Software Engineering Daily

GraphQL allows developers to communicate with all of their different data backends through a consistent query interface. A GraphQL query can be translated into queries to MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, or whatever kind of API or backend is needed to fulfill the GraphQL query. GraphQL users need to set up a GraphQL server to fulfill this query federation. Prisma is a tool for automatically generati...

Internet of Things is a concept that describes lots of devices that you interact with regularly being connected to the Internet and networked together. Technologists have been dreaming of the world of IoT for many years, where our connected refrigerator can detect that we are out of food, and automatically order more food. Or our connected bathroom can scan us for diseases and recommend treatment....

JavaScript performance has improved over time due to advances in JavaScript engines such as Google’s V8. A JavaScript engine performs compiler optimization, garbage collection, hot code management, caching, and other runtime aspects that keep a JavaScript program running efficiently.  JavaScript runs in browsers and servers. The resources that are available to a JavaScript engine vary widely acros...

Unity is a game engine for building 2-D and 3-D experiences, augmented reality, movies, and other applications. Unity is cross-platform, so that applications can be written once and deployed to iOS, Android, web, and other surfaces. Unity has been around for 13 years, and has grown in popularity with the rise in gaming and game development. Brett Bibby is VP of engineering at Unity, and he joins t...

Front is a shared inbox application that has seen rapid adoption within companies. Front allows multiple members of a company to collaborate together on a conversation–whether that conversation is in email, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger. This is useful when a customer email needs to be shared between the sales and engineering teams, or when a single email address is shared between different membe...

Background checks are a routine part of the hiring process. After a potential employee has made it through job interviews, a background check is administered to look through the applicant’s work history, criminal record, and other available data. Conducting a conventional background check can require manual work–including phone calls for reference checks and going to a courthouse to look up physic...

Google has two consumer operating systems: Android and Chrome. The Android operating system has been widely deployed on mobile devices. Chrome is an operating system for laptops and tablets, originally based around the Chrome browser. For several years, these two ecosystems were mostly separate–you could not run Android apps on a Chrome operating system. Shahid Hussain and Stefan Kuhne are enginee...

Kubernetes is an open source container management system. Kubernetes is sometimes described as “the Linux of distributed systems” and this description makes sense: the large numbers of users and contributors in the Kubernetes community is comparable to the volume of Linux adopters in its early days. There are many different distributions of Linux: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Chromium OS. These different oper...

Continuous integration and delivery allows teams to move faster by allowing developers to ship code independently of each other. A multi-stage CD pipeline might consist of development, staging, testing, and production. At each of these stages, a new piece of code undergoes additional tests, so that when the code finally makes it to production, the developers can be certain it won’t break the rest...

The DEV Community is a platform where developers share ideas, programming advice, and tools. Ben Halpern started it after running an extremely successful Twitter account creating humorous tweets for developers. One way to describe DEV Community is as a cross between Medium, Stack Overflow, and Reddit–but it has its own personality, so I recommend checking it out. The DEV Community was open sourced...

Modern applications produce large numbers of events. These events can be users clicking, IoT sensors accumulating data, or log messages. The cost of cloud storage and compute continues to drop, so engineers can afford to build applications around these high volumes of events, and a variety of tools have been developed to process them. Apache Kafka is widely used to store and queue these streams of...

A company runs a variety of distributed systems applications such as Hadoop for batch processing jobs, Spark for data science, and Kubernetes for container management. These distributed systems tools can run on-prem, in a cloud provider, or in a hybrid system that uses on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Some enterprises use VMs, some use bare metal, some use both. Mesosphere is a company that was s...

Netflix users stream terabytes of data from the cloud to their devices every day. During a high bandwidth, long-lived connection, a lot can go wrong. Networks can drop packets, machines can run out of memory, and the Netflix app on a user’s device can have a bug. All of these events can result in a bad user experience. Other errors can occur that do not disrupt the user experience. Netflix runs th...

Stock traders have access to high volumes of information to help them make decisions on whether to buy an asset. A trader who is considering buying a share of Google stock can find charts, reports, and statistical tools to help with their decision. There are a variety of machine learning products to help a technical investor create models of how a stock price might change in the future. Real estat...

Engineering organizations can operate more efficiently by working with a continuous integration and continuous deployment workflow. Continuous integration is the process of automatically building and deploying code that gets pushed to a remote repository. Continuous deployment is the process of moving that code through a pipeline of environments, from dev to test to production. At each stage, the...

Engineers need to have an awareness of the business model that allows their company to succeed. When a software company is going to market, the engineers need to work closely with the sales and marketing team to formulate a strategy for building and selling that product. This is especially true in highly technical products, such as database- or platform-as-a-service companies. An engineer at a Had...

For most of history, a typical musician would learn to play one specific instrument. As synthesizers became available to the public, it became commonplace for a musician to create their own instruments using hardware and software. By the early 2000s, digital audio workstation software allowed a musician with a laptop to have access to the tools of a record producer. These tools changed how music i...

Robinhood is a platform for buying and selling stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets. Since its founding in 2013, Robinhood has grown to have more than 3 million user accounts, which is approximately the same as the popular online broker E-Trade. With the surge in user growth and transaction volume, the demands on the software infrastructure have increased significantly. When a user buys a st...

TIBCO was started in the 90’s with a popular message bus product that was widely used by finance companies, logistics providers, and other systems with high throughput. As TIBCO grew in popularity, the company expanded into other areas through products it developed in-house as well as through acquisitions. One acquisition was Jaspersoft, a business intelligence data platform. When TIBCO acquired J...

Self-driving transportation will be widely deployed at some point in the future. How far off is that future? There are widely varying estimations: maybe you will summon a self-driving Uber in a New York within 5 years, or maybe it will take 20 years to work out all of the challenges in legal and engineering. Between now and the self-driving future, there will be a long span of time where cars are...

Engineering organizations can operate more efficiently by working with a continuous integration and continuous deployment workflow. Continuous integration is the process of automatically building and deploying code that gets pushed to a remote repository. Continuous deployment is the process of moving that code through a pipeline of environments, from dev to test to production. At each stage, the...

Every company with a large set of customers has a large set of data–whether that company is 5 years old or 50 years old. That data is valuable whether you are an insurance company, a soft drink manufacturer, or a ridesharing company. All of these large companies know that their data is valuable, but some of them are not sure how to standardize the access patterns of that data, or build a culture a...

The main user interfaces today are the smartphone, the laptop, and the desktop computer. Some people today interact with voice interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, and automotive computer screens like the Tesla. In the future, these other interfaces will become more common. Developers will want to be able to expose their applications to these new interfaces. For example, let’s say I am...

Back in 2014, platform-as-a-service was becoming an increasingly popular idea. The idea of PaaS was to sit on top of infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and simplify some of the complexity of these infrastructure providers. Heroku had built a successful businesses from the idea of platform-as-a-service, and there was a widely held desire in the developer communi...

Stitch Fix is a company that recommends packages of clothing based on a set of preferences that the user defines and updates over time. Stitch Fix’s software platform includes the website, data engineering infrastructure, and warehouse software. Stitch Fix has over 5000 employees, including a large team of engineers. Cathy Polinsky is the CTO of Stitch Fix. In today’s show Cathy describes how the...