Software Engineering Daily

Donald Trump has either alarmed or excited everyone in the engineering community. Some of the debates are based around innovation. Opponents to Trump say that his anti-immigration policies will reduce the innovation that relies on H1-B visas. Supporters of Trump say that his anti-regulation policies will unlock innovation that is restricted by bureaucracy. Other debates are around philosophy and free speech. Opponents to Trump say that his views on womenContinue reading...

Making the right engineering choices in today’s wide landscape of cloud technologies is hard. Predicting the future in order to invest in companies in this space has the same level of complexity. The cost of cloud computing is going down but the volume of total required space and processing power is going up. The open source community is growing and improving but people are increasingly willing to buy software thatContinue reading...

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) is a powerful concept that has the potential to make for reliable and maintainable systems.  It is also broadly misunderstood and means different things to different people. Derek Comartin learned about the idea after viewing some talks by Greg Young and has since successfully applied the approach with great success and it has transformed the way he views features, business requirements, and dependencies.  The resultContinue reading...

Machine learning has improved both in tools and accessibility. Frameworks like TensorFlow create the right abstractions for developers to work efficiently. Educational programs like Metis and Insight Data Science provide a place for developers to learn these tools. As a result, artificial intelligence is becoming easier to develop and more widespread. Rumman Chowdhury works on artificial intelligence at Accenture. Before her current role, she taught data science at Metis. InContinue reading...

Thursday February 23rd was a big day in security news: details were published about the Cloudbleed bug, which leaked tons of plaintext requests from across the Internet into plain view. On the same day, the first collision attack against SHA-1 was demonstrated by researchers at Google, foretelling the demise of SHA-1 as a safe hashing function. What does this mean for the average engineer? What are the implications for regularContinue reading...

Manufacturing electronics is not a simple task and because of its complexity it is also quite expensive. Companies like Apple are able to pull their costs down through economies of scale. Since Apple is always placing huge bulk orders on chips, sensors, and other components, the company can get lower prices for those components than an individual hardware hacker that wants to build a prototype. Herein lies the opportunity forContinue reading...

When an engineer is offered a job a tech company, their compensation is often partly in cash and partly in equity–shares of the company. How should an engineer evaluate that offer? How should they negotiate? In the world of equity compensation, costly and avoidable mistakes are routine, and this hurts both companies and employees. Josh Levy was on Software Engineering Daily previously to talk about the Amazon Web Services openContinue reading...

Parse was a backend as a service company built in 2011 before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Building a backend as a service for developers requires walking a thin line between giving engineers lots of control and preventing those engineers from shooting themselves in the foot. While she was at Parse, Charity Majors learned about the operational burdens of managing a service with high uptime requirements and deeply technicalContinue reading...

When an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time. Applications on Heroku have access to autoscaling. Heroku users don’t need to worry about provisioning new servers manuallyContinue reading...

In the mid 90s, data warehousing might have meant “using an Oracle database.” Today, it means a wide variety of things. You could be stitching together a big data pipeline using Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. You could be using managed tools like BigQuery from Google. How did we get from the simple days of Oracle databases to the wealth of options available today? Mark Rittman writes and podcasts about dataContinue reading...