Software Engineering Daily

CDN stands for content delivery network. A content delivery network is a system of distributed servers that delivers web pages and other web content. Without CDNs, the internet would be much slower, because CDNs function as a caching layer for most web resources. Carl Gustas is an engineer at CacheFly, a popular content delivery network. He joins us today to discuss how CDNs work, and the differen...

Google has published papers on distributed systems such as BigTable, Chubby, and the Google File System. During this episode, we focus on a product that takes inspiration from Google’s Spanner project, a database that is built on a distributed monolithic sorted map. CockroachDB is a scalable, survivable, consistent SQL database. Today’s guest Ben Darnell is the CTO of Cockroach Labs, and he joins...

Wiki technology was invented decades ago to improve how software developers communicate. Today, Wikipedia has taken the ideas of the wiki to a new level, creating a free knowledge graph for the world to learn from. Ward Cunningham developed WikiWikiWeb in 1994. He joins us today to discuss the first wiki, and how wikis have changed the way information propagates. Ward is not just an expert on how...

Software applications are constantly generating logs. These logs are necessary to understand how an application is functioning, and logs are key to debugging. As applications have gotten more complex, logging infrastructure has become complex as well. Storing and managing all of our log data is such a big task that several companies have been started to tackle this problem. Today’s guest is Christ...

Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know. Today, we have mobile web, React, Angular, PHP, JQuery, and so much more. Marc Grabanski focuses on what he believes is timeless–pure JavaScript. Marc is the founder of Frontend Masters, a training site for developers who want to build quality web interfaces. He joins us today to discuss the shi...

Nadia Eghbal joins us as the host of today’s show to discuss the past, present, and future of open-source software. This monologue was adapted from Nadia’s article, We’re in a brave, new post open source world. In this episode, Nadia describes the origins of open-source in the Free software movement, its rise to popularity, and today’s golden era where mainstream and popular technologies like Reac...

When you spend money online, you expect a receipt to come in your email. When you register for a new web site, you need to verify your sign up in your email. These types of emails are called “transactional email” and sending these types of email at scale is a complex engineering task. J.R. Jasperson is the chief architect at SendGrid, a transactional email platform. On this episode, we discuss how...

Git is the most popular version control system. If you have been programming for less than a decade, it’s likely that you haven’t used any other method of version control. The git workflow of a software team defines how that team collaborates, builds, and ships software. Tim Pettersen is a developer advocate at Atlassian, where he has been building software around git for many years. He joins us o...

Application delivery has become more complex as software architectures have moved into the cloud. Data center infrastructure has turned into code to be manipulated, and software engineering teams are adjusting their strategies. HashiCorp is a company that builds open-source software for application development and deployment. Mitchell Hashimoto is the founder of HashiCorp, and he joins us to discu...

Code analysis tools can help a developer understand code. One tool for code analysis is bitHound, which provides code and dependency analysis for NodeJS applications. On today’s episode, we discuss how to use a code analysis tool–and we also talk about how to build one, by breaking down the distributed architecture of bitHound’s backend.

Uber is a transportation company with a high volume of temporal spacial data, constantly being collected from the devices of its users. At any given time, the engineers and data scientists at Uber need to be able to query the system, and understand what is going on with drivers and riders. The unique real-time engineering requirements of Uber lead to an interesting architecture. Danny Yuan joins u...

The last editorial we did was 10 Philosophies for Engineers. Listeners enjoyed that episode, so we decided to do another. 10 Philosophies was a collection of beliefs I have about the software engineering industry, and how we can find fulfillment in our work as engineers. The philosophies that I discussed were rooted in my experiences working as a computer science student and as an engineer at seve...

Applications can and will crash — it is increasingly important for developers to have visibility into the reasons how and why the crash occurred. James Smith is the guest on the show today, and joins Jeff to discuss why modern applications crash, and how developer products are improving to tighten the gap between QA/support and dev. James is the founder of Bugsnag, an automated crash monitoring sy...

Ten years ago, building a highly scalable image delivery service would require millions of dollars in upfront costs, and hours of work configuring hardware server infrastructure. Today, it is possible to bootstrap this type of service, with minimal investment. Today’s episode is about building a content delivery network for images and video. Today’s guest is Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary. We discu...

Memory is king. The cost of memory and disk capacity are both decreasing every year–but only the throughput of memory is increasing exponentially. This trend is driving opportunity in the space of big data processing. Alluxio is an open source, memory-centric, distributed, and reliable storage system enabling data sharing across clusters at memory speed. Alluxio was formerly known as Tachyon. Haoy...

Cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft provide both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. Infrastructure as a service gives developers access to virtual machines, servers, and network infrastructure. Platform as a service is the software that runs on top of that infrastructure as a service–this includes things like Amazon DynamoDB, Microsoft Azure Machine Learn...

In today’s episode, Ben Halpern interviews Juan Buritica, VP of Engineering at Ride. They discuss Ride’s migration from a monolith to microservices, the challenges of running a distributed team and preventing developer burnout.

GreyOrange Robotics builds robots for warehouse automation of logistics and ecommerce companies for quicker deliveries. Today’s episode features Akash Gupta, the CTO of GreyOrange.

DevOps has been the subject of many episodes of Software Engineering Daily. And yet–the question we continue to ask ourselves is “what is DevOps?” In order to understand the present, we must look into the past. On today’s show, we break down the history of dev ops with Demir Selmanovic, the lead technical editor at TopTal. From waterfall software development, to the agile manifesto. From lean manu...

Today’s guest is Calvin French-Owen, the CTO of Segment, a tool that companies use to aggregate their analytics into once place. As Segment has scaled, the company has had to restructure its etire technical architecture. Microservices, containers, Amazon Web Services, and dev ops are a few of the topics that Calvin and I explore in our conversation, so this is a great episode for anyone who is try...

CodeNewbie is a community of programmers and people learning to code. There are so many people learning about software today, and CodeNewbie gives them a place to hang out, socialize, and become comfortable with the world of software. CodeNewbie has an excellent podcast, and if you like Software Engineering Daily you should check it out. Saron Yitbarek is the guest today, she is the creator of Cod...

Mic.com is a media company focused on news for millennials. Anthony Sessa is the VP of product at Mic.com, and he joins us to talk about the engineering of a modern news organization tailored to young people. We discuss data engineering, frontend technologies, and how to migrate away from WordPress. We also explore how to build a successful media company today, and how millennials want to consume...

Software developers have been socializing on chat rooms for decades. In the nineties, we began using IRC and AOL instant messenger. In the early 2000s, we turned to Google Hangouts and Yammer. Today, we are using modern apps like Slack and Hipchat. On today’s show, we take a deep dive into Gitter, the chat client specifically designed for developers. Our guests are Mike Bartlett and Andrew Newdiga...

Military veterans have the right set of skills to become programmers. Technical expertise, emotional resilience, psychological persistence, and teamwork–these are the qualities of the US army and they are the qualities of the best programmers. More and more veterans who leave the army are becoming coders, and the mission of Operation Code is to help veterans make that transition. Dave Molina is th...

Building a software business today requires lots of decision making. Building software isn’t just about choosing a programming language, or a framework, or a database. Developers have to choose the right cloud service provider, the best issue tracking service, the best hosted code repository, the clearest data visualization tools. We need a platform to compare the options between different product...