Software Engineering Daily

Data science is typically done by engineers writing code in Python, R, or another scripting language. Lots of engineers know these languages, and their ecosystems have great library support. But these languages have some issues around deployment, reproducibility, and other areas. The programming language Golang presents an appealing alternative for data scientists. Daniel Whitenack transitioned from doing most of his data science work in Python to writing code in Golang.Continue reading...

Open source software is publicly available code that is worked on in the open by large crowds of developers. Almost all new software today uses some open source software in its code. But most people never contribute to open source themselves. Some people would love to get involved in open source, but they don’t know how to get started. Shubheksha Jalan found herself in this position. In her early attemptsContinue reading...

Giphy is a search engine for gifs, the short animated graphics that we see around the Internet. Giphy is also a creative platform where people create new gifs. Every search engine requires the construction of a search index, which is a data structure that responds to search queries efficiently. Since Giphy is a search engine for graphics, there is almost no text inherently associated with the each document. Giphy usesContinue reading...

Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning proliferates, the current model of cloud computing will become too slow. A small difference inContinue reading...

Software developers succeed by combining technical ability, communication skills, and well-reasoned philosophies to craft information systems. Where this podcast focuses on the information systems, Developer On Fire focuses on the engineers who built them. Dave Rael started his podcast as a way to overcome fear and access an entrepreneurial side of himself. In his interviews with prominent engineers, Dave identifies patterns and strategies that have enabled his guests to succeed.Continue reading...

Back in 2008, the range of tools that engineers could use to connect computer systems together were getting quite good. Cloud computing was democratizing access to servers. But the telephony ecosystem was still inaccessible to the average developer. If you needed your program to make a phone call and connect a user to a customer service representative, there was no easy way to do that. Twilio was started to makeContinue reading...

Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering Daily a few months ago, when he discussed Indie Hackers, a platform he built toContinue reading...

Many elderly people live with unhealthy levels of isolation. Social isolation is a problem for anybody, but younger people can use technology to alleviate their isolation with tools like Skype and Facebook. How can we bridge the generational gap and give elderly people access to the same technological tools that younger people find easy to use? Voice interfaces are an important new medium for communicating with computers. Amazon and GoogleContinue reading...

Translation is a classic problem in computer science. How do you translate a sentence from one human language into another? This seems like a problem that computers are well-suited to solve. Languages follow well-defined rules, we have lots of sample data to train our machine learning models. And yet, the problem has not been solved–largely because languages don’t always follow rules. We have idioms and subtle contextual clues that makeContinue reading...

The goals of microservices are the same as what we have pursued in software engineering for decades: isolation, decoupling, maintainability, scalability. The reason that we use the term microservices is not because we have a completely different idea of what a service is than we used to. We use the term microservices because we are signaling that we need to achieve these architectural goals in a different way than weContinue reading...