Software Engineering Daily

Containers and virtual machines are two ways of running virtualized infrastructure. Containers use less resources than VMs, and typically use the runc open source container runtime. Sysbox is a containerization runtime that offers an alternative to runc, and allows for the deployment of Docker or Kubernetes within a container. Cesar Talledo is the founder of Nestybox, a company built around the Sysbox runtime. He joins the show to talk about container runtimes and his new company. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Firebase is well-known as a platform that makes it easy to build real-time applications quickly and easily. Firebase was acquired by Google, and has been turned into a large platform that runs on top of Google Cloud. Firebase is closed-source, which leads to a different ecosystem than open source platforms. Supabase is a new open source alternative to Firebase, built on Postgres and Elixir. Paul Copplestone is the founder of Supabase and he joins the show to talk through what he is building. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Development environments are brittle and hard to manage. They lack the kind of fungibility afforded by infrastructure-as-code. Gitpod is a company that allows developers to describe development environments as code to make them easier to work with, and enabling a more streamlined GitOps workflow. Johannes Landgraf and Sven Efftinge are creators of Gitpod and they join the show to discuss the product and the motivation for building it. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Training a computer vision model is not easy. Bottlenecks in the development process make it even harder. Ad hoc code, inconsistent data sets, and other workflow issues hamper the ability to streamline models. Roboflow is a company built to simplify and streamline these model training workflows. Brad Dwyer is a founder of Roboflow and joins the show to talk about model development and his company. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Databases are the source of truth for every company. Editing the data in the database normally requires writing a query in SQL or a domain specific querying language–languages that are only accessible to engineers and highly technical people. BaseDash is a tool for interfacing with a database without requiring the usage of a query language. It allows the user to interface with the database as easily as a spreadsheet. Max Musing is a founder of BaseDash, and he joins the show to talk about how it works and why he built it. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Machine learning models are only as good as the datasets they’re trained on. Aquarium is a system that helps machine learning teams make better models by improving their dataset quality. Model improvement is often made by curating high quality datasets, and Aquarium helps make that a reality. Peter Gao works on Aquarium, and he joins the show to talk through modern machine learning and the role of Aquarium. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. Ray is used for reinforcement learning and other compute intensive tasks. It was developed at the Berkeley RISELab, a research and development lab with an emphasis on practical applications. Ion Stoica is a professor at Berkeley, and he joins the show to talk about the present and future of the Ray framework. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

