Software Engineering Daily

DNS stands for domain name system. This is the naming system that maps the entire internet. It associates information with domain names. More specifically, DNS specifies mappings between numerical IP addresses and domain names. Most engineers know these basic facts about DNS, but they may not know how much engineering a complex company like Etsy or Zappos puts into their DNS configuration. Dynamic DNS allows for intelligent response, so that a resource is served from the most efficient place–even in the face of a DDoS attack, or just routine failure of cloud servers. Phil Stanhope is the VP of technology at Oracle Dyn and he joins the show to explain how modern DNS works and the role of a DNS provider. Full disclosure: Dyn is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Video object segmentation allows computer vision to identify objects as they move through space in a video. The DAVIS challenge is a contest among machine learning researchers working off of a shared dataset of annotated videos. The organizers of the DAVIS challenge join the show today to explain how video object segmentation models are trained and how different competitors take part in the DAVIS challenge. A good companion to this episode is our discussion of Convolutional Neural Networks with Matt Zeiler. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: [email protected] Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

On January 31st 2017, GitLab experienced a major outage of their online repository hosting service. The primary database server experienced data loss due to a combination of malicious spam attacks and engineering mistakes that occurred while trying to respond to those spam attacks. GitLab responded to the event transparently. The company put up a postmortem describing the event in detail. In subsequent posts, GitLab expressed sympathy for the employee who made engineering mistakes that led to the deletion of data. The employee was not judged or disciplined for an understandable error. The response from the developer community was very positive. Engineers know that building cloud services is hard. Engineering is as much about avoiding errors as it is about appropriately responding to the inevitable mistakes. GitLab is a developer platform that combines repository hosting with several other features–issue tracking, code review, and CD. Today’s guest is Pablo Carranza, who works on infrastructure at GitLab. In this episode, he walks us through GitLab’s product, the engineering stack, and a postmortem of the outage. We also discuss working at Amazon, and the importance of postmortems, which I first encountered at Amazon. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Different databases have different access patterns. Key-value, document, graph, and columnar databases are useful under different circumstances. For example, if you are a bank, and you have a database of customers and the transactions they have performed, the ideal access pattern for aggregating the total amount of all transactions might be a columnar store. If the transaction amounts are all in one column, it helps to have all of the columnar entries close together on disk. But if you want to look at your bank as a social network, and you want to be able to map how money flows between the different people who use your bank, you might want to map your data as a graph database. That would make it easier to query for the connections across the different users in the bank. CosmosDB is a database from Microsoft that allows for multiple data models and multiple well-defined consistency models. Today’s guest Andy Hoh is a product manager at Azure CosmosDB and he joins the show to describe the product. Microsoft unveiled CosmosDB at Build, their annual developer conference, which is where I performed this interview. It was a pleasure hanging out at Build in the podcast booths they set up, so thanks to Microsoft for inviting me.

With a fast-growing field like data science, it is important to keep some amount of skepticism. Tools can be overhyped, buzzwords can be overemphasized, and people can forget the fundamentals. If you have bad data, you will get bad results in your experimentation. If you don’t know what statistical approach you want to take to your data, it doesn’t matter how well you know Spark or TensorFlow. And if you aren’t passionate about the work you are doing, you are unlikely to finish the projects you start (whether we are talking data science or otherwise). Kyle Polich hosts the Data Skeptic podcast, a show at the intersection of data science and skepticism. As a podcaster, Kyle takes himself seriously and is prepared for his shows–which I admire. Having met him recently at the Microsoft Build conference, he’s a great guy and I look forward to doing more podcasts with him in the future. In this episode, Kyle is interviewed by Sid Ramesh, a data engineering correspondent for Software Engineering Daily. https://dataskeptic.com http://openhouseproject.co

Apple controls the iOS ecosystem. As an accident of history, Apple also controls the podcasting ecosystem. Unlike most ecosystems within Apple’s dominion, podcasts remain open. A podcaster merely has to record an mp3, distribute it via RSS feed, and submit that RSS feed to the iTunes podcast portal. Podcasting has thrived in recent years, but very few technology companies have managed to take advantage of that growth. Libsyn is the most popular place to host a podcast. Libsyn is a combination of a CDN, a hosting service, analytics, and place to get an RSS feed for a podcaster. There have been many clones of Libsyn over the years, but the company remains the industry standard. For people who are confused–iTunes does not host any audio files. It is just an index of feeds. A podcaster needs to host audio files somewhere in order to give iTunes access. Today’s guest Rob Walch joins the show to talk about podcasts–including his podcast Today in iOS. I had a great time meeting Rob at the Microsoft Build conference. Special thanks to Bharat Bhat for organizing the podcast booths at Microsoft Build.

