Software Engineering Daily

Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Bol.com is the biggest e-commerce company in the Netherlands and Belgium. For 20 years, Bol has been developing its software architecture, which includes a variety of services and databases, and a mix of physical and cloud infrastructure. For an ecommerce company...

Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Modern web development tools have given frontend developers more power. On the frontend, JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue have become easier to work with. For deployment, tools like Netlify and Zeit give developers a workflow that is tightly integrated wi...

In the world of commercial open source, there is plenty of room for both point solution providers and cloud providers. But they are competing for the same customers, and the competitive battlefield is expanding to the nuanced world of software licensing. By changing their licenses, open source projects like Kafka, MongoDB, and Redis can prohibit AWS from certain usage patterns. This might offer so...

This is a post written and narrated by Haseeb Qureshi, a cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur. Haseeb is speaking at an upcoming Software Engineering Daily Meetup. The ICO bubble had no single cause. Mono-causal explanations always fall short in explaining complex phenomena. But its effects are easier to pinpoint. There are now many world class teams well-capitalized to build, scale, and evolv...

GitLab is an open source platform for software development. GitLab started with the ability to manage git repositories and now has functionality for collaboration, issue tracking, continuous integration, logging, and tracing. GitLab’s core business is selling to enterprises who want a self-hosted git installation, such as banks or other companies who prefer not to use a git service in the cloud. T...

An operating system kernel manages the system resources that are needed to run applications. The Linux kernel runs most of the smart devices that we interact with, and is the largest open source project in history. Shuah Khan has worked on operating systems for two decades, including 13 years at HP and 5 years at Samsung. She has worked on proprietary operating systems and a variety of Linux opera...

Malware is malicious software that makes money for the creator of that software. Malware can appear onto a user’s computer if that user visits a malicious website or installs malicious software by accident. There are many types of malware. Spyware sits on your machine and logs your data in order to sell it. Ransomware can lock your computer and demand that you pay money to unlock it. Adware serves...

Advertising fraud occurs when a brand pays for an advertisement online and that advertisement is shown to an automated bot account that has been created to view ads. Advertising fraud is rampant on the Internet. It’s not possible to know how much money is lost to ad fraud, but the costs are in the billions of dollars. Praneet Sharma and Shailin Dhar are the founders of Method Media Intelligence, a...

The demand for electricity is based on the consumption of the electrical grid at a given time. The supply of electricity is based on how much energy is being produced or stored on the grid at a given time. Because these sources of supply and demand fluctuate rapidly but predictably, energy markets present profit opportunities for traders. Minh Dang and Corey Noone are engineers with Advanced Micro...

Cloud computing started to become popular in 2006 with the release of Amazon EC2, a system for deploying applications to virtual machines sitting on remote data center infrastructure . With cloud computing, application developers no longer needed to purchase expensive server hardware. Creating an application for the Internet became easier, cheaper, and simpler. As the cloud has become popular, new...

Monitoring tools are used by every area of an organization. Business development teams use monitoring to understand the metrics for product performance. Finance teams need to understand how the costs of cloud computing resources are changing. Site reliability engineers use monitoring dashboards that applications are up and running without problematic latency. Product managers evaluate the results...

WebAssembly is a runtime that lets languages beyond JavaScript to execute in frontend web applications. WebAssembly is novel because most modern frontend applications are written entirely in JavaScript. WebAssembly lets us use languages like Rust and C++ after they have been compiled down to a web assembly binary module. Language interoperability is only one part of why WebAssembly is exciting. Th...

Cryptocurrencies enable a large number of applications. Trustless reputation systems, decentralized identity tools, micropayments, non-fungible Internet items, borderless currencies, just to name a few. But cryptocurrencies have not yet impacted daily life, for most of us. Why is that? One reason is that it is still very hard for developers to build within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The program...

Computational integrity is a property that is required for financial transactions on the Internet. Computational integrity means that the output of a certain computation is correct. If I deposit money into my bank, my bank sends me a number that represents the new balance in my account. I assume that the number they have sent me is correct. The bank could be lying to me–maybe this bank is not actu...

Collaboration on the Internet creates innovation. New inventions, new art, and new products–built by people working together on the Internet. FindCollabs is a product we have been working on to enable people to find and collaborate with each other. If you want to try it out, you can go to FindCollabs.com. FindCollabs is for finding people to create your projects with, and getting those projects bu...

The Internet has transformed humanity. The Internet is the result of a long series of innovations from military, academia, business, and the open source community. In his book, How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, Brian McCullough tells the story of the last 25 years of Internet development through the lens of companies like ebay, Amazon, Google, and Apple. Whereas other books h...

Advertising fraud steals billions of dollars every year. BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman reports on advertising fraud and its impact on the Internet. In one investigation, Craig uncovered a mobile advertising fraud scheme in which four people stole millions of dollars (perhaps as much as $75 million or even $750 million) by serving advertisements to automated users on mobile apps. The scheme wor...

Podcast listeners usually find out about a new podcast in one of two ways: either a friend recommends that podcast or the Apple podcast charts rank that new podcast highly. The Apple podcast charts are created using an algorithm that is not public. Many people believe that the chart ranking of a podcast is based on the number of podcast subscribers, the number of podcast downloads, and the reviews...

Many devices in our world are not “smart.” Air conditioners, electric guitars, power outlets, and factory conveyor belts, just to name a few. There are exciting software applications that we could build around these devices, but we need to be able to interface with them programmatically. We need to be able to know the state of these devices. We need to be able to save that state, and then we can u...

Edge computing refers to computation involving drones, connected cars, smart factories, or IoT sensors. Any software deployment that is not a large centralized server installation could qualify as an edge device–even a smartphone. Today, much of our heavy computation takes place in the cloud–a set of remote data centers some distance away from our client devices. For many use cases, this works fin...

React Native allows developers to build native applications for iOS and Android using components written in the React JavaScript framework. These ReactJS components render to native application code by going over a JavaScript bridge, a message bus that communicates between JavaScript code and native iOS or Android runtimes. For most mobile application use cases, React Native works well. But in som...

In the early days of YouTube, there were scalability problems with the MySQL database that hosted the data model for all of YouTube’s videos. The state of the art solution to scaling MySQL at the time was known as “application-level sharding.” To scale a database using application-level sharding, you break up the database into shards–disjoint regions of data. When you want to query the database, y...

Zoox is a full-stack self-driving car company. Zoox engineers work on everything a self-driving car company needs, from the physical car itself to the algorithms running on the car to the ride hailing system which the company plans to use to drive around riders. Since starting in 2014, Zoox has grown to over 500 employees. Ethan Dreyfuss is a software infrastructure engineer at Zoox. He joins the...

DoorDash is a food delivery company where users find restaurants to order from. When a user opens the DoorDash app, the user can search for types of food or specific restaurants from the search bar or they can scroll through the feed section and look at recommendations that the app gives them within their local geographic area. Recommendations is a classic computer science problem. Much like sorti...

The nature of software projects is changing. Projects are using a wider variety of cloud providers and SaaS tools. Projects are being broken up into more git repositories, and the code in those repositories are being deployed into small microservices. With the increased number of tools, repositories, and deployment targets, it can become difficult to manage software policy. “Policy” defines how di...