Software Engineering Daily

Computer systems consume memory, CPU, battery, data, and network bandwidth as inputs. These systems provide value for the end user by delivering information, virtual objects, and physical products as outputs. Another fundamental resource that is becoming easier to consume as input is money. There are also new outputs–financial constructs that are made possible by cloud

Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In these P2P systems, nodes need to find each other. Users need to be able to search for files that exist across the system. P2P systems are decentralized, so these routing problems must be solved without a centralized service in the middle. Without a centralized service

Chromium is an open source browser that shares code with the Chrome browser from Google. A browser is a large piece of software, with engineering challenges around threading, rendering, resource management, and networking. To add to the complexity, Chrome runs on iOS, Android, MacOSX, Windows, and other platforms. Chrome OS is an operating system based

Shopify runs more than 500,000 small business websites. When Shopify was figuring out how to scale, the engineering teams did not have a standard workflow for how to deploy and manage services. Some teams used AWS, some teams used Heroku, some teams used other infrastructure providers. To manage all those stores effectively, Shopify has built

“Serverless” is a word used to describe functions that get deployed and run without the developer having to manage the infrastructure explicitly. Instead of creating a server, installing the dependencies, and executing your code, the developer just provides the code to the serverless API, and the serverless system takes care of the server creation, the

When you interact with your bank, it probably feels different than when you interact with a software technology company. That’s because the biggest banks in the world were started before software became such a universally important tool. Their core competency is banking–not consumer software. Today, most banks make consumer-facing software. But these banks were not

Crocodile Browser is a fast browser built by Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. I interviewed them 3 years ago, and in this episode I caught up with Osine to learn what he and his brother have been working on since then. Osine and Anesi have become friends of mine since

Searching through all of the videos on the Internet is not a simple problem. In order to search through all the videos, you need to build a search index. In order to build a search index, you need to build a web crawler. Video files are large. To store all of the actual video files

Different browsers consume JavaScript in different ways. When a new version of JavaScript comes out, developers are eager to use the new functionality of that language version. But if you are writing frontend JavaScript code, that code needs to be interpretable by every browser that might consume it–whether the consumer is on an iPhone running

Over the last decade, cloud computing made it easier to programmatically define what infrastructure we have running, and perform operations across that infrastructure. This is called “infrastructure as code.” Whether you want to backup a database, deploy a new version of a service, or introduce a new tier of load balancers, the changes that we