Software Engineering Daily

Diagnosing illness today requires the trained eye of a doctor. With machine learning, we might someday be able to diagnose illness using only a data set. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we are joined by David Kale, a researcher at the intersection of machine learning and clinical data. We discuss the machine learning and research techniques he is using to diagnose illnesses using neural networks, and we also talk about the challenges of performing data science in hospitals, where the data is mostly confidential. David will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.

Ruby on Rails has had the most commits made by its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. The next most frequent contributor to Rails is Aaron Patterson, our guest on today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily. Topics discussed in today’s episode include Ruby relative to JavaScript, Rails relative to Linux, and DHH relative to Tenderlove.

Microsoft and Amazon are the tech giants of the Pacific Northwest. These two companies shape Seattle technology, and Todd Bishop has been writing about them for over a decade. Todd is the co-founder of GeekWire, an online media company focused on technology in the Pacific Northwest. We talk about the past and present of Microsoft and Amazon, what it means for an engineering company to be good or evil, and what it’s like to be a software journalist.

Socket.io enables realtime bidirectional communication. But what does “realtime” actually mean? Today’s guest is Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Socket.IO, a widely used technology for client server communication. We discuss the nature of real-time apps like Uber and Google Docs, and talk about the API and usage of Socket.IO.

Technology careers are not as accessible to certain demographics, such as women. Sarah Allen is working to change that through education and outreach. Sarah Allen created RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, a pair of organizations working to make technology more accessible to people who are underrepresented in tech. RailsBridge workshops are a fun and free way to get started with Ruby, Rails or other technologies. RailsBridge was so successful that Sarah created Bridge Foundry, which has an even wider variety of free workshops, from Clojure to Go to Mobile. This is an inspirational episode of Software Engineering Daily, and is a great learning opportunity for anyone interested in building a community.

Continuous integration and deployment are important tools for modern software development. With continuous integration and deployment, individual engineers can push code without waiting to synchronize with the rest of the team on a big software release. Today on Software Engineering Daily, Flo Motlik, the CTO of Codeship, joins us to discuss continuous integration, dev ops, and microservices. In full disclosure, Codeship is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but we would be doing this interview whether or not that was the case, because Flo has a lot to say about software engineering. In this show, we get into conversations and case studies of how software teams take continuous deployment from theory into practice.

Monsanto is a company that is known for its chemical and biological engineering. It is less well known for its data science and software engineering teams. Tim Williamson is a data scientist at Monsanto, and on today’s show he talked about how he and a small group of engineers at Monsanto dramatically shifted the culture around data science-driven genetic engineering. In this episode, Tim explains how useful graph databases are for modeling the genetic lineages, and talks about how Monsanto manages simulations and experiments on their genomics software pipeline. Tim also talks about how just a few engineers can create a cultural shift within a large company like Monsanto using the leverage allowed by software.

This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a definition: a distributed system is a multiprocessor system in which the time required for interprocess communication is large compared to the time for events within a single processor–in other words, it takes longer for interprocess communication than it does for a process to look at its own memory. Alternatively, a distributed system is one in which processors communicate by sending messages. Leslie goes on to talk about how he became interested in distributed systems, and describes the story behind his paper about the Paxos algorithm. The goal of Paxos is to maintain consensus in an environment with unexpected faults (otherwise known as Byzantine faults). After the discussion of Paxos, Jeff asks Leslie about his recent talk “Thinking for Programmers,” which emphasizes the benefit of having a specification prior to writing actual code. “Specification” can mean a variety of things, but predicates and next-state relationships provide a mathematical rigor that is well-suited to distributed and concurrent systems. The conversation concludes with Jeff asking Leslie about how a programmer can build the mental resolve to work through a difficult problem.

