Software Engineering Daily

Deno is a runtime for JavaScript applications. Deno is written in Rust, which changes the security properties of it. Parts of Deno are also written in TypeScript, which are causing problems in the compilation and organization of Deno. Elio Rivero is an engineer who has studied Deno and TypeScript, and he joins the show to talk about the newer JavaScript runtime and the issues caused by TypeScript....

Developer tooling and infrastructure is a fruitful area for investing. A wide variety of technologies can have large investment outcomes based on the fact that there are lots of engineers and businesses are willing to pay for products that give those engineers a higher degree of leverage. Lee Edwards is a partner with Root Ventures. His focus is on hard problems within software, and he joins the s...

Salesforce is a platform with a large number of developers, ISVs, and companies built on top of it. There is a thriving ecosystem of applications built and managed around Salesforce, leading to an important set of relationships and integration points between Salesforce and the other entities involved with the company. Kevin Poorman works at Salesforce as a developer evangelist, helping to strength...

Twitter is a social media platform with billions of objects: people, tweets, words, events, and other entities. The high volume of information that gets created on Twitter everyday leads to a complex engineering problem for the developers building the Twitter search index. Nico Tonozzi is an engineer at Twitter. He joins the show to talk through the problem space of search at Twitter, as well as s...

Robinhood is a platform for buying and selling stocks and cryptocurrencies. Robinhood is complex, fast-moving, and financial, and together these things require high quality engineering in distributed systems, observability, and data infrastructure. Jaren Glover is an engineer at Robinhood, and he joins the show to talk about the problem space within Robinhood, as well as the specific DevOps and so...

The Java ecosystem is maturing. The GraalVM high performance runtime provides a virtual machine for running applications in a variety of languages. TornadoVM extends the Graal compiler with a new backend for OpenCL. TornadoVM allows the offloading of JVM applications onto heterogeneous hardware. Juan Fumero works on TornadoVM. He joins the show to talk about the use case for TornadoVM, the design,...

Investing in enterprise software has become a competitive business. Lots of venture capital firms compete for the good deals at every stage. This level of competition has driven more capital into the early stages.  Ed Sim is a partner with Boldstart, an early stage enterprise investment firm. He joins the show to talk about modern enterprise investment strategy and his own varied personal experien...

Factories require quality assurance work. That QA work can be accomplished by a robot with a camera together with computer vision. This allows for sophisticated inspection techniques that do not require as much manual effort on the part of a human. Arye Barnehama is a founder of Elementary Robotics, a company that makes these kinds of robots. Arye joins the show to talk through the engineering of...

The most popular email client is Gmail, the web-based email client from Google. Gmail is dominant, but that dominance has come at a price, namely speed. Gmail caters to the lowest common denominator, serving a large ecosystem of use cases and plugins. This makes for a slow overall performance. Superhuman is an email client built for power users. Rahul Vohra is the founder of Superhuman, and joins...

The Internet Archive collects historical records of the Internet. The Wayback Machine is one tool from the Internet Archive which you may be familiar with. One project you may be unfamiliar with is book scanning. Internet Archive scans high volumes of books in order to digitize them. In today’s episode, Davide Semenzin joins the show to talk through the history of the Internet Archive and the engi...

Biometric authentication uses signals from a human’s unique biology to verify identity. Forms of biometric authentication include fingerprints, eye patterns, and the way a person walks, otherwise known as gait. UnifyID is a company that builds systems for biometric authentication. John Whaley is the CEO of UnifyID, and he joins the show to talk through techniques for biometrics, and the implementa...

Robotic process automation involves the scripting and automation of highly repeatable tasks. RPA tools such as UIPath paved the way for a newer wave of automation, including the Robot Framework, an open source system for RPA. Antti Karjalainen is the CEO of Robocorp, a company that provides an RPA tool suite for developers. Antti joins the show to talk through the definition of RPA, common RPA tas...

