Software Engineering Daily

Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but it can also leverage the classical advancements of Moore’s Law. If classical computing ad...

Continuous delivery is a model for deploying small, frequent changes to an application. In a continuous delivery workflow, code changes that are pushed to a repository set off a build process that spins up a new version of the application. Testing is performed against that new build before advancing it to production, merging it with the existing codebase. Many continuous delivery products are gett...

Patents allow individuals and company to lay creative claim for an invention. A patent can provide protection from having its idea being used without giving credit to its creators. Of course, is that patents can be filed and not turned into products, inhibiting innovation. Patents can also be used offensively in a practice known as patent trolling. Large companies like IBM and Google have so many...

Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a condition that inhibits movement, and this wearable allows the Parkinson’s patient to write and draw again. Haiyan explained the research process and the technical aspects of...

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 every single circumstance that a c...

A decade ago, a Microsoft developer might have been defined by the fact that they built C# applications on Windows. Today, a Microsoft developer is just as likely to be writing JavaScript for Linux. The company has repositioned itself to focus on cloud services, SaaS products, and enterprise artificial intelligence. Jason Young and Carl Schweitzer host the MS Dev Show, a popular podcast about Micr...

Building a startup requires constant evaluation of tradeoffs. At the earliest stage, the founders evaluate different ideas. Once an idea is settled on, the company develops strategies for finding early customers and growing. As the company develops traction, the operators consider ways to scale further or partner with an acquirer. Joseph Jacks and Greg Koberger are two founders who have been on th...

Access to education is something everyone strives for but not all achieve–especially education that leads to meaningful and well-paying work. In today’s world where software is eating all sorts of industries, access to a good technical education is still out of the reach of many people. Laboratoria is a social enterprise which teaches women from low-income backgrounds in Peru, Mexico and Chile how...

Containers are widely used in projects that have adopted Docker, Kubernetes, or Mesos. Containers allow for better resource isolation and scalability. With all of the adoption of containers, companies like Red Hat, Google, and CoreOS are working on improved standards within the community. Standards are important to this community because of its pace of growth and the number of concurrent projects....

Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where a program learns how to take actions in an environment based on how that program has been rewarded for actions it took in the past. When program takes an action, and it receives a reward for that action, it is likely to take that action again in the future because it was positively reinforced. Michal Kempka is a computer scientist work wor...

In its most basic definition, machine learning is a tool that makes takes a data set, finds a correlation in that data set, and uses that correlation to improve a system. Any complex system with well-defined behavior and clean data can be improved with machine learning. Several precipitating forces have caused machine learning to become widely used: more data, cheaper storage, and better tooling....

Software engineers have a skill set that can be applied to solve problems outside of a codebase. Analytical skills can be used to evaluate investment opportunities. Creative thinking can be used to build businesses. Communication skills can be used to build and enhance relationships. John Sonmez is a software engineer who created the Simple Programmer, a community of developers who discuss strateg...

Every software company backs up critical data sources. Backing up databases is a common procedure, whether a company is in the cloud or on-prem. Backing up virtual machine instances is less common. Rubrik is a company that is known for building backup infrastructure for enterprises. Their main product is an appliance that sits on prem at an enterprise and stores snapshots of virtual machines runni...

Shopify is a company that helps customers build custom online storefronts. Shopify has built upon the same Ruby on Rails application since the founding of their business 12 years ago starting with Rails 0.5 and moving all the way to Rails 5.  MRuby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby language. Shopify made the decision to use mruby to allow customers to create custom scripts that are run e...

At Coinbase, security is more important than anything else. Coinbase is a company that allows for storage and exchange of cryptocurrencies. Protecting banking infrastructure is difficult, but in some ways the stakes are higher with Coinbase, because bitcoin is fundamentally unregulated. If a hacker were able to syphon all of the money out of Coinbase accounts, Coinbase would have no recourse–which...

Coinbase is a platform for buying and selling digital currency: bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Every payments company deals with fraud, but a cryptocurrency company has a harder job than most payments companies, because bitcoin transactions are anonymous and non-reversible. This is in contrast to a bank, which deals with a regulated, reversible transaction system. Soups Ranjan is the director of...

Cryptocurrencies have seen a surge of value recently. People are starting to see that bitcoin, ethereum, and other currencies are not just for speculation. At worst, they are a store of value–like digital gold. At best, they are a tool for micropayments, smart contracts, and an entire decentralized financial platform. Coinbase is a company for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. This episode is t...

Software deployment evolves over time. In the 90s, a “deployment” might have meant issuing a new edition of your software via CD-ROM. Today, a deployment is often a multi-stage process. A new software build will undergo automated unit tests and integration tests, before being deployed to users.  The deployment might only go out to a small percentage of total users initially, with that percentage g...

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform. Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn, and the creators of the project eventually left LinkedIn and started Confluent, a company that is building a streaming platform based on Kafka. Kafka is very popular, but is not easy to deploy and operationalize. That is why Confluent has built a Kafka-as-a-service product, so that managing K...

A cryptocurrency exchange faces a uniquely difficult fraud problem. A hacker who steals my credentials can initiate a transfer of all my bitcoin to another wallet, and it is a non-reversible, non-identifiable payment. So it is really important to prevent those kinds of fraudulent transactions. At the third Software Engineering Daily Meetup, Coinbase director of data science Soups Ranjan explained...

Airbnb is a company that is driven by design. New user interfaces are dreamed up by designers and implemented for web, iOS, and Android. This implementation process takes a lot of resources, but it used to take even more before the company started using React Native. React Native allows Airbnb to reuse components effectively. React Native works by presenting a consistent model for the user interfa...

React Native allows developers to reuse components from one user interface on multiple platforms. React Native was introduced by Facebook to reduce the pain of teams who were rewriting their user interfaces for web, iOS, and Android. Nader Dabit hosts React Native Radio, a podcast about React Native. Nader also trains companies to user React Native through his company React Native Training. In thi...

“Culture fit” is a term that is used to describe engineers that have the right personality for a given company. In the hiring process, “lack of culture fit” is used to turn away engineers who are good enough at coding but just don’t seem right for the company. As today’s guest Ammon Bartram says, “lack of culture fit” usually means “lack of enthusiasm for what a company does.” Ammon is the co-foun...

The history of computing can be thought of as a series of ideas rather than objects. From Aristotle’s formalization of the syllogism, to Alan Turing’s model for an all-purpose computing machine, to Satoshi Nakamoto’s distributed transaction ledger–these breakthroughs did not come in the form of polished, tangible objects. In fact, the objects which end up changing computing fundamentally are often...

Instacart is a grocery delivery service. Customers log onto the website or mobile app and pick their groceries. Shoppers at the store get those groceries off the shelves. Drivers pick up the groceries and drive them to the customer. This is an infinitely complex set of logistics problems, paired with a rich data set given by the popularity of Instacart. Jeremy Stanley is the VP of data science for...