Software Engineering Daily

Data modeling is the process of creating relationships and rules about objects, so that we can decide how to store them in a database. Data modeling defines how we store and query our database systems.   Today’s episode features a discussion of data modeling in Cassandra with Jon Haddad, an evangelist at Datastax. The distributed nature of Cassandra creates some unique rules around how we should model our Cassandra tables.Continue reading...

At software conferences, I like to walk around the vendor booths and talk to the representatives from different companies. By talking to the vendors about their marketing pitches, I get an idea of how those companies are positioning themselves for the future, and the complex business landscape of software becomes slightly easier to understand.   At recent conferences, many of the big vendors have been talking about their cloud platform. WithContinue reading...

Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly.   As an application scales, it becomes significantly more complicated while at the same time receivingContinue reading...

Call centers are a vulnerable point of attack for large enterprises. Fraud accounts for more than $20 billion in lost money every year, and a significant portion of that fraud is due to customer service representatives being fraudulent social engineering attacks.   Chris Halaschek joins the show today to discuss how Pindrop Security is addressing this attack vector. Every phone call that gets made to a call center has aContinue reading...

In 1999, it took $50,000 to buy a server. Once you bought that server, you had to know how to operate and maintain it. Today, cloud service providers have changed how we build software. Servers, load balancers, networking, storage–these hardware concerns have been turned into software. Don Pezet joins the show today to discuss the fundamentals of a cloud service provider. These are the basics that you need to knowContinue reading...

At most universities, there is not a course titled “cloud computing”. Most students leave college without an understanding of distributed systems, cloud service providers, and the fundamentals of how a data center works. Kasper Nissen and Martin Jensen are changing that with KubeCloud, a small tangible cloud computing cluster that runs on Raspberry Pis.   Kasper and Martin started KubeCloud as a masters thesis, and it is grown to aContinue reading...

Twenty years ago, Bill Joy talked about the eight fallacies of distributed computing–these are things such as “the network is reliable”, and “latency is zero”, and “bandwidth is infinite”, and these fallacies are even more relevant today. With the popularity of Docker containers, the networks of distributed systems that we deal with have become even more complex, and with this growing complexity comes new problems and new fallacies. WeaveWorks isContinue reading...

Transferring money from one country to another is expensive, and the banks that facilitate money transfer have tricked us into believing that it should be expensive. On today’s show, Harsh Sinha explains the peer-to-peer system of transferring money with TransferWise, where he works as VP of engineering. Harsh also discusses the larger picture of FinTech companies. The emergence of so many companies at the intersection of finance and technology isContinue reading...

Apache Cassandra is a distributed database that can handle large amounts of data with no single point of failure. Since 2008, Cassandra has been widely adopted and the software and the community around it have grown steadily. A software developer interacting with Cassandra uses CQL, the Cassandra Query Language. ScyllaDB is another open-source database that has been created to be totally compatible with CQL. By complying with CQL, the internalsContinue reading...

In order to use a remote desktop experience, software engineers have a limited number of options, and most of them are proprietary, like VMWare or Oracle. Remote desktop is a functionality that many engineers use every day, so it is surprising that the open source world has taken awhile to displace the functionality of proprietary software. In 2010, Mike Jumper started working on Guacamole, a way to access remote desktopsContinue reading...