A blockchain is a data structure that provides decentralized, peer-to-peer data distribution. Bitcoin is the most well-known blockchain, but in the next decade we will see many more blockchains. Most listeners probably know that you could just fork the code of Bitcoin to start your own blockchain–but wouldn’t it be nice to know how to build a blockchain from scratch? Daniel van Flymen is the author of the Medium articleContinue reading...

Visa processes 1,600 transactions per second. PayPal processes 193 transactions per second. Bitcoin processes only 3-4 transactions per second. In order to fulfill the dreams of financial programming–in order to get decentralized, peer-to-peer micropayments–Bitcoin needs a much higher transaction throughput. Bitcoin’s scalability issues have led to debates within the community and changes in the software. In this episode, Jordan Clifford gives an overview of some of the scaling limitations ofContinue reading...

Tinder is a rapidly growing social network for meeting people and dating. In the past few years, Tinder’s userbase has grown rapidly, and the engineering team has scaled to meet the demands of increased popularity. On Tinder, you are presented with a queue of suggested people that you might match with, and you swipe left or right to indicate that you like or dislike them. Creating that queue of suggestionsContinue reading...

Despite all the problems with online advertising, ads are not going away. Advertising is fundamental to the modern Internet economy. In previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily, we have mostly dissected the problems of adtech–bots, tracking, fraud, brand safety. We have talked about some solutions–for example, JavaScript tags that you can put on a page to identify a bot before you serve it an ad. But these solutions don’t getContinue reading...

Advertising fraud continues to plague the Internet. We do not know the scope and scale of that fraud. How many ads on the Internet are viewed by bots? Estimations range from 2% to 99%. Advertisers are slowly becoming more educated about fraud, thanks in part to Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is a full-time advertising fraud researcher. He looks at data sets of billions of ad impressions to figure outContinue reading...

A customer engages with a company across a variety of channels–email, Zendesk, Salesforce, online advertising. Unifying those data sources and getting a dashboard into the entire customer experience is the goal of Usermind, a customer engagement hub. If you can get all of that data unified in one place, it creates a tool that salespeople, customer service, and marketing can all look at to see how users are engaging withContinue reading...

42 is tuition-free developer school for students from 18-30. It was started by Xavier Niel, a French billionaire who wanted to encourage a new model of software education. 42 has campuses in France and Silicon Valley. 42 has very high standards for the students it admits, because the students that get in are not paying tuition, but they have 24/7 access to high quality computers and a beautiful campus. UnlikeContinue reading...

React is a programming model for user interfaces. ReactJS is for building user interfaces for web applications. React Native is for building UI on Android or iOS. ReactVR is for building user interfaces in virtual reality. React Native was originally developed to make it easier to maintain parity between the web, iOS, and Android teams at Facebook. If I build an application for the web with ReactJS, I can rewriteContinue reading...

A basketball game gives off endless amounts of data. Cameras from all angles capture the players making their way around the court, dribbling, passing, and shooting. With computer vision, a computer can build a well-defined understanding for what a sport looks like. With other machine learning techniques, the computer can make predictions by combining historical data with a game that is going on right now. Second Spectrum is a companyContinue reading...

An alert is a signal of problematic application behavior. When something unusual happens to your application, an alert can bring that anomaly to your attention. In order to detect unusual events, you need to define the norm. In order to define both normal and problematic behavior, you need metrics. Metrics are measurements of the behavior in your application. Metrics get created from logs and other data. These high volumes ofContinue reading...