Software Engineering Daily

When you are working on a program, a lot of things are going through your head. In some sense, you become part machine when you are programming. Learnable Programming is a concept that facilitates this, by showing developers what the computer is doing in real time, before compiling.

In this episode, Josh Varty, co-founder of Code Connect Inc., talks to Edaena Salinas about incorporating concepts from Learnable Programming into Visual Studio and C# by showing developers what the computer is thinking while they are typing. Code Connect lets a developer immediately see what value a variable is taking, and provide test values to troubleshoot a portion of code to understand how different code paths are going to work. This is instead of having to compile and run the full program.

If you have ever thought about making developer tools for an IDE or a programming language, this episode provides some great information.

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Microservices are a widely adopted pattern for breaking an application up into pieces that can be well-understood by the individual teams within the company. Microservices also allow these individual pieces to be scaled independently and updated in isolation.

Past Software Engineering Daily episodes have covered the microservice architectures of Twitter, Netflix, Google, Uber, and other companies. In today’s episode, I sit down with Rafael Schloming, who is building tools for microservices at Datawire.

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Slack is a chat client that has reached wide adoption. The rise of Slack has coincided with the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is a simple, conversational interface into a computer program that may have simple functionality, like telling you some simple statistics, or more complex functionality, like helping you manage your continuous integration pipeline.

Bot design and engineering is a new field, and a vast array of resources and techniques are available for developers looking to hack on it. Amir Shevat is the director of developer relations at Slack, and is responsible for communicating with developers about the best ways to build bots for Slack.

After seeing his talk at O’Reilly Bot Day, I had a number of questions about where we are with bots today and where we are going. I enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and if you aren’t already convinced that bots are an important platform for engineers to understand, this conversation will convince you.

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Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales.

As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become insufficient. As an answer to this, Joshua Levy initiated The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services, an open-source collection of resources available on github. Joshua has experience at a variety of companies, including Viv, the conversational interface that was recently acquired by Samsung.

In our conversation, Josh brought his years of experience to the table to explain the risks, benefits, and alternatives of Amazon Web Services. Josh has become a friend over the last year, and if you get the chance to have a conversation with him, I highly recommend it. He will be at the re:Invent conference in Vegas at the end of this month (November) and if you are interested in talking to him about the AWS Open Guide, or anything else, reach out to him.

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The blueprint for a typical startup involves investing heavily in cloud services–either from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The high costs can quickly eat away at all of the money that startup has raised. In today’s episode, Avi Freedman outlines some of the infrastructure mistakes that can set back a company severely–cloud jail, hipster tools, and lack of monitorability.

Avi is the CEO of Kentik, network traffic, performance, and security visibility company, so he gets lots of perspective on the infrastructure of the average company. We also discussed the business of running a software company, contrasted with the life of a poker player. Avi and I both have some experience playing high-stakes poker, so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on the parallels between the two fields.

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