Software Engineering Daily

18F is an organization that is building the 21st century digital government. In order to build online government services that have the high quality of modern cloud applications, 18F built Cloud.gov, a platform-as-a-service that can be used to stand up web applications for divisions of the government. Aidan Feldman helped build Cloud.gov, and on today’s episode he dissects its architecture. Cloud.gov is built on CloudFoundry, which sits on top ofContinue reading...

Six years ago, Twitter was experiencing outages due to high traffic. Back in 2010 Twitter was built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application. Twitter migrated to a microservices architecture to fix these problems. During this migration, the engineers at Twitter learned how to build and scale highly distributed microservice architectures. William Morgan was an engineer at Twitter during that time, and he is now the CEO of Buoyant.io, aContinue reading...

Mass customization is the process of making customized, personalized products that are accessible to individuals and small businesses. The process involves manufacturing, assembly lines, supply chains, and software at every step along the way. Today’s guests are Jim Sokoloff and Maarten Wensveen, who work on infrastructure and technology at Cimpress, a mass customization platform. Cimpress has t shirt printers, warehousing machines, supply chain management tools, and lots of other computersContinue reading...

The unit of computation has evolved from on premise servers to virtual machines in the cloud to containers running in those virtual machines. Serverless computation is another stage in the evolution of computational unit management. With a serverless architecture, a function call to the cloud spins up a transient container, calls the function on that container, and then spins down the container. Ryan Scott Brown joins the show today toContinue reading...

Algorithmia is marketplace for algorithms. A software engineer who writes an algorithm for image processing or spam detection or TF-IDF can turn that algorithm into a RESTful API to be consumed by other developers. Different algorithms can be composed together to build even higher level applications. Diego Oppenheimer is the CEO of Algorithmia, and he joins the show today to explain how Algorithmia works. The company has developed its ownContinue reading...

The Internet of Things is becoming a reality. Factories are being outfitted with sensors, temperature monitors, and other data gathering devices. In agriculture, farms are becoming more efficient thanks to soil monitoring devices and automated pesticide regulation. In our homes, refrigerators, alarm clocks, and mirrors are becoming “smart”. Steve Busby joins the show today to talk about the big picture: how the Internet of things works, from data ingestion toContinue reading...

Every software application has secrets. User passwords and database credentials must be managed carefully, because poor access controls can lead to disaster scenarios. Vault is a tool for secret management, developed at Hashicorp, a company that builds software tools for application delivery and infrastructure management. Seth Vargo is a software engineer and open source advocate at Hashicorp, and in today’s episode he discusses the advantages of having a single toolContinue reading...

Google researcher Jennifer Wang co-wrote a paper called “Gender Differences in Factors Influencing Pursuit of Computer Science and Related Fields”. The paper focuses on a survey of 1700 high school and college students, and takes a statistical approach to understanding why women are not pursuing computer science. In our conversation, Jennifer talks about the two influences that lead to fewer women in computer science: encouragement and exposure. The problem ofContinue reading...

JavaScript programming usually is done through the use of frameworks, such as ReactJS, AngularJS, and EmberJS. These frameworks abstract away some of the messy details of JavaScript, and simplify web development so that engineers can build products at a faster pace. When we build software using JavaScript frameworks, we are missing out on some of the richness of the JavaScript language itself. Kyle Simpson is the author of “You Don’tContinue reading...

Virtual machines were the unit of cloud computation for many years. Amazon Web Services pioneered the democratized model of allowing anyone to deploy a service to the cloud, running on a virtual machine on Amazon’s servers. After virtual machines, containers have become the unit of scale in the cloud. We break up our virtualized servers into even smaller units of computation called containers. Today, the unit of compute is gettingContinue reading...