Software Engineering Daily

Zoom video chat has become an indispensable part of our lives. In a crowded market of video conferencing apps, Zoom managed to build a product that performs better than the competition, scaling with high quality to hundreds of meeting participants, and millions of concurrent users. Zoom’s rapid growth in user adoption came from its focus on user experience and video call quality. This focus on pro...

Facebook applications use maps for showing users where to go. These maps can display businesses, roads, and event locations. Understanding the geographical world is also important for performing search queries that take into account a user’s location. For all of these different purposes, Facebook needs up-to-date, reliable mapping data. OpenStreetMap is an open system for accessing mapping data. A...

NGINX is a web server that is used as a load balancer, an API gateway, a reverse proxy, and other purposes. Core application servers such as Ruby on Rails are often supported by NGINX, which handles routing the user requests between the different application server instances.  This model of routing and load balancing between different application instances has matured over the last ten years due t...

Shopify is a platform for selling products and building a business. It is a large e-commerce company with hundreds of engineers and several different mobile apps. Shopify’s engineering culture is willing to adopt new technologies aggressively, trying new tools that might provide significant leverage to the organization. React Native is one of those technologies. React Native can be used to make cr...

Ceph is a storage system that can be used for provisioning object storage, block storage, and file storage. These storage primitives can be used as the underlying medium for databases, queueing systems, and bucket storage. Ceph is used in circumstances where the developer may not want to use public cloud resources like Amazon S3. As an example, consider telecom infrastructure. Telecom companies th...

Data analysts need to collaborate with each other in the same way that software engineers do. They also need a high quality development environment.  These data analysts are not working with programming languages like Java and Python, so they are not using an IDE such as Eclipse. Data analysts predominantly use SQL, and the tooling for a data analyst to work with SQL is often a SQL explorer tool t...

When a developer spins up a virtual machine on AWS, that virtual machine could be purchased using one of several types of cost structures. These cost structures include on-demand instances, spot instances, and reserved instances. On-demand instances are often the most expensive, because the developer gets reliable VM infrastructure without committing to long-term pricing. Spot instances are cheap,...

Machine learning models require the use of training data, and that data needs to be labeled. Today, we have high quality data infrastructure tools such as TensorFlow, but we don’t have large high quality data sets. For many applications, the state of the art is to manually label training examples and feed them into the training process. Snorkel is a system for scaling the creation of labeled train...

A workflow is an application that involves more than just a simple request/response communication. For example, consider a session of a user taking a ride in an Uber. The user initiates the ride, and the ride might last for an hour. At the end of the ride, the user is charged for the ride and sent a transactional email. Throughout this entire ride, there are many different services and database ta...

Kafka is a distributed stream processing system that is commonly used for storing large volumes of append-only event data. Kafka has been open source for almost a decade, and as the project has matured, it has been used for new kinds of applications.  Kafka’s pubsub interface for writing and reading topics is not ideal for all of these applications, which has led to the creation of ksqlDB, a datab...

Building a game is not easy. The development team needs to figure out a unique design and gameplay mechanics that will attract players. There is a great deal of creative work that goes into making a game successful, and these games are often built with low budgets by people who are driven by the art and passion of game creation. A game engine is a system used to build and run games. Game engines l...

V8 is the JavaScript engine that runs Chrome. Every popular website makes heavy use of JavaScript, and V8 manages the execution environment of that code. The code that processes in your browser can run faster or slower depending on how “hot” the codepath is. If a certain line of code is executed frequently, that code might be optimized to run faster. V8 is running behind the scenes in your browser...

Serverless tools have come a long way since the release of AWS Lambda in 2014. Serverless apps were originally architected around Lambda, with the functions-as-a-service being used to glue together larger pieces of functionality and API services. Today, many of the common AWS services such as API Gateway and DynamoDB have functionality built in to be able to respond to events. These services can u...

Cortico is a non-profit that builds audio tools to improve public dialogue. Allison King is an engineer at Cortico, and she joins the show to talk about the process of building audio applications.  One of these applications was a system for ingesting radio streams, transcribing the radio, and looking for duplicate information across the different radio stations. In a talk at Data Council, Allison...

Facebook Messenger is a chat application that millions of people use every day to talk to each other. Over time, Messenger has grown to include group chats, video chats, animations, facial filters, stories, and many more features. Messenger is a tool for utility as well as for entertainment. Messenger is used both on mobile and on desktop, but the size of the mobile application is particularly imp...

Modern web development involves a complicated toolchain for managing dependencies. One part of this toolchain is the bundler, a tool that puts all your code and dependencies together into static asset files. The most popular bundler is webpack, which was originally released in 2012, before browsers widely supported ES Modules. Today, every major browser supports the ES Module system, which improve...

Food delivery apps have changed how the restaurant world operates. After seven years of mobile food delivery, the volume of food ordered through these apps has become so large that entire restaurants can be sustained solely through the order flow that comes in from the apps. This raises the question as to why you even need an “on-prem” restaurant. A cloud kitchen is a large, shared kitchen where f...

Remote engineering work makes some elements of software development harder, and some elements easier. With Slack and email, communication becomes more clear cut. Project management tools lay out the responsibilities and deliverables of each person. GitHub centralizes and defines the roles of developers. On the other hand, remote work subtracts the role of nuanced conversation. There is no water co...

Programming languages are dynamically typed or statically typed. In a dynamically typed language, the programmer does not need to declare if a variable is an integer, string, or other type. In a statically typed language, the developer must declare the type of the variable upfront, so that the compiler can take advantage of that information. Dynamically typed languages give a programmer flexibilit...

Datomic is a database system based on an append-only record keeping system. Datomic users can query the complete history of the database, and Datomic has ACID transactional support. The data within Datomic is stored in an underlying database system such as Cassandra or Postgres. The database is written in Clojure, and was co-authored by the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey. Datomic has a unique arc...

A large cloud provider has high volumes of network traffic moving through data centers throughout the world. These providers manage the infrastructure for thousands of companies, across racks and racks of multitenant servers, and cables that stretch underseas, connecting network packets with their destination. Google Cloud Platform has grown steadily into a wide range of products, including databa...

Over the last fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of new software tools. This is true at the infrastructure layer: there are more databases, more cloud providers, and more open-source projects. And it’s also true at a higher level: there are more APIs, project management systems, and productivity tools. ClickUp is a project management and productivity system for organiza...

Infrastructure-as-code allows developers to use programming languages to define the architecture of their software deployments, including servers, load balancers, and databases.  There have been several generations of infrastructure-as-code tools. Systems such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Ansible provided a domain-specific imperative scripting language that became popular along with the early growth...

Software investing requires a deep understanding of the market, and an ability to predict what changes might occur in the near future. At the level of core infrastructure, software investing is particularly difficult. Databases, virtualization, and large scale data processing tools are all complicated, highly competitive areas. As the software world has matured, it has become apparent just how big...

A high volume of data can contain a high volume of useful information. That fact is well understood by the software world. Unfortunately, it is not a simple process to surface useful information from this high volume of data. A human analyst needs to understand the business, formulate a question, and determine what metrics could reveal the answer to such a question. Sisu is a system for automatica...