Software Engineering Daily

Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response willContinue reading...

Designers and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of the designers with the realities of code. InVision is a product for prototyping designs andContinue reading...

Developing a product requires careful balance between engineering, sales, design, and customer service. The founding CTO of a company often needs to take on each of these responsibilities, because when the company only has a few people there is nobody to delegate these different tasks to. Cullen Zandstra is the CTO at FloQast, a SaaS tool for accounting close management. It isn’t important what that means–we do describe it inContinue reading...

Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers and governments regulating the internet should treat all data on the internet the same. Debates around Net Neutrality can be as contentious as subjects like global warming, or tabs vs. spaces. To a hardcore free market economist, Net Neutrality sounds suspicious. Why would it be good for the government to regulate prices on the data that passes around wires owned byContinue reading...

In bitcoin, every transaction in the shared ledger has the sender, recipient, and value. This ledger gets appended infinitely and is shared within a peer-to-peer network. Zcash is a cryptocurrency with all the features of bitcoin, plus encrypted transactions. The sender, recipient, and value fields are all encrypted. If bitcoin is HTTP, Zcash is like HTTPS, a secure transport layer. Nathan Wilcox works on Zcash, and in this episode weContinue reading...

Wearables have become more accessible to the public. Snap’s spectacles, Google Glass, FitBit, and Apple Watch suggest a future in which many people will be wearing a smart device. In this episode Asta Roseway, Research Designer at Microsoft Research, gives insights into other categories of wearables like tattoos, scarves, and cosmetics. Asta talked about her work on DuoSkin, a wearable that looks like a beautiful metallic tattoo. We talked aboutContinue reading...

Multiagent systems involve the interaction of autonomous agents that may be acting independently or in collaboration with each other. Examples of these systems include financial markets, robot soccer matches, and automated warehouses. Today’s guest Peter Stone is a professor of computer science who specializies in multiagent systems and robotics. In this episode, we discuss some of the canonical problems of multiagent systems, which have some overlap with the canonical problemsContinue reading...

Biology research is complex. The sample size of a biological data set is often too small to make confident judgments about the biological system being studied. During Jason Knight’s PhD research, the RNA sequence data that he was studying was not significant enough to make strong conclusions about the gene regulatory networks he was trying to understand. After working in academia, and then at Human Longevity, Inc Jason came toContinue reading...

Every company that deals with payments deals with fraud. The question is not whether fraud will occur on your system, but rather how much of it you can detect and prevent. If a payments company flags too many transactions as fraudulent, then real transactions might accidentally get flagged as well. But if you don’t reject enough of the fraudulent transactions, you might not be able to make any money atContinue reading...

Observability allows engineers to understand what is going on inside their systems. In its most raw form, observability comes from log data. Modern systems have many layers of logs–virtualized cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, the container runtime itself, and the application logic running within the container. With all of these layers, it is not practical for a developer to have to sift through layers of logs every time a bug occursContinue reading...