Apache Spark is replacing MATLAB in the domain of computational neuroscience. The constraints of running MATLAB on a single machine can’t support the demands of neuroscience, which has huge collections of images and time-series data sets. Jeremy Freeman is a computational neuroscientist who is adopting Apache Spark to be able to analyze these giant data sets that do not fit on a single machine. But Apache Spark was not designed with neuroscience in mind. For this reason, Jeremy has helped to build several libraries on top of Spark. Thunder is a library for standard, distributed representation of data. Lightning is an API for reproducible web visualizations. These abstractions sit on top of Spark, and add a layer of usability. As it turns out, solving these problems for neuroscience have produced tools that are useful in a variety of other domains. In our discussion with Jeremy Freeman, we talk about Apache Spark, neuroscience, and the technological and cultural problems faced by traditional academic research.

University research produces numerous papers about software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the problems explored by these software engineering researchers have no actual application. These papers fall into The Black Hole of Software Engineering Research. Andy Ko is an associate professor at the University of Washington. When he worked as a CTO of AnswerDash, he experimented with some of the software engineering research coming out of academia and industry. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we discuss Andy’s results. Our conversation spans the topics of education, big companies, and startups.

NewSQL is a class of modern relational databases that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for OLTP, while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system. VoltDB is a NewSQL database, designed in part by Turing Award Winner Michael Stonebraker. Today’s guest is John Hugg, a founding engineer at VoltDB. Today’s show covers the internals of VoltDB, including concepts like tunable consistency, database replication, and the advantages of a deterministic logical log.

React is a set of technologies started by Facebook and open-sourced in 2013. Since then, it has become widely accepted as the best JavaScript library for building user-interfaces. A dedicated community around React has developed as well, and with any large software community, conferences are a necessity. React.js Conf is a yearly conference in San Francisco where React developers talk about the latest developments in the React ecosystem. React started with user interfaces, but has evolved to be so much more. From data flow patterns like Redux, to hardware libraries and virtual reality–React is no longer just a JavaScript library; it is a philosophy for how to build futuristic technologies today. Brent and Jeff discuss all of this, as well as Exponent, a web development platform for building native mobile apps with JavaScript – using React Native. Brent Vatne is the organizer of React.js Conf and a software engineer at Exponent.

Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was on the front lines of that war, back in 1992. Eric Sink was one of the original developers of Spyglass, a browser that was licensed to both Microsoft AND Netscape. If you want to understand why that happened, and what the inside story of the browser wars is, and what the business of selling browser licenses was like in 1992, check out this episode of Software Engineering Daily.

In this episode, Jeff and Jeremy discuss Internet.org and the criticism it has received from organizations like the EFF. Internet.org is a program created by Facebook whose purpose is to expand the reach of the internet by connecting people in developing nations like India. However, it has come under fire for its failure to provide “the whole internet” and limiting access to a subset of websites which have to be approved by Facebook. Critics call this a violation of net neutrality and argue that it betrays what the internet stands for – openness and fair access to all destinations. This episodes jumps into the nuances of the debate, with Jeff playing counterpoint to the EFF’s stance – that Internet.org is not the internet. Jeremy Malcolm is a technologist and lawyer who works for EFF’s international team on issues such as intellectual property, network neutrality, Internet governance, and trade.

Design is more important than ever. There are so many websites being created every day, that it is not enough to differentiate your product with rock solid engineering. Your product has to be beautiful, intuitive, and tested for usability. You don’t want all of the hard work of the product and engineering teams to go to waste, so on this episode, the focus is design. Tracy Osborn is the creator of WeddingLovely, a beautifully designed two sided marketplace website, where people who are getting married connect with wedding vendors. Today, Tracy discusses “design for nondesigners”. Whether you are an engineer, a marketer, or a business analyst, just learning a few simple tactics about design can take you far.

JavaScript is everywhere, on the browser, the server, and now on hardware. Finally–the Internet of Things is upon us — and it is powered by JavaScript. Even if you consider yourself a web developer, and you have no interest in “maker” culture, keep your eye on this space. Factories in Shenzhen are making better, more modular parts, and the same supply chain economics that are driving down the cost of smart phones and smart cars, will give hobbyist engineers all the simple hardware components they could ever need. This will power a future of proliferated devices that have internet connectivity and “talk” to each other to enable user experiences we wouldn’t dream of today. And naturally, with this will come problems that we cannot anticipate as well. On today’s episode, Andrew discusses how JavaScript can be used on hardware. Jeff and Andrew talk about the players in the hardware space, as well as how the big cloud players like AWS and Azure are positioning themselves to be the data lakes for the internet of things. Andrew is giving a talk about this at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to Fluent, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily. Andrew Chalkley is a hardware hobbyist, software engineer and a full-time teacher at Treehouse.

Disabled individuals account for over a billion people worldwide. This represents the world’s largest minority on the Web, with $220 billion in discretionary spending power in the United States alone. Yet, the accessible web is more than a financial issue – it is also a moral issue, and it is crucial that we make the web accessible to ensure an equitable information platform. Today’s guest Nic Steenhout joins us to explain how to develop software with accessibility in mind. At the upcoming Fluent Conference, he will be giving a talk entitled Don’t turn off that JavaScript just yet, referencing JavaScript’s history of causing accessibility problems. If you want to win a free ticket to Fluent, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily. Nic Steenhout is a software engineer and an accessibility consultant at Simply Accessible.

Reactive programming emphasizes writing code that is readily responsive to events. It is an increasingly popular paradigm with highly interactive websites like Netflix. It draws on the value of functional programming calls like map, reduce, and flatmap. Matt joins us today to chat about reactive programming, the observer pattern, and his thoughts on where the future is going. If you are a fan of functional programming or JavaScript, you will enjoy this show. Matt is also speaking at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to the conference, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily. Matt Podwysocki is the author ReactiveX JS and a software engineer at Microsoft.

Node.js powers an increasing number of applications in the modern web. As node’s popularity grew, npm evolved in parallel as its default package manager and it has become a robust system for sharing and developing node programs. Yet today, npm is growing beyond its roots, and poised to become a generalized framework for all kinds of workflows within web development. Laurie will be giving a talk at the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference. If you want to win a free ticket to the conference, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily. Laurie Voss is the CTO of npm, Inc.

Following the successful experiment of History of Hadoop, we are doing another Saturday experiment: an editorial podcast. Let us know your thoughts via Slack, Twitter, or email! Our podcast errs on the side of technical rigor. Whether the topic is distributed databases, microservices, Soylent, Uber, or Dwarf Fortress, we try to separate hype from substance, deferring the narrative to the guest. With that deference there is editorial objectivity on the part of Software Engineering Daily. One Slack channel member said “when Software Engineering Daily’s opinions are announced, that takes time away from the guest.” Fair enough. However, as with any journalistic organization, we have opinions. On SE Daily, we stream objectivity and batch subjectivity. This episode is willfully subjective. It has no guest. It is a monologue editorial inspired by Developer Tea. Immutable laws are rare in software engineering, and when an engineer claims to have found one, that engineer is usually regarded with skepticism. General principles are more welcome. In this post and podcast episode, I convey some loose philosophies about modern software engineering. These are strong opinions weakly held. I welcome debate and discussion. Software is a new field and nobody knows how to do it. If someone says you are unqualified and therefore you must do maintenance work, you should question that person. We have an upside down system where the people who are paid the least do the crappiest work. They tend to be young and naive. This is not an axiom. The narrative that is sold to young engineers by giant companies is the following: take your $80k/yr job, do the software maintenance which makes the company $1 million, and hate your life. After you have spent enough time in the first tier of the intellectual strip mine, we will make you an SDE 2, where you can do slightly higher level refactoring for $150k a year, which will make the giant company $5 million. This is what is called an arbitrage. We have an assembly line mindset left over from the industrial age. Software is more of an artisanship. Don’t believe that you are a replaceable cog. Don’t believe the one-size-fits-all interview process with whiteboarding problems. These serve to grind away your individuality and make you feel like an assembly line worker. The planning and design process is an art, but once the requirements are in place you can proceed more deterministically. The same is true for the other quantitative activities I have taken part in–poker, music, and writing. As Michael Rosenthal and I discussed, the question of art vs. science is the same question as strategy vs. tactics. I learned this very early on playing poker when I had to leave that career, and I had tightly coupled poker to my identity. If you make your job the same thing as who you are, then your self-worth is defined by those who are judging you in your job. Your job is a means to service your own higher purpose. When you take an action on your smartphone, there is latency before that action is ingested. Servers sometimes will lie to you, but servers tend towards eventual consistency. The world works the same way. In the short term, human systems lie to us all the time, but the world tends toward eventual consistency–the truth eventually presents itself. A decent analogy is the efficient market hypothesis: slowly efficient markets are an eventually consistent process. The world is a distributed system–what is the consequence of this? We have to do the arduous risk and reward calculations that are mandatory for every distributed systems programmer. Long-tail failures can and do occur. In a distributed system, we often prioritize safety over liveness. In a distributed operating system, the programmer takes all precaution to avoid data loss. Similarly, if a real life scenario presents a small probability of giant downside risk, you should take huge precaution. If someone offers you to roll a die with 1000...

