Software Engineering Daily

When the Kubernetes project was started, Amazon Web Services was the dominant cloud provider. Most of the code that runs AWS is closed source, which prevents an open ecosystem from developing around AWS. Developers who deploy their application onto AWS are opting into a closed, controlled ecosystem, which has both costs and benefits. The software industry has a history of closed and open ecosystem...

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, but freeCodeCamp is the best place to start, because it is free, and there are no advertisements.  For most...

The software category known as “no-code” describes a set of tools that can be used to build software without writing large amounts of code in a programming language. No-code tools use visual interfaces such as spreadsheets and web based drag-and-drop systems. In previous shows, we have covered some of the prominent no-code products such as Airtable, Webflow, and Bubble. It is clear that no-code to...

Roblox is a gaming platform with a large ecosystem of players, creators, game designers, and entrepreneurs. The world of Roblox is a three-dimensional environment where characters and objects interact through a physics engine. Roblox is multiplayer, and users can interact with each other over the Internet. Roblox is not one single game—it is a system where anyone can design and monetize their own...

Cruise is a company that is building a fully automated self-driving car service. The infrastructure of a self-driving car platform presents a large number of new engineering problems. Self-driving cars collect vast quantities of data as they are driving around the city. This data needs to be transferred from the cars onto cloud servers. The data needs to be used for training machine learning model...

The software supply chain includes cloud infrastructure, on-prem proprietary solutions, APIs, programming languages, networking products, and open source software.  Each of these software categories has its own security vulnerabilities, and each category has tools that can help protect a company from attackers that are trying to exploit known vulnerabilities. As open source software has grown in p...

GitLab is a company that builds an open source platform for managing git repositories. GitLab was started in 2012, and has grown to have a large enterprise business with additional products such as continuous integration and security tooling. GitLab is also known for being a large, entirely remote workforce. GitLab does not have any offices, and the employees mostly communicate through Slack, emai...

Automation has the potential to eliminate rote jobs such as call center workers and truck drivers. The downstream effects of automation also leads to new jobs, such as data labeling and robot operations. The net effect of modern automation technology is unclear, but it is likely to cause some disruption in the job market. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an economic policy idea in which a governmen...

Logging provides raw data that can be abstracted into higher level information. Logs are generated at every layer of infrastructure: physical host, virtual machine, container, pod, and Kubernetes cluster. Logs are generated by network proxies, edge servers, and API requests. There is far too much logging information to be read by humans.  Log messages need to be refined into statistical metrics th...

Offices have historically been the place where most knowledge work takes place. An office is a central meeting point for everyone in an organization. Offices allow for high bandwidth, in-person communication. Employees have access to shared resources, such as food, tables, and quiet working space. Offices provide a means of encouraging a common culture within a given workplace. There are also sign...

Machine learning algorithms have existed for decades. But in the last ten years, several advancements in software and hardware have caused dramatic growth in the viability of applications based on machine learning. Smartphones generate large quantities of data about how humans move through the world. Software-as-a-service companies generate data about how these humans interact with businesses. Che...

The container orchestration wars ended in 2016 with Kubernetes being the most popular open source tool for deploying and managing infrastructure. Since that time, most large enterprises have been implementing a “platform strategy” based around Kubernetes. A platform strategy is a plan for creating a consistent experience for software engineers working throughout an enterprise. At most companies, a...

Kubernetes has created a widespread system for deploying and managing infrastructure. As Kubernetes has been increasingly adopted, companies are thinking about how to leverage that common layer of infrastructure. With the common infrastructure abstraction of Kubernetes, it becomes easier to adopt other abstractions that are uniform across the entire company.  This has created a market opportunity...

A cloud provider gives a developer low-cost compute infrastructure on-demand.  Cloud providers can be divided up into two categories: Layer 1 cloud providers and Layer 2 cloud providers. A Layer 1 cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services owns server hardware and sells compute infrastructure as a commodity. A Layer 2 cloud provider purchases compute infrastructure from a Layer 1 provider and buil...

Java has been popular since the 90s, when it started to be used as a programming language for enterprises.  Today, Java is still widely deployed, but the infrastructure environment is dramatically different. Java is often deployed to containers in the cloud. If those containers can share resources, then those containers can share the same underlying Java infrastructure.  Java 13 is the most recent...

Relational databases provide durable transactional systems for storing data. The relational model has existed for decades, but the requirements for a relational database have changed. Modern applications have requirements for high volumes of data that do not fit onto a single machine. When a database gets too big to fit on a single machine, that database needs to be sharded into smaller subsets of...

Originally published July 14, 2016 EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics. Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since 2006 and it was a central point of...

Originally published May 24, 2018 When a user takes a ride on Uber, the app on the user’s phone is communicating with Uber’s backend infrastructure, which is writing to a database that maintains the state of that user’s activity. This database is known as a transactional database or “OLTP” (online transaction processing). Every active user and driver and UberEATS restaurant is writing data to the...

Originally published January 4, 2019 When a user makes a request to product like The New York Times, that request hits an API gateway. An API gateway is the entry point for an external request. An API gateway serves several purposes: authentication, security, routing, load balancing, and logging. API gateways have grown in popularity as applications have become more distributed, and companies offe...

Originally published June 7, 2018 Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore’s Law is less like a “law” and more like an observation or a prediction. Moore’s Law is ending. We can no longer fit an increasing amount of transistors in the same amount of space with a highly predictable rate. Dennard scaling is also coming to an...

Originally published November 4, 2016 Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, and interviewer...

New software abstractions always take advantage of the abstractions that have been built before. Software libraries allow us to import code that sits on the same host as a new program. Open source software let us copy and paste existing code, or clone entire repositories. Cloud providers offer hosted tools and APIs that we can leverage to develop scalable, easy-to-use infrastructure. When existing...

Web applications are used on a wide variety of platforms.  On each of these platforms the web app needs to load properly and allow the user to navigate the website and interact with all of the user flows, such as sign-up, login, and the various read and write operations that make up the functionality of any website. It is difficult to ensure web application functionality across all platforms, beca...

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, and HTTP request methods such as GET, PUT, and POST. But unless you have had a reason to learn more about the d...

Key Values is a platform where companies are profiled with descriptions of their company values. These profiles describe features such as work-life balance, company culture, daily routines, and strategy. Lynne Tye created Key Values with the goal of building a small business that would make money through connecting job seekers to companies with a culture that matched their own personal values syst...