Software Engineering Daily

Static analysis allows for the discovery of issues in a codebase without compiling. There have been many generations of static analysis tools. A newer static analysis tool is DeepSource, which automates code reviews, identifies bug risks, and generates pull requests to fix them. Jai Pradeesh and Sanket Saurav are founders of DeepSource, and join the show to talk through the creation of static anal...

Data science requires data sets to be cataloged and indexed. The data sets are versioned and might be in CSV files in S3, a database, or another data storage system. Splitgraph allows the user to query this data catalog like it is a Postgres database, routing queries to any data set across your catalog. Artjoms Iškovs and Miles Richardson are the founders of Splitgraph and join the show to talk ab...

Sendbird is a company that makes chat, voice, and video APIs for developers. The biggest company in this category is arguably Twilio, but Sendbird works at a higher level of abstraction, with an emphasis on developer experience and visual components. John Kim is the CEO of Sendbird and he joins the show to discuss the engineering and competitive positioning of his company. Sponsorship inquiries: s...

Newer machine learning tooling is often focused on streamlining the workflows and developer experience. One such tool is BentoML. BentoML is a workflow that allows data scientists and developers to ship models more effectively. Chaoyu Yang is the creator of BentoML and he joins the show to talk about why he created Bento and the engineering behind the project. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwa...

Data labeling is a major bottleneck in training and deploying machine learning and especially NLP. But new tools for training models with humans in the loop can drastically reduce how much data is required. Humanloop is a platform for annotating text and training NLP models with much less labelled data. Raza Habib, founder of Humanloop, joins the show to to talk about NLP workflows and his work on...

A customer data platform such as Segment allows developers to build analytics and workflows around customer data such as purchases, clicks, and other interactions. These customer data platforms (CDP) are often tightly coupled to an underlying data warehouse technology. Hightouch is a platform that provides an unbundled CDP--a platform that sits on top of your own data warehouse. The Hightouch team...

Fivetran is a company that builds data integration infrastructure. If your company is performing ELT or ETL jobs to move data from one place to another, Fivetran can help with that movement from source to destination. Once the data is moved into a data warehouse, a tool called DBT (data build tool) can be used to transform the data more effectively. We have done shows previously about Fivetran and...

Staff engineer is a job title that suggests the engineer has deep expertise, and considerable experience. More and more companies are adopting a “staff engineer track” where an engineer can work to become a staff engineer. What is the role of staff engineer? Is it a management role or an individual contributor? What are the expectations and obligations of staff engineer? Will Larson is an experien...

The Salesforce Ecosystem has thousands of developers, designers, product people, and entrepreneurs engaging with each other. Salesforce exposes APIs and SDKs that allow people to build infrastructure on top of the Salesforce platform. In a previous episode, we explored how the ecosystem works as a whole. In today’s show, Chuck Liddell joins the show to talk about how developers themselves engage w...

Pair programming allows developers to partner on solving problems and learn from each other more effectively. Pair programming has become harder to do as remote work has become more prevalent. GitDuck is a tool to enable more effective pair programming. Dragos Fotescu and Thiago Monteiro are the founders of GitDuck, and they join the show to explain what they have built and their motivation behind...

Effective data science requires clean data. As data moves through the data pipeline, there may be errors introduced. Errors can also arise from code changes, database migrations, and other forms of data movement. How can you ensure data quality within a fast moving, dynamic data system? Datafold is a company built around data quality management. It allows users to compare tables and databases, as...

Federated learning is machine learning without a centralized data source. Federated Learning enables mobile phones or edge servers to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device. Mike Lee Williams is an expert in federated learning, and he joins the show to give an overview of the subject and share his thoughts on its applications. Sponsorship inqu...

For all the advances in software development over the years, one area that has seen minimal improvement is the terminal. Typing commands into a black text interface seems antiquated compared to the dynamic, flashy interfaces available in web browsers and modern desktop applications. Fig is a visual terminal assistant with the goal of changing that. Fig sits next to the developer’s normal terminal...

Cloud resources can get out of control if proper management constraints are not put in place. Cloud Custodian enables users to be well managed in the cloud. It is a YAML DSL that allows you to easily define rules to enable a well-managed cloud infrastructure giving security and cost optimization. Kapil Thangavelu works on Cloud Custodian and he joins the show to talk about modern cloud management...

Predicting the spread of COVID-19 is not easy. The best methods we have available require us to extrapolate trends from a large volume of data, and this requires the construction of large-scale models. Because of the expertise needed for developing these models, Silicon Valley engineers were brought in to help develop a maintainable model. Two of these engineers are Josh Wills and Sam Shah, and th...

Machine learning models require training data, and training data needs to be labeled. Raw images and text can be labeled using a training data platform like Labelbox. Labelbox is a system of labeling tools that enables a human workforce to create data that is ready to be consumed by machine learning training algorithms. The Labelbox team joins the show today to discuss training data and how to lab...

Containers and virtual machines are two ways of running virtualized infrastructure. Containers use less resources than VMs, and typically use the runc open source container runtime. Sysbox is a containerization runtime that offers an alternative to runc, and allows for the deployment of Docker or Kubernetes within a container. Cesar Talledo is the founder of Nestybox, a company built around the Sy...

Firebase is well-known as a platform that makes it easy to build real-time applications quickly and easily. Firebase was acquired by Google, and has been turned into a large platform that runs on top of Google Cloud. Firebase is closed-source, which leads to a different ecosystem than open source platforms. Supabase is a new open source alternative to Firebase, built on Postgres and Elixir. Paul C...

Development environments are brittle and hard to manage. They lack the kind of fungibility afforded by infrastructure-as-code. Gitpod is a company that allows developers to describe development environments as code to make them easier to work with, and enabling a more streamlined GitOps workflow. Johannes Landgraf and Sven Efftinge are creators of Gitpod and they join the show to discuss the produ...

Training a computer vision model is not easy. Bottlenecks in the development process make it even harder. Ad hoc code, inconsistent data sets, and other workflow issues hamper the ability to streamline models. Roboflow is a company built to simplify and streamline these model training workflows. Brad Dwyer is a founder of Roboflow and joins the show to talk about model development and his company....

Databases are the source of truth for every company. Editing the data in the database normally requires writing a query in SQL or a domain specific querying language–languages that are only accessible to engineers and highly technical people.  BaseDash is a tool for interfacing with a database without requiring the usage of a query language. It allows the user to interface with the database as eas...

Machine learning models are only as good as the datasets they’re trained on. Aquarium is a system that helps machine learning teams make better models by improving their dataset quality. Model improvement is often made by curating high quality datasets, and Aquarium helps make that a reality. Peter Gao works on Aquarium, and he joins the show to talk through modern machine learning and the role of...

Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. Ray is used for reinforcement learning and other compute intensive tasks. It was developed at the Berkeley RISELab, a research and development lab with an emphasis on practical applications. Ion Stoica is a professor at Berkeley, and he joins the show to talk about the present and future of the Ray framework. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@...

A private network connects servers, computers, and cloud instances. These networked objects are often separated by firewalls and subnets that create latency and complication. David Crawshaw is the CTO of Tailscale, a company that works to make private networks easier to build and simpler to configure and maintain. David joins the show to talk about private networks and the implementation of Tailsc...

Pachyderm is a system for data version control. Code has been version controlled for many years, but not data. In previous episodes with Joe Doliner, we explored the evolution of Pachyderm. In today’s show, we talk about the state of the company in 2020, as well as Pachyderm Hub, and end-to-end machine learning and data lineage product. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com