Software Engineering Daily

There are multiple paths to constructing a piece of software from start to finish. An individual programmer can build an entire product from scratch in a couple days. A giant corporation can commission a project and delegate responsibilities to hundreds of people. An open source community can use the wisdom of the crowds to efficiently build an operating system. Today’s episode is about another path for building software, and myContinue reading...

You have probably received a parking ticket that you felt was unfair,   but instead of fighting it, you paid the expensive price to get rid of it quickly. Fighting a parking ticket sounds like it would be so time consuming that it is a better decision to just pay for it. When Joshua Browder was faced with this situation, his response was different. He decided there should be an automatedContinue reading...

Eight years ago, MongoDB was an internal project at 10gen, a company that was trying to build a platform-as-a-service out of open-source components. The team at 10gen realized that the platform-as-a-service play would be too complex, and difficult to build. Since MongoDB was the most valuable component of that project, they narrowed their focus to this new document-oriented database. In today’s episode, MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz describes the history ofContinue reading...

Four years ago, I started volunteering for a popular podcast about software–Software Engineering Radio. For the next two years, I learned about the process of making a quality podcast about engineering. With its emphasis on preparation, timeless engineering principles, and attention to the listener, Software Engineering Radio continues to be one of the most popular shows about engineering. Software Engineering Daily is my effort to bring the quality of SEContinue reading...

C# .NET is the framework that is most often used to write software for the Microsoft Windows operating system. For many years, the C# .NET framework was closed source, but Microsoft’s recent push towards open source has led to the creation of .NET Core, a fork of C# .NET composed of a small subset of features from the original C# .NET stack. This episode takes us through a history ofContinue reading...

Biology research at Microsoft is focused on three main areas: molecular programming, synthetic biology, and stem cell biology. At the intersection of biology and computing there are implications for health, medicine, and efficient computing techniques. The field of Biological Computation is in its early days, and there is still lots of work to be done. Colin Gravill works in the computational science group at Microsoft Research, and today he explainsContinue reading...

Rust is a systems level language that is built to prevent crashes and eliminate data races. A language like C++ gives you high speed and lots of control, but it is easy to have segfaults, data races, and other problems if you aren’t careful. On this spectrum of control versus safety, we can plot other languages like Java, Go, and Haskell–but none of these languages have the unique feature setContinue reading...

Microservices are a widely adopted pattern for breaking an application up into pieces that can be well-understood by the individual teams within the company. Microservices also allow these individual pieces to be scaled independently and updated in isolation. Past Software Engineering Daily episodes have covered the microservice architectures of Twitter, Netflix, Google, Uber and other companies. In today’s episode, I sit down with Rafael Schloming, who is building tools forContinue reading...

There is a hierarchy of ways to access and store data in a computer system. The cheapest, slowest way to store and retrieve data is disk. On the faster end, we have memory. As we architect systems with increasing complexity, we have additional considerations–network latency, transient compute nodes, and numerous caching layers. Apache Geode is a distributed, in-memory system for the JVM. It provides fast data storage and retrieval. SwapnilContinue reading...

Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever.