Software Engineering Daily

Many programmers listening to this podcast are working at a big company, and they would prefer to be running their own software business. Patrick McKenzie has been writing about this topic for several years on his blog Kalzumeus.com. Almost a decade ago, he was working as an enterprise developer at a large company in Japan. Over time, his side projects started making enough money to justify his leaving to workContinue reading...

Botnets have a massive influence on the Internet. As we have seen recently with the Mirai Botnet, IOT bots can take down companies as big as Netflix. In our recent episodes about advertising fraud, we’ve talked about how bots are being used to take billions of dollars of revenue from advertisers. Derek Muller is one of those advertisers who has spent money on ads and gotten nothing but fake trafficContinue reading...

Slack is a chat client that has reached wide adoption. The rise of Slack has coincided with the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is a simple, conversational interface into a computer program that may have simple functionality, like telling you some simple statistics, or more complex functionality, like helping you manage your continuous integration pipeline. Bot design and engineering is a new field, and a vast array of resources andContinue reading...

Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to move as fast as they want to. Tomasz Tunguz saw this when he was workingContinue reading...

Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become insufficient. As an answer to this, Joshua Levy initiated The Open Guide to Amazon WebContinue reading...

Bot Day was an O’Reilly conference featuring talks from some of the leading figures in the bot industry. Before I attended Bot Day, I knew there were lots of applications for chatbots, but I didn’t realize how good the tooling has gotten–it’s very easy to get started with chatbots today so if you are a developer and you have a basic idea, I suggest checking out the videos from BotContinue reading...

The blueprint for a typical startup involves investing heavily in cloud services–either from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The high costs can quickly eat away at all of the money that startup has raised. In today’s episode, Avi Freedman outlines some of the infrastructure mistakes that can set back a company severely–cloud jail, hipster tools, and lack of monitorability. Avi is the CEO of Kentik, a network traffic, performance, and securityContinue reading...

When Facebook acquired Instagram, one of the first systems Instagram plugged into was Facebook’s internal spam and fraud prevention system. Pete Hunt was the first Facebook engineer to join the Instagram team. When he joined, the big problems at Instagram were around fake accounts, harassment, and large volumes of spammy comments. After seeing the internal Facebook spam prevention tools clean up Instagram, Pete decided to start a company to buildContinue reading...

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able to disrupt everything, and he has relentlessly been keeping up as best he can withContinue reading...

Jeff Bezanson’s university thesis described the motivation for a new programming language. He discussed the shortcomings of “array based programming environments” and his desire to create a more performant language with the best qualities of Lisp, Python, Ruby, Perl, Mathematica, R, and C. The Julia Language is a high performance language designed to suit technical users that crave the flexibility to pick their own notation. The language has support forContinue reading...