Software Engineering Daily

In a microservices architecture, a user request will often make its way through several different services before it returns a result to the end user. If a user experiences a failed request, the root cause could be in any of the services along that request path. Even more problematic is the challenge of debugging latency in this kind of request chain.   Reshmi Krishna joins the show today to discussContinue reading...

“Serverless” usually refers to an architectural pattern where the server side logic is run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered and ephemeral. Mike Roberts has written a series of articles about serverless computing, in which he discusses theories and patterns around serverless architecture. In this episode, Mike and I discuss how to reimagine our software architecture using functions-as-a-service. We go into the costs, benefits, and modern limitations of currentContinue reading...

Akka is a toolkit for building concurrent, distributed, message-driven applications on the JVM. Akka provides an implementation of the actor model of concurrency, which simplifies concurrency by adding a lighter weight abstraction than threads and thread pools.   Konrad Malawski joins the show today to discuss Akka and reactive streams. Reactive streams is an initiative to provide a standard for asynchronous stream processing. This show goes deep into modern concurrentContinue reading...

Unbounded data streams create difficult challenges for our application architectures. The data never stops coming, and we are forced to assume that we will never know if or when we have seen all of our data. Some streaming systems give us the tools to deal partially with unbounded data streams, but we have to complement those streaming systems with batch processing, in a technique known as the Lambda Architecture. ApacheContinue reading...

TensorFlow is Google’s open source machine learning library. Rajat Monga is the engineering director for TensorFlow. In this episode, we cover how to use TensorFlow, including an example of how to build a machine learning model to identify whether a picture contains a cat or not.   TensorFlow was built with the mission of simplifying the process of deploying a machine learning model from research to production, so we alsoContinue reading...

Data Validation is the process of ensuring that data is accurate. In many software domains, an application is pulling in large quantities of data from external sources. That data will eventually be exposed to users, and it needs to be correct. Radius Intelligence is a company that aggregates data on small businesses. In order to ensure that business addresses and phone numbers are correct, Radius uses human data validation toContinue reading...

Machine learning has become simplified. Similar to how Ruby on Rails made web development approachable, scikit-learn takes away much of the frustrating aspects of machine learning, and lets the developer focus on building functionality with high-level APIs.   Per Harald Borgen is a developer at Xeneta. He started programming fairly recently, but has already built a machine learning application that cuts down on the time his sales team has toContinue reading...

Flexport is a technology company that makes logistics, supply chain management, and freight forwarding software. Shipping freight across the world requires container ships, airplanes, trains, warehouses, and trucks. Flexport’s software integrates with many of these different shipping companies, and provides a dashboard for the end user to understand how their products are being shipped around the world.   Amos Elliston is the CTO of Flexport, and he joins the showContinue reading...

When you hear about massive data breaches like the recent ones from LinkedIn, MySpace, or Ashley Madison, how can you find out whether your own data was compromised?   Troy Hunt created the website HaveIBeenPwned.com to answer this question. When a major data breach occurs, Troy acquires a copy of the stolen data and provides a safe way for individuals to check if their credentials have been stolen. Troy isContinue reading...

The Linux kernel of many popular operating system distributions contains 200-500 million lines of code. The average user never touches many of the libraries that are contained in these operating system distributions. For example, if you spin up a virtual machine on a cloud service provider, the virtual machine will have a USB driver. This is wasted space, because you can’t even interact with the USB port on a virtualContinue reading...