Software Engineering Daily

When a cyber attack occurs, how do we identify who committed it? There is no straightforward answer to that question. Even if we know Chinese hackers have infiltrated our power grid with logic bombs, we might not be able to say with certainty whether those hackers were state actors or rogue Chinese hackers looking for an offensive asset to sell to their government. Even if we know someone in Russi...

Ransomware and DDoS attacks happen all the time. Sometimes they affect large swaths of users. WannaCry ransomware froze the computer systems in hospitals. Mirai botnet DDoS attacks took down a DNS provider, making Netflix and Twitter inaccessible for a short period of time. These are innocent attacks compared to what we could face from a world where cars, heart rate monitors, and other safety crit...

Software companies that have been around for a decade have a ton of data. Modern machine learning techniques are able to turn that data into extremely useful models. Salesforce users have been entering petabytes of data into the company’s CRM tool since 1999. With its Einstein suite of products, Salesforce is using that data to build new product features and APIs. Simon Chan is the senior director...

We write code in a language that looks like English. Whether it is JavaScript, Fortran, or assembly language, that code is an abstraction on top of layers of intermediate languages, binary, transistors, and physics. 100 years ago, this would have seemed like magic. Most of us know about Alan Turing, who described the vision of a multipurpose computer with the concept of the Turing machine. Less we...

Automation will make healthcare more efficient and less prone to error. Today, machine learning is already being used to diagnose diabetic retinopathy and improve radiology accuracy. Someday, an AI assistant will assist a doctor in working through a complicated differential diagnosis. Our hospitals look roughly the same today as they did ten years ago, because getting new technology into the hands...

Loans give people more financial security. If people know that they can receive a loan, they will be more willing to take intelligent risks. A loan can allow for a short-term investment that pays off enough to justify the interest rate on that loan. For the lender, a loan can be a fantastic return on capital–as long as the lendee does not default. When banks were the rulers of the financial infras...

Sensors are being attached to trains, lightposts, and all kinds of factory equipment. Industrial machinery gives off high volumes of data that can be captured, stored, and processed with machine learning in order to improve workflows and ensure safety. Jayson Delancey works at GE, which is building tools and systems to manage large IoT deployments. The full stack for enterprise IoT involves tools...

Most products do not sell themselves. Salespeople bridge the gap between a product creation and a customer who purchases it. People can make a good living on the internet selling niche products–if they can find their customers. The process of taking a large group of potential customers and narrowing it down to only the subset of those customers who will buy your product is known as the sales funne...

Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the user in Germany, that database is not strongly consis...

Religious extremists use technology to recruit vulnerable individuals to a violent cause. Google is developing ways to combat this extremism through its platforms, namely YouTube. When a user looks for inflammatory religious or supremacist content, YouTube’s “Redirect Method” instead sends those users toward anti-terrorist videos. Google’s fight against extremism compelled writer Lochlan Bloom to...

Content websites are supported by advertising. Most of the advertisements around the internet are dynamic ad slots that change depending on the user who visits the site. Those dynamic ad slots are available to a variety of different bidders. For each ad slot, an auction occurs. The highest bidder gets to serve an ad for that slot. Praneet Sharma is the co-founder of Method Media Intelligence, whic...

The Internet runs on advertising. Advertising is subject to fraud–but then again, so is every system of online transactions. The amount of money lost in electronic payments fraud and ecommerce scamming is probably much greater than what is lost due to ad fraud. So why do we keep covering advertising fraud on Software Engineering Daily? More of our audience needs to know about ad fraud. Few people...

Querying a search index for objects similar to a given object is a common problem. A user who has just read a great news article might want to read articles similar to it. A user who has just taken a picture of a dog might want to search for dog photos similar to it. In both of these cases, the query object is turned into a vector and compared to the vectors representing the objects in the search...

Augmented reality is coming at us fast. Every large tech company is rumored to be building an AR product. Microsoft HoloLens is already available to developers. Pokemon Go, the most popular augmented reality product today, was made by a company that was spun out of Google. But Apple seems to be ahead of everyone. Apple’s ARKit is a set of tools for developers to build augmented reality application...

When a user experiences an error in an application, the engineers who are building that application need to find out why that error occurred. The root cause of that error may be on the user’s device, or within a piece of server-side logic, or hidden behind a black box API. To fix a complex error, we need a stack trace of contextual information so that we can correlate events across all layers of a...

GatsbyJS is a framework for building web applications for JavaScript. Gatsby’s original goal was to allow users to create super fast static web sites that could be hosted and served efficiently at a low cost. Most web pages have components from a framework like React or Angular that need to render after the user requests them. This rendering can sometimes require additional requests to external da...

Building and nurturing a developer community is hard work but it is vital for the growth of a country’s technology ecosystem. When communities coalesce around programming languages, tools or programming methods, what follows is a network of conferences, meet ups and other similar events. Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, has spent the last decade building developer communities in h...

Quality assurance testing is a form of testing that closely mirrors user behavior. Sometimes it is manual, sometimes it is automated. Automated QA tests are scripts that validate correct data representation as the application mechanically runs through high-level workflows–like a login page. Manual QA testers act out use cases of an application to see if there are any bugs that were missed during a...

Facebook was rapidly outgrowing its infrastructure in 2009. Classic data center design was not up to the task of the rapid influx of new users and data, photos and streaming video hitting Facebook’s servers. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing a data center from the ground up to be cheaper, more energy efficient, and more ergonomic for the engineers who worked within. That...

Slack is an application for team communication. Users chat across mobile devices, web browsers, and a desktop application, which means Slack has three places to deploy on rather than two. And the desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux are not identical, so Slack has even more places to deploy. With so many different runtime environments, Slack needs to make technology choices that reduce the chan...

Animations make an application more fun and engaging. For most apps, animation is an afterthought. Developers are concerned with getting the functionality right, and designers have enough work to do simply getting icons, text formatting, and page layout correct. There is also the issue of cross-device compatibility. iOS, Android, and web have different ways of doing animation, with no unifying sta...

JavaScript is moving so fast. It’s not easy to keep up with all of the frameworks, build tools, and packages. No other language spans frontend to backend, mobile to web to server. Sacha Greif is an independent designer and developer most prominent in his roles as co-author of Discover Meteor and community builder at Sidebar.io, a design newsletter with over 35,000 subscribers, and Hacker News Kans...

The Internet of Things is the concept that traditionally analog objects, like thermostats and lightbulbs, can be given digital guts and connected to the internet to create more value for users. From Nest thermostats to Phillips Hue lightbulbs, these connected things are starting to enter the mainstream. According to recent estimates by Gartner, over eight billion connected “Things” will be in use...

Serverless computing reduces the cost of using the cloud. Serverless also makes it easy to scale applications. The downside: building serverless apps requires some mindset shift. Serverless functions are deployed to transient units of computation that are spun up on demand. This is in contrast to the typical model of application delivery–the deployment of an application to a server or a container...

After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services. This was the environment in which Yan Cui joined Yubl....