Software Engineering Daily

Healthcare is a complex business. Oscar is a company that wanted to build a new insurance provider–but realized that healthcare is so interconnected that in order to build a new insurance provider, realized it actually needed to build an entire healthcare business too, complete with patient management and facilities. Since Oscar is a modern technology company, the focus on customer service, engine...

Many companies are transitioning from a monolith to microservices architecture. Tools for cloud computing, containerization, and continuous delivery are making this easier. But there are still technological and organizational challenges that a company will encounter while making this transition. Cassandra Shum is an engineer with ThoughtWorks. She has worked with major financial institutions and o...

Cloud computing changed how we develop applications for the web. Over the last decade, engineers have been learning how to build software in this new paradigm. The costs have gone down, but our nodes can fail at any time. We no longer have to manage individual servers, but the layers of virtualization and containerization require new strategies for communicating between services. As we have adjust...

Public data is not always so accessible. It is nice when you can request data simply by making an API call, but that is the exception rather than the rule–especially when we are talking about data managed by the government. Oil and gas drilling data falls into this category. Oseberg is a company that is building a tool for analyzing oil and gas data. Oseberg is a rich dashboard for knowledge worke...

Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service). The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good backend for chat tools. And so they...

When you purchase an ebook you must agree to the Terms of Service that tell you what you can do with it. What is actually in that terms of service? What are you agreeing to when you buy an ebook? The answers might surprise you. In this episode, Srini Kadamati interviews Chris Groskopf on how the rise of digital products has eroded the idea of traditional ownership. They discuss digital ownership f...

Artsy is an online art marketplace. This might sound like a simple engineering problem–you just set up a basic ecommerce site, list some pieces of art, and start making money, right? The art world is complicated. There are four major pillars: patrons, art fairs, galleries, and auctions. Bringing these different parts online is not trivial. And in order to do so, Artsy has to work with the existing...

Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It is too human to be automated. The game space of poker is different than that of Go. It h...

Many countries in the developing world are undergoing a technological revolution which is shaping how they tackle problems around infrastructure, health, education and finance. Young people are at the forefront of developing solutions to the problems in the developing world. These young people creating technology and businesses to foster innovation and growth. Countries in the Middle East are no e...

Convolutional neural networks are a machine learning tool that uses layers of convolution and pooling to process and classify inputs. CNNs are useful for identifying objects in images and video. In this episode, we focus on the application of convolutional neural networks to image and video recognition and classification. Matt Zeiler is the CEO of Clarifai, an API for image and video recognition....

Software consultancies solve problems involving management and software engineering. A large company might hire a software consulting company to give an external opinion on software architecture, or on an organizational structure. Sometimes a consultancy is brought in to help integrate a new technology, or do a major refactoring. Scaling a software consultancy to meet the varying demands of client...

Suddenly, automation is changing our world faster than anyone anticipated. For technologists, the world is becoming convenient and high-leverage. For non-technologists, the job market is evaporating. Haseeb Qureshi and Quincy Larson join me for a roundtable discussion on automation, jobs, and artificial intelligence. Haseeb and I have had numerous discussions about this topic before, and Quincy is...

CRISPR is a technique for altering the human genome. It might be the most powerful tool for biological modification that we have ever discovered. In this episode, we explore CRISPR: how it works, why it exists in the natural world, and the implications for being able to modify DNA so easily. Geoff Ralston is a partner at Y-Combinator. He wrote an article entitled Hacking DNA: The Story of CRISPR,...

The Washington Post was acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2013. Since then, the newspaper has started thinking more like a software company, opting to build new software rather than buy off-the-shelf third party solutions. Arc Publishing is a CMS built by The Washington Post to produce and display content. When you visit washingtonpost.com, you are viewing a site built with Arc Publishing. The...

There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts. Before I used Zencastr to record my podcasts, like most podcasters, I used a Skype plugin. There were a numb...

Listeners have had difficulty finding the Software Engineering Daily content they want to listen to. We are creating new podcast feeds to address this. The content on each podcast feed is mutually exclusive from the other feeds, except for the main feed and “Greatest Hits.” You can now find the following podcast feeds in iTunes and Google Play: Every new episode goes into 2 feeds: An episode can p...

A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward. The applications we are building today are data-intensive ra...

Most popular music today uses a computer as the central instrument. A single musician is often selecting the instruments, programming the drum loops, composing the melodies, and mixing the track to get the right overall atmosphere. With so much work to do on each song, popular musicians need to simplify–the result is that pop music today consists of simple melodies without much chord progression....

We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it. Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive. Peeqo is a robot assistant similar to Amazon Echo or Google Home. It was buil...

Ransomware uses software to extort people. A piece of ransomware might arrive in your inbox looking like a PDF, or a link to a website with a redirect. Ransomware is often distributed using social engineering. The email address might resemble someone you know, or a transactional email from a company like Uber or Amazon. Tim Gallo and Allan Liska are authors of the O’Reilly book Ransomware: Defendi...

Spring Framework is an application framework for Java and JVM languages. Spring was originally built around dependency injection, but grew to become an entire ecosystem of tools and plugins for Java developers. Spring was originally released 15 years ago, and since then a lot has changed around application development. For example, many engineers deploy applications to the cloud in microservices a...

The online advertising industry is a giant casino. Giant technology companies are the casino owners, online publishers are the casino employees, the brand advertisers are the victims who keep returning to the casino to lose their money, and the small adtech companies are the sharks who make lots of money exploiting the inefficiencies of the system. One of these smaller adtech companies is called e...

Software Engineering Daily examines the world through the lens of software engineering. In most episodes, an expert in a particular topic joins the show as a guest, and we go into deep technical detail. Occasionally we like to do episodes where we survey a collection of topics. In today’s topic roundtable, Caleb Meredith and Courtland Allen join me for a discussion of several questions: would it m...

Bitcoin is underappreciated even to this day. The public focus is usually on the speculative value, but Bitcoin has functional value as a technology platform. If I want to make 100 transactions with my bank for 1 cent, the bank won’t allow it. Our current financial infrastructure is not set up for micropayments. Bitcoin is built with micropayments in mind. As Bitcoin works through its governance i...

The word “microservices” started getting used after a series of events–companies were moving to cloud virtual machines. Those VMs got broken up into containers, and the containers can fit to the size of the service. Services that are more narrowly defined take up smaller containers, and can be packed more densely into the virtual machines–hence the term “microservices.” As this change to software...