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 company brokering that relationship. Andre Staltz works on Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer system for social graphs, identity, and messaging. Scuttlebutt is used by a group of open-source hackers, many of whom live off-grid and do not have constant access to the Internet. In this episode, we discuss why someone would want a peer-to-peer social network, how to build one, and the progress that has been made on Scuttlebutt by some of the most talented open-source engineers in the world. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Everyone in the world should have some basic level of guaranteed healthcare. This is not controversial. But what should that basic level of healthcare be? Should it extend into the later years of your life, when the majority of your health costs are incurred? And how much has modern technology driven down the cost of what it should cost to treat a patient? Healthcare today has lots of problems with bureaucracy and poorly aligned incentives. But the potential of vastly better healthcare is clear to technologists, and advances in software in hardware that have benefited other enterprises will eventually make their way into healthcare–reducing cost, improving oversight, and leading to better health. Watsi is a non-profit with the goal of seeing a world with universal healthcare. Watsi facilitates crowdfunding of patients who need low-cost, high-impact treatment. Y-Combinator Research recently funded a study in collaboration with Watsi to study using technology to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. Thomas Bukowski is a software engineer with Watsi, and he joins me for an interview about what universal healthcare means and what the roadmap to getting there might look like. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Relay is a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications. Facebook open sourced Relay around the same time they open sourced GraphQL, and Facebook expected Relay to be the more popular of the two projects. However, the reality was reversed. Open source companies like Meteor quickly began to build GraphQL tools and a few businesses were started around GraphQL. One year later, the excitement for GraphQL had completely surpassed the excitement for Relay which had aged poorly in a newborn ecosystem of GraphQL tooling. At the same time, Facebook was also starting to integrate Relay into their React Native apps. But Relay was performing poorly on low-end Android devices. This led the Relay team to the conclusion that they needed to rewrite Relay. Both to better fit into the growing GraphQL ecosystem, and to be built with performance in low-end React Native environments at the top of mind. Relay Modern is the new version of Relay. It was released to the open source community at this year’s F8. In this episode Caleb Meredith is joined by Lee Byron, the co-creator of GraphQL, and Joe Savona, a founding member of the Relay team, to discuss Relay Modern. The discussion includes a conversation about the commercial GraphQL ecosystem, the story of why Facebook decided Relay needed to be rewritten, and a look at the future of UI development from some trends seen in Relay Modern. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript. Sponsors

Healthcare is a complex business. Oscar is a company that wanted to build a new insurance provider–but realized that healthcare is so interconnected that in order to build a new insurance provider, realized it actually needed to build an entire healthcare business too, complete with patient management and facilities. Since Oscar is a modern technology company, the focus on customer service, engineering, and data management offers an optimistic view into what healthcare might look like in the near future. Every time a patient interacts with the healthcare system, their insurance provider collects data on that interaction. Isaac Councill helped architect the infrastructure at Oscar that manages and analyzes the patient data. In this show, we talk about the healthcare system, data engineering, and Apache Mesos, which Oscar uses to manage its applications.