After working at VMware for 10 years, Jerry Chen developed an expertise in technology companies. Today, he works at Greylock, where he looks at deals in the infrastructure and developer tooling space. Jerry is an expert in go-to-market strategy and makes investments in technologies that have a good chance at becoming large and profitable businesses. In today’s episode, Jerry and I talk through the...

APIs within a company change all the time. Every service owner has an API to manage, and those APIs have upstream and downstream connections. APIs need to be tested for integration points as well as for their “contract”, the agreement between an API owner and the consumers of that API. Aidan Cuniffe is the founder of Optic, a product built for API change management. He joins the show to explain wh...

WebAssembly allows for the execution of languages other than JavaScript in a browser-based environment. But WebAssembly is still not widely used outside of a few particular niches such as Dropbox and Figma. Nicolo Davis works on an application called Boardgame Lab, and he joins the show to explain why WebAssembly can be useful even for a simple application. Nicolo also shares his reflections on Ty...

Hyperparameters define the strategy for exploring a space in which a machine learning model is being developed. Whereas the parameters of a machine learning model are the actual data coming into a system, the hyperparameters define how those data points are fed into the training process for building a model to be used by an end consumer. A different set of hyperparameters will yield a different mo...

Anduril is a technology defense company with a focus on drones, computer vision, and other problems related to national security. It is a full-stack company that builds its own hardware and software, which leads to a great many interesting questions about cloud services, engineering workflows, and management. Gokul Subramanian is an engineer at Anduril, and he joins the show to share his knowledge...

CrowdFlower was a company started in 2007 by Lukas Biewald, an entrepreneur and computer scientist. CrowdFlower solved some of the data labeling problems that were not being solved by Amazon Mechanical Turk. A decade after starting CrowdFlower, the company was sold for several hundred million dollars. Today, data labeling has only grown in volume and scope. But Lukas has moved on to a different pa...

As software permeates our lives, there are an increased number of situations where the legal system must be designed to account for that software. Whether the issues are open source licensing, cryptocurrencies, or worker classifications, software overlaps heavily with the law. Just as software is crafted by engineers, the legal structure around software is crafted by lawyers. There are large law f...

Code is version controlled through git, the version control system originally built to manage the Linux codebase. For decades, software has been developed using git for version control. More recently, data engineering has become an unavoidable facet of software development. It is reasonable to ask–why are we not version controlling our data? Dmitry Petrov is the founder of Iterative.ai, a company...

Every software company works off of several different development environments–at the very least there is staging, testing, and production. Every push to staging can be spun up as an application to be explored, tinkered with, and tested. These ad hoc spin-ups are known as release apps. A release app is an environment for engineers to play with, and potentially throw away or promote to production....

Chatbots are useful for developing well-defined applications such as first-contact customer support, sales, and troubleshooting. But the potential for chatbots is so much greater. Over the last five years, there have been numerous platforms that have arisen to allow for better, more streamlined chatbot creation. Dialogue software enables the creation of sophisticated chatbots. ParlAI is a dialogue...

Image annotation is necessary for building supervised learning models for computer vision. An image annotation platform streamlines the annotation of these images. Well-known annotation platforms include Scale AI, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Crowdflower. There are also large consulting-like companies that will annotate images in bulk for you. If you have an application that requires lots of annota...

Business intelligence tooling allows analysts to see large quantities of data presented to them in a flexible interface including charts, graphs, and other visualizations. BI tools have been around for decades, and as the world moves towards increased open source software, the business intelligence tools are following that trend. Metabase is an open source business intelligence system that has bee...

The US Army Cyber School is a training program which trains cyber soldiers and leaders to be adept in cyber military strategy and tactics. In order to teach these skills, the cyber school uses a system they call “courseware as code”, a workflow that allows updates to the curriculum in a reversion-friendly fashion similar to infrastructure-as-code. Ben Allison teaches at the US Army Cyber School an...