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 netwo...

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 e...

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...

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 f...

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...

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 h...

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. Bu...

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 s...

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, i...

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 la...

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,...

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 w...

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...

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...

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 Ste...

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 f...

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...

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. Wi...

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....

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...

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...

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 givi...

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 e...