Many companies are transitioning from a monolith to microservices architecture. Tools for cloud computing, containerization, and continuous delivery are making this easier. But there are still technological and organizational challenges that a company will encounter while making this transition. Cassandra Shum is an engineer with ThoughtWorks. She has worked with major financial institutions and other large companies to architect their migrations from monolith to microservices. Also, she regularly puts on workshops to engineers who are seeking to make this migration at the company they work at. In this episode, she describes some of her experiences and recommendations around transitioning from a monolith to microservices. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Cloud computing changed how we develop applications for the web. Over the last decade, engineers have been learning how to build software in this new paradigm. The costs have gone down, but our nodes can fail at any time. We no longer have to manage individual servers, but the layers of virtualization and containerization require new strategies for communicating between services. As we have adjusted to this new way of building applications, the term “cloud-native” has become a useful descriptor. Cloud native applications are modern distributed systems capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes. Open source projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Linkerd draw on the lessons of big technology companies like Google, Twitter, and SoundCloud. Engineers today don’t need to reinvent the key infrastructure of those companies. We can combine the open source cloud-native technologies and use them to build powerful systems. Dan Kohn is the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and he joins me for an interview about the projects within the CNCF, how they fit together, and the future of computing. Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about job searching brought to you by Indeed Prime. Measuring the Popularity of Kubernetes Using BigQuery Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Public data is not always so accessible. It is nice when you can request data simply by making an API call, but that is the exception rather than the rule–especially when we are talking about data managed by the government. Oil and gas drilling data falls into this category. Oseberg is a company that is building a tool for analyzing oil and gas data. Oseberg is a rich dashboard for knowledge workers to query and visualize the data. Evan Anderson is the CEO of Oseberg, and he joins me to discuss building a business where the data is hard to acquire. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service). The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good backend for chat tools. And so they started a chat-as-a-service tool, for people who wanted to include chat in their applications. And that led them to the fundamental realization that chat is actually representative of a broader category of real-time synchronization problems. Firebase was eventually acquired by Google. Doug Stevenson is a senior developer advocate with Google and the host of Meet Firebase, a YouTube talk show about Firebase. It was a pleasure to sit down for a conversation with him, especially because I recently started using Firebase in my own application as a backend for real-time chat. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

When you purchase an ebook you must agree to the Terms of Service that tell you what you can do with it. What is actually in that terms of service? What are you agreeing to when you buy an ebook? The answers might surprise you. In this episode, Srini Kadamati interviews Chris Groskopf on how the rise of digital products has eroded the idea of traditional ownership. They discuss digital ownership from the point of view of the legal system, consumers, and the companies creating these products. Chris Groskopf is a data journalist who uses data, graphics, and storytelling to build compelling news experiences. He’s worked on multiple pioneering teams at organizations like the Chicago Tribune and NPR. He’s currently the first data editor at Quartz, a digital-first Atlantic publication, where he’s written about how complex systems like the stock market fail and how most of the world’s art is locked away in museums. Outside of journalism, he’s created multiple Python data libraries, like agate, proof, and csvkit. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Artsy is an online art marketplace. This might sound like a simple engineering problem–you just set up a basic ecommerce site, list some pieces of art, and start making money, right? The art world is complicated. There are four major pillars: patrons, art fairs, galleries, and auctions. Bringing these different parts online is not trivial. And in order to do so, Artsy has to work with the existing ecosystem. It is not like the taxi industry, where you can aggressively compete against the pre-existing businesses. The art world is built around relationships and trust. The engineering is hard too. An art auction results in a transaction for millions of dollars. In this way, building an auction system is like building a trading system. Latency needs to be very low, and you can’t make any mistakes or else customers could suffer to the tune of millions of dollars. Daniel Doubrovkine is the CTO of Artsy, and he joins me to describe the complexities of the art market and the engineering challenges that come with building a software company around it. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

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 is too human to be automated. The game space of poker is different than that of Go. It has 10^160 different situations–which is more than the number of atoms in the universe. And the game space keeps getting bigger as the stack sizes of the two competitors gets bigger. But it is still possible for a computer to beat a human at calculating game theory optimal decisions–if you approach the problem correctly. Libratus was developed by CMU professor Tuomas Sandholm, along with my guest today Noam Brown. The Libratus team taught their AI the rules of poker, they gave it a reward function (to win as much money as possible), and they told it to optimize that reward function. Then they had Libratus train itself with simulations. After enough training, Libratus was ready to crush human competitors, which it did in hilarious, entertaining fashion. There is a video from Engadget on YouTube about the AI competing against professional humans. In this episode, Noam Brown explains how they built Libratus, what it means for poker players, and what the implications are for humanity–if we can automate poker, what can’t we automate?

Many countries in the developing world are undergoing a technological revolution which is shaping how they tackle problems around infrastructure, health, education and finance. Young people are at the forefront of developing solutions to the problems in the developing world. These young people creating technology and businesses to foster innovation and growth. Countries in the Middle East are no exception to this. Despite the difficulties the region faces such as the wars in Syria and Yemen, its populations are well-informed, plugged in and are using technology to build the future of their societies. In the book Startup Rising published in 2013, Washington D.C.- and New York City-based entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Schroeder wrote about how the rest of the world, especially the West, needed to wake up to what was happening in the Middle East. In today’s episode, Chris talks to Carl Mungazi about what he has seen throughout his travels in the Middle East. He discusses the successes and challenges faced by the entrepreneurs who shared their stories with him and what this means for those watching in the West. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Convolutional neural networks are a machine learning tool that uses layers of convolution and pooling to process and classify inputs. CNNs are useful for identifying objects in images and video. In this episode, we focus on the application of convolutional neural networks to image and video recognition and classification. Matt Zeiler is the CEO of Clarifai, an API for image and video recognition. Matt takes us through the basics of a convolutional neural network–you don’t need any background in machine learning to understand the content of the episode. He also discusses the subjective aspects of image and video recognition, and some of the tactics Clarifai has explored. This is far from a solved problem. Matt also discusses the infrastructure of Clarifai–how they use Kubernetes, how models are deployed, and how models are updated. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view the transcript for this episode.

