Software Engineering Daily

Originally published December 20, 2018 Ten years ago, there was a distinction between “backend” and “frontend” developers. A backend developer would be managing the business logic and database transactions using Ruby on Rails or Java. A frontend developer would be responsible for implementing designs and arranging buttons using raw HTML and JavaScript. Today, developers can build entire applicatio...

Originally published May 16, 2019 React is a set of open source tools for building user interfaces. React was open sourced by Facebook, and includes libraries for creating interfaces on the web (ReactJS) and on mobile devices (React Native). React was released during a time when there was not a dominant frontend JavaScript library. Backbone, Angular, and other JavaScript frameworks were all popula...

Originally published August 28, 2019 Kent Beck is a legendary figure in the world of software engineering.  Kent was an early advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and popularized the idea of writing unit tests before writing code that would satisfy those unit tests. A unit test isolates and tests a small piece of functionality within a large piece of software. Practitioners of Test-Driven De...

Originally published April 3, 2017 A hedge fund is a collection of investors that make bets on the future. The “hedge” refers to the fact that the investors often try to diversify their strategies so that the direction of their bets are less correlated, and they can be successful in a variety of future scenarios. Engineering-focused hedge funds have used what might be called “machine learning” for...

Originally published March 31, 2017 Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser. For all of its pro...

Originally published September 4, 2018 TIBCO was started in the 90’s with a popular message bus product that was widely used by finance companies, logistics providers, and other systems with high throughput. As TIBCO grew in popularity, the company expanded into other areas through products it developed in-house as well as through acquisitions. One acquisition was Jaspersoft, a business intelligen...

Osquery is a tool for providing visibility into operating system endpoints. It is a flexible tool developed originally at Facebook. Ganesh Pai is the founder of Uptycs, a company that uses Osquery to find threats and malicious activity occurring across nodes. Ganesh joins the show to talk about Osquery usage and his work on Uptycs. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Data science is a collaborative field. Collaboration requires sharing the artifacts that data scientists are working on, such as Jupyter Notebooks and SQL tables. Hex is a platform for improving sharing across data science workflows. Caitlin Colgrove and Barry McCardel are founders of Hex and they join the show to discuss what they have built. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdail...

Border Gateway Protocol is a protocol designed for routing and reachability between autonomous systems on the internet. BGPmon is a tool for assessing the routing health of your network, which allows for a network administrator to understand network stability and risk of data. Andree Toonk is the founder of BGPmon and joins the show to talk about BGP, how to monitor routing data, and his work at C...

Business intelligence is crucial for both internal and external applications at any company. There is a wide array of proprietary BI tools. Today, there is an increasing number of options for open source business intelligence, one of which is CubeJS. CubeJS is an open source analytical API platform for building BI. Artyom and Pavel from CubeJS join the show to talk about what they have built and t...

For several years, we have had the ability to create artificially generated text articles. More recently, audio and video synthesis have been feasible for artificial intelligence. Rosebud is a company that creates animated virtual characters that can speak. Users can generate real or fictional presenters easily with Rosebud. Dzmitry Pletnikau is an engineer with Rosebud and joins the show to talk...

An instruction set defines a low level programming language for moving information throughout a computer. In the early 1970’s, the prevalent instruction set language used a large vocabulary of different instructions. One justification for a large instruction set was that it would give a programmer more freedom to express the logic of their programs. Many of these instructions were rarely used. Thi...

Originally published July 27, 2018 React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic for iOS and Android. Reac...

Originally published May 14, 2018 The Kubernetes ecosystem consists of enterprises, vendors, open source projects, and individual engineers. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation was created to balance the interests of all the different groups within the cloud native community. CNCF has similarities to the Linux Foundation and the Apache Foundation. CNCF helps to guide open source projects in the...

October 1, 2019 The development of self-driving cars is one of the biggest technological changes that is under way. Across the world, thousands of engineers are working on developing self-driving cars. Although it still seems far away, self-driving cars are starting to feel like an inevitability. This is especially true if you spend much time in downtown San Francisco, where you will see a self-dr...

Originally published January 10, 2020 Slack is a messaging platform for organizations. Since its creation in 2013, Slack has quickly become a core piece of technology used by a wide variety of technology companies, groups, and small teams.  The messages that are sent on Slack are generated at a very high volume, and are extremely sensitive. These messages must be stored on Slack’s servers in a way...

GitHub manages a large API surface for both internal and external developers. This API surface has been migrated from purely RESTful requests to GraphQL. GraphQL is a newer request language for data fetching with fewer round trips. Marc-Andre Giroux works at GitHub and is the author of Production Ready GraphQL. He joins the show to talk about GraphQL across the industry, and specifically at GitHub...

Infrastructure at Spotify runs at high speeds. Developers work autonomously, building and deploying services all the time. Backstage is an open source platform built at Spotify that allows developers to build portals for making sense of their infrastructure. Backstage developer portals are powered by a central service catalog, with centralized services and streamlined development. Stefan Alund joi...

The JavaScript ecosystem has millions of packages. How do you choose from those packages to find the best in breed for your projects? OpenBase is a system for searching and discovering JavaScript packages. OpenBase includes reviews, insights, and statistics around these JavaScript packages. Lior Grossman is a founder of OpenBase, and joins the show to talk about the JavaScript ecosystem and what h...

Data leaks can cause privacy violations and other cloud security vulnerabilities. Visibility and control of cloud resources can help secure data and ensure compliance and governance. Open Raven is a system for discovering and classifying sensitive data in a public cloud, and assuring compliance and governance. Dave Cole is a founder of Open Raven, and he joins the show to talk through data protect...

Banking and money management are at the core of many modern applications. Payment operations teams work to enable the transfer of funds between different bank accounts, and to track the movement of those funds effectively. Modern Treasury is a company that builds payment operations APIs. Sam Aarons works at Modern Treasury and joins the show to talk through the engineering at Modern Treasury. Spon...

Internal tools are often built with Ruby on Rails or NodeJS. Developers create entire full-fledged applications in order to suit simple needs such as database lookups, dashboarding, and product refunds. This internal tooling creates a drain on engineering resources. Retool is a low-code platform for creating internal tools. These internal tools can be written by bizops, marketing, or roles other t...

Microservices route requests between each other. As the underlying infrastructure changes, this routing becomes more complex and dynamic. The interaction patterns across this infrastructure requires operators to create rules around traffic management. Tobias Kunze Briseno is the founder of Glasnostic, a system for ensuring resilience of microservice applications. Tobias joins the show to talk abou...

Netlify is a cloud provider for JAMStack applications. To make those applications more performant, Netlify has built out capacity for edge computing--specifically “edge handlers”. Edge handlers can be used for a variety of use cases that need lower latency or other edge computing functionality. Matt Biilmann Christensen is the CEO of Netlify and joins the show to talk through the engineering behin...

DevOps practices are shared via community, and community manifests at conferences. Unfortunately, conferences are not possible right now due to COVID-19. The world has turned to virtual conferences. All Day DevOps is a 24 hour conference sharing learnings and software strategies around DevOps, starting November 12th. Derek Weeks and Mark Miller are organizers of the conference and they join the sh...