Software Engineering Daily

Prometheus is a tool for monitoring our distributed applications. It allows us to focus on the services we are deploying rather than the individual machines that make up instances of that service.   The monitoring service itself is a portion of a distributed system that is treated differently than the services we are monitoring. We don’t want to use a consensus-based tool like Zookeeper or Consul because we can’t affordContinue reading...

The technology underlying podcasts is simple–a podcaster publishes mp3 files to an RSS feed, and the listener subscribes to that feed, receiving mp3s whenever the feed is updated. Unfortunately, the simplicity of podcasts makes it difficult to build automated advertising infrastructure on top of that simple RSS model. This lack of rich automated advertising has kept podcasting from flourishing. aCast is a company that is trying to change that byContinue reading...

GraphQL was open sourced out of Facebook, and gave developers a way to unify their different data sources into a single endpoint. Although the promise of GraphQL is appealing, the process of setting up a GraphQL server that can communicate with each disparate data source can prove to be complex. Scaphold.io provides GraphQL as a service, and today’s guests are the creators of Scaphold, Vince Ning and Michael Paris. Scaphold.ioContinue reading...

Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Occasionally I write editorials, and also record them as a podcast. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers, the second was about how poker relates to software engineering, and the third was about music and software engineering. Today’s episode is called “You Are Not A Commodity”. Since it is a departure from the normalContinue reading...

Alec Ross worked in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor to Hillary Clinton. His book Industries of the Future explores the biggest technological opportunities and threats to our society. The industries addressed in his book include robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity. Technological familiarity is increasingly correlated with an individual’s optimism. Cyberwarfare presents attack vectors that are difficult to insulate against. Arguments about surveillance center disproportionately on governmental surveillance ratherContinue reading...

Odd Networks is building a platform for anyone to launch their own over-the-top streaming video service. With Odd Networks, you can deploy your own video channel using a Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and other services. Creating a streaming video service with interoperability between these different platforms presents numerous technical challenges, and today’s guest Kris Walker explains how Odd Networks is addressing those challenges. We discuss the open sourceContinue reading...

MobyCraft is a client-side Minecraft mod to manage and visualize Docker containers. MobyCraft was created by Aditya Gupta. I met him at DockerCon, where he gave a presentation about his project. He also discussed his interaction with the Netflix team, who integrated MobyCraft with their container management tool called Titus.   You can watch a video online of Titus managing hundreds of 3-D containers within MineCraft. In this episode, weContinue reading...

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool built at SoundCloud. It can be used to produce detailed time-series data about a distributed architecture. Prometheus is based on the monitoring system inside Google’s infrastructure, called Borgmon.   Julius Volz is the creator of Prometheus, and he joins the show to explain why he built Prometheus and how it differs from previous monitoring tools. Prometheus is widely used to monitor Kubernetes clusters, justContinue reading...

Financial technology has changed significantly in the last decade, and companies both new and old are adapting to that change. Newer companies like TransferWise and Stripe are often called “fintech” companies–short for “financial technology”. Established companies like banks may not refer to themselves as fintech companies, but the way that they do business is changing, due to technological advances like blockchain. Ed Donner is the CEO of untapt, a hiringContinue reading...

Monitoring translates machine data into actionable business metrics, and is a key component of a modern software company. James Turnbull’s new book “The Art of Monitoring” describes how organizations can build their monitoring infrastructure.     James joins the show today to outline the strategies that a company can use to proactively monitor their systems. We talk about pull- vs. push-based monitoring, events, logging, metrics, and James’s experience as CTOContinue reading...