Software consultancies solve problems involving management and software engineering. A large company might hire a software consulting company to give an external opinion on software architecture, or on an organizational structure. Sometimes a consultancy is brought in to help integrate a new technology, or do a major refactoring. Scaling a software consultancy to meet the varying demands of clients presents a unique challenge. Software companies that make money from media, or software-as-a-service, or advertising technology are primarily focused on scaling the technology. For a software consulting business, scaling and updating the team is arguably more important than any particular piece of software. Rachel Laycock is the head of technology for ThoughtWorks North America. She joins the show to discuss how to manage and grow a large software consulting organization. It’s a great discussion of culture, technology, and how the nature of work is changing. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Let’s get on with the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Suddenly, automation is changing our world faster than anyone anticipated. For technologists, the world is becoming convenient and high-leverage. For non-technologists, the job market is evaporating. Haseeb Qureshi and Quincy Larson join me for a roundtable discussion on automation, jobs, and artificial intelligence. Haseeb and I have had numerous discussions about this topic before, and Quincy is the founder of Free Code Camp, which teaches people to learn programming for free. If there is one upside of all these jobs being automated away, its that it will lead to massive user growth for Free Code Camp. I enjoyed talking to Quincy and Haseeb as always. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Let’s get on with the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

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 partner at Y-Combinator. He wrote an article entitled Hacking DNA: The Story of CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive. Since Geoff is not a biologist, he is the perfect person to explain CRISPR to an audience of non-biologists. Since he is an investor, he is also great at explaining the pace at which CRISPR might make it to market, and how it might converge with some of the other futuristic trends we are seeing so regularly today. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

The Washington Post was acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2013. Since then, the newspaper has started thinking more like a software company, opting to build new software rather than buy off-the-shelf third party solutions. Arc Publishing is a CMS built by The Washington Post to produce and display content. When you visit washingtonpost.com, you are viewing a site built with Arc Publishing. The Washington Post has also brought its advertising technology in-house. Jarrod Dicker is the head of commercial product and technology at The Washington Post. He joins the show to discuss the transformation that has occurred since Bezos purchased the company. We also explore the problems in digital advertising that have been covered in recent episodes of Software Engineering Daily. Thanks to listener Mani Gandham for introducing me to Jarrod, and if you have a suggestion for a guest you want to hear, please send me an email. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Let’s get on with the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store.

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 podcasts, like most podcasters, I used a Skype plugin. There were a number of inconveniences in the podcaster workflow from Skype. Zencastr solved all of these by creating a podcast recording tool in the browser and presenting a simple user interface. Josh Nielsen joins the show to talk about the challenges of building a podcasting tool in the browser, and the new technologies that make it easier, such as WebRTC. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download the transcript for this episode.

Listeners have had difficulty finding the Software Engineering Daily content they want to listen to. We are creating new podcast feeds to address this. The content on each podcast feed is mutually exclusive from the other feeds, except for the main feed and “Greatest Hits.” You can now find the following podcast feeds in iTunes and Google Play: Every new episode goes into 2 feeds: An episode can potentially be in 3 feeds if it is also in Greatest Hits. If you subscribe to all of the feeds including Software Engineering Daily (main feed), you will receive 2 notifications for every new episode. With the different feeds, we hope you can curate your own ideal SE Daily listening experience. Thanks for listening to Software Engineering Daily and please let us know what you think of the new feeds. A few recommendations: We hope the rollout of these new feeds goes smoothly. If you have issues, please email me, notify us in Slack, or tweet at us.