Lin Clark is today’s guest on Software Engineering Daily, and she joins Jeff to talk about Code Cartoons, a webcomic that explains Facebook’s open source projects like Flux and Relay with the same elegance and creativity as XKCD. Lin explains why cartoons can be a surprisingly effective way to introduce technologies to people without the fuss and intimidation of written tutorials or documentation. At the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference, Lin Clark will be speaking about Code Cartoons and the technologies that have sprung up around React JS. Software Engineering Daily is giving away a free ticket to the Fluent 2016 conference, which takes place on March 8-10 in San Francisco. If you want to be entered to win this free ticket, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily and tag @fluentconf and @software_daily. Lin Clark is the creator of Code Cartoons, and a Senior Developer Tools Engineer at Mozilla.

Prepare for the post-browser world, says today’s guest Jonathan Stark. We are moving beyond the browser, into a world where the web is consumed by a variety of front ends. Jonathan is a speaker at the upcoming O’Reilly Fluent Conference in San Francisco, and you can win a free ticket to the conference. To be entered into a random drawing for that ticket, send us a tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily between now and February 22nd. Include the hashtag #fluentconf and and tag us @software_daily to make sure we can see your tweet. Fluent is a conference about the web platform–which certainly includes the browser, but also mobile apps, VR experiences, and smart objects connected to the web. In today’s episode, Jeff and Jonathan explore what adjustments developers should make in this post-browser world. Jonathan Stark is a mobile consultant who helps consumer brands thrive in the post-PC era.

You keep hearing about containers, and maybe you have even used Docker in production. Now, it’s time to move beyond Docker. In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, Steve Pousty talks about OpenShift, a platform from RedHat that helps engineers leverage the power of containers and the dev ops harmony of microservices. To hear these buzzwords, you can always listen to Software Engineering Daily. But to see these buzzwords demonstrated in live presentations, the 2016 O’Reilly Fluent Conference is coming up March 8-10 in San Francisco, and you can get a chance to win a free ticket by tweeting at us about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily. Include the hashtag #fluentconf and and tag us @software_daily to make sure we can see your tweet. Steve Pousty is a Developer Advocate (and PaaS Dust Spreader) at Red Hat.

In today’s episode of SEDaily, Jeff and Austin discuss why designing for a drunk user is a competitive advantage. Austin also explains why engineers need to think about UX and how they can incorporate UX considerations into development workflows. Austin Knight is a designer and UX engineer at Hubspot. Austin will be speaking at the upcoming Fluent Conference, and Software Engineering Daily is giving away a ticket to Fluent, which will be held March 8-10 in San Francisco. To be entered in a random drawing for this free ticket, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily between now and February 22nd. Make sure to tag us @software_daily and Fluent @fluentconf so we see your tweet.