A private network connects servers, computers, and cloud instances. These networked objects are often separated by firewalls and subnets that create latency and complication. David Crawshaw is the CTO of Tailscale, a company that works to make private networks easier to build and simpler to configure and maintain. David joins the show to talk about private networks and the implementation of Tailscale. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Pachyderm is a system for data version control. Code has been version controlled for many years, but not data. In previous episodes with Joe Doliner, we explored the evolution of Pachyderm. In today’s show, we talk about the state of the company in 2020, as well as Pachyderm Hub, and end-to-end machine learning and data lineage product. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Deno is a runtime for JavaScript applications. Deno is written in Rust, which changes the security properties of it. Parts of Deno are also written in TypeScript, which are causing problems in the compilation and organization of Deno. Elio Rivero is an engineer who has studied Deno and TypeScript, and he joins the show to talk about the newer JavaScript runtime and the issues caused by TypeScript. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Developer tooling and infrastructure is a fruitful area for investing. A wide variety of technologies can have large investment outcomes based on the fact that there are lots of engineers and businesses are willing to pay for products that give those engineers a higher degree of leverage. Lee Edwards is a partner with Root Ventures. His focus is on hard problems within software, and he joins the show to talk about the thesis of his firm, as well as his personal beliefs on what makes a good investment. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Salesforce is a platform with a large number of developers, ISVs, and companies built on top of it. There is a thriving ecosystem of applications built and managed around Salesforce, leading to an important set of relationships and integration points between Salesforce and the other entities involved with the company. Kevin Poorman works at Salesforce as a developer evangelist, helping to strengthen the relationships in the Salesforce ecosystem. Kevin joins the show to talk about Salesforce and the applications that connect to it. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Twitter is a social media platform with billions of objects: people, tweets, words, events, and other entities. The high volume of information that gets created on Twitter everyday leads to a complex engineering problem for the developers building the Twitter search index. Nico Tonozzi is an engineer at Twitter. He joins the show to talk through the problem space of search at Twitter, as well as some recent challenges that he had to tackle in the continuously changing Twitter product. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Robinhood is a platform for buying and selling stocks and cryptocurrencies. Robinhood is complex, fast-moving, and financial, and together these things require high quality engineering in distributed systems, observability, and data infrastructure. Jaren Glover is an engineer at Robinhood, and he joins the show to talk about the problem space within Robinhood, as well as the specific DevOps and software engineering challenges. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The Java ecosystem is maturing. The GraalVM high performance runtime provides a virtual machine for running applications in a variety of languages. TornadoVM extends the Graal compiler with a new backend for OpenCL. TornadoVM allows the offloading of JVM applications onto heterogeneous hardware. Juan Fumero works on TornadoVM. He joins the show to talk about the use case for TornadoVM, the design, and the engineering that underlies the system. We also talk about the overall Java ecosystem. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Investing in enterprise software has become a competitive business. Lots of venture capital firms compete for the good deals at every stage. This level of competition has driven more capital into the early stages. Ed Sim is a partner with Boldstart, an early stage enterprise investment firm. He joins the show to talk about modern enterprise investment strategy and his own varied personal experiences in working at funds. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Factories require quality assurance work. That QA work can be accomplished by a robot with a camera together with computer vision. This allows for sophisticated inspection techniques that do not require as much manual effort on the part of a human. Arye Barnehama is a founder of Elementary Robotics, a company that makes these kinds of robots. Arye joins the show to talk through the engineering of Elementary Robotics, and his vision for the future of the factory floor. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The most popular email client is Gmail, the web-based email client from Google. Gmail is dominant, but that dominance has come at a price, namely speed. Gmail caters to the lowest common denominator, serving a large ecosystem of use cases and plugins. This makes for a slow overall performance. Superhuman is an email client built for power users. Rahul Vohra is the founder of Superhuman, and joins the show to talk about the design and engineering of an email client that is made to be fast. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The Internet Archive collects historical records of the Internet. The Wayback Machine is one tool from the Internet Archive which you may be familiar with. One project you may be unfamiliar with is book scanning. Internet Archive scans high volumes of books in order to digitize them. In today’s episode, Davide Semenzin joins the show to talk through the history of the Internet Archive and the engineering behind book digitization. We talk through OCR, storage, architecture, and scalability. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Biometric authentication uses signals from a human’s unique biology to verify identity. Forms of biometric authentication include fingerprints, eye patterns, and the way a person walks, otherwise known as gait. UnifyID is a company that builds systems for biometric authentication. John Whaley is the CEO of UnifyID, and he joins the show to talk through techniques for biometrics, and the implementation details that UnifyID has built to turn these into a reality. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Robotic process automation involves the scripting and automation of highly repeatable tasks. RPA tools such as UIPath paved the way for a newer wave of automation, including the Robot Framework, an open source system for RPA. Antti Karjalainen is the CEO of Robocorp, a company that provides an RPA tool suite for developers. Antti joins the show to talk through the definition of RPA, common RPA tasks, and what he is building with Robocorp. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

After working at VMware for 10 years, Jerry Chen developed an expertise in technology companies. Today, he works at Greylock, where he looks at deals in the infrastructure and developer tooling space. Jerry is an expert in go-to-market strategy and makes investments in technologies that have a good chance at becoming large and profitable businesses. In today’s episode, Jerry and I talk through the dynamics of modern infrastructure investing, including examples of deals such as Chronosphere and Rockset, both of which have been featured in previous episodes of the podcast. Jerry gives his perspective on deal terms, board dynamics, and everything else that goes into a smart investment. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