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 are data-intensive rather than compute-intensive. Netflix needs to know how to store and cache large video files, and stream them to users quickly. Twitter needs to update user news feeds with a fanout of the president’s latest tweet. These operations are simple with small amounts of data, but become complicated with a high volume of users. Martin Kleppmann is the author of Data Intensive Applications, an O’Reilly book about how to use modern data tools to solve modern data problems. His book includes high-level discussions about architectural strategy, and lower level discussions like how leader election algorithms can create problems for a data intensive application. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Most popular music today uses a computer as the central instrument. A single musician is often selecting the instruments, programming the drum loops, composing the melodies, and mixing the track to get the right overall atmosphere. With so much work to do on each song, popular musicians need to simplify–the result is that pop music today consists of simple melodies without much chord progression. Magenta is a project out of Google Brain to design algorithms that learn how to generate art and music. One goal of Magenta is to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation. Another goal is to build a community of artists, coders, and machine learning researchers who can collaborate. Engineers today are happy to outsource server management to a cloud service provider. Similarly, a musician can use Magenta for creation of a melody, so she can focus on other aspects of a song, such as instrumentation. Doug Eck is a research scientist at Google. In today’s episode, we explore the Magenta project and the future of music. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download this show’s transcript.

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 is a robot assistant similar to Amazon Echo or Google Home. It was built by Abhishek Singh as part of his thesis. Abhishek wanted to explore the border between inanimate electronics and the electronics we personify. Peeqo is a cylindrical tube that bends slightly, like the human neck. At its head, it has a smartphone-sized screen that displays gifs to reflect its feedback visually. Abhishek also has a company called Svrround, which makes 360 degree video experiences. We explore the changes to engineering that allow someone to be involved in two cutting-edge projects at once despite having very few employees working with him. This was an energizing conversation, and I greatly enjoyed meeting Abhishek. I hope to have him on again in the future. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Ransomware uses software to extort people. A piece of ransomware might arrive in your inbox looking like a PDF, or a link to a website with a redirect. Ransomware is often distributed using social engineering. The email address might resemble someone you know, or a transactional email from a company like Uber or Amazon. Tim Gallo and Allan Liska are authors of the O’Reilly book Ransomware: Defending Against Digital Distortion. They join me to describe the 5 stages of ransomware: deployment, installation, command and control, destruction, and extortion. Tim and Allan describe conditions under which it might make sense to pay the extortion, and some frightening recent cases of ransomware impacting the real world. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download the Ransomware transcript.

Spring Framework is an application framework for Java and JVM languages. Spring was originally built around dependency injection, but grew to become an entire ecosystem of tools and plugins for Java developers. Spring was originally released 15 years ago, and since then a lot has changed around application development. For example, many engineers deploy applications to the cloud in microservices architectures. The expectations around frameworks has also changed, with the rise of Django, Ruby on Rails, and NodeJS. Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of building production-ready Spring applications. By taking an opinionated view, Spring Boot gets engineers up and running faster than the traditional Spring framework. Josh Long is a Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal and he joins the show to discuss Spring Boot and the history of the Spring Framework. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download the Spring Boot transcript.

The online advertising industry is a giant casino. Giant technology companies are the casino owners, online publishers are the casino employees, the brand advertisers are the victims who keep returning to the casino to lose their money, and the small adtech companies are the sharks who make lots of money exploiting the inefficiencies of the system. One of these smaller adtech companies is called eZanga. eZanga sells “pre-filtered traffic.” Pre-filtered traffic means traffic that will pass through bot detection filters. A publisher can purchase traffic to their website so that the ads on that website get viewed. eZanga describes this technology as “marketing,” and has won a giant contract with United States government to handle advertising for the GSA. Advertising fraud does not just promote misinformation–it is now taking our tax dollars and spending it on paid traffic. If any of this is confusing to you, don’t worry. We explain it all in today’s episode with Shailin Dhar, the advertising fraud expert who wrote a detailed report about eZanga and its contract with the US Government. Shailin was previously on the show to give an overview of ad fraud, and what his work as an ad fraud investigator entails. Also, Shailin will be a speaker at our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. Ad Fraud in Our Own Backyard: The Dhar Method Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download the eZanga transcript.

Software Engineering Daily examines the world through the lens of software engineering. In most episodes, an expert in a particular topic joins the show as a guest, and we go into deep technical detail. Occasionally we like to do episodes where we survey a collection of topics. In today’s topic roundtable, Caleb Meredith and Courtland Allen join me for a discussion of several questions: would it make sense for Facebook to build an operating system? Does online advertising work? How can you work productively on an engineering company with your brother as a co-founder? Courtland is the founder of IndieHackers.com, which was recently acquired by Stripe. Caleb Meredith is the lead JavaScript correspondent of Software Engineering Daily. It was a blast talking to both of them, and we plan to do more round table episodes in the future. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to download the Topic Roundtable transcript.

