Software Engineering Daily

You have probably missed some of the best episodes of Software Engineering Daily. If you listen to just a few episodes a week, it can be difficult to identify the high quality shows. And if you are new to the podcast, you have no idea how to find episodes that might appeal to you. Software Engineering Daily has a discovery problem. We have 600 episodes, and much of the contentContinue reading...

When a cyber attack occurs, how do we identify who committed it? There is no straightforward answer to that question. Even if we know Chinese hackers have infiltrated our power grid with logic bombs, we might not be able to say with certainty whether those hackers were state actors or rogue Chinese hackers looking for an offensive asset to sell to their government. Even if we know someone in RussiaContinue reading...

Ransomware and DDoS attacks happen all the time. Sometimes they affect large swaths of users. WannaCry ransomware froze the computer systems in hospitals. Mirai botnet DDoS attacks took down a DNS provider, making Netflix and Twitter inaccessible for a short period of time. These are innocent attacks compared to what we could face from a world where cars, heart rate monitors, and other safety critical machinery become connected to theContinue reading...

Software companies that have been around for a decade have a ton of data. Modern machine learning techniques are able to turn that data into extremely useful models. Salesforce users have been entering petabytes of data into the company’s CRM tool since 1999. With its Einstein suite of products, Salesforce is using that data to build new product features and APIs. Simon Chan is the senior director of product managementContinue reading...

We write code in a language that looks like English. Whether it is JavaScript, Fortran, or assembly language, that code is an abstraction on top of layers of intermediate languages, binary, transistors, and physics. 100 years ago, this would have seemed like magic. Most of us know about Alan Turing, who described the vision of a multipurpose computer with the concept of the Turing machine. Less well known is theContinue reading...

Automation will make healthcare more efficient and less prone to error. Today, machine learning is already being used to diagnose diabetic retinopathy and improve radiology accuracy. Someday, an AI assistant will assist a doctor in working through a complicated differential diagnosis. Our hospitals look roughly the same today as they did ten years ago, because getting new technology into the hands of doctors and nurses is a slow process–just askContinue reading...

Loans give people more financial security. If people know that they can receive a loan, they will be more willing to take intelligent risks. A loan can allow for a short-term investment that pays off enough to justify the interest rate on that loan. For the lender, a loan can be a fantastic return on capital–as long as the lendee does not default. When banks were the rulers of theContinue reading...

Sensors are being attached to trains, lightposts, and all kinds of factory equipment. Industrial machinery gives off high volumes of data that can be captured, stored, and processed with machine learning in order to improve workflows and ensure safety. Jayson Delancey works at GE, which is building tools and systems to manage large IoT deployments. The full stack for enterprise IoT involves tools for managing thousands of sensors; databases forContinue reading...

Most products do not sell themselves. Salespeople bridge the gap between a product creation and a customer who purchases it. People can make a good living on the internet selling niche products–if they can find their customers. The process of taking a large group of potential customers and narrowing it down to only the subset of those customers who will buy your product is known as the sales funnel. TheContinue reading...

Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the user in Germany, that database isContinue reading...