APIs within a company change all the time. Every service owner has an API to manage, and those APIs have upstream and downstream connections. APIs need to be tested for integration points as well as for their “contract”, the agreement between an API owner and the consumers of that API. Aidan Cuniffe is the founder of Optic, a product built for API change management. He joins the show to explain why there is an opportunity for such a product, and the market dynamics of the space of API testing and change management. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

WebAssembly allows for the execution of languages other than JavaScript in a browser-based environment. But WebAssembly is still not widely used outside of a few particular niches such as Dropbox and Figma. Nicolo Davis works on an application called Boardgame Lab, and he joins the show to explain why WebAssembly can be useful even for a simple application. Nicolo also shares his reflections on TypeScript, Rust, and the future of web development. He talks through the client/server interaction, performance, error handling, and the process of an actual migration. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Hyperparameters define the strategy for exploring a space in which a machine learning model is being developed. Whereas the parameters of a machine learning model are the actual data coming into a system, the hyperparameters define how those data points are fed into the training process for building a model to be used by an end consumer. A different set of hyperparameters will yield a different model. Thus, it is important to try different hyperparameter configurations to see which models end up performing better for a given application. Hyperparameter tuning is an art and a science. Richard Liaw is an engineer and researcher, and the creator of Tune, a library for scalable hyperparameter tuning. Richard joins the show to talk through hyperparameters and the software that he has built for tuning them.

Anduril is a technology defense company with a focus on drones, computer vision, and other problems related to national security. It is a full-stack company that builds its own hardware and software, which leads to a great many interesting questions about cloud services, engineering workflows, and management. Gokul Subramanian is an engineer at Anduril, and he joins the show to share his knowledge of how Anduril operates and what the company has built.

CrowdFlower was a company started in 2007 by Lukas Biewald, an entrepreneur and computer scientist. CrowdFlower solved some of the data labeling problems that were not being solved by Amazon Mechanical Turk. A decade after starting CrowdFlower, the company was sold for several hundred million dollars. Today, data labeling has only grown in volume and scope. But Lukas has moved on to a different part of the machine learning stack: tooling for hyperparameter search and machine learning monitoring. Lukas Biewald joins the show to talk about the problems he was solving with CrowdFlower, the solutions that he developed as part of that company, and the efforts with his current focus: Weights and Biases, a machine learning tooling company.

As software permeates our lives, there are an increased number of situations where the legal system must be designed to account for that software. Whether the issues are open source licensing, cryptocurrencies, or worker classifications, software overlaps heavily with the law. Just as software is crafted by engineers, the legal structure around software is crafted by lawyers. There are large law firms that have built their business by knowing how to navigate these software and business questions. Mark Radcliffe is a lawyer who has been working with software companies for decades. He joins the show to talk about the intersection of software and the law, which we discuss from multiple points of view.

Code is version controlled through git, the version control system originally built to manage the Linux codebase. For decades, software has been developed using git for version control. More recently, data engineering has become an unavoidable facet of software development. It is reasonable to ask–why are we not version controlling our data? Dmitry Petrov is the founder of Iterative.ai, a company for collaborating and version controlling data sets. Dmitry joins the show to talk about how data version control works, and Iterative.ai, the company he is building around dataset management and collaboration.

Every software company works off of several different development environments–at the very least there is staging, testing, and production. Every push to staging can be spun up as an application to be explored, tinkered with, and tested. These ad hoc spin-ups are known as release apps. A release app is an environment for engineers to play with, and potentially throw away or promote to production. Release apps have been made easier due to technologies such as infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration, and Kubernetes. Tommy McClung is the co-founder of Release App, a company that makes it easy to spin up release environments for your software. Tommy joins the show to discuss release workflows, and his work building Release App.