Bitcoin is underappreciated even to this day. The public focus is usually on the speculative value, but Bitcoin has functional value as a technology platform. If I want to make 100 transactions with my bank for 1 cent, the bank won’t allow it. Our current financial infrastructure is not set up for micropayments. Bitcoin is built with micropayments in mind. As Bitcoin works through its governance issues and its scalability problems, we will see gradual improvement in financial liquidity between people and machines. 21 is a company that has raised $120M to make Bitcoin useful to developers. This is a long term project, and the first step of that project is to get Bitcoin in the hands of users. To fulfill that end, 21 is developing services that encourage people to make small digital transactions. The first service is the 21 messaging service, where users can pay to send messages to people who are unlikely to respond to an unsolicited email otherwise. For example, if I want to send an email to a venture capitalist pitching my company, I am more likely to get a response if I pay that venture capitalist $20 to read my message through 21, rather than if I sent a cold email from my email address. Balaji Srinivasan is the CEO of 21, and he joins me for a conversation about the potential of Bitcoin and the objectives of the company he is building. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

The word “microservices” started getting used after a series of events–companies were moving to cloud virtual machines. Those VMs got broken up into containers, and the containers can fit to the size of the service. Services that are more narrowly defined take up smaller containers, and can be packed more densely into the virtual machines–hence the term “microservices.” As this change to software architecture has occurred, the DevOps movement has encouraged organizations to have better relationships between development and operations. Continuous deployment leads to fewer painful outages. Improved monitoring tools make it easier for developers to take on some of the pain that was previously centralized in operations. Several months ago, I attended the Microservices Practitioner Summit, which brings together engineers who are working with microservices at their companies. The conference was organized by Austin Gunter and Richard Li of Datawire. In this episode, they joined me for a conversation about microservices. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Swift is a language that is most commonly used to write apps for Apple client devices, such as iPhones. Since being released in 2014, Swift has become one of the most popular languages due to its high performance and developer ergonomics. In 2015, Swift was open sourced, creating the opportunity for Swift to be used outside of the Apple ecosystem. If you write an iPhone app today, your frontend is in Swift and your backend is probably in NodeJS, Java, or Ruby. Engineers are working to port Swift to the server so that the Swift developer experience is isomorphic: the same language on the backend and the frontend. Chris Bailey is an engineer at IBM working on Kitura, a Swift web framework. In this episode, we discuss the history of Swift, why it is so appealing to developers, and why Swift could become a server side language with as much popularity as Java. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Most people in Africa never had a desktop computer. The first computer they owned was a smart phone. This is why Africa is referred to as a “leap frog” place with regard to computers–Africa leapfrogged the desktop to the smart phone. The banking system in Africa also followed a trajectory that is different than the West. Westerners are used to banking on their desktop computers. African e-commerce has developed around the smartphone as the computer for banking. As a result, Africa is in a technological development phase with tremendous opportunities in the financial sector and beyond. Mymookh.com is a Kenyan end-to-end payment platform that allows small- to medium-sized businesses to easily set up online stores and sell to consumers directly from their social media pages. It is one of the many startups across Africa leveraging the accessibility of mobile payments to meet the particular needs of merchants and consumers there. Africa’s development and use of mobile payment systems is expected to grow as more countries on the continent create and adopt this technology. In this episode, George Gachui, co-founder of Mymookh, talks to Carl Mungazi about how Kenya became a leading player in the mobile payment space with its m-pesa system. He explains how it has revolutionized the way Kenyans approach commerce and payment technology and discusses the challenges of creating a unified platform system that transcends borders and currencies. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Bots on the internet can be malicious, helpful, and everything in between. A bot that responds to all of your tweets might call you a socialist–that is malicious. Google crawls the web to index Google search. That is helpful. Social media marketing bots schedule 200 Twitter posts to go out throughout the day. That is either a little annoying or a little helpful depending on who you are. Bots are being used to amplify political viewpoints. An amplified viewpoint can serve as a gravity well for like-minded individuals, and help a sparsely supported political cause find its footing. Sometimes that amplified viewpoint is completely fictional or unfalsifiable. Real people believe that Hillary Clinton is a lizard alien because they have seen that story shared by enough Twitter bots. So-called “fake news” is a topic that has been discussed on so many other podcasts. What is not reported is the connection between link bait and advertising fraud. When a botnet is able to make an article go viral, thousands of people organically click on the link to that article. That organic traffic is used to launder fake clicks. These bots that are spreading “fake news” might be controlled by conspiratorial Russians. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Anyone who wants to make money in online advertising fraud is incentivized to make salacious media–whether it is real or fake. Samuel Woolley is the director of research at Political Bots. He works with Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet that seeks to make the Internet safer. In today’s episode, we talk about political bots, advertising fraud, and the connection between the two. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

