Software Engineering Daily

Modern business applications are complex. It's not enough to have raw logs or some basic telemetry. Today's enterprise organizations require an application performance monitoring solution or APM. Today's applications are complex distributed systems whose performance depends on a wide variety of factors. Every single line of code can affect production and teams need insights into the health of the...

One of the most painful parts of getting started on a new development team is getting one’s environment set up. Whether it’s undocumented steps, overly complex setups, or simply the challenges of understanding how the pieces fit together, getting a dev environment up often feels like a chore to be suffered through in order to do what I want: contribute to the codebase. Gitpod seeks to solve these...

The notebook paradigm of coding is relatively new in comparison to REPLs and IDEs. Notebooks run in your browser and give you discrete cells for running segments of code. All the code in a single cell runs at once, but cells run independently. Cells can be re-run, which is a blessing and a curse. The ability to run cells out of order can make it difficult for users to have a clear understanding of...

Virtual meetings were growing in popularity before the need accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Gather is a place where you can create a space for your community today. Users who join find themselves in a shared virtual space that offers the ability to interact with other users as well as interact with the environment itself. In this episode, I interview Phillip Wang, CEO at Gather about the...

Imagine a world where you own some sort of building whether that’s a grocery store, a restaurant, a factory... and you want to know how many people reside in each section of the store, or maybe how long did the average person wait to be seated or how long did it take the average factory worker to complete their assembly task. Currently today these systems today are either not using AI and instead...

The gig economy involves independent contractors engaging in flexible jobs. Today gig workers often get work from centralized platforms that facilitate the process of connecting workers with employers in exchange for a fee. Some workers find the relationship between worker and platform to be adversarial in nature since the platform can establish and enforce rules at its own discretion. In this epi...

Venture capital investment has continued to flow into technology startups. No one builds technology from scratch. There are cloud services, software libraries, 3rd party services, and software platforms that modern entrepreneurs must adopt to build their products efficiently and quickly. These layers of infrastructure are a key area for many investors. In this episode, I interview Tim Chen, managi...

Whether you love them or hate them, share them or ignore them, you encounter memes all over the internet. Those that are popular can often take off and spawn a long history of remixes, variants, derivatives, and inspired works. In this episode, we interview Johan Unger, the founder of meme.com. They’re creating a platform for Meme Explorers to track these Memes and earn rewards along the way. Spon...

The last 15 years have seen the emergence of cloud-based developer APIs and services as dominant components of the developer toolchain. As a result, there has never been more power at developers’ fingertips. But making that power usable and accessible is a challenge that is shared between the providers and the consumers of these services. Google’s Developer Relations team has spent the past 15 yea...

The expression firing on all cylinders dates back to the early 1900s and refers to a function of the internal combustion engine. This expression poetically applies to successful businesses as well. Each department must operate at peak performance and the couplings between departments need optimization as well. In this episode, I interview business coach Jon Dwoskin about a variety of topics relate...

Infrastructure as Code is an approach to machine provisioning and setup in which a programmer describes the underlying services they need for their projects. However, this infrastructure code doesn’t compile a binary artifact like traditional source code. The successful completion of running the code signals that the servers and other components described in the configuration file have been create...

As our guest today points out, most enterprise software applications are essentially forms for collecting data. The tag and related components started appearing in HTML fairly early and those same concepts are still in use with modern web browsers. However, the technology for capturing state, validating input, and providing other common services for the management of form data has continued to evo...

By most accounts, demand for software engineers exceeds supply. Not just anyone can develop this skill set to the level required to deliver enterprise-grade production code. For those that can, companies are incentivized to take extra measures to ensure software engineers are as productive as possible. The pace of business is often throttled by the pace of software releases. In today’s episode, we...

The first industrial deployments of machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions were bespoke by definition and often had brittle operating characteristics. Almost no one builds custom databases, web servers, or email clients. Yet technology groups today often consider developing homegrown ML and data solutions in order to solve their unique use cases. Today’s modern data stack is a patc...

Phishing attacks, malware, and ransomware are just some of the major threats everyone connected to the internet faces. For companies, the stakes are especially high. Setting up a secure infrastructure is difficult. Your adversary only needs to find one flaw to get in. Vancord is a private cybersecurity company, based in Connecticut, that was founded and built by security engineers to specialize in...

In a version control system, a Monorepo is a version control management strategy in which all your code is contained in one potentially large but complete repository. The monorepo is in stark contrast to an alternative approach in which software teams independently manage microservices or deliver software as libraries to be imported in other projects. The monorepo strategy has been followed by not...

Companies that gather data about their users have an ethical obligation and legal responsibility to protect the personally identifiable information in their dataset. Ideally, developers working on a software application wouldn’t need access to production data. Yet without high-quality example data, many technology groups stumble on avoidable problems. Organizations need a solution to protect priva...

Applications write data to persistent storage like a database. The most popular database query language is SQL which has many similar dialects. SQL is expressive and powerful for describing what data you want. What you do with that data requires a solution in the form of a data pipeline. Ideally, these analytical workflows can follow similar best practices to those handled in application code. DBT...

The way we write, compile, and run software has continued to evolve since computer programming began. The cloud, serverless, no-code, and CI/CD are all contemporary ideas introduced to help software engineers spend more time on their application and less time on the chores of running it. Darklang is a new way of building serverless backends. It’s a cloud native programming language with several no...

Tedious, repetitive tasks are better handled by machines. Unless these tasks truly require human intelligence, repetitive tasks are often good candidates for automation. Implementing process automation can be challenging and technical. Increasingly, engineers are seeking out tools and platforms to facilitate faster, more reliable automation. In this episode I talk to Yaseer Sheriff, Co-Founder and...

Financial technology or fintech has always been a hot topic. This is increasingly true in recent years as disruptive companies enter the market to give better alternatives and solutions to consumers. Current is focused on creating better financial outcomes. In addition to providing banking services, their app has many tools and reminders to help users learn and execute better money management stra...

The dream of machines with artificial general intelligence is entirely plausible in the future, yet well beyond the reach of today’s cutting edge technology. However, a virtual agent need not win in Alan Turing’s Imitation Game to be useful. Modern technology can deliver on some of the promises of narrow intelligence for accomplishing specific tasks. PeopleReign has created a virtual agent for IT...

A developer’s core deliverables are individual commits and the pull requests they aggregate into. While the number of lines of code written alone may not be very informative, in total, the code and metadata about the code found in tracking systems present a rich dataset with great promise for analysis and productivity optimization insights. LinearB is a systematic approach to engineering improveme...

Interest in autonomous vehicles dates back to the 1920s. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the first truly autonomous vehicle prototypes began to appear. The first DARPA Grand Challenge took place in 2004 offering competitors $1 million dollars to complete a 150-mile course through the Mojave desert. The prize was not claimed. Since then, rapid progress has begun in autonomous driving fueled by advan...

Money laundering is not a new crime. However, the growth of digital communications has greatly expanded the opportunity for money launderers to find innovative new ways to hide their true intent. Some estimates suggest it could be as high as 2-5% of the world’s GDP. Unit21 is a customizable no-code platform for risk and compliance operations. They offer a simple API and dashboard for detecting and...