Software Engineering Daily

In 2003, Paul Martino co-founded Tribe.net, one of the earliest social networking sites.  Tribe had significant traction, with hundreds of thousands of users. In the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of users was enough traffic to pose a company with engineering challenges. Paul had studied computer science, and was able to use his knowledge of high-performance computing to write an efficient graph database, and solve the other technical puzzles thatContinue reading...

In the 1960s, advertising agencies were high-dollar creative producers. A client would come to an ad agency and pay millions of dollars for artistic messaging that would convince a consumer to buy a product. How could you measure the success of these advertising campaigns? Maybe you could see success in the sales data. Maybe people were starting to talk about the product. Ultimately, success was defined by how satisfied theContinue reading...

Augmented reality applications are slowly making their way into the world of the consumer. Pokemon Go created the magical experience of seeing Pokemon superimposed upon the real world. IKEA’s mobile app lets you see how a couch would fit into your living room, which has a significant improvement on the furniture buying process. Augmented reality applications can have even more dramatic impact on industrial enterprises. Have you ever set upContinue reading...

Computational load is the amount of demand that is being placed on a computer system. “Load” can take the form of memory, CPU, network bandwidth, disk space, and other finite resources. When we design systems, we need to prepare for high-load events. On a social network, people are much more active in the mornings. On an e-commerce site, Black Friday causes many more users to come online for discount shopping.Continue reading...

The New York Times is a newspaper that evolved into a digital publication. Across its 166 year history, The Times has been known for longform journalistic quality, in addition to its ability to quickly churn out news stories. Some content on the New York Times is old but timeless “evergreen” content. Readers of the New York Times website are not only looking for the most recent news–they want to know whatContinue reading...

A cryptocurrency has a distributed ledger called a blockchain. The blockchain keeps track of every transaction that occurs across the cryptocurrency. This blockchain must stay up-to-date and verified–which requires someone in the network to do that validation. Bitcoin and Ethereum use the proof-of-work algorithm. Miners do computational work to validate the legitimacy of transactions across the network, and in return they are given cryptocurrency as a reward for that computationalContinue reading...

In America, the tech companies we focus on are commonly known as FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. We all know what these companies do because they impact our daily lives. In Asia, there are three giant tech companies that have similar scale: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, otherwise known as BAT. Technology within a location is shaped by the pressures of that location. You might think we live in aContinue reading...

It’s 9pm at night, and you are hungry. You order a pizza from Domino’s. You live on a street that’s dark, and so you have installed a smart lightbulb in front of your mailbox that lights up the address. When the pizza at Domino’s is ready, you want the lightbulb on your mailbox to light up so that the delivery person can read your address when they arrive in frontContinue reading...

The MapReduce paper was published by Google in 2004. MapReduce is an algorithm that describes how to do large-scale data processing on large clusters of commodity hardware. The MapReduce paper marked the beginning of the “big data” movement. The Hadoop project is an open source implementation of the MapReduce paper. Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella wrote software that allowed anybody to use MapReduce, as long as they had significant serverContinue reading...

Public key encryption allows for encrypted, private messages. A message sent from Bob to Alice gets encrypted using Alice’s public key. Public key encryption also allows for signed messages–so that when Alice signs a message, Alice uses her private key and Bob can verify it if Bob has her public key. In both cases, Bob needs Alice’s public key! If Bob gets that public key from an email message, BobContinue reading...