Software Engineering Daily

Building a mobile app requires developers to build a separate version for Android and iOS. The approval process for app stores makes it difficult to deploy quickly and iterate in small batches for developers who are making native apps. These frictions cause fewer developers to write mobile apps than we would have if the smartphone platform was unified. Since the early days of the smartphone, different cross platform solutions haveContinue reading...

Urbit is a completely new way of looking at computing. Every user gets a personal server, which runs your apps, wrangles your connected devices, and defines your secure identity. Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. Urbit feels foreign and confusing for those of us coming from the traditional web because the normal paradigm is to iterate and paper over the problems of the currentContinue reading...

Over the past few years, React has become the most popular front end JavaScript framework. As React has matured, the open source community around React has identified areas for improvement. Since React itself is too mature to refactor completely, new projects have been started to take the best aspects of React and start from scratch. Inferno is an extremely fast, React-like JavaScript library for building modern user interfaces. Dominic GannawayContinue reading...

Product managers are responsible for guiding the design and overall functionality of software. The relationship between product managers and engineers is complimentary: a PM is viewing the product from a perspective that is closer to the customer, so the PM often has the responsibility of navigating high-level tradeoffs in the functionality of a product. Suzie Prince is the head of product at ThoughtWorks and she joins the show to discussContinue reading...

Medical imaging is used to understand what is going on inside the human body and prescribe treatment. With new image processing and machine learning techniques, the traditional medical imaging techniques such as CT scans can be enriched to get a more sophisticated diagnosis. HeartFlow uses data from a standard CT scan to model a human heart and understand blockages of blood flow using simulations of fluid dynamics. In today’s episode,Continue reading...

Data visualization tools are required to translate the findings of data scientists into charts, graphs, and pictures. Understanding how to utilize these tools and display data is necessary for a data scientist to communicate with people in other domains. In this episode, Srini Kadamati hosts a discussion with Jake VanderPlas about the Python ecosystem for data science and the different attempts at creating a data visualization library. Jake VanderPlas isContinue reading...

Column-oriented data storage allows us to access all of the entries in a database column quickly and efficiently. Columnar storage formats are mostly relevant today for performing large analytics jobs. For example, if you are a bank, and you want to get the sum of all of the financial transactions that took place on your system in the last week, you don’t want to iterate through every row in aContinue reading...

Free Code Camp is an online learning platform that takes people from knowing nothing about code to having enough knowledge to build software for a living. We have already done a show with Quincy Larson, the founder of Free Code Camp, in which we discussed his motivation for starting the organization. The economics of running a free interactive platform with thousands of users informs the architectural strategy. Free Code CampContinue reading...

Software engineers are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices. Every software company encounters situations where the line between right and wrong is not clearly drawn. Back in the year 2000 Bill Sourour was asked to code a project to help market a pharmaceutical product in a misleading way. Reflecting on this experience, Bill recently wrote about it on Medium, suggesting that developersContinue reading...

A company like Pinterest has millions of transactional emails to send to people. The scalability challenges of sending high volumes of email mean that it makes more sense for most companies to use an email as a service product rather than building their own. Chris McFadden is the VP of engineering and cloud operations at SparkPost and he joins the show to explain the architecture of SparkPost’s email as a serviceContinue reading...