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. Facebook has high standards for what they are willing to release. Tom Occhino manages the React team at Facebook and works closely with engineers to determine what projects make sense to open source. In this episode, Preethi Kasireddy interviews Tom about how Facebook thinks about open source–what went right with React, why it makes sense for Facebook to continue to release new open source projects, and how full-time employees at Facebook interact with that open source codebase. We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup. Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices — JSConf EU 2013

The Internet is decreasing in privacy and increasing in utility. Under some conditions, this tradeoff makes sense. We publicize our profile photo so that people know what we look like. Under other conditions, this tradeoff does not make sense. We do not want a television that costs less to purchase because it is silently recording all of the conversations that take place in the room and selling them to the highest bidder. The example of the TV that records everything you say (which is a real thing) illustrates a tradeoff of the Internet. The advertising industry pushes us towards lower marginal costs for products and services in exchange for less privacy. Someday we will live in a world where it will be easy for consumers to control the dial on the tradeoff between privacy and the price of their services. Until then, we have almost zero control over what information the advertising surveillance industrial complex knows about us. Bill Budington is a security engineer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In today’s episode, Bill describes some of the current techniques used by the advertising industry to track your activity through the web. Bill works on encryption tools as well as Panopticlick, a project that allows users to see what trackers they are vulnerable to. Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search index. Philipp Krenn from Elastic joins the show today to discuss how search works and how Elasticsearch scales. We use Wikipedia as a running example for how a query is processed and how documents are stored. If you’ve ever wondered how search works–or if your company uses Elasticsearch and you want to know more about it–this is a great episode for you.

React Native has unlocked native mobile development to web engineers who may now apply their skills to build iOS and Android applications in JavaScript. For the first time, cross platform JavaScript-based applications feel as if they were written in the native language of choice for the platforms. Businesses who choose to adopt React Native for their native app development also see great benefits such as the ability to push new JavaScript code without going through the app store review process, and the ability to share code and business behaviors across the iOS and Android platforms. Expo is building a cross-platform native runtime for React Native. Expo brings the benefits of deployment and iterative development to native without sacrificing any user experience costs. Expo plans to do this with their native SDK, custom development environment, and tools built in collaboration with Facebook like create-react-native-app. React Native has the incredible potential to revolutionize all user interface development with its core set of cross-platform UI primitives, and React’s popular declarative rendering pattern. So in this episode Brent Vatne and Adam Perry join Caleb Meredith to first discuss Expo and the future of React Native to try and answer the question: can React Native become the one UI framework to rule them all?

Every program gets compiled down to 1s and 0s before it can be executed against hardware. Before being translated to machine code, programs that are written in a language like Rust, Swift, or Java spend time in an intermediate representation. In Java, this intermediate representation is Java bytecode. Many different languages–such as Scala–translate to Java bytecode, because there has been lots of optimization written to speed up Java bytecode. Java bytecode runs on the JVM–the Java Virtual Machine. LLVM is a project that draws inspiration from the Java Virtual Machine. LLVM originally meant “low level virtual machine” but today it is just called LLVM and describes a set of compiler tools. In today’s interview with Morgan Wilde, we explore how compilers work, how different processor hardware architectures present a problem for compilers, and why LLVM’s intermediate representation creates a layer of interoperability for any language that compiles down to that intermediate representation. Whether you are new to compilers or have experience, this episode will appeal to you. Morgan is an excellent teacher and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through. He has a 30-minute YouTube video–A Brief Introduction to LLVM that I highly recommend.

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, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled into complacency, what does that say about the rest of the United States? American exceptionalism has faltered and complacency has risen in its wake. Today’s guest Tyler Cowen is an economist and author. His new book The Complacent Class is the final book in a trilogy that describes a decline of American output and a decline in American mindset. Complacent America has lost its ability to assess risk. Children are prevented from playing tag for risk of injury. College students protest against speakers who might present challenging ideas. The number of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65% since the 1980’s–millennials are too busy going to business school to start businesses. In his books, Tyler weaves together history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. He presents hard data about many different fields, and theorizes about how the trends in those fields relate to each other. He also has a podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and in this episode I tried to mirror his interview style. If you like this episode, you should check out his show–he has interviewed people like Ezra Klein, Peter Thiel, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Cryptocurrencies are not only a financial instrument–they are a new platform for building applications. The blockchain allows for new solutions to digital property management, micropayments, hedge fund incentives, and ad fraud. The cryptocurrency platforms with the most traction are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leader and is going through some growing pains with governance issues. Ethereum is led by the charismatic Vitalik Buterin. Bitcoin and Ethereum are not competing instruments. They fulfill different technical purposes. Under current conditions of algorithm development and network infrastructure, neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum can accomplish the dreams that will one day be realized, because of the problem of distributing transaction information across nodes in the system. If we compared cryptocurrencies to the Internet, we would not even be in the days of dial-up yet. ConsenSys is a venture production studio that is working on several projects within the blockchain space. Mike Goldin is a software developer with ConsenSys and joins the show to talk about blockchain applications in 2017–where we are and where we are going. It was a wide ranging conversation and I hope to have Mike back in the future so we can go deeper on some of the topics we glossed over.

There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs). These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses. He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his mission, with an emphasis on making the right information easily accessible without having to download more than necessary. He has traveled to meet with leaders in the field to promote standards and to make APIs easier to create and to consume. In this episode, Andy joins Dave Rael for a conversation about API design standards, what makes for a good API, and steps in moving the broader technical community toward more useful and secure APIs.

In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include: We always want more feedback and questions. Please email me, join Slack, and fill out our survey!

A hedge fund is a collection of investors that make bets on the future. The “hedge” refers to the fact that the investors often try to diversify their strategies so that the direction of their bets are less correlated, and they can be successful in a variety of future scenarios. Engineering-focused hedge funds have used what might be called “machine learning” for a long time to predict what will happen in the future. Numerai is a hedge fund that crowdsources its investment strategies by allowing anyone to train models against Numerai’s data. A model that succeeds in a simulated environment will be adopted by Numerai and used within its real money portfolio. The engineers who create the models are rewarded in proportion to how well the models perform. Xander Dunn is a software engineer at Numerai and in this episode he explains what a hedge fund is, why the traditional strategies are not optimal, and how Numerai creates the right incentive structure to crowdsource market intelligence. This interview was fun and thought provoking–Numerai is one of those companies that makes me very excited about the future.

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 Brave browser. For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complex video games. With JavaScript falling short on its charge to be the “assembly language for the web” the four major browser vendors started collaborating on the WebAssembly project to allow programming languages a faster, lower level compile target when deploying to the web. Brendan is the CEO of Brave which aims to provide a faster and safer browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers by default in a new browser. The Brave browser is also helping publishers monetize in interesting new ways while also giving a share of ad revenue to its users. Caleb Meredith is the host of this show. He previously guest hosted a popular episode on Inferno, a fast, React-like JavaScript framework. As we bring on more guest hosts, please send us feedback. We want to know what every host is doing well, and what we can improve on.

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 apparent to outsiders with time. Amazon’s culture and business strategy were detailed in The Everything Store, a 2013 book by Brad Stone. I read The Everything Store before working at Amazon, then I read it a second time after working at Amazon. The book is an accurate and balanced depiction of Amazon’s ethos. Brad’s new book The Upstarts documents the rise of Uber and Airbnb, two companies with a similar controversial valence to Amazon. It was a pleasure to speak to Brad because I admire his engrossing storytelling as an author and his strategic analysis as a business journalist. After discussing business and technology with him, we explored journalism–Brad is senior executive editor at Bloomberg.

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 making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response will work before an actual catastrophe occurs? Kolton Andrus is CEO of Gremlin, a company that works on failure injection as a service. Gremlin is based on ideas around planned failure that Kolton learned from his years at Amazon and Netflix. We ended up talking as much about the culture of Netflix and Amazon as we did about how and why to build failure injection. It’s always nice to share war stories with other people who have worked at Amazon because the culture is so distinct. If you want to know more about Amazon’s culture, check out the episode tomorrow with Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store.