Software Engineering Daily

Over the last 5 years, web development has matured considerably. React has become a standard for frontend component development. GraphQL has seen massive growth in adoption as a data fetching middleware layer. The hosting platforms have expanded beyond AWS and Heroku, to newer environments like Netlify and Vercel. These changes are collectively known as the JAMStack. With the changes brought by th...

Geospatial analytics tools are used to render visualizations for a vast array of applications. Data sources such as satellites and cellular data can gather location data, and that data can be superimposed over a map. A map-based visualization can allow the end user to make decisions based on what they see. ArcGIS is one of the most widely used geospatial analytics platforms. It is created by ESRI,...

Customer data infrastructure is a type of tool for saving analytics and information about your customers. The company that is best known in this category is Segment, a very popular API company. This customer data is used for making all kinds of decisions around product roadmap, pricing, and design. RudderStack is a company built around open source customer data infrastructure. RudderStack can be s...

Matterport is a company that builds 3-D imaging for the inside of buildings, construction sites, and other locations that require a “digital twin.” Generating digital images of the insides of buildings has a broad spectrum of applications, and there are considerable engineering challenges in building such a system. Matterport’s hardware stack involves a camera built in-house by the company. The ca...

There are many bad recipe web sites. Every time I navigate to a recipe website, it feels like my browser is filling up with spyware. The page loads slowly, everything seems broken, I can feel the 25 different JavaScript adtech tags interrupting each other. Whether I am searching for banana bread or a spaghetti sauce recipe, recipe sites usually make me lose my appetite. Anycart is a recipe platfor...

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...

Amazon’s virtual server instances have come a long way since the early days of EC2. There are now a wide variety of available configuration options for spinning up an EC2 instance, which can be chosen from based on the workload that will be scheduled onto a virtual machine. There are also Fargate containers and AWS Lambda functions, creating even more options for someone who wants to deploy virtua...

A credit score is a rating that allows someone to qualify for a line of credit, which could be a loan such as a mortgage, or a credit card. We are assigned a credit score based on a credit history, which could be related to work history, rental payments, or loan repayments.  One problem with the credit scoring system is that it is not internationalized. If I am coming from Brazil, I have a rental...

A large software company such as Dropbox is at a constant risk of security breaches. These security breaches can take the form of social engineering attacks, network breaches, and other malicious adversarial behavior. This behavior can be surfaced by analyzing collections of log data. Log-based threat response is not a new technique. But how should those logs be analyzed? Grapl is a system for mod...

Infrastructure-as-code tools are used to define the architecture of software systems. Common infrastructure-as-code tools include Terraform and AWS CloudFormation. When infrastructure is defined as code, we can use static analysis tools to analyze that code for configuration mistakes, just as we could analyze a programming language with traditional static analysis tools. When a developer writes a...

Social distancing has been imposed across the United States. We are running an experiment unlike anything before it in history, and it is likely to have a lasting impact on human behavior. By looking at location data of how people are moving around today, we can examine the real-world impacts of social distancing. SafeGraph is a company that provides geospatial location data to be used by develope...

Dropbox is a consumer storage product with petabytes of data. Dropbox was originally started on the cloud, backed by S3. Once there was a high enough volume of data, Dropbox created its own data centers, designing hardware for the express purpose of storing user files.  Over the last 13 years, Dropbox’s infrastructure has developed hardware, software, networking, data center infrastructure, and op...

“Data stream” is a word that can be used in multiple ways. A stream can refer to data in motion or data at rest.  When a stream is data in motion, an endpoint is receiving new pieces of data on a continual basis. Each new data point is sent over the wire and captured by the other end. Another way a stream can be represented is as a sequence of events that have been written to a storage medium. Thi...

Redis is an in-memory object storage system that is commonly used as a cache for web applications. This core primitive of in-memory object storage has created a larger ecosystem encompassing a broad set of tools. Redis is also used for creating objects such as queues, streams, and probabilistic data structures. Machine learning systems also need access to fast, in-memory object storage. RedisAI is...

For many applications, a transactional MySQL database is the source of truth. To make a MySQL database scale, some developers deploy their database using Vitess, a sharding system built on top of Kubernetes.  Jiten Vaidya and Anthony Yeh work at PlanetScale, a company that focuses on building and supporting MySQL databases sharded with Vitess. Their experience comes from working at YouTube, which...

We are all living in social isolation due to the quarantine from COVID-19. Isolation is changing our habits and our moods, ravaging the economy, and changing how we work. One positive change is that more people have been reconnecting with their friends and family over frequent calls and video chats. Isolation is not a normal way for humans to live. We are social animals, and we need social interac...

A data warehouse is a system for performing fast queries on large amounts of data. A data lake is a system for storing high volumes of data in a format that is slow to access. A typical workflow for a data engineer is to pull data sets from this slow data lake storage into the data warehouse for faster querying. Apache Spark is a system for fast processing of data across distributed datasets. Spar...

A content management system (CMS) defines how the content on a website is arranged and presented. The most widely used CMS is WordPress, the open source tool that is written in PHP. A large percentage of the web consists of WordPress sites, and WordPress has a huge ecosystem of plugins and templates. Despite the success of WordPress, the JAMStack represents the future of web development. JAM stand...

A data workflow scheduler is a tool used for connecting multiple systems together in order to build pipelines for processing data. A data pipeline might include a Hadoop task for ETL, a Spark task for stream processing, and a TensorFlow task to train a machine learning model.  The workflow scheduler manages the tasks in that data pipeline and the logical flow between them. Airflow is a popular dat...

A relational database often holds critical operational data for a company, including user names and financial information. Since this data is so important, a relational database must be architected to avoid data loss. Relational databases need to be a distributed system in order to provide the fault tolerance necessary for production use cases. If a database node goes down, the database must be ab...

Python is the most widely used language for data science, and there are several libraries that are commonly used by Python data scientists including Numpy, Pandas, and scikit-learn. These libraries improve the user experience of a Python data scientist by giving them access to high level APIs. Data science is often performed over huge datasets, and the data structures that are instantiated with th...

Chatbots became widely popular around 2016 with the growth of chat platforms like Slack and voice interfaces such as Amazon Alexa. As chatbots came into use, so did the infrastructure that enabled chatbots. NLP APIs and complete chatbot frameworks came out to make it easier for people to build chatbots. The first suite of chatbot frameworks were largely built around rule-based state machine system...

Serverless computing is a way of designing applications that do not directly address or deploy application code to servers. Serverless applications are composed of stateless functions-as-a-service and stateful data storage systems such as Redis or DynamoDB.  Serverless applications allow for scaling up and down the entire architecture, because each component is naturally scalable. And this pattern...

NGINX is a web server that can be used to manage the APIs across an organization. Managing these APIs involves deciding on the routing and load balancing across the servers which host them. If the traffic of a website suddenly spikes, the website needs to spin up new replica servers and update the API gateway to route traffic to those new replicas. Some servers should not be accessible to outside...

Web development has historically had more work being done on the server than on the client. The observability tooling has reflected this emphasis on the backend. Monitoring tools for log management and backend metrics have existed for decades, helping developers debug their server infrastructure. Today, web frontends have more work to do. Detailed components in frameworks such as React and Angular...