Java and Kotlin developers looking for a consistent way to deploy their applications to Android and iphone devices, Codename One offers a solution. Codename One is an open-source cross-platform framework aiming to provide write once, run anywhere code for various mobile and desktop operating systems. In this episode I interview Steve Hannah about the project. https://twitter.com/codename_one

If you haven’t encountered a data quality problem, then you haven’t yet worked on a large enough project. Invariably, a gap exists between the state of raw data and what an analyst or machine learning engineer needs to solve their problem. Many organizations needing to automate data preparation workflows look to Trifacta as a solution. In this episode, I interview Joseph Hellerstein, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Trifacta. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

As the internet has grown, increasingly, we are consumers of services provided by corporations rather than owners and operators of our own systems. To many, this trend towards centralization is antithetical to the spirit of a free and open internet. Urbit is a new operating system and peer-to-peer network. There are several layers of novel ideas in this ambitious project. In this episode, I interview Galen Wolfe-Pauly about the Urbit project. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It’s maintained by InfuxData who offers a suite of products that help organizations gain insights from time-series data. In this episode, I interview Zoe Steinkamp, software engineering and developer advocate at InfluxData. We explore some of the common use cases for time-series databases such as IoT and some recent announcements such as the ability to run flux queries right inside VS Code. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Robotic process automation or RPA refers to software robots constructed to automate some business process. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example is adding filters to your email inbox. I’ve worked with a lot of salespeople that configure complex email follow-up campaigns when inbound emails come in, but even that’s a fairly basic example compared to what’s becoming possible. UiPath is an automation platform. They offer a suite of solutions that empower developers and non-developers to construct effective software robots that can measurably improve business efficiency. In this interview, I speak with Boris Krumrey, Global VP Automation Innovations at UiPath. We overview the platform and discuss the current and future state of RPA. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Everyone is becoming increasingly aware of supply chains for physical goods. Software has its own supply chain. A supply of open source solutions exists as does a demand for these solutions by industry. Both have surely grown, but it would be nice to have a way of measuring by how much. The State of Software Supply Chain 2021 is an annual publication now in its 7th year. It’s released by Sonatype. In this interview, I speak with their Field CTO Ilkka Turunen. We review some of the highlights from the report including the state of open source and some particularly interesting statistics about supply chain attacks.