Software Engineering Daily

Engineering managers start out as engineers. Eventually, there is a fork in their career road where an engineer can choose to move up into management or continue on as an engineer in a more senior role. Changing to management involves an increase in responsibilities, a different set of goals to focus on. Jon Emerson was working at Google as an engineer when a project he was working on started toContinue reading...

The war against spam has been going on for decades. Email spam blockers and ad blockers help protect us from unwanted messages in our communication and browsing experience. These spam prevention tools are powered by machine learning, which catches most of the emails and ads that we don’t want to see. TrueCaller is a company that is bringing this quality of spam detection to our phone call systems. Umut AlpContinue reading...

The software industry has a severe lack of women. There are numerous root causes of this diversity problem. Families do not encourage women to enter math and science. The media portrays most programmers as white males. Our industry often picks up on the signals of the broader society and perpetuates them. Reversing this trend of low female involvement in computer science could have tremendous positive impact, and Jenine Beekhuyzen joinsContinue reading...

Smart phone apps have better performance than web apps. When we have an application that we use on a regular basis, we download that application to a smart phone rather than using the browser based version on our mobile browser. Google’s Polymer Project wants to improve the gap between native app performance and mobile web app performance. The key problem with mobile web is that we are sending huge JavaScriptContinue reading...

Most programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is the creator of Practical Dev, and he joins the show to discuss software editorialism. TheContinue reading...

Ten years ago, databases were much simpler. Most companies would only have one or two types of databases in production. Today, the age of one-size-fits-all is over. Companies have multiple databases to deal with different types of use cases, and databases have become distributed to multiple nodes in order to be scalable. Ozgun Erdogan of Citus Data joins the show to give us a modern look at databases. Ozgun suggestsContinue reading...

Kubernetes is the container management platform that came out of Google’s experiences managing data centers. Kubernetes abstracts away many of the frustrations of distributed systems management. OpenShift is a platform built on top of Kubernetes to provide an additional layer of usability. Clayton Coleman is the lead engineer of OpenShift, and in our conversation today, we start with the basics of Kubernetes, then talk about OpenShift–Clayton explains why we needContinue reading...

Coding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran attended one coding boot camp, then spent some time living at home absorbed in hisContinue reading...

Infrastructure-as-code is a trend that has been popularized over the past decade, as cloud computing and distributed systems have become a part of every technology company. Tools like Salt, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible allow us to manage servers and processes from the command line. David Boucha works at SaltStack, the company that makes Salt. Salt is a platform that provides configuration management and remote execution. In our conversation today, weContinue reading...

Solar energy is a growing market. Improvements in hardware have led to some people predicting that solar energy will be powering the world within the next few decades. Undoubtedly, a large percentage of our current energy infrastructure will be replaced by solar in the near future. Replacing our old, inefficient power grid requires massive investment. On Software Engineering Daily, the resources we usually talk about are memory, bandwidth, storage, andContinue reading...