Software Engineering Daily

Food gets thrown away from restaurants, homes, catering companies, and any other place with a kitchen. Most of this food gets thrown away when it is still edible, and could provide nutrition to someone who is hungry. Just like Airbnb makes use of excess living capacity, OLIO was started to connect excess food with people who want to eat that food. There are numerous challenges with this idea. How...

Building software today is much faster than it was just a few years ago. The tools are higher level, and abstract away tasks that would have required months of development. Much of a developer’s time used to be spent optimizing databases, load balancers, and queueing systems in order to be able to handle the load created by thousands of users. Today, scalability is built into much of our infrastru...

WebAssembly allows developers to run any language in a sandboxed, memory controlled module that can be called via well-defined semantics. As we have discussed in recent episodes with Lin Clark and Steve Klabnik from Mozilla, WebAssembly is changing application architectures both in and outside the browser. WebAssembly is being adopted by all of the major browser vendors, including Google. Today’s...

WebAssembly is a low-level compilation target for any programming language that can be interpreted into WebAssembly. Alternatively, WebAssembly is a way to run languages other than JavaScript in the browser. Or, yet another way of describing WebAssembly is a virtual machine for executing code in a low level, well-defined sandbox. WebAssembly is reshaping what is possible to do in the web browser....

DoorDash is a logistics company that connects customers, restaurants, and drivers that can move food to its destination. When a customer orders from a restaurant, DoorDash needs to identify the ideal driver for picking up the order from the restaurant and dropping it off with the customer. This process of matching an order to a driver takes in many different factors. Let’s say I order spaghetti fr...

Cryptocurrency security is a concern to anyone who has a significant amount of money in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto assets. Most Bitcoin is held in either a Bitcoin wallet or a Bitcoin bank. Your Bitcoin holdings are recorded on a public ledger. You access these holdings by authenticating with your private key. A Bitcoin wallet could be described more accurately as a Bitcoin key...

At Google, the job of a site reliability engineer involves building tools to automate infrastructure operations. If a server crashes, there is automation in place to create a new server. If a service starts to receive a high load of traffic, there is automation in place to scale up the instances of that service. In order to create an automated response to an infrastructure problem, a site reliabil...

Continuous delivery is a way of releasing software without requiring software engineers to synchronize during a release.  Over the last decade, continuous delivery workflows have evolved as the tools have changed. Jenkins was one of the first continuous delivery tools and is still in heavy use today. Netflix’s open sourced Spinnaker has also been widely adopted. As Kubernetes has grown in populari...

Klarna is a payments company headquartered in Sweden. Since being established in 2005 it has grown to handling $21 billion in online sales in 2017. Roughly 40% of all e-commerce sales in Sweden go through Klarna. Klarna’s original differentiator was that it allowed users to checkout of e-commerce stores without entering in credit card information. Instead, the user enters an email address and regi...

Stripe is a payments API that allows merchants to transact online. Since the creation of the payments API, Stripe has expanded into adjacent services such as fraud detection, business management, and billing. These other verticals leverage the existing customer base and infrastructure that Stripe has developed from the success of their payments business. Raylene Yung is the head of payments at Str...

In the smartphone market there are two dominant operating systems: one closed source (iPhone) and one open source (Android). The market for self-driving cars could play out the same way, with a company like Tesla becoming the closed source iPhone of cars, and a company like Comma.ai developing the open source Android of self-driving cars. George Hotz is the CEO of Comma.ai. Comma makes hardware de...

Chad Fowler was the CTO of Wunderlist prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Since the acquisition, Chad has become the general manager of developer advocacy at Microsoft. He also works as a venture capitalist at BlueYard Capital, an early stage investment firm. I’ve had a lot of fun talking to Chad, because he can move seamlessly between talking about disparate subjects like cloud computing, inve...

Music collaboration has historically been accomplished by musicians gathering in bands. A band is usually an in-person, physical manifestation: a drummer, a guitarist, a piano player. Or, on a large scale, a symphony of classical instruments led by a conductor. Today, the most flexible instrument that anyone can play is arguably the computer, because a computer can simulate or replay any of the so...

Java programs compile into Java bytecode. Java bytecode executes in the Java Virtual Machine, a runtime environment that compiles that bytecode further into machine code, and optimizes the runtime by identifying “hot” code paths and keeping those hot code paths executing quickly. The Java Virtual Machine is a popular platform for building languages on top of. Languages like Scala and Clojure compi...

A token is a unit of virtual currency. Most tokens are built on a blockchain-based cryptocurrency platform, such as Ethereum. Building on top of a platform like Ethereum allows these tokens to form their own financial ecosystem while leveraging the scale of an existing currency. Tokens became highly popular in early 2018, with the boom in ICOs–initial coin offerings. Many of these coins offer a va...

Medical breakthroughs require medical research. Medical research requires patient testing and data collection. The most common form of capturing patient data is through surveys–and most of those surveys today are done on paper. Surveying patients to understand the side effects or benefits of trial drugs or treatments, and getting accurate results out of these are critical aspects of medical resear...

Apple operating systems are closed source. This closed source nature gives Apple an extremely successful business model–and a very different software developer ecosystem than Linux-based systems. Since Linux is open source, the information on how to manipulate the system at a low level is very public. The lack of information about low-level programming in Apple operating systems has led to a large...

“Edge computing” is a term used to define computation that takes place in an environment outside of a data center. Edge computing is a broad term. Your smartphone is an edge device. A self-driving car is an edge device. A security camera with a computer chip is an edge device. These “edge devices” have existed for a long time now, but the term “edge computing” has only started being used more rece...

React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic for iOS and Android. React Native was created at Facebook. F...

Blogging is more than 20 years old. Over that period of time, numerous publishing platforms have been created. Squarespace, Blogger, Medium, and Twitter are popular closed source platforms. WordPress has been the most popular open source blogging platform–and much of the Internet (including Software Engineering Daily) runs on WordPress. WordPress is a powerful platform. News companies, ecommerce w...

Howard Marks ran two video game companies in the 90’s: Activision and Acclaim. While running these companies, he developed a love for entrepreneurship that he maintains today. Howard is the CEO of StartEngine, a company that functions as an accelerator, a crowdfunding platform, and ICO launcher. Howard joins the show to talk about his background as an entrepreneur, as well as some modern alternati...

Video streaming platforms like Netflix offer a convenient way to watch video content. We are now able to watch our favorite TV shows, movies, or content creators on a range of devices. However, buffering while watching videos can be a painful experience on mobile phones and tablets that use 4G or LTE. As streaming becomes available to a wider range of devices with varying bandwidth restrictions, d...

Enterprises want to update their technology faster. One way an enterprise can accelerate the adoption of new tools is to move more aggressively towards the cloud. By giving internal developers access to the cloud, it becomes easier to provision new servers–allowing for rapid experimentation, test environments, and scalability. In previous shows we have explored how large enterprises successfully l...

JavaScript has been the exclusive language of the web browser for the last 20 years. Whether you use Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, your browser interprets and executes code in a virtual machine–and that virtual machine only runs JavaScript. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not ideal for every task we want to perform in the browser. Think about the use cases where you need to use softw...

“Bots” are becoming increasingly relevant to our everyday interactions with technology. A bot sometimes mediates the interactions of two people. Examples of bots include automated reply systems, intelligent chat bots, classification systems, and prediction machines. These systems are often powered by machine learning systems that are black boxes to the user. Today’s guest Rob May argues that these...