Software Engineering Daily

Originally published May 24, 2018 When a user takes a ride on Uber, the app on the user’s phone is communicating with Uber’s backend infrastructure, which is writing to a database that maintains the state of that user’s activity. This database is known as a transactional database or “OLTP” (online transaction processing). Every active user

Originally published January 4, 2019 When a user makes a request to product like The New York Times, that request hits an API gateway. An API gateway is the entry point for an external request. An API gateway serves several purposes: authentication, security, routing, load balancing, and logging. API gateways have grown in popularity as

Originally published June 7, 2018 Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore’s Law is less like a “law” and more like an observation or a prediction. Moore’s Law is ending. We can no longer fit an increasing amount of transistors in the same

Originally published November 4, 2016 Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland

New software abstractions always take advantage of the abstractions that have been built before. Software libraries allow us to import code that sits on the same host as a new program. Open source software let us copy and paste existing code, or clone entire repositories. Cloud providers offer hosted tools and APIs that we can

Key Values is a platform where companies are profiled with descriptions of their company values. These profiles describe features such as work-life balance, company culture, daily routines, and strategy. Lynne Tye created Key Values with the goal of building a small business that would make money through connecting job seekers to companies with a culture

The vision of code-free programming has existed for decades. Software engineers have always dreamed of empowering non-technical users with the same creative tools that programmers have access to.  For many years, the underlying technology of the web was not powerful enough to make this dream a reality. Platforms such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix have

“Serverless” is an execution model where applications are scheduled and deployed to servers that are not directly managed by the application developer.  In serverless execution, an application only loads and operates when a user actually needs to get a response from that application. This saves on resources, because many applications do not need to run

Data engineering is difficult.  Companies want to be able to maximize the value they get from their large data sets, but there are so many steps required for deriving that value that most companies feel like they are always far behind the ideal state of where they could be.  The cloud makes it cheap to

Java programs run in a different environment than they did ten years ago. Modern infrastructure runs on containers sitting in a Kubernetes cluster. The optimal configuration for a Java program in that context is different than it was for an environment dominated by virtual machines and bare metal. When you are co-scheduling your services with