When Chuck Rossi joined Facebook in 2008, he was one of the most experienced release engineers at the company. As he began to explore the engineering practices of the organization, he was surprised, confused, and impressed by the release engineering system that he encountered. Release engineering is the process by which software is released to

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.

When a new employee joins a software company, it is often unclear where that employee should begin. Do they have a mentor? What are they working on? What are the expectations for how fast that employee should be contributing? The early period of employment is often referred to as “onboarding.” During the onboarding period, an

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

Insurance is an old business. Individuals and businesses have been buying insurance policies for decades. These insurance policies can cost hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per year.   Software is remaking the insurance industry. One way new software can improve the insurance industry is through better brokerage technology. Insurance involves carriers and brokers,

Open source software has evolved into a thriving, multifaceted ecosystem. Open source encompasses operating systems and databases. Open source embodies both altruism and self-interest. And open source enables thriving businesses from WordPress blogs to hundred billion dollar cloud providers. There is a large set of business models that can be built around a successful open

Software engineers often work as a contractor for some duration of their career. A contractor earns a fixed hourly salary for a defined period of weeks, months, or years. Contract work can be more flexible than full-time work, and often pays more than full-time software engineering, because contract jobs can end at any time, and

The service mesh abstraction allows for a consistent model for managing and monitoring the different components of a microservices architecture.  In the service mesh pattern, each service is deployed with a sidecar container that contains a service proxy. These sidecars are collectively referred to as the “data plane.” Each sidecar provides the service that it

The PlayStation is a line of game consoles created by Sony. PlayStation devices include the PS2, PS3, PS4, and the PSP mobile system. Tony Godar worked as an engineer in the PlayStation ecosystem for 15 years, and he joins the show to give a retrospective on his time in the console industry. Developing hardware and

Large software companies have become a target for criticism. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other prominent technology giants find themselves under a kind of scrutiny that is reminiscent of banks in 2008 and oil companies in the early 1900s. Across the planet, there is a growing sentiment that “big tech” has too much power, and that