Software Engineering Daily

The role of “tech lead” is a combination of a software engineer, a project manager, and an architect. A tech lead might spend 30% of her time coding and 70% managing a project, resolving conflicts, and planning.   In today’s episode, we discuss the structure of software teams, and when it might make sense to have a tech lead on your team, in contrast to the more common team structureContinue reading...

Devoxx4Kids is an organization that is inspiring children through robotics, programming, and engineering. Kids who attend a Devoxx4Kids workshop are exposed to entertaining and educational activities, such as writing a Minecraft mod or programming an Arduino.   Arun Gupta is a software engineer and the president of the board for Devoxx4Kids USA. In this episode we discuss coding education for kids, and what happens at a Devoxx4Kids workshop. If youContinue reading...

Google builds cloud services for developers, such as PubSub, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud DataStore. On Software Engineering Daily, we’ve done lots of shows about how these types of services are built. In this episode, we are zooming in on the interaction between the developer using a cloud service and the design and engineering of the client APIs.   To build a useful cloud service, Google has to make aContinue reading...

When the US government hacks its own citizens, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is often the best source of reporting to find out what laws the government has broken. When a change to the privacy policy of Google or Facebook is made, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the best place to find out how that change in privacy exploits users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides legal defense and editorialism at theContinue reading...

Batch and stream processing systems have been evolving for the past decade. From MapReduce to Apache Storm to Dataflow, the best practices for large volume data processing have become more sophisticated as the industry and open source communities have iterated on them.   Dataflow and Apache Beam are projects that present a unified batch and stream processing system. A previous episode with Frances Perry discussed how they work in detail.Continue reading...

A previous episode of Software Engineering Daily called “You Are Not A Commodity” received a lot of feedback, both negative and positive. The episode was a monologue I wrote about why engineers should build products on their own as a default career path, rather than work at a large corporation as a default career path.   A reddit thread about the episode was almost entirely negative. Most of the emailsContinue reading...

Unikernels allow us to specify the minimum features of an operating system we need to deploy our applications. We’ve had many shows about containers, which allow you to deploy your application on top of a segregated portion of an operating system. Unikernels are different because they can be deployed directly to bare metal or to a hypervisor.   Idit Levine works on Unikernels at EMC. We had an interview aContinue reading...

Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform.   This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competition, what the impact of Microsoft’s legal battles in the late 90’s was, and how theContinue reading...

Slack is a chat application that is rapidly growing in popularity. The focus of Slack is to create a polished, responsive tool for productivity that cuts down on the emailing, context switching, and useless meetings that take place at a typical enterprise.   Keith Adams, the chief architect at Slack, joins the show to explain how those high level principles translate into engineering decisions.   Keith previously worked for 7Continue reading...

When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right?   Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog post about the migration, and post got very popular for at least three reasons:  Continue reading...