Software Engineering Daily

Applications of artificial intelligence are permeating our everyday lives. We notice it in small ways–improvements to speech recognition; better quality products being recommended to us; cheaper goods and services that have dropped in price because of more intelligent production. But what can we quantitatively say about the rate at which artificial intelligence is improving? How

Cryptocurrency infrastructure is a new form of software. Thousands of developers are submitting transactions to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and this transaction volume tests the scalability of current blockchain implementations. The bottlenecks in scalability lead to slow transaction times and high fees. Over the last twenty years, engineers have learned how to scale databases. We’ve learned

Ten years ago, a biology researcher was limited by the software tools available. Most of the electronic record keeping was done using Excel and other general purpose tools. Benchling is a suite of software tools that were designed to simplify the lives of life science researchers. Benchling helps with sample tracking, experiment design, and workflow

Containers have improved deployments and resource utilization. Kubernetes created a platform to manage those containers and orchestrate them into distributed applications. In today’s episode, we explore tools that improve the workflow of the application developer who is working with Kubernetes, including Helm, Draft, and Brigade. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes, which allows users

Ad blockers in the browser protect us from the most annoying marketing messages that the Internet tries to serve to us. But we still pay a price for these ads. We pay the bandwidth costs of requesting these pages. Our browsers are slowed down by these extra requests. Pi Hole is a hardware based ad

Self-driving, electric cars will someday outnumber traditional automobiles on the road. As transportation becomes autonomous, it is hard to imagine an industry that will not be affected by the downstream effects of this change. These cars will likely be managed by fleet operators like Lyft and Uber. We will need fewer cars, and the amount

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 and driver and UberEATS restaurant is writing data to the transactional data store. Periodically, that data is copied from theContinue reading...

The world of software moves faster than the laws that regulate it. When software companies do get regulated, that regulation is often enforced unevenly among different companies. Software continually presents the legal system with new requirements. Consumer data privacy needs to enforced on a granular level. Software developers need a system of protecting their intellectual property. When a company becomes dominant, our legal system needs to scrutinize that company forContinue reading...

Deploying software to a container presents a different security model than deploying an application to a VM. There is a smaller attack surface per container, but the container is colocated on a node with other containers. Containers are meant to have a shorter lifetime than VMs, so there are generally fewer consequences if a container needs to be destroyed and rebuilt due to a potential security vulnerability. Maya Kaczorowski worksContinue reading...

A sample of the human voice is a rich piece of unstructured data. Voice recordings can be turned into visualizations called spectrograms. Machine learning models can be trained to identify features of these spectrograms. Using this kind of analytic strategy, breakthroughs in voice analysis are happening at an amazing pace. Rita Singh researches voice at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work studies the high volume of latent data that is availableContinue reading...