Software Engineering Daily

A company’s approach to data can make or break the business. In the past, data was static. There was not much data, it sat in Excel, and it was interacted with on a nightly or monthly basis. Now, data is dynamic, real time and huge. To tap into available data, many industries have oriented themselves to becoming data intensive. With many new industry sectors becoming data driven, a new fieldContinue reading...

When I log into my bank account from my laptop, I first enter my banking password. Then the bank sends a text message to my phone with a unique code, and I enter that code into my computer to finish the login. This login process is two-factor authentication. I am proving my identity by entering my banking password (the first factor) and validating that I am in control of myContinue reading...

Functions as a service are deployable functions that run without an addressable server. Functions as a service scale without any work by the developer. When you deploy a function as a service to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will take care of running that function whenever it is called. You don’t have to worry about spinning up a new machine and monitoring that machine, and spinning the machine downContinue reading...

Most user interfaces that we interact with are not animated. We click on a button, and a form blinks into view. We click a link and the page abruptly changes. On the other hand, when we interact with an application that has animations, we can feel the difference. The animations are often subtle. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, pay attention the next time you use Slack orContinue reading...

Cloud computing changed the economics of running a software company. A cloud is a network of data centers that offers compute resources to developers. In the 1990s, software companies purchased servers–an upfront capital expense that required tens of thousands of dollars. In the early 2000s, cloud computing started, and turned that capital expense into an operational expense. Instead of a huge bulk purchase of servers, a software developer can payContinue reading...

Thumbtack is a marketplace for real-world services. On Thumbtack, people get their house painted, their dog walked, and their furniture assembled. With 40,000 daily marketplace transactions, the company handles significant traffic. On yesterday’s episode, we explored how one aspect of Thumbtack’s marketplace recently changed, going from asynchronous matching to synchronous “instant” matching. In this episode, we zoom out to the larger architecture of Thumbtack, and how the company has grownContinue reading...

The labor market is moving online. Taxi drivers are joining Uber and Lyft. Digital freelancers are selling their services through Fiverr. Experienced software contractors are leaving contract agencies to join Gigster. Online labor marketplaces create market efficiency by improving the communications between buyers and sellers. Workers make their own hours, and their performance is judged by customers and algorithms, rather than the skewed perspective of a human manager. These marketplacesContinue reading...

Facebook serves interactive content to billions of users. Google serves query requests on the world’s biggest search engine. Uber handles a significant percentage of the transportation within the United States. These services are handling radically different types of traffic, but many of the techniques they use to balance loads are similar. Vivek Panyam is an engineer with Uber, and he previously interned at Google and Facebook. In a popular blogContinue reading...

As a system becomes more complex, the chance of failure increases. At a large enough scale, failures are inevitable. Incident response is the practice of preparing for and effectively recovering from these failures. An engineering team can use checklists and runbooks to minimize failures. They can put a plan in place for responding to failures. And they can use the process of post mortems to reflect on a failure andContinue reading...

There is a quote from Jeff Bezos: “70% of the work of building a business today is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Only 30% is creative work. Things will be more exciting when those numbers are inverted.” That quote is from 2006, before Amazon Web Services had built most of their managed services. In 2006, you had no choice but to manage your own database, data warehouse, and search cluster. If yourContinue reading...