Software Engineering Daily

Swift is a language that is most commonly used to write apps for Apple client devices, such as iPhones. Since being released in 2014, Swift has become one of the most popular languages due to its high performance and developer ergonomics. In 2015, Swift was open sourced, creating the opportunity for Swift to be used outside of the Apple ecosystem. If you write an iPhone app today, your frontend is...

Most people in Africa never had a desktop computer. The first computer they owned was a smart phone. This is why Africa is referred to as a “leap frog” place with regard to computers–Africa leapfrogged the desktop to the smart phone. The banking system in Africa also followed a trajectory that is different than the West. Westerners are used to banking on their desktop computers. African e-commerce...

Bots on the internet can be malicious, helpful, and everything in between. A bot that responds to all of your tweets might call you a socialist–that is malicious. Google crawls the web to index Google search. That is helpful. Social media marketing bots schedule 200 Twitter posts to go out throughout the day. That is either a little annoying or a little helpful depending on who you are.  Bots are...

Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild. Facebook has high sta...

The Internet is decreasing in privacy and increasing in utility. Under some conditions, this tradeoff makes sense. We publicize our profile photo so that people know what we look like. Under other conditions, this tradeoff does not make sense. We do not want a television that costs less to purchase because it is silently recording all of the conversations that take place in the room and selling th...

Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search index. Philipp Krenn from Elastic joins the show today to dis...

React Native has unlocked native mobile development to web engineers who may now apply their skills to build iOS and Android applications in JavaScript. For the first time, cross platform JavaScript-based applications feel as if they were written in the native language of choice for the platforms. Businesses who choose to adopt React Native for their native app development also see great benefits...

Every program gets compiled down to 1s and 0s before it can be executed against hardware. Before being translated to machine code, programs that are written in a language like Rust, Swift, or Java spend time in an intermediate representation. In Java, this intermediate representation is Java bytecode. Many different languages–such as Scala–translate to Java bytecode, because there has been lots of...

Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Vall...

Cryptocurrencies are not only a financial instrument–they are a new platform for building applications. The blockchain allows for new solutions to digital property management, micropayments, hedge fund incentives, and ad fraud. The cryptocurrency platforms with the most traction are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leader and is going through some growing pains with governance issues....

There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs). These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses. He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his miss...

In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include: We always want more feedback and questions. Please email me, join Slack, and fill out our survey!

A hedge fund is a collection of investors that make bets on the future. The “hedge” refers to the fact that the investors often try to diversify their strategies so that the direction of their bets are less correlated, and they can be successful in a variety of future scenarios. Engineering-focused hedge funds have used what might be called “machine learning” for a long time to predict what will h...

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser. For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run r...

Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes apparent to outsiders with time. Amazon’s culture and business strategy were detailed in The Everythin...

Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response will w...

Designers and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of the designers with the realities of code. InVision is a...

Developing a product requires careful balance between engineering, sales, design, and customer service. The founding CTO of a company often needs to take on each of these responsibilities, because when the company only has a few people there is nobody to delegate these different tasks to. Cullen Zandstra is the CTO at FloQast, a SaaS tool for accounting close management. It isn’t important what th...

Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers and governments regulating the internet should treat all data on the internet the same. Debates around Net Neutrality can be as contentious as subjects like global warming, or tabs vs. spaces. To a hardcore free market economist, Net Neutrality sounds suspicious. Why would it be good for the government to regulate prices on the data t...

In bitcoin, every transaction in the shared ledger has the sender, recipient, and value. This ledger gets appended infinitely and is shared within a peer-to-peer network. Zcash is a cryptocurrency with all the features of bitcoin, plus encrypted transactions. The sender, recipient, and value fields are all encrypted. If bitcoin is HTTP, Zcash is like HTTPS, a secure transport layer. Nathan Wilcox...

Wearables have become more accessible to the public. Snap’s spectacles, Google Glass, FitBit, and Apple Watch suggest a future in which many people will be wearing a smart device. In this episode Asta Roseway, Research Designer at Microsoft Research, gives insights into other categories of wearables like tattoos, scarves, and cosmetics. Asta talked about her work on DuoSkin, a wearable that looks...

Multiagent systems involve the interaction of autonomous agents that may be acting independently or in collaboration with each other. Examples of these systems include financial markets, robot soccer matches, and automated warehouses. Today’s guest Peter Stone is a professor of computer science who specializies in multiagent systems and robotics. In this episode, we discuss some of the canonical p...

Biology research is complex. The sample size of a biological data set is often too small to make confident judgments about the biological system being studied. During Jason Knight’s PhD research, the RNA sequence data that he was studying was not significant enough to make strong conclusions about the gene regulatory networks he was trying to understand. After working in academia, and then at Huma...

Every company that deals with payments deals with fraud. The question is not whether fraud will occur on your system, but rather how much of it you can detect and prevent. If a payments company flags too many transactions as fraudulent, then real transactions might accidentally get flagged as well. But if you don’t reject enough of the fraudulent transactions, you might not be able to make any mon...

If you are building a service that processes payments, your software architecture has a lot of requirements. Not only do you need to be highly available, consistent, and fast–you need to be PCI compliant. In this episode, we explore the infrastructure of Stripe with Evan Broder, who has been with the company for five years. Stripe started as a small payments company catering to developers with a m...