Software Engineering Daily

Diffbot is a knowledge graph that allows developers to interface with the unstructured web as if it was a structured database. In today’s show, Diffbot CEO Mike Tung returns for a second discussion about how he has built Diffbot and how Diffbot is used. The web has many different entities. Web pages, topics, people, stories, articles, companies, and much more. Humans use a search engine to find an...

Render is a cloud provider built on top of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Render uses the compute abstractions provided by the major cloud providers to build a second layer cloud provider with the goal of providing a better user experience. Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he returns to the show to discuss how Render works, and why there is a need for a new cloud provider.  Everyon...

Webflow is a platform for building applications without programming. Software engineering has barely been around for 30 years. Over that period of time, there have been many attempts to create a platform that allows for the creation of software without writing a line of code. Most of these systems have not been able to fulfill that task. And this should come as no surprise. It is hard enough to bu...

Data visualization is the presentation of data in a way that emphasizes certain qualities about that data. Data visualization can be used to prove a specific point, or it can be used as a depiction of a data set to be explored. Data visualization is used in consumer software products as well as backend engineering systems such as logging data. As tools for data visualization have improved, data ap...

The ability to create software is a superpower. But software education is not evenly distributed. Ryan Carson started Treehouse to provide a high quality education system for anyone to learn how to build software. On a previous episode, Ryan and I discussed the field of programming education. Ryan returns to the show for a conversation about building Treehouse, and the company’s expansion from an...

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 dictators. Like any piece of technology, video surveillance can be used for good or evil. Video recognition le...

Data privacy policies have changed how software organizations need to operate. As consumer preferences have shifted in favor of strong privacy, software companies are having to examine their policies around data collection and retention. Many software companies were started in a time with different norms around data.  Building a new application that is compliant with GDPR is hard. Updating an exis...

Indie Hackers is a platform for independent software businesses to discuss strategy and find inspiration. Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers with the goal of sharing the stories of these businesses, and the company has become a thriving community of entrepreneurs, engineers, and creators. Business is a creative medium. The definition of a successful business is as subjective as the rules for wh...

Scott Belsky founded Behance in 2006. Behance is a social platform where designers and creators share their work. Scott was motivated to start Behance due to his desire to combine his love for creativity with his desire to create a business. After 6 years of work, Behance was acquired by Adobe for more than $150 million. Today, Scott works as the Chief Product Officer at Adobe. Behance’s journey f...

Large companies have multiple databases, multiple data formats, and multiple applications that need to use the data. Every data engineer needs to move data between these different components of a system. Moving data between different parts of a system is often called “ETL”, an acronym for “Extract, Transform, Load.” Data engineers spend much of their time writing code for ETL. This ETL code often...

The development of self-driving cars is one of the biggest technological changes that is under way. Across the world, thousands of engineers are working on developing self-driving cars. Although it still seems far away, self-driving cars are starting to feel like an inevitability. This is especially true if you spend much time in downtown San Francisco, where you will see a self-driving car being...

Investors often use the term “moat” to describe the durable competitive advantage of a company. When an investor puts money into a company, they are making that investment based on a valuation. That valuation is subjective–it is how much the investor thinks the company is worth. A valuation is determined by the present value of future cash flows. What are the future cash flows of a company? In ord...

Software engineering is a new field. There are theories about how we should be building our systems, but these theories might change over time. The same is true for engineering management.  There are many successful examples of companies scaling with the management hierarchies pioneered by Microsoft and Google, but since everyone knows that those techniques work, they get continually copied. Of co...

Ethos Life Insurance is a software company that sells life insurance products. Software is reshaping established industries such as banking, insurance, and manufacturing. In these large, established industries, incumbents are adopting new technology as fast as they can, but the new technology needs to be integrated with the old technology. The slow rate of technology adoption by incumbents creates...

Isolation is a fundamental concept in computer science. Software workloads are isolated from each other in order to keep resource access cleanly separated.  When programs are properly isolated, it is easier for the programmer to reason about the memory safety of that program. When a program is not properly isolated, it can lead problems such as security flaws where one program can access the infor...

Cloud Foundry is a system for managing distributed applications. Cloud Foundry was released in 2011, and has been widely adopted by enterprises that need a platform for deploying and scaling the applications that run within their company. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes systems for continuous delivery, pubsub messaging, and containerization. Abby Kearns is the executive director at Clo...

A new software product usually starts with a single database. That database manages the tables for user accounts and basic transactions. When a product becomes popular, the database grows in size. There are more transactions and more users. A company grows around that product, and the company starts to accumulate more data in different sources. Analytics systems, time series databases, and logging...

A software company needs to get many things right in order to be successful. Having a useful product with solid engineering is only the beginning. ReadMe was started five years ago. The company solved a seemingly simple problem: documentation for software products. If you have worked as a software engineer, you have looked at documentation. You know that there is a wide range of quality among the...

Open source software is very new. Open source has existed for less than 30-40 years, depending on who you ask. The idea of open source was popularized by Linux, and open source software started to get heavily commercialized in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, open source was used by nearly every large software company. In recent years, most of the new databases, web frameworks, user interface librar...

Modern databases consist of multiple servers that host the data in a distributed fashion. Using multiple servers allows a database to be resilient to the failure of any one database node, because copies of the data are shared to other servers. A multi-node setup also lets the database grow beyond the size of data that could be hosted on a single node. Although a distributed database gains in scala...

Ever since Apache Kafka was open sourced from LinkedIn, it has been used to solve a wide variety of problems in distributed systems and data engineering. Kafka is a distributed messaging queue that is used by developers to publish messages and subscribe to topics with a certain message type. Kafka allows information to flow throughout a company such that multiple systems can consume the messages f...

A new employee at a software company needs access to a variety of tools. In order to get started working, the employee might need Slack, email, Google Docs, and Amazon Web Services, and all of these require an account with a username and password. Setting up all of these accounts can be time consuming, because the company needs to go into their admin portal and create the accounts. The accounts ne...

Amazon Web Services first came out in 2006. It took several years before the software industry realized that cloud computing was a transformative piece of technology. Initially, the common perspective around cloud computing was that it was a useful tool for startups, but would not be a smart option for large, established businesses. Cloud computing was not considered economical nor secure. Today,...

Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the software world. After working with Python and developing a love for the language, Michael Kennedy started to wonder why there was not a high quality podcast dedicated to covering the community and new technologies of the Python ecosystem. Michael started Talk Python To Me as a podcast with the goal of telling stories from the world of...

A new software application has simple requirements for a database.  The database needs to be written to and read from. The database fulfills simple needs such as storing user information and providing the application frontend with the necessary data to render a simple webpage of financial transactions or blog posts. As an application becomes successful, the database grows in size. The complexity o...