Chatbots are useful for developing well-defined applications such as first-contact customer support, sales, and troubleshooting. But the potential for chatbots is so much greater. Over the last five years, there have been numerous platforms that have arisen to allow for better, more streamlined chatbot creation. Dialogue software enables the creation of sophisticated chatbots. ParlAI is a dialogue platform built inside of Facebook. It allows for the development of dialogue models within Facebook. These chatbots can “remember” information from session to session, and continually learn from user input. Stephen Roller is an engineer who helped build ParlAI, and he joins the show to discuss the history of chatbot applications and what the Facebook team is trying to accomplish with the development of ParlAI.

Image annotation is necessary for building supervised learning models for computer vision. An image annotation platform streamlines the annotation of these images. Well-known annotation platforms include Scale AI, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Crowdflower. There are also large consulting-like companies that will annotate images in bulk for you. If you have an application that requires lots of annotation, such as self-driving cars, then you might be compelled to outsource this annotation to such a company. SuperAnnotate is an image annotation platform that can be used by these image annotation outsourcing firms. This episode explores SuperAnnotate, and the growing niche of image annotation. Vahan and Tigran Petrosyan are the founders of SuperAnnotate, and join the show for today’s interview.

Business intelligence tooling allows analysts to see large quantities of data presented to them in a flexible interface including charts, graphs, and other visualizations. BI tools have been around for decades, and as the world moves towards increased open source software, the business intelligence tools are following that trend. Metabase is an open source business intelligence system that has been widely adopted by enterprises. It includes all the common tools that are expected from a business intelligence system: large-scale data ingestion, visualization software, and a flexible user interface. Sameer Al-Sakran is the CEO of Metabase and he joins the show to talk about Metabase’s design, engineering, and usage.

The US Army Cyber School is a training program which trains cyber soldiers and leaders to be adept in cyber military strategy and tactics. In order to teach these skills, the cyber school uses a system they call “courseware as code”, a workflow that allows updates to the curriculum in a reversion-friendly fashion similar to infrastructure-as-code. Ben Allison teaches at the US Army Cyber School and has put work into developing the training program and ongoing lesson plans. Ben joins the show to talk about how the US Army manages curriculum through courseware as code, and the work he has done to improve this workflow over time. Ben is also speaking at GitLab Commit 2020, GitLab’s upcoming conference. You can register for GitLab Commit yourself by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com/gitlabcommit.

Logs are the source of truth. If a company is sufficiently instrumented, the logging data that streams off of the internal infrastructure can be refined to tell a comprehensive story for what is changing across that infrastructure in real time. This includes logins, permissions changes, other events that could signal a potential security compromise. Datadog is a company that was built around log management, metrics storage, and distributed tracing. More recently, they have also built tools for monitoring the security of an organization. Detecting security threats can be achieved by alerting on known security risks, or pieces of information that could be indicative of a vulnerability. Marc Tremsal works at Datadog, and joins the show to talk through security monitoring. Full disclosure: Datadog is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

Dev.to has become one of the most popular places for developers to write about engineering, programming languages, and everyday life. For those who have not seen it, DEV is like a cross between Twitter and Medium, but targeted at developers. The content on DEV ranges from serious to humorous to technically useful. DEV contains a set of features which appeal to a developer community, such as the ability to embed code snippets in a post, but for the most part the entire app is generalizable to other types of communities. Hence, the motivation for “Forem”. Forem is an open source project to make it possible to spin up instances of communities that are like DEV, but for other communities such as mixed martial arts, or doctors. Ben Halpern is the creator of DEV and Forem, and he joins the show to talk about the DEV Community and his long-term goals for what the DEV team is building.

Drug trials can lead to new therapeutics and preventative medications being discovered and placed on the market. Unfortunately, these drug trials typically require animal testing. This means animals are killed or harmed as a result of needing to verify that a drug will not kill humans. Animal testing is unavoidable, but the extent to which testing needs to occur can be reduced by inserting machine learning models which simulate the effects of a drug on the human body. If the simulated effect is negative enough, animal testing doesn’t need to be run, thus no animals need to be harmed. Bryan Vicknair and Jason Walsh work at VeriSIM Life, a company which makes software simulations of animals. These simulations can be used to model drug testing, and change the workflow for drug trials. They join the show to talk through the mechanics of drug testing, and how VeriSIM Life fits into that workflow.