This week of shows on Software Engineering Daily focuses on O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference, a yearly software conference that focuses on the web and the tools used to build modern applications. Software Engineering Daily is giving away a ticket to The Fluent Conference, which will be held March 8-10 in San Francisco. To be entered in a random drawing for this free ticket, tweet about your favorite episode of Software Engineering Daily between now and February 22nd. Include the hashtag #fluentconf and and tag us @software_daily to make sure we can see your tweet. In today’s show, Jeff chats with Peter Cooper and Simon St Laurent, the organizers of Fluent. They discuss how the web is transitioning beyond the desktop and how to keep up with ever evolving javascript frameworks. This was also unique chance as well to learn why software conferences are so important.

This episode is different from the traditional interview format of Software Engineering Daily, and focuses on the history of Hadoop. Thanks to Marco Bonaci for allowing us to republish this in audio format. You can find the original post here: History of Hadoop

Operating a data center has been turned into a service. For most new companies, managing real-world servers is no longer an issue. But one exception is if your startup is a company offering the data center as a service. In this episode, Jeff and Sam talk about the engineering that goes on at DigitalOcean, and how the company differentiates itself from its competitors. Sam Kottler is an engineering manager at DigitalOcean, and previously worked at Red Hat.

Monoliths versus microservices – the architectural debate continues across the internet. SoundCloud is a popular music company that experienced the rapid development benefits of a monolith, as well as the long-term technical debt. That technical debt has since been relieved by a move towards microservices. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Lukasz joins Jeff to talk about the realities of moving from a monolith to a microservices architecture, and walks through the lessons learned at SoundCloud. Lukasz Plotnicki is a consultant and software engineer at ThoughtWorks, which helps clients address their software development challenges and needs.

Stream processing engines are often the component of data engineering stacks with the most variety, with the big data ecosystem offering several compelling options. Assessing the differences between projects like Flink, Storm, and Spark Streaming is difficult without an agreed upon set of metrics to compare them on. Fortunately, the Yahoo engineering team created a set of benchmarks to do exactly this. On today’s episode, Jeff and Bobby compare streaming frameworks through the performance on several of Yahoo’s benchmarking tests. Bobby Evans is an architect at Yahoo working on streaming frameworks, primarily on Apache Storm. He is also the Apache Storm Incubating PMC at The Apache Software Foundation.

Software engineering combines art, science, and philosophy. On the Developer Tea podcast, Jonathan Cutrell explores how engineers can improve their technical ability as well as their interpersonal skills and mental clarity. On this episode of Software Engineering Daily, Jeff and Jonathan about focus, career development, and software podcasting. Jonathan Cutrell is the founder and host of Developer Tea. He is also the Director of Technology at Whiteboard.

Matplotlib is a python plotting library inspired by MATLAB. It allows developers to easily visualize their data using simple functions. In this episode, Jeff and Ben discuss why visualizing data is integral for the human experience, and how they it can make drawing conclusions from data more meaningful. Ben relates this to his experience studying atmospheric data in the wild, and how his work as a researcher drives his need to visualize the vast amounts of raw data generated by weather systems. Ben Root is a core contributor to Matplotlib and works as a scientific programmer for Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc.

Keras is a minimalist, highly modular neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. In this episode, François discusses the state of deep learning, and explains why the field is experiencing a cambrian explosion that eventually may taper off. He explains the need for Keras and why its simplicity and ease makes it a useful deep learning library for developers to experiment and build with. François Chollet is the author of Keras and the founder of Wysp, learning platform for artists. He currently works for Google as a deep learning engineer and researcher.

Software is changing every domain including Marketing, Healthcare, and even Agriculture. Government is one specific area where the potential for improvement is obvious. Governments are often defined by abstract rules, transactions, permissions and hierarchies, grounded on some fundamental principles – this is striking similar to the same tenets that software and computer science are based on. In that sense, could software be leveraged in this unique industry to create massive change? OpenGov is one company trying to find out through application of software in local city and state governments. The company currently offers a web-based financial visualization software that focuses on making government budget and financial data accessible by modeling and presenting it in a user-friendly way. But it is not farfetched to see the potential being greater and broader in scope. In this episode, Jeff discussed with Andrew how OpenGov is using technology to improve government. Their conversation focuses in on the front-end technologies used to create the webapp, as well as “microservice fatigue” and the other various architectural concerns within the team. Andrew Clark is a software engineer at OpenGov.

