A software company needs to get many things right in order to be successful. Having a useful product with solid engineering is only the beginning. ReadMe was started five years ago. The company solved a seemingly simple problem: documentation for software products. If you have worked as a software engineer, you have looked at documentation.

Modern databases consist of multiple servers that host the data in a distributed fashion. Using multiple servers allows a database to be resilient to the failure of any one database node, because copies of the data are shared to other servers. A multi-node setup also lets the database grow beyond the size of data that

Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the software world. After working with Python and developing a love for the language, Michael Kennedy started to wonder why there was not a high quality podcast dedicated to covering the community and new technologies of the Python ecosystem. Michael started Talk Python To Me

A new software application has simple requirements for a database.  The database needs to be written to and read from. The database fulfills simple needs such as storing user information and providing the application frontend with the necessary data to render a simple webpage of financial transactions or blog posts. As an application becomes successful,

Spanner is a globally distributed, transactionally consistent database.  Spanner initially emerged as a paper that came out of Google in 2012. Around this time, database scalability was difficult to solve, even for Google. The Spanner paper offered some breakthroughs in distributed systems which allowed Google to take some of the learnings from BigTable’s eventual consistency

Modern software is built with cloud services, APIs, and other high level tools. Technical software development is moving beyond the realm of writing code. Individuals who do not have a background in computer science or programming can create increasingly complex tools. Higher level APIs include Twilio for managing phone communications, and Stripe for managing financial

Cassandra was initially released in 2008 as a project out of Facebook. Cassandra offered an open source solution to database scalability issues that were being tackled internally by large companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. 2008 was a golden age of new infrastructure, with systems such as Hadoop and Kafka gaining traction around the same

Airlines have always had an emphasis on new technology. Over the years, airlines have needed to develop more and more software. Digital transformation is causing every large company to adopt the tools and practices of software companies, and that includes Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines has existed for more than 90 years. Over that period of

Facebook is a large multiuser application. Scaling Facebook was different than scaling a single-user application such as an ecommerce store or a search engine. A social network is faced with unique infrastructure scalability challenges, as well as subjective questions around user communications, privacy, and content. Pedram Keyani worked at Google before joining Facebook in 2007.

A time series database is optimized for the storage of high volumes of sequential data across time. Time series databases are often organized as columnar data stores that can write large volumes of data quickly. These systems can sometimes tolerate data loss, because the data they are gathering is used for monitoring and other applications