Software Engineering Daily

Amazon Web Services changed how software engineers work. Before AWS, it was common for startups to purchase their own physical servers. AWS made server resources as accessible as an API request, and has gone on to create higher-level abstractions for building applications. For the first few years of AWS, the abstractions were familiar. S3 provided distributed, reliable object storage. Elastic MapR...

Serverless computing is a technique for deploying applications without an addressable server. A serverless application is running on servers, but the developer does not have access to the server in the traditional sense. The developer is not dealing with IP addresses and configuring instances of their different services to be able to scale. Just as higher level languages like C abstracted away the...

Functions-as-a-service allow developers to run their code in a “serverless” environment. A developer can provide a function to a cloud provider and the code for that function will be scheduled onto a container and executed whenever an event triggers that function. An “event” can mean many different things. It is a signal that something has changed within your application. When you save a file to a...

Most applications today are either deployed to on-premise environments or deployed to a single cloud provider. Developers who are deploying on-prem struggle to set up complicated open source tools like Kafka and Hadoop. Developers who are deploying to a cloud provider tend to stay within that specific cloud provider, because moving between different clouds and integrating services across clouds ad...

In a cloud infrastructure environment, failures happen regularly. The servers can fail, the network can fail, and software bugs can crash your software unexpectedly. The amount of failures that can occur in cloud infrastructure is one reason why storage is often separated from application logic. A developer can launch multiple instances of their application, with each instance providing a “statele...

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 offer a wider variety of services. If an...

Augmented reality glasses will let us walk through a world where the digital blends together with the physical. 3-D objects will be rendered and superimposed onto our field of vision, creating an environment for people to build applications we can hardly dream of today. These augmented reality glasses are probably three to five years away from being ready for consumer use. But developers are alrea...

Cloud providers created the ability for developers to easily deploy their applications to servers on data centers. In the early days of the cloud, most of the code that a developer wrote for their application could run on any cloud provider, whether it was Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. These cloud providers were giving developers the same Linux server that they would expect from an on-premise depl...

Originally posted on 13 September 2017. Machines understand the world through mathematical representations. In order to train a machine learning model, we need to describe everything in terms of numbers. Images, words, and sounds are too abstract for a computer. But a series of numbers is a representation that we can all agree on, whether we are a computer or a human. In recent shows, we have expl...

Originally posted on 28 July 2017. Self-driving cars are here. Fully autonomous systems like Waymo are being piloted in less complex circumstances. Human-in-the-loop systems like Tesla Autopilot navigate drivers when it is safe to do so, and lets the human take control in ambiguous circumstances. Computers are great at memorization, but not yet great at reasoning. We cannot enumerate to a computer...

Originally posted on 1 May 2018. Technology is pushing us rapidly toward a future that is impossible to forecast. We try to imagine what that future might look like, and we can’t help having our predictions shaped by the media we have consumed. 1984, Terminator, Gattaca, Ex Machina, Black Mirror–all of these stories present a dystopian future. But if you look around the world, the most successful...

Originally posted on 16 June 2017. John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture that has made Google so successful. He...

Originally posted on 14 February 2017. Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company L...

At Facebook, Venkat Venkataramani saw how large volumes of data were changing software infrastructure. Applications such as logging servers and advertising were creating fast moving, semi-structured data. The user base was growing, the traffic was growing, and the volume of data was growing. And the popular methods for managing this data were insufficient for the applications that developers wante...

Ten years ago, there was a distinction between “backend” and “frontend” developers. A backend developer would be managing the business logic and database transactions using Ruby on Rails or Java. A frontend developer would be responsible for implementing designs and arranging buttons using raw HTML and JavaScript. Today, developers can build entire applications in JavaScript. Developers who spent...

Software products are distributed across more and more servers as they grow. With the proliferation of cloud providers like AWS, these large infrastructure deployments have become much easier to create. With the maturity of Kubernetes, these distributed applications are more reliable. Developers and operators can use a service mesh to manage the interactions between services across this distribute...

Market strategy defines how a company is positioning itself to be successful. This strategy encompasses engineering, sales, marketing, recruiting, and everything else within a company. Herb Cunitz has led teams at Hortonworks, VMware, SpringSource, and several other companies over his 30 year career in software. After working as president of Hortonworks, Herb started AccelG2M. AccelG2M works with...

Software companies today rely on group chat applications. The world of startups and small businesses is dominated by Slack. But for some large enterprises, regulatory constraints prevent them from using Slack. Slack is a web application that is hosted in the cloud, and regulated industries such as banking often need to run their applications on their own on-prem infrastructure. Mattermost is an op...

Wes Bos has created popular courses on React, GraphQL, and JavaScript. With hundreds of thousands of students, Wes has earned a cult following for his fun, practical lessons on web development. The courses produced by Wes teach developers how to build useful applications such as a complete e-commerce store. Wes has built a career around studying and evangelizing JavaScript. His approach to educati...

A bank account is a platform for apps to be built on top of. If that sounds like a weird idea, think about the features of a bank account. Most users only have a single bank account, making it a tool for identity and authentication. The series of transactions in a bank account provides a data set that can be used for analyzing payment history and issuing loans, or insurance. But there are difficul...

When a startup finds product market fit, the adoption of that product can grow rapidly, turning a startup into a high growth company. All of a sudden, a startup that was struggling to find its first customer is bombarded with new challenges. The startup has to hire tens of new employees. This requires raising capital, so the startup has to meet with investors and lawyers. A rapid influx of new cus...

Releasing software has inherent risk. If your users don’t like your new feature, they might stop using your product immediately. If a software bug makes it into production, it can crash your entire application. Releasing software gradually has many benefits. A slow rollout to an increasing population of users allows you to test your software in multiple real-world environments before it goes live...

The Berkeley AMPLab was a research lab where Apache Spark and Apache Mesos were both created. In the last five years, the Mesos and Spark projects have changed the way infrastructure is managed and improved the tools for data science. Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley, Berkeley has become a university where fundamental research is blended with a sense of industry applications. Students an...

Robotics, genomics, and backend infrastructure: as an in vestor, it can be difficult to assess the viability of a startup that is on the cutting edge in any of these areas. A robotics startup requires a team with an integrated understanding of hardware and software. A genomics company will not only have to develop a successful healthcare product, but will have to bring it to market through regulat...

Building software was simplified by cloud providers. With the cloud, it became much easier to deploy a server, spin up a database, and scale an application. Cloud providers like AWS gave developers access to these infrastructure primitives like storage and compute. On top of those primitives, numerous API companies have been built. An API company offers a more specific set of services. Twilio offe...