In this episode, Jeff and Derrick sit down to discuss the state of tech journalism, and how it has kept up with the rapid pace of technology innovation. Additionally, they discuss the evolution of the “big data” stack and where it is headed. The conversation focuses in on Apache Mesos and Mesosphere, the company building the Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). Derrick Harris is a long time tech journalist, having worked at GigaOm and Fortune as a writer covering tech topics. He currently works at Mesosphere, where he is a tech evangelist.

Incarceration in the United States is often a punitive exercise rather than a rehabilitative one. As a consequence, recidivism is the norm – according to a 2012 report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, just over 65% of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. San Quentin State Prison in California is challenging this issue by trying to equip inmates with valuable skills while they are incarcerated. The Last Mile is a program that works with prisoners to help them build relevant skills in technology so that they can more easily transition to productive employment once they are out of prison. Specifically, it teaches inmates how to program, oftentimes starting at the basics like how to use a computer, and how hypertext works. In addition to the challenges of teaching students who may not know computer basics, the program has to work with the constraint of not having internet access. In this episode, Wes and Jeff discuss the realities of incarceration in the United States, and how teaching inmates how to code is a remarkably empowering way to combat and weaken the prison-industrial complex. Wes Bailey is the Director of Program Operations at The Last Mile, and a self-taught developer.

Governments are often laggards in the adoption of new technology. Every aspect of life, from transportation to healthcare, are being affected by the convergence of several trends including connected mobile devices, cloud storage and distributed systems. Yet federal services are in many cases still incapable of delivering the best and most affordable services to citizens. The most visible instance of the U.S. government struggling to modernize was the implementation of Healthcare.gov. What was originally a modest budget for deploying the web marketplace of the Affordable Care Act ballooned into a costly implementation that required hiring external consultants and developers to fix. In response to this dysfunction, 18F was formed with the mission to simplify the government’s digital services. Sarah joins Software Engineering Daily to explain how and why 18F was formed, and how it plans to improve government from within in the years to come. Sarah Allen is a Presidential Innovation Fellow who serves as a developer and product manager for 18F. She is also a co-founder of Bridge Foundry, an organization that helps encourage and empower people who are learning to code.

Riak is a distributed NoSQL key value data store. It was created by Basho, taking inspiration from the Amazon Dynamo paper. In this episode, Jon and Jeff discuss the benefits and different implementations of non-relational distributed data stores, and why Riak is a compelling option. Jon Meredith is the chief architect at Basho.

Apache Spark has skyrocketed in popularity lately, arguably surpassing Hadoop as the hottest big data technology as of late. Even IBM has thrown its weight behind the framework, calling it the “most important new open source project in a decade”. In this episode, Holden joins Software Engineering Daily to discuss why Spark is growing in popularity and how developers can begin learning the framework. Holden Karau is a principal engineer at IBM working with Apache Spark. She is also an author of Learning Spark, a technical guide for developers new to the data processing framework.

Apache Drill is a schema­-free SQL query engine for Hadoop, NoSQL, and cloud storage. Drill is unique in that it uses a JSON data model instead of a relational model like many traditional engines. Additionally, it supports on-the-fly schema discovery, which allows execution to begin without knowing the structure of the data. As a result, Drill can work with data that is constantly updating or changing. Tomer Shiran is the founder of the Apache Drill project and the CEO of Dremio.

