Software Engineering Daily

The creator economy has seen rapid growth, thanks largely to software solutions like Patreon that are enabling creators. As the creator economy grows, providers must be prepared for scalability issues and the challenges of maintaining and growing a software infrastructure and the team that evolves it. In this episode, I interview Utkarash Srivastava, SVP Engineering at Patreon. Sponsorship inquiri...

Snyk is a platform for security that started with open source scanning and has expanded into container security, infrastructure as code, and other products. Snyk is a simple product to use, but has hidden complexities that build large data structures to manage and scan code dynamically. In a previous episode we discussed the core Snyk product. In today’s show, we talk about the engineering behind...

Linkerd is a service mesh that runs efficiently with a low memory footprint. We have covered the details of Linkerd in previous episodes. Buoyant is the company that sells Linkerd as a service, and today’s show focuses on the engineering details of the company, and how Linkerd is architected in 2022. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant, and he joins the show to talk in detail about running a lead...

Online poker was deemed illegal in the United States ten years ago. Since then, poker has decreased in popularity, then found new invigoration thanks to live streaming and a large volume of bored gamers looking for something to do during the pandemic. Poker is a strategy game that can be played even without the financial element, and Clubs Poker is a free-to-play web-based poker client that grew s...

Database product companies typically have a few phases. First, the company will develop a technology with some kind of innovation such as speed, scalability, or durability. The company will offer support contracts around that technology for a period of time, before eventually building a managed, hosted offering. PlanetScale is a database company built around the Kubernetes-based Vitess technology....

Couchbase is a distributed NoSQL cloud database. Since its creation, Couchbase has expanded into edge computing, application services, and most recently a database-as-a-service called Capella.  Couchbase started as an in-memory cache and needed to be rearchitected to be a persistent storage system. In this episode, I interview Ravi Mayuram, SVP Products and Engineering at Couchbase about the archi...

Rackspace is a multi cloud solutions provider that has evolved beyond its cloud computing origins into a diverse set of services and support offerings. Customers work with Rackspace to adopt cloud application deployments, modern data analytics, and all the other opportunities offered by cloud computing. Much of this occurs through partnerships where Rackspace provides teams of engineers to work wi...

Historically, search engines made money by showing sponsored ads alongside organic results. As the idiom goes, if you’re not paying for something, you are the product. Neeva is a new take on search engines. When you search at neeva.com, you get the type of result you’d expect from a search engine minus any advertising. In this episode, I speak with Darin Fisher, Software Engineer at Neeva. We disc...

Tabnine is an AI assistant that helps software engineers write more efficient code. It’s been trained on a large corpus of source code or can be trained based on your specific codebase. Either way, the resulting model offers predictive completion of code that can make programmers more productive. In this episode, I interview Eran Yahav, professor at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and CT...

Protecting your customers begins with best practices for securely capturing, storing, and protecting the data you collect for or about them. When an organization has a large enough dataset, needs typically arise for doing analytical workloads or training machine learning models on this data. If you use random or mock data to generate a report or train a model, you arrive at an output that doesn’t...

When businesses share a common need such as payroll, commercial offerings can compete for market share with software solutions that easily adapt to a variety of businesses. Not all tasks can be easily commoditized or standardized. Take content moderation as an example. Every site that accepts user generated content is likely to have unique and nuanced processes that match their internal definition...

If you're working on a proof of concept which you hope will help you raise funding, it's fine to take a few shortcuts. Use the tech stack you know the best, don't fall in love with your code, and when you start to experience growing pains, hopefully you'll have the time to thoughtfully and carefully identify the bottlenecks and limits of your tech stack applied to the specific industry problem you...

Writing software is an absolute joy. Getting software to build is a chore. Thus, build systems emerged as a solution to automate this chore. At some point software engineers either use or hear legends about make and makefiles. While perhaps being the historically known tool, a great deal of thought has gone into approaches to build systems since 1976 when make was introduced. In today’s episode, w...

Infrastructure as code is a concept that has delighted software engineers, dev ops, and engineering management across the board. It’s neither fun nor efficient to configure the infrastructure and environments software teams require. Operating software at scale on a cloud, on-prem, or hybrid model is a problem of modernity that many enterprises find surprisingly challenging. Rob Hirschfeld is CEO a...

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine people use to find ideas in home, food, style, beauty, and more. The service grew quickly after its founding in 2010 and the company has grown to be a global team of thousands of professionals spanning time zones and continents. To deliver the smooth experience Pinterest users have come to expect requires an engineering team to keep the system running while c...

Charlie Gerard is an incredibly productive developer.  In addition to being the author of Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript, her website charliegerard.dev has a long list of really interesting side projects exploring the intersection of human computer interaction, computer vision, interactivity, and art.  In this episode we touch on some of these projects and broadly explore how practical i...

TechLit Africa is a non-profit on a mission to lessen African poverty by leveraging the internet. Rural Africans lack digital skills and computers to gain from the digital economy, even though developed countries have an abundance of used computers. That’s where TechLit Africa comes in. They accept used computers, refurbish them with custom classroom code, ship them to Africa, and establish relati...

Getting a computer program to run the same in different environments has been a recurring problem since the earliest days of software systems. Software versioning, versions of dependencies, hardware configurations, and CPU instruction set differences are just a few examples of challenges engineers have faced to get their software to run in different settings. A core promise of the Java programming...

If you haven’t encountered a data quality problem, then you haven’t yet worked on a large enough project. Invariably, a gap exists between the state of raw data and what an analyst or machine learning engineer needs to solve their problem. Many organizations needing to automate data preparation workflows look to Trifacta as a solution. In this episode, I interview Joseph Hellerstein, professor of...

As the internet has grown, increasingly, we are consumers of services provided by corporations rather than owners and operators of our own systems. To many, this trend towards centralization is antithetical to the spirit of a free and open internet. Urbit is a new operating system and peer-to-peer network. There are several layers of novel ideas in this ambitious project. In this episode, I interv...

InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It’s maintained by InfuxData who offers a suite of products that help organizations gain insights from time-series data. In this episode, I interview Zoe Steinkamp, software engineering and developer advocate at InfluxData. We explore some of the common use cases for time-series databases such as IoT and some recent announcements such as the ability...

Robotic process automation or RPA refers to software robots constructed to automate some business process. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example is adding filters to your email inbox. I’ve worked with a lot of salespeople that configure complex email follow-up campaigns when inbound emails come in, but even that’s a fairly basic example compared to what’s becoming possible. UiPath is an automation p...

Everyone is becoming increasingly aware of supply chains for physical goods. Software has its own supply chain. A supply of open source solutions exists as does a demand for these solutions by industry. Both have surely grown, but it would be nice to have a way of measuring by how much. The State of Software Supply Chain 2021 is an annual publication now in its 7th year. It’s released by Sonatype....

Relational databases have been a fixture of software applications for decades. They are highly tuned for performance and typically offer explicit guarantees like transactional consistency. More recently, there’s been a figurative cambrian explosion of other-than-relational databases. Simple key value stores or counters were an early win in this space. Managing a graph data structure is a more chal...

The lifeblood of most companies is their sales departments. When you’re selling something other than a commodity, it’s typically necessary to carefully groom the onboarding experience for inbound future customers. Historically, companies approached this in a one-size-fits-all manner, giving all customers a common experience. In today’s data-driven age, a better experience can be provided that is d...