Software Engineering Daily

Originally posted on May 12, 2015. Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no

Featured Image Photo Credits Originally posted on July 11, 2016. Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from

Originally published on July 6, 2016. Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network

The volume of data in the world is always increasing. The costs of storing that data is always decreasing. And the means for processing that data is always evolving. Sensors, cameras, and other small computers gather large quantities of data from the physical world around us. User analytics tools gather information about how we are

The software release process is a barrier between written code and a live production environment that affects users. A software release process can involve a variety of different practices. Code might be tested for bugs using automation and manual testing. Static analysis tools can look at the code for potential memory leaks. A software release

Modern software consists of sprawling international networks of servers. Users contact these servers to access applications. Microservices talk to each other to fulfill complicated requests. Databases and machine learning frameworks crunch terabytes of information to provide complicated answers. Across this infrastructure, there is a lot of different activities–and a lot of vulnerabilities. Without a reliable

Serverless computing abstracts away the idea of a server node. Serverless lets programmers treat compute resources as high-level, reliable APIs, rather than unreliable, low-level compute nodes that might fail. Serverless dramatically improves the efficiency of programmers. Instead of thinking of a database as a set of servers that need to be sharded and replicated, the

TLA+ is a formal specification language. TLA+ is used to design, model, and verify concurrent systems. TLA+ allows a user to describe a system formally with simple, precise mathematics. TLA+ was designed by Leslie Lamport, a computer scientist and Turing Award winner. Leslie joins the show to talk about the purpose of TLA+. Since its

Mapillary is a company that processes high volumes of images to develop a labeled 3-D model of the physical world. Mapillary’s APIs allow developers to build applications that are aware of stop signs, buildings, streets, trees, and other physical objects in real-world space. The potential use cases for Mapillary are numerous, ranging from self-driving cars

An instruction set defines a low level programming language for moving information throughout a computer. In the early 1970’s, the prevalent instruction set language used a large vocabulary of different instructions. One justification for a large instruction set was that it would give a programmer more freedom to express the logic of their programs. Many