Software Engineering Daily

Vulnerabilities exist in every computer system. As a system gets bigger, the number of vulnerabilities magnifies. The web is the biggest, most complex computer system we have–but fortunately, the steps we can take to secure our web applications are often quite simple. Jared Smith is a cyber security research scientist with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He joined me on the show to discuss web application security, but I really wantedContinue reading...

Meetup is an online service that allows people to gather into groups and meet in person. Since 2002, the company has been growing and its technology stack has been changing. Today, they are in the process of migrating to the cloud, using both Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Platform. Yvette Pasqua is the CTO of Meetup and she joins the show to explain how Meetup’s technology stack works andContinue reading...

When a useful new technology comes out, companies that are in a position to adopt that new technology can gain an edge over competitors. As our industry grows and moves faster, these kinds of changes are coming faster–some recent examples are Docker, ReactJS, and Kubernetes. Evolutionary architecture supports incremental, guided change as a first principle along multiple dimensions. A company with an evolutionary architecture is structured to evolve in responseContinue reading...

Every digital system has vulnerabilities. Cars can be hacked, locked computers can be exploited, and credit cards can be spoofed. Security researchers make a career out of finding these types of vulnerabilities. Samy Kamkar’s approach to security research is not just about dissection–it’s also about creativity. For many of the technologies he hacks on, Samy open-sources code that summarily describes the vulnerability he has been working on. For example, inContinue reading...

Self-contained systems is an architectural approach that separates the functionality of a system into many independent systems. Each self-contained system is an autonomous web application, and is owned by one team. Communication with other self-contained systems or 3rd party systems is asynchronous where possible. As Eberhard Wolff explains in this episode, self-contained systems is not the same thing as microservices, but they are not mutually exclusive. Organizations often adopt aContinue reading...

Many people find themselves going down a career path that does not bring them satisfaction. A lawyer finds himself constantly working cases he doesn’t care about. A student in medical school gets completely burned out from hospital bureaucracy. An investment banker no longer finds joy in the accounting statements that she used to enthusiastically study. Startups offer a different career path. Within a startup, an employee can often find creativity,Continue reading...

In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky. The process of building software has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, but manyContinue reading...

A biologist wants to study the genetic makeup of an organism. A pharmaceutical researcher wants to test the effects of an experimental drug. These types of experiments require a deep knowledge of the scientific domain as well as the lab techniques to produce the data that will eventually yield a result. Transcriptic is a robotic biology laboratory that allows you to make requests for experiments to run remotely. Scientists whoContinue reading...

Application performance monitoring helps an engineer understand what is going on with an application. An application on a single machine is often monitored by inserting bytecode instructions into the application after it has been interpreted. Distributed cloud applications with functionality broken up across multiple servers often use distributed tracing. Andi Grabner from Dynatrace joins today’s show to explain how monitoring software is built, and how engineers use it to solveContinue reading...

Online marketplaces and social networks often have a trust and safety team. The trust and safety team helps protect the platform from scams, fraud, and malicious actors. To detect these bad actors at scale requires building a system that classifies every transaction on the platform as safe or potentially malicious. Since every social platform has to build something like this, Smyte decided to engineer trust and safety as a service.Continue reading...