Software Engineering Daily

Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same cannot be said about biology. Matt Might is an associate professor with a PhD in computer science. When his son was diagnosed with an extremely rare illness...

In many ways the engineering job market is broken. Engineers cannot find the right jobs where they are valued properly and enjoy their work. Employers have difficulty filling their positions and finding the right people that fit their cultures. Traditional matchmakers like Monster and generic recruiting agencies don’t cut it — you know this by the generic LinkedIn messages you get looking for a Ja...

Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder of Stack Exchange and Discourse.org, Jeff has been solving the problem of civilized online communication for seven years. In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, Jeff...

On Software Engineering Daily, we often discuss big data in terms of data engineering and data science. Data engineering is the infrastructure and pipelines that handle massive amounts of data and puts that data in a data lake. With a data infrastructure in place, a data scientist can study the data and take action on it. A data scientist can also create visualizations–which is the subject of toda...

Big data is yesterday–fast data is now. FiloDB is a reactive columnar OLAP database that is built on Cassandra and Spark. Today’s guest is Evan Chan, creator of FiloDB. In our discussion today, we talk about the use cases of an OLAP data store. Evan explains how to tackle the problem of video analytics–if you have ever found yourself asking how a company like YouTube or Netflix or Ooyala performs...

Apache Cassandra can serve as both the real-time data store for online transactional applications, as well as the read-intensive database for data warehousing operations. In order to combine these two use cases into a single database, Apache Cassandra required lots of innovation. In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, we discuss the internals of Cassandra. Tim Berglund takes us through...

Hadoop was created in 2003. In the early years, Hadoop provided large scale data processing with MapReduce, and distributed fault-tolerant storage with the Hadoop Distributed File System. Over the last decade, Hadoop has evolved rapidly, with the support of a big open-source community. Today’s guest is Mike Cafarella, co-creator of Hadoop. Mike takes us on a journey from past to present. Hadoop wa...

When a company gets big enough, there is so much data to be processed that an entire data engineering team becomes responsible for managing this data and making it available to other teams. Airbnb is one such company. Max Beauchemin works on the data engineering team at Airbnb, where he creates infrastructure and tooling for managing data. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, we talk abo...

Diagnosing illness today requires the trained eye of a doctor. With machine learning, we might someday be able to diagnose illness using only a data set. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we are joined by David Kale, a researcher at the intersection of machine learning and clinical data. We discuss the machine learning and research techniques he is using to diagnose illnesses using neural netwo...

Ruby on Rails has had the most commits made by its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. The next most frequent contributor to Rails is Aaron Patterson, our guest on today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily. Topics discussed in today’s episode include Ruby relative to JavaScript, Rails relative to Linux, and DHH relative to Tenderlove.

Microsoft and Amazon are the tech giants of the Pacific Northwest. These two companies shape Seattle technology, and Todd Bishop has been writing about them for over a decade. Todd is the co-founder of GeekWire, an online media company focused on technology in the Pacific Northwest. We talk about the past and present of Microsoft and Amazon, what it means for an engineering company to be good or e...

Socket.io enables realtime bidirectional communication. But what does “realtime” actually mean? Today’s guest is Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Socket. IO, a widely used technology for client server communication. We discuss the nature of real-time apps like Uber and Google Docs, and talk about the API and usage of Socket. IO.

Technology careers are not as accessible to certain demographics, such as women. Sarah Allen is working to change that through education and outreach. Sarah Allen created RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, a pair of organizations working to make technology more accessible to people who are underrepresented in tech. RailsBridge workshops are a fun and free way to get started with Ruby, Rails or other...

Continuous integration and deployment are important tools for modern software development. With continuous integration and deployment, individual engineers can push code without waiting to synchronize with the rest of the team on a big software release. Today on Software Engineering Daily, Flo Motlik, the CTO of Codeship, joins us to discuss continuous integration, dev ops, and microservices. In f...

Monsanto is a company that is known for its chemical and biological engineering. It is less well known for its data science and software engineering teams. Tim Williamson is a data scientist at Monsanto, and on today’s show he talked about how he and a small group of engineers at Monsanto dramatically shifted the culture around data science-driven genetic engineering. In this episode, Tim explains...

This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a h...

Apache Spark is replacing MATLAB in the domain of computational neuroscience. The constraints of running MATLAB on a single machine can’t support the demands of neuroscience, which has huge collections of images and time-series data sets. Jeremy Freeman is a computational neuroscientist who is adopting Apache Spark to be able to analyze these giant data sets that do not fit on a single machine. Bu...

University research produces numerous papers about software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the problems explored by these software engineering researchers have no actual application. These papers fall into The Black Hole of Software Engineering Research. Andy Ko is an associate professor at the University of Washington. When he worked as a CTO of AnswerDash, he experimented with some of the s...

NewSQL is a class of modern relational databases that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for OLTP, while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system. VoltDB is a NewSQL database, designed in part by Turing Award Winner Michael Stonebraker. Today’s guest is John Hugg, a founding engineer at VoltDB. Today’s show covers the internals of VoltDB, i...

React is a set of technologies started by Facebook and open-sourced in 2013. Since then, it has become widely accepted as the best JavaScript library for building user-interfaces. A dedicated community around React has developed as well, and with any large software community, conferences are a necessity. React.js Conf is a yearly conference in San Francisco where React developers talk about the la...

Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was on the front lines of that war, back in 1992. Eric Sink was one of the original developers of Spyglass, a browser that was licensed to both Microsoft AND Netscape. If you want to understand why that happened,...

In this episode, Jeff and Jeremy discuss Internet.org and the criticism it has received from organizations like the EFF. Internet.org is a program created by Facebook whose purpose is to expand the reach of the internet by connecting people in developing nations like India. However, it has come under fire for its failure to provide “the whole internet” and limiting access to a subset of websites w...

Design is more important than ever. There are so many websites being created every day, that it is not enough to differentiate your product with rock solid engineering. Your product has to be beautiful, intuitive, and tested for usability. You don’t want all of the hard work of the product and engineering teams to go to waste, so on this episode, the focus is design. Tracy Osborn is the creator of...

JavaScript is everywhere, on the browser, the server, and now on hardware. Finally–the Internet of Things is upon us — and it is powered by JavaScript. Even if you consider yourself a web developer, and you have no interest in “maker” culture, keep your eye on this space. Factories in Shenzhen are making better, more modular parts, and the same supply chain economics that are driving down the cost...

Disabled individuals account for over a billion people worldwide. This represents the world’s largest minority on the Web, with $220 billion in discretionary spending power in the United States alone. Yet, the accessible web is more than a financial issue – it is also a moral issue, and it is crucial that we make the web accessible to ensure an equitable information platform. Today’s guest Nic Ste...