Software Engineering Daily

Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild. Facebook has high standards for what they are willing to release. Tom Occhino manages theContinue reading...

The Internet is decreasing in privacy and increasing in utility. Under some conditions, this tradeoff makes sense. We publicize our profile photo so that people know what we look like. Under other conditions, this tradeoff does not make sense. We do not want a television that costs less to purchase because it is silently recording all of the conversations that take place in the room and selling them to theContinue reading...

Search is a common building block for applications. Whether we are searching Wikipedia or our log files, the behavior is similar: a query is entered and the most relevant documents are returned. The core data structure for search is an inverted index. Elasticsearch is a scalable, resilient search tool that shards and replicates a search index. Philipp Krenn from Elastic joins the show today to discuss how search works andContinue reading...

Every program gets compiled down to 1s and 0s before it can be executed against hardware. Before being translated to machine code, programs that are written in a language like Rust, Swift, or Java spend time in an intermediate representation. In Java, this intermediate representation is Java bytecode. Many different languages–such as Scala–translate to Java bytecode, because there has been lots of optimization written to speed up Java bytecode. JavaContinue reading...

Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled intoContinue reading...

Cryptocurrencies are not only a financial instrument–they are a new platform for building applications. The blockchain allows for new solutions to digital property management, micropayments, hedge fund incentives, and ad fraud. The cryptocurrency platforms with the most traction are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leader and is going through some growing pains with governance issues. Ethereum is led by the charismatic Vitalik Buterin. Bitcoin and Ethereum are notContinue reading...

There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs).  These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses.  He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his mission, with an emphasis on making the right informationContinue reading...

In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include: How and when do you see yourself leaving SE Daily? What is your personal opinion on Facebook’s Internet.org initiative? How does the defense industry affect software engineering? How can a programmer learn to deeply understand code? We always want more feedback and questions. Please email me, join Slack, and fillContinue reading...

A hedge fund is a collection of investors that make bets on the future. The “hedge” refers to the fact that the investors often try to diversify their strategies so that the direction of their bets are less correlated, and they can be successful in a variety of future scenarios. Engineering-focused hedge funds have used what might be called “machine learning” for a long time to predict what will happenContinue reading...

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser. For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complexContinue reading...