Across a company, there is a wide range of resources that employees need access to. Documents, S3 buckets, git repositories, and many others. As access to resources changes across the organization, a history of the changes to permissions can be useful for compliance and monitoring. Indent is a system for simplifying access management across infrastructure. Indent allows users within an organization to request access to resources, and keeps logs of the changes to who can access those resources. Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie are the founders of Indent, and they join the show to talk through the application of access control management, and the architecture of Indent itself, which has numerous interesting engineering decisions within it. Indent job opportunities

Acquisitions are part of the technology industry. A successful corporation will often have an “exit”, either going public or becoming acquired. And with each of these corporations, there is a set of stories that narrate the company from beginning to end. Acquired is a podcast that tells the stories of companies such as YouTube, Instagram, and PayPal. During each episode, the life of a company is explored from its beginning til the end. Media companies, chip companies, and software companies all take the center stage on various episodes. David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are the hosts of Acquired, and they join today’s show to talk about the podcast they started, a few business stories, and the podcast industry itself.

Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. At a low level, Ray provides fault-tolerant primitives that support applications running across multiple processors. At a higher level, Ray supports scalable reinforcement learning, including the common problem of hyperparameter tuning. In a previous episode, we explored the primitives of Ray as well as Anyscale, the business built around Ray and reinforcement learning. In today’s episode, Richard Liaw explores some of the libraries and applications that sit on top of Ray. RLlib gives APIs for reinforcement learning such as policy serving and multi-agent environments. Tune gives developers an easy way to do scalable hyperparameter tuning, which is necessary for exploring different types of deep learning configurations. In a future show, we will explore Tune in more detail.

Pandas is a Python data analysis library, and an essential tool in data science. Pandas allows users to load large quantities of data into a data structure called a dataframe, over which the user can call mathematical operations. When the data fits entirely into memory this works well, but sometimes there is too much data for a single box. The Modin project scales Pandas workflows to multiple machines by utilizing Dask or Ray, which are distributed computing primitives for Python programs. Modin builds an execution plan for large data frames to be operated on against each other, which makes data science considerably easier for these large data sets. Devin Petersohn started the Modin project, and he joins the show to talk about data science with Python, and his work in the Berkeley RISELab.

A large codebase cannot be searched with naive indexing algorithms. In order to search through a codebase the size of Uber’s it is necessary to build a much more sophisticated indexing system than simple pure text search. SourceGraph is a system for universal code search. It allows developers to more easily onboard to a new codebase, make large refactors, and perform other tasks. SourceGraph can integrate with source control systems, IDEs, and other tools to fit comfortably into an engineer’s workflow. Beyang Liu is a co-founder of SourceGraph and he joins the show to talk about how codebases can become large and unwieldy, and the tooling that SourceGraph offers to make these codebases easier to work with.

Users do not use web applications in the way that you might expect. And it is not easy to get the data that is necessary to get a full picture. But a newer API within browsers does make this more possible by capturing DOM mutations. The change capture of these DOM mutations can be stored for replay in the future. After being stored, this change capture can be retrieved and replayed. That allows for comprehensive frontend monitoring, which has been built into a product called FullStory. Michael Morrissey is the CTO of FullStory, and he joins the show to talk about how session capture works, and the architecture of FullStory–how sessions get saved, stored and retrieved. In a previous show we talked about LogRocket, a product which does something similar.

