Software Engineering Daily

Amazon Web Services changed how software engineers work. Before AWS, it was common for startups to purchase their own physical servers. AWS made server resources as accessible as an API request, and has gone on to create higher-level abstractions for building applications. For the first few years of AWS, the abstractions were familiar. S3 provided

Serverless computing is a technique for deploying applications without an addressable server. A serverless application is running on servers, but the developer does not have access to the server in the traditional sense. The developer is not dealing with IP addresses and configuring instances of their different services to be able to scale. Just as

Functions-as-a-service allow developers to run their code in a “serverless” environment. A developer can provide a function to a cloud provider and the code for that function will be scheduled onto a container and executed whenever an event triggers that function. An “event” can mean many different things. It is a signal that something has

In a cloud infrastructure environment, failures happen regularly. The servers can fail, the network can fail, and software bugs can crash your software unexpectedly. The amount of failures that can occur in cloud infrastructure is one reason why storage is often separated from application logic. A developer can launch multiple instances of their application, with

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 applications have become more distributed,

Augmented reality glasses will let us walk through a world where the digital blends together with the physical. 3-D objects will be rendered and superimposed onto our field of vision, creating an environment for people to build applications we can hardly dream of today. These augmented reality glasses are probably three to five years away

Originally posted on 13 September 2017. Machines understand the world through mathematical representations. In order to train a machine learning model, we need to describe everything in terms of numbers.  Images, words, and sounds are too abstract for a computer. But a series of numbers is a representation that we can all agree on, whether

Originally posted on 28 July 2017. Self-driving cars are here. Fully autonomous systems like Waymo are being piloted in less complex circumstances. Human-in-the-loop systems like Tesla Autopilot navigate drivers when it is safe to do so, and lets the human take control in ambiguous circumstances. Computers are great at memorization, but not yet great at

Originally posted on 1 May 2018. Technology is pushing us rapidly toward a future that is impossible to forecast. We try to imagine what that future might look like, and we can’t help having our predictions shaped by the media we have consumed. 1984, Terminator, Gattaca, Ex Machina, Black Mirror–all of these stories present a

Originally posted on 14 February 2017. Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the