Software Engineering Daily

“If we don’t have all of the people represented in the creation activities, I don’t believe we’re going to end up with the solutions that we need for our society.” Technology careers are not as accessible to certain demographics, such as women. Sarah Allen is working to change that through education and outreach. Sarah Allen created RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, a pair of organizations working to make technology more accessibleContinue reading...

“Nothing’s cool unless you call it ‘as a service.’ ” Monsanto is a company that is known for its chemical and biological engineering. It is less well known for its data science and software engineering teams. Tim Williamson is a data scientist at Monsanto, and on today’s show he talked about how he and a small group of engineers at Monsanto dramatically shifted the culture around data science-driven genetic engineering.Continue reading...

“You want to take a scientist who knows a little bit of matlab programming and try to teach them mapreduce, and write a mapreduce program in java to do image processing? It’s a disaster!” Apache Spark is replacing MATLAB in the domain of computational neuroscience. The constraints of running MATLAB on a single machine can’t support the demands of neuroscience, which has huge collections of images and time-series data sets.Continue reading...

“It’s not just about tools, it’s also a lot about how you structure a team, how you structure the communication between engineers, how you facilitate decision making – all of those things.” University research produces numerous papers about software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the problems explored by these software engineering researchers have no actual application. These papers fall into The Black Hole of Software Engineering Research. Andy Ko is anContinue reading...

“There’s a lot of value in moving logic to the data rather than moving data to the logic. And the issue here is the data is a lot bigger than the logic.” NewSQL is a class of modern relational databases that seek to provide the same scalable performance of NoSQL systems for OLTP, while still maintaining the ACID guarantees of a traditional database system. VoltDB is a NewSQL database, designedContinue reading...

“With React, it’s so much easier to create a mental model of what’s going on in your application.” React is a set of technologies started by Facebook and open-sourced in 2013. Since then, it has become widely accepted as the best JavaScript library for building user-interfaces. A dedicated community around React has developed as well, and with any large software community, conferences are a necessity. React.js Conf is a yearlyContinue reading...

“Its not just that we didn’t have git, we didn’t have Subversion, and before that we didn’t have CVS. Basically all that we had was RCS.” Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was on the front lines of that war, back in 1992. Eric Sink was one ofContinue reading...

“We do agree that some internet is better than no internet. But it’s a question as what you define as the internet – and the internet has never been a filtered service like this.” In this episode, Jeff and Jeremy discuss Internet.org and the criticism it has received from organizations like the EFF. Internet.org is a program created by Facebook whose purpose is to expand the reach of the internetContinue reading...

“Just paying attention to clutter in general, makes things a lot better.” Design is more important than ever. There are so many websites being created every day, that it is not enough to differentiate your product with rock solid engineering. Your product has to be beautiful, intuitive, and tested for usability. You don’t want all of the hard work of the product and engineering teams to go to waste, soContinue reading...

“The lessons that we’re learning on the front-end and on the server side are applicable to hardware. I don’t think that anything’s gonna arise out of hardware that we haven’t thought of yet.” JavaScript is everywhere, on the browser, the server, and now on hardware. Finally–the Internet of Things is upon us — and it is powered by JavaScript. Even if you consider yourself a web developer, and you haveContinue reading...