Video surveillance impacts human lives every day.  On most days, we do not feel the impact of video surveillance. But the effects of video surveillance have tremendous potential. It can be used to solve crimes and find missing children. It can be used to intimidate journalists and empower dictators. Like any piece of technology, video

Data privacy policies have changed how software organizations need to operate. As consumer preferences have shifted in favor of strong privacy, software companies are having to examine their policies around data collection and retention. Many software companies were started in a time with different norms around data.  Building a new application that is compliant with

Indie Hackers is a platform for independent software businesses to discuss strategy and find inspiration. Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers with the goal of sharing the stories of these businesses, and the company has become a thriving community of entrepreneurs, engineers, and creators. Business is a creative medium. The definition of a successful business is

Scott Belsky founded Behance in 2006. Behance is a social platform where designers and creators share their work. Scott was motivated to start Behance due to his desire to combine his love for creativity with his desire to create a business. After 6 years of work, Behance was acquired by Adobe for more than $150

Large companies have multiple databases, multiple data formats, and multiple applications that need to use the data. Every data engineer needs to move data between these different components of a system. Moving data between different parts of a system is often called “ETL”, an acronym for “Extract, Transform, Load.” Data engineers spend much of their

The development of self-driving cars is one of the biggest technological changes that is under way. Across the world, thousands of engineers are working on developing self-driving cars. Although it still seems far away, self-driving cars are starting to feel like an inevitability. This is especially true if you spend much time in downtown San

Investors often use the term “moat” to describe the durable competitive advantage of a company. When an investor puts money into a company, they are making that investment based on a valuation. That valuation is subjective–it is how much the investor thinks the company is worth. A valuation is determined by the present value of

Software engineering is a new field. There are theories about how we should be building our systems, but these theories might change over time. The same is true for engineering management.  There are many successful examples of companies scaling with the management hierarchies pioneered by Microsoft and Google, but since everyone knows that those techniques

Ethos Life Insurance is a software company that sells life insurance products. Software is reshaping established industries such as banking, insurance, and manufacturing. In these large, established industries, incumbents are adopting new technology as fast as they can, but the new technology needs to be integrated with the old technology. The slow rate of technology

Isolation is a fundamental concept in computer science. Software workloads are isolated from each other in order to keep resource access cleanly separated.  When programs are properly isolated, it is easier for the programmer to reason about the memory safety of that program. When a program is not properly isolated, it can lead problems such