Software Engineering Daily

Observability allows engineers to understand what is going on inside their systems. In its most raw form, observability comes from log data. Modern systems have many layers of logs–virtualized cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, the container runtime itself, and the application logic running within the container. With all of these layers, it is not practical for a developer to have to s...

Donald Trump has either alarmed or excited everyone in the engineering community. Some of the debates are based around innovation. Opponents to Trump say that his anti-immigration policies will reduce the innovation that relies on H1-B visas. Supporters of Trump say that his anti-regulation policies will unlock innovation that is restricted by bureaucracy. Other debates are around philosophy and f...

Making the right engineering choices in today’s wide landscape of cloud technologies is hard. Predicting the future in order to invest in companies in this space has the same level of complexity. The cost of cloud computing is going down but the volume of total required space and processing power is going up. The open source community is growing and improving but people are increasingly willing to...

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a powerful concept that has the potential to make for reliable and maintainable systems. It is also broadly misunderstood and means different things to different people. Derek Comartin learned about the idea after viewing some talks by Greg Young and has since successfully applied the approach with great success and it has transformed the way he v...

Machine learning has improved both in tools and accessibility. Frameworks like TensorFlow create the right abstractions for developers to work efficiently. Educational programs like Metis and Insight Data Science provide a place for developers to learn these tools. As a result, artificial intelligence is becoming easier to develop and more widespread. Rumman Chowdhury works on artificial intellige...

Load testing measures performance of a system undergoing a large volume of requests. Before an application is pushed to production, engineers will often load test their software to ensure it is resilient in the face of high traffic. As web applications have changed, the requirements around load testing have changed as well. External APIs, internal undocumented APIs, and proprietary databases are b...

There is too much mobile engineering work to be done and not enough mobile engineers. As a result, a talented mobile engineer will often make more money than a similarly talented web developer. There are many other disconnects between the world of mobile engineering and the world of backend and web development. We have reported on web development far more than mobile on Software Engineering Daily,...

Thursday February 23rd was a big day in security news: details were published about the Cloudbleed bug, which leaked tons of plaintext requests from across the Internet into plain view. On the same day, the first collision attack against SHA-1 was demonstrated by researchers at Google, foretelling the demise of SHA-1 as a safe hashing function. What does this mean for the average engineer? What ar...

Manufacturing electronics is not a simple task and because of its complexity it is also quite expensive. Companies like Apple are able to pull their costs down through economies of scale. Since Apple is always placing huge bulk orders on chips, sensors, and other components, the company can get lower prices for those components than an individual hardware hacker that wants to build a prototype. He...

When an engineer is offered a job a tech company, their compensation is often partly in cash and partly in equity–shares of the company. How should an engineer evaluate that offer? How should they negotiate? In the world of equity compensation, costly and avoidable mistakes are routine, and this hurts both companies and employees. Josh Levy was on Software Engineering Daily previously to talk abou...

Parse was a backend as a service company built in 2011 before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Building a backend as a service for developers requires walking a thin line between giving engineers lots of control and preventing those engineers from shooting themselves in the foot. While she was at Parse, Charity Majors learned about the operational burdens of managing a service with high uptime...

When an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time. Applications on Heroku have access to autoscaling. Her...

In the mid 90s, data warehousing might have meant “using an Oracle database.” Today, it means a wide variety of things. You could be stitching together a big data pipeline using Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. You could be using managed tools like BigQuery from Google. How did we get from the simple days of Oracle databases to the wealth of options available today? Mark Rittman writes and podcasts about...

At the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, the speakers explored a range of topics. A few weeks ago, we published Courtland Allen’s talk about how to build a small software business. In today’s episode, we are publishing Haseeb Qureshi’s talk, called “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Why Engineers Disagree About Everything (And Why Fraudsters Do Too).” This talk explores philosophy, poker...

Security vulnerabilities are an important concern in systems. When we specify that we want certain information hidden, for example our phone number or our date of birth, we expect the system to hide the information. However, this doesn’t always happen due to human error in the code because programmers have to write checks and filters across the program. In this episode, Edaena Salinas interviews J...

Expectations for mobile apps have gone up steadily since the iPhone was released. But the choice of databases built for mobile apps has remained limited mostly to SQLite. RealmDB was created as a new option for mobile developers on iOS, Android, or any other mobile platform.  Realm is not just a database. It is a database platform, offering a variety of systems such as authentication, sync, and an...

Online advertising is a system of transactions that involve many different players. The user visits a publisher’s website; the publisher notifies an exchange that the user is on the website; the exchange presents an opportunity to a marketplace that can buy that opportunity to show the end user the ad. And this a simple example. The transactions in online advertising are as opaque and rife with fr...

The impact of artificial intelligence on our everyday lives will be so profound that our modern institutions will change completely. Employment, government, romance, social norms–all of these things will be upended. To see the signs of this coming, you no longer have to read science fiction. Every week, there are blog posts, news stories, and videos chronicling our strange, exciting time. Rob May...

If you wanted to build a machine learning model to understand human health, where would you get the data? A hospital database would be useful, but privacy laws make it difficult to disclose that patient data to the public. In order to publicize the data safely, you would have to anonymize it, so that a patient’s identity could not be derived from data about that patient–and true anonymization is n...

Machine learning frameworks like Torch and TensorFlow have made the job of a machine learning engineer much easier. But machine learning is still hard. Debugging a machine learning model is a slow, messy process. A bug in a machine learning model does not always mean a complete failure. Your model could continue to deliver usable results even in the presence of a mistaken implementation. Perhaps y...

Data scientists need flexible interfaces for displaying and manipulating data sets. Data engineers need to be able to visualize how their data pipelines wire together databases and data processing frameworks. DevOps engineers need dashboards to understand their monitoring data at a high level. All of these programmers are building data applications. Data applications let us visualize and manipulat...

Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service runs a tool...

Infrastructure is a term that can mean many different things: your physical computer, the data center of your Amazon EC2 cluster, the virtualization layer, the container layer–on and on. In today’s episode, podcasters Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks discuss the past, present, and future of infrastructure with me. Ethan and Chris host Datanauts, a podcast about infrastructure. In each episode, Datanauts...

Deep learning uses neural networks to identify patterns. Neural networks allow us to sequence “layers” of computing, with each layer using learning algorithms such as unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Deep learning has taken off in the last few years, but it has been around for much longer. Adam Gibson founded Skymind, the company behind Deeplearning4j. Deeple...

Data science is typically done by engineers writing code in Python, R, or another scripting language. Lots of engineers know these languages, and their ecosystems have great library support. But these languages have some issues around deployment, reproducibility, and other areas. The programming language Golang presents an appealing alternative for data scientists. Daniel Whitenack transitioned fr...