Software Engineering Daily

Banking has been a part of the economy for 600 years. Banking has always been evolving. The most recent evolution: the financial industry has been going digital. Newer “fintech” companies have created innovative ways of doing everything related to money–from friendly payments to budgeting; from business transactions to insurance. However, the traditional banks themselves have been relatively slow...

Git is a distributed file system for version control. Git is extremely reliable, fast, and secure, owing to the fact that it is one of the oldest pieces of open source software. But even battle-tested software can have vulnerabilities. In this episode, we explore a subtle git vulnerability that could have potentially led to git users executing malicious scripts when they intended to simply pull a...

If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store. Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do you need to unlock an additional entrance? Should you open another store? Do you reall...

Machine learning models allow our applications to perform highly accurate inferences. A model can be used to classify a picture as a cat, or to predict what movie I might want to watch. But before a machine learning model can be used to make these inferences, the model must be trained and deployed. In the training process, a machine learning model consumes a data set and learns from it. The traini...

Modern programming requires lots of integration between APIs. Some of these integrations are trivial–such as using Twilio or Stripe. But there are many more complex integrations. For example, when a large company acquires a smaller company, the acquiring company might want to integrate with that smaller company to leverage the synergies between the two companies. How do you build clean communicati...

Flutter allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps. In our previous show about Flutter, Eric Seidel from Google described the goals of Flutter, why he founded the project, and how Flutter is built. In today’s show, Randal Schwartz talks about Flutter in more detail–including the developer experience of building Flutter apps and why he finds Flutter so exciting. Randal is a longtime soft...

Nubank was started in 2013 with a credit card that was controlled through a mobile app. At the time, it was the first service in Brazil that allowed customers to do banking without going to a physical bank branch. Since then, Nubank has expanded into additional financial services and currently has 850 employees working in Brazil. Edward Wible is a co-founder and CTO of Nubank and in this episode h...

Flutter is a project from Google that is rebuilding user interface engineering from the ground up. Today, most engineering teams have dedicated engineering resources for web, iOS, and Android. These different platforms have their own design constraints, their own toolset, and their own programming languages. But each platform is merely building a user interface. Why should development across these...

Tim O’Reilly’s book What’s the Future? is an overview of business, technology, and society. As the founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim has been steeped in technology trends for the last 40 years. From his vantage point running conferences and publishing technical content, Tim has been able to make informed predictions about what is coming next. In today’s conversation, Tim gave his perspective on how a...

When a patient comes into the hospital with stroke symptoms, the hospital will give that patient a CAT scan, a 3-dimensional imaging of the patient’s brain. The CAT scan needs to be examined by a radiologist, and the radiologist will decide whether to refer the patient to an interventionist–a surgeon who can perform an operation to lower the risk of long-term damage to the patient’s brain function...

Computer systems consume memory, CPU, battery, data, and network bandwidth as inputs. These systems provide value for the end user by delivering information, virtual objects, and physical products as outputs. Another fundamental resource that is becoming easier to consume as input is money. There are also new outputs–financial constructs that are made possible by cloud computing, machine learning,...

Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In these P2P systems, nodes need to find each other. Users need to be able to search for files that exist across the system. P2P systems are decentralized, so these routing problems must be solved without a centralized service in the middle. Without a centralized service that has all the information in one place, how can you sol...

Every company has the idea of the “nightly report.” A business analyst comes into the office, sits down in front their inbox, and looks at yesterday’s data. Did sales go up? Did the marketing campaigns bring in the expected number of customers? Was there an increase in helpdesk tickets? The statistics that these reports deliver to human analysts can change the direction of the business. Everyone w...

Chromium is an open source browser that shares code with the Chrome browser from Google. A browser is a large piece of software, with engineering challenges around threading, rendering, resource management, and networking. To add to the complexity, Chrome runs on iOS, Android, MacOSX, Windows, and other platforms. Chrome OS is an operating system based on Chrome. There is also Chromium OS, the ope...

Shopify runs more than 500,000 small business websites. When Shopify was figuring out how to scale, the engineering teams did not have a standard workflow for how to deploy and manage services. Some teams used AWS, some teams used Heroku, some teams used other infrastructure providers. To manage all those stores effectively, Shopify has built its own platform-as-a-service on top of Kubernetes call...

“Serverless” is a word used to describe functions that get deployed and run without the developer having to manage the infrastructure explicitly. Instead of creating a server, installing the dependencies, and executing your code, the developer just provides the code to the serverless API, and the serverless system takes care of the server creation, the installation, and the execution. Serverless w...

When you interact with your bank, it probably feels different than when you interact with a software technology company. That’s because the biggest banks in the world were started before software became such a universally important tool. Their core competency is banking–not consumer software. Today, most banks make consumer-facing software. But these banks were not founded by engineers. The softwa...

Crocodile Browser is a fast browser built by Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. I interviewed them 3 years ago, and in this episode I caught up with Osine to learn what he and his brother have been working on since then. Osine and Anesi have become friends of mine since we had a conversation several years ago. I met Osine for the first time at the Facebook F8 conference...

Searching through all of the videos on the Internet is not a simple problem. In order to search through all the videos, you need to build a search index. In order to build a search index, you need to build a web crawler. Video files are large. To store all of the actual video files would cost far too much money. In order to build an index in a cost-efficient manner, you need to have a way of stori...

Different browsers consume JavaScript in different ways. When a new version of JavaScript comes out, developers are eager to use the new functionality of that language version. But if you are writing frontend JavaScript code, that code needs to be interpretable by every browser that might consume it–whether the consumer is on an iPhone running Safari or a Windows machine running Internet Explorer...

Over the last decade, cloud computing made it easier to programmatically define what infrastructure we have running, and perform operations across that infrastructure. This is called “infrastructure as code.” Whether you want to backup a database, deploy a new version of a service, or introduce a new tier of load balancers, the changes that we make across our infrastructure can be done programmati...

Rust is a systems programming language with a distinct set of features for safety and concurrency. In previous shows about Rust, we explored how Rust can prevent crashes and eliminate data races through its approach to type safety and memory management. Rust’s focus on efficiency and safety makes it a promising language for networking code. Tokio is a set of networking libraries built on Rust. Tok...

Twenty years ago, all of the data in an organization could fit inside of relational databases. Imagine a company like Proctor and Gamble. P&G is a consumer packaged goods company with hundreds of business sectors–shaving products, toothpaste, shampoo, laundry detergent. Twenty years ago, if the chief financial officer of P&G wanted to answer a question about the revenue projections within the ente...

Evolutionary algorithms can generate surprising, effective solutions to our problems. Evolutionary algorithms are often let loose within a simulated environment. The algorithm is given a function to optimize for, and the engineers expect that algorithm to evolve a solution that optimizes for the objective function given the constraints of the simulated environment. But sometimes these results are...

If you have ever stayed in a short-term rental (like an Airbnb, HomeAway, or CouchSurfing), you have probably used the wifi network at that rental property. Why wouldn’t you? It’s no different than hopping on an open wifi network at an airport, or a Starbucks, or your friend’s house, right? One major difference: the hardware is easily accessible to previous guests at the short-term rental. Previou...