Software Engineering Daily

One of the key challenges that teams encounter is how to smoothly collaborate on converting a design into code. For example, if a designer designs a web component, how can it be most efficiently implemented by a developer? What happens if the designer needs to adjust the design and communicate this change to the developer? These sorts of issues can often lead to inefficiencies and frustrations on...

Frontend web frameworks are software toolkits that handle many of the low-level and repetitive aspects of building a website. These frameworks have made it easier than ever to build a modern website. The open-source Astro framework was created in 2021 for the purpose of creating simple static sites that load quickly. A key factor to its high performance is that, by default, webpages don't include...

Observability software helps teams to actively monitor and debug their systems, and these tools are increasingly vital in DevOps. However, it's not uncommon for the volume of observability data to exceed the amount of actual business data. This creates two challenges - how to analyze the large stream of observability data, and how to keep down the compute and storage costs for that data. Chronosph...

The open source coding philosophy has enormous appeal to many software engineers, and with good reason. Open source libraries, applications, and operating systems are now essential to the overall technology ecosystem. And the number of open source projects is only increasing. But many developers don't know how to get involved in open source. Or, they may have even faced resistance when trying to m...

There are countless real world scenarios where a workflow or process has multiple steps, and some steps must be completed before others can be started. Think of something as simple as cooking dinner. First you look up a recipe, then you write down the ingredients you need, you go shopping, and then you cook. These steps must be run in a certain order, and the state of the workflow must be tracked...

Speech technology has been around for a long time, but in the last 12 months it’s undergone a quantum leap. New speech synthesis models are able to produce speech that's often indistinguishable from real speech. I'm sure many listeners have heard deep fakes where computer speech perfectly mimics the voice of famous actors or public figures. A major factor in driving the ongoing advances is generat...

If you're a developer, there's a good chance you've experimented with coding assistants like GitHub Copilot. Many developers have even fully integrated these tools into their workflows. One way these tools accelerate development is by autocompleting entire blocks of code. The AI achieves this by having awareness of the surrounding code. It understands context. However, in many cases the context av...

Documentation is something that everyone knows is important but it's often difficult to get right. On software teams, good documentation can help to onboard new people, improve communication across teams, and troubleshoot technical issues. When an application, API, or library is a commercial product, the quality of its documentation can determine whether it attracts users and succeeds on the marke...

Observability is becoming an increasingly competitive space in the software world. Many developers have heard of Datadog and New Relic, but there are a seemingly countless number of observability products out there. Costa Tsaousis (he/him) is the Founder and CEO of Netdata. His goal was to build an open-source platform that was high-resolution, real-time, and easily scalable. Netdata is the result...

Ongoing advances in generative AI are already having a huge impact on developer productivity. Tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are increasing the velocity of code development, and more advances are on the horizon. However, an ever-growing challenge for developers is how to manage their coding resources – things like code snippets, website links, messages, and screenshots. This is hard for ind...

The importance of data teams is undeniable. Most companies today use data to drive decision-making on anything from software feature development to product strategy, hiring and marketing. In some companies data is the product, which can make data teams even more vital. But there's a common problem - analyzing data is hard and time consuming. Lots of people have questions they want to answer with d...

Platform engineering is difficult to get right, and in the age of DevOps and cloud computing, software developers increasingly serve as platform engineers while they're building their applications. This can be an engineering challenge because organizations often require their platforms to provide fine-grained control and compliance management. Cory O'Daniel is the CEO and Co-Founder of Massdriver,...

Today it’s estimated there are over 1 billion websites on the internet. Much of this content is optimized to be viewed by human eyes, not consumed by machines. However, creating systems to automatically parse and structure the web greatly extends its utility, and paves the way for innovative solutions and applications. The industry of web scraping has emerged to do just that. However, many website...

If you're a developer, you've probably worked with an API, or application programming interface. An API is a set of rules for how to communicate with an applications or device. For example, when you build an app and want to use Stripe to handle payments, or use Slack to deliver notifications, it's APIs that make this possible. Handling communication between different applications was historically...

There are hundreds of observability companies out there, and many ways to think about observability, such as application performance monitoring, server monitoring, and tracing. In a production application, multiple tools are often needed to get proper visibility on the application. This creates some challenges. Applications can produce lots of different observatory observability data, but how shou...

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is used to load webpages using hypertext links, and it’s the foundation of the web. Tim Berners-Lee famously created HTTP version 0.9 in 1989, and defined the essential behavior of a client and a server. Version 1.0 was eventually finalized in 1996, and its secure variant called HTTPS is now used on more than 80% of websites. HTTP continues to undergo inte...

A platform as a service, or PaaS, is the concept of a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. One of the best examples is Heroku, which was created in 2007 and later acquired by Salesforce. Although these services are great for helping startups get off the ground quickly, they can ultimately become a form of technical debt because of issues with cost, control, scale, and reli...

It’s now clear that the adoption of AI will continue to increase, with nearly every industry working to rapidly incorporate it into their systems and applications to provide greater value to their users. Business analytics is a key domain that promises to be radically reshaped by AI. Alembic is an AI platform that integrates web data, product conversion metrics, and social media to guide business...

When StackOverflow launched in 2008 it lowered the barrier to writing complex software. It solved the longstanding problem of accessing accurate and reliable programming knowledge by offering a collaborative space where programmers could ask questions, share insights, and receive high-quality answers from a community of experts. Generative AI has impacted the way programmers want to consume this k...

Picture a user interacting with a web app on their phone. When they tap the screen the app triggers communication with a server, which in turn communicates with a database. This process then happens in reverse to eventually update what the user sees on-screen. The latency for this round trip depends a lot on the physical distance between the user and the server. In a traditional web app, latency c...

Developer experience, or DevX, is a critical aspect of modern software development that focuses on creating a seamless and productive environment for developers. It encompasses everything from the tools and technologies used in the development process to the documentation, libraries, and frameworks available to streamline coding tasks. An emphasis on DevX can enhance individual developer productiv...

Infrastructure as code refers to the use of software and configuration files to convey infrastructure specifications. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of manually provisioning servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components. With the growth of cloud computing, the infrastructure as code paradigm is becoming more integral to managing compute resources. AutoCl...

Charlie Gerard is a highly accomplished software engineer and technologist. She's worked at Stripe, Netlify, and Atlassian and authored the book, Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript. In her spare time, Charlie explores the field of human-computer interaction and builds interactive prototypes using hardware and machine learning. Some of her recent projects include building a DIY aircraft radar...

Incident management is the process of responding to unplanned events or service interruptions, and then restoring service to an operational state. Having robust incident management is vital to many software teams. Blameless is a framework designed to help software companies manage their production incidents effectively. It provides a workflow for managing the incident response as well as the post-...

Cloud applications continue to grow in popularity, but ensuring the security of these applications often presents a formidable engineering challenge. This challenge motivated the creation of Jit. Jit is a continuous security platform for developers, and seeks to enable every cloud app to start with minimum viable security, or MVS, without slowing development velocity.   David Melamed is the Co-fou...