Software Engineering Daily

In the first 10 years of cloud computing, a set of technologies emerge that every software enterprise needs; continuous delivery, version control, logging, monitoring, routing, data warehousing. These tools were built into the Cloud Foundry project, a platform for application deployment and management. As we enter the second decade of cloud computing, another new set of technologies are emerging as useful tools. Serverless functions allow for rapid scalability at aContinue reading...

In the 1980s and the 1990s, most applications used only a relational database for their data management. In the early 2000s, software projects started to use an ever increasing number of data sources. MongoDB popularized the document database, which allows storage of objects that do not have a consistent schema. The Hadoop distributed file system enabled the redundant storage and efficient querying of high volumes of data that are spreadContinue reading...

Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service for deploying and managing web applications. Cloud Foundry is widely used by enterprises who are running applications that are built using Spring, a popular web framework for Java applications, but developers also use Cloud Foundry to manage apps built in Ruby, Node and any other programming language. Cloud Foundry includes routing, message brokering, service discovery, authentication and other application level toolingContinue reading...

Originally published October 22, 2015 “The official motto that we have in our help manual is ‘Losing is fun!’ ” Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress. Tarn Adams works on Dwarf Fortress with his brother Zach. Questions What is the objective ofContinue reading...

Originally published January 6, 2016 “The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.” Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including The Go Programming Language and The C Programming Language, a book moreContinue reading...

Originally published November 18, 2015 “The playing field has never ever been more leveled – that means everything you don’t build is your choice not to build it.” Seth Godin is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of many books, including most recently, What To Do When It’s Your Turn. Questions How did your atypical computer science education shape you? What were the biggest engineering difficulties when youContinue reading...

Originally published November 10, 2015 “The cloud as an environment – I had thought it was a purely utilitarian kind of thing. What I realized is that it’s a fascinating centralized repository of computation.” Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming paradigms. Stephen Wolfram is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, and also the authorContinue reading...

Originally published November 17, 2015 “Changing anything changes everything.” Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems. D. Sculley is a software engineer at Google, focusing on machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He recently co-authored the paper Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt. Questions How do you define technical debt? Why doesContinue reading...

Military force is powered by software. The drones that are used to kill suspected terrorists can identify those terrorists using the same computer vision tools that are used to identify who is in an Instagram picture. Nuclear facilities in Iran were physically disabled by the military-sponsored Stuxnet virus. National intelligence data is collected and processed using the MapReduce algorithm. The military keeps up with technology more effectively than lawmakers. ItContinue reading...

Modern frontend development is about components. Whether we are building an application in React, Vue, or Angular, components are the abstractions that we build our user interfaces out of. Today, this seems obvious, but if you think back five years ago, frontend development was much more chaotic–partly because we had not settled around this terminology of the component. React has become the most popular frontend framework, and part of itsContinue reading...