Software Engineering Daily

“Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance. To make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” That quote is from Peter Drucker. It is one of the many useful quotes collected in Ron Lichty’s book “Managing the Unmanageable”—and it illustrates why we work in teams. When we collaborate with each other, we make each other’s strengths effective, and our weaknesses become irrelevant.Continue reading...

The New York Times makes most of its money off of subscriptions. Facebook makes its money off of native advertising. Hacker News is funded by Y-Combinator. Each of these business models creates biases in the information that gets promoted on the respective platforms. This is why I like to know the origin story and the business models behind the publications that I read. Published content is shaped by the profitContinue reading...

When engineers are writing code, they are manipulating objects. You might have a user object represented on your computer, and that user object has several different fields—a name, a gender, and an age. When you want to send that object across the network to a different computer, the object needs to be turned into a sequence of 1s and 0s that will travel efficiently across the network. This is knownContinue reading...

Google Docs is used by millions of people to collaborate on documents together. With today’s technology, you could spend a weekend coding and build a basic version of a collaborative text editor. But in 2004 it was not so easy. In 2004 Steve Newman built a product called Writely, which allowed users to collaborate on documents together. Initially, Writely was hosted on a single server that Steve managed himself. AllContinue reading...

Duolingo is a language learning platform with over 200 million users. On a daily basis millions of users receive customized language lessons targeted specifically to them. These lessons are generated by a system called the session generator.   Andre Kenji Horie is senior engineer at Duolingo. He wrote about the process of rewriting the session generator, moving from Python to Scala and changing architecture at the same time. In thisContinue reading...

The values system of a company guides the actions of the engineers who work at that company. Some companies value open communication and a flat organization where anybody can talk to anyone else. Other companies encourage hierarchy and secrecy, so that employees are focused on their specific section of the company. Some companies take themselves seriously, and have a work environment that is as stoic as the military. Other companiesContinue reading...

Ten years ago, if you wanted to build software, you probably needed to know how to write code. Today, the line between “technical” and “non-technical” people is blurring. Website designers can make a living building sites for people on WordPress or Squarespace–without knowing how to write code. Salesforce integration experts can help a sales team set up complicated software–without knowing how to write code. Shopify experts can set up anContinue reading...

Remember when the best game you could play on your phone was Snake? In 1998, Snake was preloaded on Nokia phones, and it was massively popular. That same year Half-Life won game of the year on PC. Metal Gear Solid came out for Playstation. The first version of Starcraft also came out in 1998. In 1998, few people would have anticipated that games with as much interactivity as Starcraft wouldContinue reading...

The Internet was designed as a decentralized system. Theoretically, if Alice wants to send an email to Bob, she can set up an email client on her computer and send that email to Bob’s email server on his computer. In reality, very few people run their own email servers. We all send our emails to centralized services like Gmail, and connect to those centralized services using our own client—a browserContinue reading...

Developers can build networked applications today without having to deploy their code to a server. These “serverless” applications are constructed from managed services and functions-as-a-service. Managed services are cloud offerings like database-as-a-service, queueing-as-a-service, or search-as-a-service. These managed services are easy to use. They take care of operational burdens like scalability and outages. But managed services typically solve a narrow use case. You can’t build an application entirely out of managedContinue reading...