Machine learning is something that many business are starting to tack onto their existing processes. Yet, to add machine learning capabilities after the fact is often a fool’s errand. Joshua argues that machine learning cannot be an afterthought, but rather must be custom developed to suit the specific problem or question that each company is trying to answer. His company, Wise.io, tackles this challenge of helping business build ground up machine learning applications that generate accurate predictions for use in an array of business processes. Joshua Bloom is the cofounder and CTO of Wise.io. He is also an astrophysicist, and a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Data science has emerged as an integral discipline alongside software engineering. In this episode, Jeff and Srini discuss the rise of the field, what it means to be a data scientist, and how the field will evolve as more businesses adopt data driven decision making. Srini also explains his thoughts on the essential qualities of a data scientist, and how educating data scientists is a growing challenge in a world that is flooded with “big data”. Srini Kadamati is a data scientist at Dataquest, where he creates content to help people learn data science.

WebTorrent is a streaming torrent client for the browser that can be used without any additional plugins, extensions, or installations. It is written entirely in JavaScript, and uses WebRTC to handle peer-to-peer communication. There are some limitations to making BitTorrent work over the web using WebRTC, including the inability for a browser-based WebTorrent client or “web peer” to communicate directly with a torrent client. However, the potential for every browser to contribute to the hosting and streaming of files is unprecedented. Imagine if large content sites like Netflix or YouTube did not have centralized hosting, and instead relied on its users to seed the content to each other using their web clients. This enables not only more efficient networks, but also the ability for each user to contribute to and be part of the content delivery network. Feross Aboukhadijeh is the creator of WebTorrent. Previously he built PeerCDN, a peer-to-peer content delivery network, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2013.

Django is an open source web development framework that was initially released in 2005, around the same time as Ruby on Rails. In many ways, the two frameworks are similar – they expedited web development by modularizing common components of web apps and enabling developers to quickly prototype and launch their products. They both encouraged the use of the MVC architectural pattern, with each respectively acting as the controller, allowing developers to use their own front end and database technologies. But the path of the two frameworks diverged in other parameters, including mainstream adoption. Ruby on Rails became the sweetheart in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, while Django was loved by a core constituency of pythonistas who had used Python in other applications and fallen in love with it. At the peak of the frameworks’ popularity, there was a common question from new developers asking whether they should first learn Django or Rails – the answer often boiled down to whether you wanted to use Python or Ruby. In this episode, Frank discusses the history and growth of Django, and explains how it evolved in comparison with other frameworks. Frank Wiles is the President of the Django Software Foundation, and partner at Revolution Systems. He worked at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, where Django was initially conceived and created.

Ruby on Rails is a web app framework released 10 years ago that influenced the way websites were being built. Rails skyrocketed to popularity in the late 2000’s and empowered many small companies to quickly build and maintain robust web apps. While it is still a mainstay in web development, it has been overshadowed as of late by JavaScript, and Node.js on the backend. David joins Software Engineering Daily to discuss how Ruby on Rails has evolved to keep up with newer programming paradigms and why it is still an excellent choice to build web apps with nowadays. David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails and a partner at Basecamp. Rails was extracted from the work done at Basecamp, and open-sourced for the public to commit to and use for their applications.

Marty Haught is a director of Ruby Central, a nonprofit dedicated to the support and advocacy of the worldwide ruby community. Ruby Central also hosts the RubyConf and RailsConf software conferences.

Michael Hartl is the author of The Ruby on Rails Tutorial, a widely acclaimed guide to learning how to build Ruby on Rails webapps.

Soylent is a meal replacement beverage, available in both liquid and powdered forms. Soylent is designed with the goal of meeting all nutritional requirements for an average adult. John Coogan is the CTO of Soylent.

Druid is a column-oriented distributed database that excels as a data warehousing solution for fast queries on large data sets. Fangjin Yang is a core contributor to Druid, and is currently co-founder and CEO of Imply, which helps build interactive analytics powered by Druid.

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including “The Go Programming Language” and “The C Programming Language”, a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix.

Kitematic is an open source project built to simplify and streamline using Docker on a Mac or Windows machine. It allows users to get up and running on Docker with a single click, and provides a user interface that makes running and managing Docker files easy. Kitematic was acquired by Docker in March 2015. Sean Li is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Kitematic. He is now working on product design and developer experience at Docker.