Managing microservices becomes a challenge as the number of services within the organization grows. With that many services comes more interdependencies–downstream and upstream services that may be impacted by an update to your service. One solution to this problem: a dashboard and newsfeed system that lets you see into the health and changes across your services. With this kind of system, you can avoid accidentally shipping code that will impact other service owners. It can also help with testing, giving you an end-to-end picture for how a test can impact other services. Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta are co-founders of Cortex, a system for managing your services. Anish and Ganesh join the show to talk about their work building Cortex, and the value that it provides to the companies that use it. In a previous show we covered a company called Effx, which does something similar.

ADP has been around for more than 70 years, fulfilling payroll and other human resources services. Payroll processing is a complex business, involving the movement of money in accordance with regulatory and legal strictures. From an engineering point of view, ADP has decades of software behind it, and a bright future of a platform company used by thousands of companies. Balancing the maintenance of old code while charting a course with the new projects is not a simple task. Tim Halbur is the CTO of ADP, and he joins the show to talk through how engineering works at ADP, and how the organization builds for the future of the company while maintaining the code of the past.

Software companies can be funded in a variety of ways: venture capital, self-funding, and debt, among others. In order to receive financing, a company is evaluated on its ability to generate future cash flows. After all, a valuation is a number that summarizes the present value of future cash flows. Determining that valuation number is a complicated, subjective process. If the valuation can be determined more intelligently and objectively, then smarter financing decisions can be made. This is the reasoning behind the company Capital, which aims to build a better modeling system for evaluating companies. Blair Silverberg and Chris Olivares are founders of Capital, and they join the show to explore the modeling process for valuations, and their strategy for doing this with their software models.

GitHub has been a social network for developers for many years. Most social networks are centered around mobile applications, but GitHub sits squarely in a developer’s browser-based desktop workflow. As a result, the design of a mobile app for GitHub is less straightforward. GitHub did acquire a popular mobile client called GitHawk, which was developed by Ryan Nystrom. Since joining GitHub, Ryan has worked on a new mobile app for GitHub, along with a team of engineers including Brian Lovin. Ryan and Brian both join the show to discuss GitHub mobile, and how they designed, architected, and built the app. There is no company quite like GitHub–a social network combined with a version control system that provides a critical utility. All this made for an interesting episode about a one-of-a-kind mobile product.

A service mesh provides routing, load balancing, policy management, and other features to a set of services that need to communicate with each other. The mesh can simplify operations across these different services by providing an interface to configure them. There are lots of different vendors who offer service mesh technology: AWS has AppMesh, Google has Istio (which is open source), Buoyant has Linkerd (which is also open source), and HashiCorp has Consul Connect. Unfortunately, these service meshes do not all play well together. And at a large enough company, different teams will be setting up different service meshes. So it would be useful for services in those different meshes to be able to communicate with each other. Luke Kysow is an engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Consul Connect, and he joins the show to discuss service mesh usage, adoption, and possible strategies for maintaining multiple service meshes within a single organization.

Netflix runs all of its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. This includes business logic, data infrastructure, and machine learning. By tightly coupling itself to AWS, Netflix has been able to move faster and have strong defaults about engineering decisions. And today, AWS has such an expanse of services that it can be used as a platform to build custom tools. Metaflow is an open source machine learning platform built on top of AWS that allows engineers at Netflix to build directed acyclic graphs for training models. These DAGs get deployed to AWS as Step Functions, a serverless orchestration platform. Savin Goyal is a machine learning engineer with Netflix, and he joins the show to talk about the machine learning challenges within Netflix, and his experience working on Metaflow. We also talk about DAG systems such as AWS Step Functions and Airflow.

WordPress has been a dominant force in the world of online publishing for many years because of how battle-tested it is. WordPress is the definitive leader in CMS technology. But there have always been alternatives. Drupal, Ghost, and other open source CMSes. More recently, there has been an emergence of the headless CMS, such as Contentful, which decouples the CMS backend from the frontend presentation layer. Strapi is a popular open source headless CMS. Pierre Burgy is the founder of Strapi, and he joins the show to talk about the CMS category, the role that Strapi fills, and the technology behind Strapi.