Software Engineering Daily

Spanner is a globally distributed, transactionally consistent database.  Spanner initially emerged as a paper that came out of Google in 2012. Around this time, database scalability was difficult to solve, even for Google. The Spanner paper offered some breakthroughs in distributed systems which allowed Google to take some of the learnings from BigTable’s eventual consistency and construct a novel...

Open source plays a key role in today’s world of technology businesses. Today, the impact of open source seems obvious. From Kubernetes to distributed databases to cloud providers, so much of our software is powered by open source. But it was not always this way.   Bruce Perens was one of the earliest figures in the world of open source. He collaborated with Eric S. Raymond, the author of Cathedra...

The browser has become the central application of the consumer operating system. Every piece of client software, from email to document management, has become usable through the browser. Even modern desktop software such as Slack is built using Electron, a tool for building client applications that essentially run inside of a browser without an address bar. One activity that still takes place larg...

Modern software is built with cloud services, APIs, and other high level tools. Technical software development is moving beyond the realm of writing code. Individuals who do not have a background in computer science or programming can create increasingly complex tools. Higher level APIs include Twilio for managing phone communications, and Stripe for managing financial workflows. Platforms such as...

Cassandra was initially released in 2008 as a project out of Facebook. Cassandra offered an open source solution to database scalability issues that were being tackled internally by large companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. 2008 was a golden age of new infrastructure, with systems such as Hadoop and Kafka gaining traction around the same time. Jonathan Ellis started working with Cassandra,...

Airlines have always had an emphasis on new technology. Over the years, airlines have needed to develop more and more software. Digital transformation is causing every large company to adopt the tools and practices of software companies, and that includes Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines has existed for more than 90 years. Over that period of time, the company has developed new systems in every gene...

Ilya Sukhar founded Parse in 2011 to make cloud services for mobile developers. Parse was a newer kind of cloud provider called “backend-as-a-service”, built to simplify the complexities of Amazon Web Services and the complexities of the mobile ecosystem.  During this time, Facebook was in the middle of its shift toward becoming a mobile application company. Ads on the smartphone were not yet a pr...

Parse was a backend-as-a-service company that started in 2011 with the initial focus of making the cloud easier to use for mobile developers. Parse had several novel engineering challenges. In 2011, it was not easy to build on top of AWS, nor was it easy to build within the young mobile ecosystem. Charity Majors was an early engineer at Parse, and stayed with the company through its acquisition by...

Kent Beck is a legendary figure in the world of software engineering.  Kent was an early advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and popularized the idea of writing unit tests before writing code that would satisfy those unit tests. A unit test isolates and tests a small piece of functionality within a large piece of software. Practitioners of Test-Driven Development write tens or hundreds of t...

When Chuck Rossi joined Facebook in 2008, he was one of the most experienced release engineers at the company. As he began to explore the engineering practices of the organization, he was surprised, confused, and impressed by the release engineering system that he encountered. Release engineering is the process by which software is released to users. As software is being developed, it moves throug...

Facebook is a large multiuser application. Scaling Facebook was different than scaling a single-user application such as an ecommerce store or a search engine. A social network is faced with unique infrastructure scalability challenges, as well as subjective questions around user communications, privacy, and content. Pedram Keyani worked at Google before joining Facebook in 2007. In his years at F...

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized monetary systems built on open source software. The open source software movement has evolved from the world of Linux, MySQL, and Apache to a thriving ecosystem of commercial enterprises built around open source software. This ecosystem includes projects such as Kubernetes, MongoDB, and ReactJS. It includes large organizations such as Amazon Web Services, Elastic...

When a new employee joins a software company, it is often unclear where that employee should begin. Do they have a mentor? What are they working on? What are the expectations for how fast that employee should be contributing? The early period of employment is often referred to as “onboarding.” During the onboarding period, an employee will learn the basics of the company they have just joined. The...

A time series database is optimized for the storage of high volumes of sequential data across time. Time series databases are often organized as columnar data stores that can write large volumes of data quickly. These systems can sometimes tolerate data loss, because the data they are gathering is used for monitoring and other applications that require aggregated data sets rather than highly impor...

Insurance is an old business. Individuals and businesses have been buying insurance policies for decades. These insurance policies can cost hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per year.   Software is remaking the insurance industry. One way new software can improve the insurance industry is through better brokerage technology. Insurance involves carriers and brokers, who work toge...

Open source software has evolved into a thriving, multifaceted ecosystem. Open source encompasses operating systems and databases. Open source embodies both altruism and self-interest. And open source enables thriving businesses from WordPress blogs to hundred billion dollar cloud providers. There is a large set of business models that can be built around a successful open source project. Some of...

Andreas Antonopoulos is the author of several books about cryptocurrency engineering, including Mastering Bitcoin and Mastering Ethereum. In these books, Andreas lays out the systems of economics and computer science that underpin the two most mature decentralized monetary systems. When Andreas originally discovered the Bitcoin whitepaper, he had witnessed the repeated mismanagement of government-...

Software engineers often work as a contractor for some duration of their career. A contractor earns a fixed hourly salary for a defined period of weeks, months, or years. Contract work can be more flexible than full-time work, and often pays more than full-time software engineering, because contract jobs can end at any time, and they do not have the added employee benefits such as health insurance...

The service mesh abstraction allows for a consistent model for managing and monitoring the different components of a microservices architecture.  In the service mesh pattern, each service is deployed with a sidecar container that contains a service proxy. These sidecars are collectively referred to as the “data plane.” Each sidecar provides the service that it is deployed next to with a set of fea...

The PlayStation is a line of game consoles created by Sony. PlayStation devices include the PS2, PS3, PS4, and the PSP mobile system. Tony Godar worked as an engineer in the PlayStation ecosystem for 15 years, and he joins the show to give a retrospective on his time in the console industry. Developing hardware and software for game consoles differs significantly from the world of web development....

Large software companies have become a target for criticism. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other prominent technology giants find themselves under a kind of scrutiny that is reminiscent of banks in 2008 and oil companies in the early 1900s. Across the planet, there is a growing sentiment that “big tech” has too much power, and that they are abusing that power in order to dominate markets, censor sp...

In this episode Will Larson, author of An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, speaks with Uma Chingunde of Stripe and Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily about engineering management. Will was also featured on SE Daily recently. An Elegant Puzzle is an excellent resource on management techniques and strategies for scaling software organizations. Will’s writing draws from his...

The a16z Podcast is a show that is produced by Andreessen Horowitz, an investment fund based in Silicon Valley. The a16z Podcast covers topics including software engineering, biology, media, cryptocurrencies and entrepreneurship. A16z is one of the most popular podcasts about technology. Sonal Chokshi is the editor in chief at Andreessen Horowitz and the showrunner for the a16z podcast. For five y...

Data-as-a-service businesses offer paid access to data sets. These data sets can be useful for building products or training machine learning models.  There has been steady growth in the tools and practices around processing and storing data. But access to data sets remains a bottleneck for widespread development of machine learning applications in a large set of domains.  SafeGraph is a company f...

A large sales organization has hundreds of sales people. Each of those sales people manages a set of accounts who they are trying to close sales deals on. Sales people are overseen by managers who ensure that the sales people are performing well. Directors and VPs ensure the scalability and health of the overall sales organization. The sales lifecycle mostly takes place within a piece of software...