Software Engineering Daily

Originally published July 6, 2017. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. React Native allows developers to reuse components from one user interface on multiple platforms. React Native was introduced by Facebook to reduce the pain of teams who were rewriting their user interfaces for web, iOS, and Android. Nader Dabit hosts React Native Radio, a podcast about React Na...

Originally published October 8, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Video surveillance impacts human lives every day.  On most days, we do not feel the impact of video surveillance. But the effects of video surveillance have tremendous potential. It can be used to solve crimes and find missing children. It can be used to intimidate journalists and empower dic...

Originally published July 25, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that was originally developed at Lyft.  Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar application that runs alongside a service and helps that service by providing features such as routing, rate limiting, telemetry, and security policy. Envoy has gained sig...

Originally published May 2, 2017. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application...

Originally published December 20, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. freeCodeCamp was started five years ago with the goal of providing free coding education to anyone on the Internet. freeCodeCamp has become the best place to begin learning how to write software. There are many other places that a software engineer should visit on their educational journey,...

Originally published April 14, 2017. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from thei...

Originally published October 24, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Redis is an in-memory database that persists to disk. Redis is commonly used as an object cache for web applications. Applications are composed of caches and databases. A cache typically stores the data in memory, and a database typically stores the data on disk. Memory has significantly fas...

Originally published November 21, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. HTTP is a protocol that allows browsers and web applications to communicate across the Internet. Everyone knows that HTTP is doing some important work, because “HTTP” is at the beginning of most URLs that you enter into your browser. You might be familiar with the request/response model, an...

Originally published June 13, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Machine learning allows software to improve as that software consumes more data. Machine learning is a tool that every software engineer wants to be able to use. Because machine learning is so broadly applicable, software companies want to make the tools more accessible to the developers across...

Originally published January 31, 2019 Artificial intelligence is reshaping every aspect of our lives, from transportation to agriculture to dating. Someday, we may even create a superintelligence–a computer system that is demonstrably smarter than humans. But there is widespread disagreement on how soon we could build a superintelligence. There is not even a broad consensus on how we can define th...

Cruise is an autonomous car company with a development cycle that is highly dependent on testing its cars–both in the wild and in simulation. The testing cycle typically requires cars to drive around gathering data, and that data to subsequently be integrated into a simulated system called Matrix. With COVID-19, the ability to run tests in the wild has been severely dampened. Cruise cannot put so...

Grafana is an open source visualization and monitoring tool that is used for creating dashboards and charting time series data. Grafana is used by thousands of companies to monitor their infrastructure. It is a popular component in monitoring stacks, and is often used together with Prometheus, ElasticSearch, MySQL, and other data sources. The engineering complexities around building Grafana involv...

Apache Airflow was released in 2015, introducing the first popular open source solution to data pipeline orchestration. Since that time, Airflow has been widely adopted for dependency-based data workflows. A developer might orchestrate a pipeline with hundreds of tasks, with dependencies between jobs in Spark, Hadoop, and Snowflake. Since Airflow’s creation, it has powered the data infrastructure...

The life cycle of data management includes data cleaning, extraction, integration, analysis and exploration, and machine learning models. It would be great if all of this data management could be handled with automation, but unfortunately that is not an option. For most applications, data management requires a human in the loop. A human in the loop might be responsible for working in a spreadsheet...

Kubernetes continues to mature as a platform for infrastructure management. At this point, many companies have well-developed workflows and deployment patterns for working with applications built on Kubernetes. The complexity of some of these deployments may be daunting, and when a new employee joins a company, that employee needs to get quickly onboarded with the custom dev environment.  Environm...

Uber needs to visualize data on a range of different surfaces. A smartphone user sees cars moving around on a map as they wait for their ride to arrive. Data scientists and operations researchers within Uber study the renderings of traffic moving throughout a city. Data visualization is core to Uber, and the company has developed a stack of technologies around visualization in order to build appea...

A frontend developer issuing a query to a backend server typically requires the developer to issue that query through an ORM or a raw database query. Prisma is an alternative to both of these data access patterns, allowing for easier database access through auto-generated, type-safe query building tailored to an existing database schema. By integrating with Prisma, the developer gets a database cl...

Machine learning workflows have had a problem for a long time: taking a model from the prototyping step and putting it into production is not an easy task. A data scientist who is developing a model is often working with different tools, or a smaller data set, or different hardware than the environment which that model will be deployed to. This problem existed at Uber just as it does at many other...

Many data sources produce new data points at a very high rate. With so much data, the issue of data quality emerges. Low quality data can degrade the accuracy of machine learning models that are built around those data sources. Ideally, we would have completely clean data sources, but that’s not very realistic. One alternative is a data cleaning system, which can allow us to clean up the data afte...

Server infrastructure traditionally consists of monolithic servers containing all of the necessary hardware to run a computer. These different hardware components are located next to each other, and do not need to communicate over a network boundary to connect the CPU and memory. LegoOS is a model for disaggregated, network-attached hardware. LegoOS disseminates the traditional operating system fu...

Kubernetes has become a highly usable platform for deploying and managing distributed systems.  The user experience for Kubernetes is great, but is still not as simple as a full-on serverless implementation–at least, that has been a long-held assumption. Why would you manage your own infrastructure, even if it is Kubernetes? Why not use autoscaling Lambda functions and other infrastructure-as-a-se...

Every software company is a distributed system, and distributed systems fail in unexpected ways.  This ever-present tendency for systems to fail has led to the rise of failure testing, otherwise known as chaos engineering. Chaos engineering involves the deliberate failure of subsystems within an overall system to ensure that the system itself can be resilient to these kinds of unexpected failures....

Brex is a credit card company that provides credit to startups, mostly companies which have raised money. Brex processes millions of transactions, and uses the data from those transactions to assess creditworthiness, prevent fraud, and surface insights for the users of their cards. Brex is full of interesting engineering problems. The high volume of transactions requires data infrastructure to sup...

Devices on the edge are becoming more useful with improvements in the machine learning ecosystem. TensorFlow Lite allows machine learning models to run on microcontrollers and other devices with only kilobytes of memory. Microcontrollers are very low-cost, tiny computational devices. They are cheap, and they are everywhere. The low-energy embedded systems community and the machine learning communi...

For the last five months, we have been working on a new version of Software Daily, the platform we built to host and present our content.  We are creating a platform that integrates the podcast with a set of other features that make it easier to learn from the audio interviews.  Software Daily includes the following features: The world of software is large, and growing bigger every day. Software D...