Software Engineering Daily

Data infrastructure has been transformed over the last fifteen years.  The open source Hadoop project led to the creation of multiple companies based around commercializing the MapReduce algorithm and Hadoop distributed file system. Cheap cloud storage popularized the usage of data lakes. Cheap cloud servers led to wide experimentation for data tools. Apache Spark emerged from academia, and Apache...

A data platform contains all of the data that a company has accumulated over the years. Across a data platform, there is a multitude of data sources: databases, a data lake, data warehouses, a distributed queue like Kafka, and external data sources like Salesforce and Zendesk. A user of the data platform often has a question that requires multiple data sources to answer. How does this user join tw...

Nubank is a popular bank that is based in Brazil. Nubank has more than 20 million customers, and has accumulated a high volume of data over the six years since it was started. Mobile computing and cloud computing have given rise to “challenger banks” that operate more like software companies. When a software company reaches the size that Nubank is at today, it needs a data platform. A data platfor...

The Changelog is a podcast about the world of open source. As open source has become closely tied with the entire software development lifecycle, The Changelog has expanded its coverage to the broader software industry. Since starting the podcast ten years ago, Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo have become full-time podcasters, and they have started several other podcasts within the Changelog network...

Animations can be used to create games, app tutorials, and user interface components. Animations can be seen in messaging apps, where animated reactions can convey rich feelings over a text interface. Loading screens can become less boring through animation, and voice assistant products can feel more alive through animation. But we still don’t see much animation in our everyday applications. This...

Robotics has changed modern agriculture. Autonomous systems are powering the tractors, cotton pickers, and corn cutters that yield plants at industrial scale. John Deere is a company that has been making farm equipment for 183 years. Over that period, the planting and harvesting process has become increasingly mechanized, and John Deere has been at the forefront. Over the last few decades, softwar...

Venture capital investing requires an understanding of market dynamics, technology, and finance.  There is also an element of human nature. Consumer trends can make or break the viability of a new product. And early stage venture investing is always a bet on a small team or individual founder. Early stage investments are usually into companies that have not found perfect traction with their produc...

Stock trading takes place across a variety of software platforms. Etrade and Schwab have allowed individual traders to buy securities for decades. Robinhood built a business around a similar model, but also removed the commission. Wealthfront and Betterment provide “roboadvisor” services that abstract away the underlying securities and focus on managing a risk profile. Each of these services has a...

Large software companies have lots of users, and the activity from those users results in high volumes of traffic. These companies also have a large surface area across the enterprise.  There are hundreds of services and databases that are fulfilling user requests. As these requests enter the infrastructure of the enterprise, the requests travel through the different services and result in databas...

Distributed systems are required to run most modern enterprise software. Application services need multiple instances for scalability and failover. Large databases are sharded onto multiple nodes. Logging services, streaming frameworks, and continuous integration tools all require the orchestration of more than one server. Deploying a distributed system has historically been difficult because the...

Chat systems have been a part of software development for decades. Older systems like Pidgin and Yammer were surpassed by newer systems like HipChat. And when Slack was created, it quickly became a part of most software companies. But Slack does not fulfill the needs of every company. Mattermost is an open-source chat system. Mattermost can be configured to work within enterprises that have strong...

The word “DevOps” has a different definition depending on who you ask.  For some people, it is about the process of managing and releasing code. It can involve container management and server orchestration. It can involve infrastructure-as-code, and safer configuration management. In addition to a set of technologies, DevOps can be seen as a management concept that describes agile practices, and b...

The ridesharing infrastructure of Lyft has a high volume of traffic that is mostly handled by servers on AWS. When Vicki Cheung joined Lyft in 2018, the company was managing containers with an internally built container scheduler. One of her primary goals at the company was to move Lyft to Kubernetes. In today’s episode, Vicki gives an overview of Lyft infrastructure and the core engineering probl...

If the Internet was reimagined with the software and hardware infrastructure we have today, what would it look like? That is the question that DFINITY is working on answering. DFINITY’s goal is to build a decentralized, secure Internet computer. DFINITY takes concepts from the cryptocurrency world, but it is focused on computation, not financial products. DFINITY can be thought of as a decentraliz...

Webflow is a visual programming tool used by designers, developers, and other technical users. Webflow is a leader in the “low code” or “no code” category of software tools that has become prominent in the last few years.  Webflow has been years in the making. In a previous show with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin, he told the story of being heads down on Webflow, steadily working through the engineeri...

Software has changed the way the world functions. The rapid pace of change has made it difficult to know how to navigate the new world. Knowledge workers who want to keep advancing in their careers develop a strategy of continuous learning in order to adapt to these changes. O’Reilly Media has existed for almost 40 years, providing resources for the technical consumer. As O’Reilly has expanded its...

GraphQL has become a core piece of infrastructure for many software applications. GraphQL is used to make requests that are structured as GraphQL queries and responded to through a GraphQL server. The GraphQL server processes the query and fetches the response from the necessary databases, APIs, and backend services. Around 2016, when GraphQL was becoming popular, a company called Meteor was decid...

The JavaScript ecosystem stretches across frontend, backend, and middleware. There are newer tools such as GraphQL, Gatsby, and WebAssembly. There are frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. There is complex data handling with streams, caches, and TensorFlow.js. JavaScript is unlike any other ecosystem, because a single language can be used to construct every part of an application. Because JavaS...

Cloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on each physical server host. Cloud computing has led...

Edge computing is the usage of servers that are geographically close to the client device. The first common use case for edge computing was CDNs: content-delivery networks. A content delivery network placed media files such as images and videos on multiple servers throughout the world. These are big files, and they take lots of bandwidth to transfer. By placing them at CDNs, the files would be clo...

Every large company generates large amounts of data. Data engineering is the process of storing, transforming, and leveraging that data. Data infrastructure companies provide tools and platforms for performing data engineering. The last fifteen years has seen a rise in modern data management companies built in a time of decreasing storage costs, an increased volume of data, and the prevalence of c...

Slack is a messaging platform for organizations. Since its creation in 2013, Slack has quickly become a core piece of technology used by a wide variety of technology companies, groups, and small teams.  The messages that are sent on Slack are generated at a very high volume, and are extremely sensitive. These messages must be stored on Slack’s servers in a way that does not risk a message from one...

NoSQL databases provide an interface for storing and accessing data that allows the user to work with data in an “unstructured” fashion. SQL databases require the data in the database to be “normalized,” meaning that each object in the entire database has an entry (or a null value) for each field. One advantage of NoSQL is that the different objects are “denormalized,” meaning that different objec...

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been built in the cloud.  A large scale virtualization product require...

Amazon’s container offerings include ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and Fargate. Through these different offerings, Amazon provides a variety of ways that a user can manage Kubernetes clusters and standalone container instances. The choice of which containerization system to choose depends on the needs of the user, and the tradeoffs they want to make on control...