Software Engineering Daily

“Graphing when your Facebook Friends are awake” was trending at the top of Hacker News when Alex Hogue first posted it. Alex wrote a blog post about this piece of software he built that interacts with public Facebook APIs to detect when any of his friends are awake or asleep. As I read that post, I wanted to talk to Alex, because it was such a creative and technical pieceContinue reading...

Applications crash, and engineers need to be able to quickly find the root cause of a crash. Apps have become distributed, and debugging workflows have changed. Developers need better tools to identify and troubleshoot problems with their apps. Ben Curtis joins us today to discuss Honeybadger, an exception and monitoring tool for web applications. We discuss how software tools can be used to detect problems faster and improve the debuggingContinue reading...

“Functional programming is about making the complex parts of your system explicit.” Elixir is a programming language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir allows metaprogramming, polymorphism, and a web framework called Phoenix that has drawn positive comparisons to Ruby on Rails. Jose Valim is today’s guest. He built Elixir to augment a language that he loved–Erlang. On Software Engineering Daily, we interviewed Joe Armstrong, the creator ofContinue reading...

“You need to build more things yourself to be highly available, but one of the very good consequences of being bare metal is that the prices are very low compared to what you could get on the cloud provider.” Engineers who want to add search to their application usually deploy Elasticsearch, or write their own search engine that uses TF-IDF. These solutions work well for large documents, but are lessContinue reading...

“We’re not always in control of other people’s networks.” CDN stands for content delivery network. A content delivery network is a system of distributed servers that delivers web pages and other web content. Without CDNs, the internet would be much slower, because CDNs function as a caching layer for most web resources. Carl Gustas is an engineer at CacheFly, a popular content delivery network. He joins us today to discussContinue reading...

“Eventual consistency is really kind of a marketing term from some of these NoSQL systems – it’s not really consistent in any strong sense of the term.” Google has published papers on distributed systems such as BigTable, Chubby, and the Google File System. During this episode, we focus on a product that takes inspiration from Google’s Spanner project, a database that is built on a distributed monolithic sorted map. CockroachDBContinue reading...

“I believe that there’s something deeply personal, natural, and human going on as we construct these abstract devices called computers.” Wiki technology was invented decades ago to improve how software developers communicate. Today, Wikipedia has taken the ideas of the wiki to a new level, creating a free knowledge graph for the world to learn from. Ward Cunningham developed WikiWikiWeb in 1994. He joins us today to discuss the firstContinue reading...

“You write the code, but you don’t run it? That’s just preposterous.” Software applications are constantly generating logs. These logs are necessary to understand how an application is functioning, and logs are key to debugging. As applications have gotten more complex, logging infrastructure has become complex as well. Storing and managing all of our log data is such a big task that several companies have been started to tackle thisContinue reading...

“Seeing stuff happen is exciting in the early days. But when you try to be at the senior level, at the architect level, you have to understand that there is a cost to adopting a higher level abstraction.” Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know. Today, we have mobile web, React, Angular, PHP, JQuery, and so much more. Marc GrabanskiContinue reading...

Nadia Eghbal joins us as the host of today’s show to discuss the past, present, and future of open-source software. This monologue was adapted from Nadia’s article, We’re in a brave, new post open source world. In this episode, Nadia describes the origins of open-source in the Free software movement, its rise to popularity, and today’s golden era where mainstream and popular technologies like React, Spark and Docker are allContinue reading...