Software Engineering Daily

Modern architectures often consist of containers that run services. Those containers scale up and down depending on the demand for the services. These large software systems often use a technique known as event sourcing, where every change to the system is kept in an event log. When an event on the log is processed, several different data stores might be updated in response.

In these architectures, containers are interacting with each other. Multiple databases are responding to events in the event log. To connect these systems together, engineers can write small functions to pass data around–you might call these small connecting functions “glue.” Glue functions are a great use for a serverless tool such as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions. As these glue functions grow in popularity, there is an increased need for an open source way to deploy serverless functions.

Sebastien Goasgoen works on Kubeless, a serverless execution tool built on top of Kubernetes. In this episode, we explore his take on the “serverless on Kubernetes” problem. This is a great companion episode to yesterday’s interview with Soam Vasani.

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Kubernetes is an orchestration system for managing containers. Since it was open sourced by Google, Kubernetes has created a wave of innovation in the infrastructure technology space.

Another recent innovation has been the “serverless” execution tools–such as AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions. Serverless execution, otherwise known as functions-as-a-service, allows a developer to execute code against cloud servers without specifying which cloud servers they are executing on.

Serverless execution is a cheap, flexible resource that any large company wants to have access to. But AWS Lambda and the other popular serverless tools are closed source. This led Soam Vasani to work on Fission, a serverless executor that sits on top of Kubernetes.

If you have not heard about either Kubernetes or Serverless, you can check out our previous episodes about either topic. If you are familiar with the two topics, I think you’ll enjoy this episode, in which Soam explains the motivation for serverless on Kubernetes, and the architecture of Fission.

Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: [email protected]

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Cloud computing changed how we develop applications for the web. Over the last decade, engineers have been learning how to build software in this new paradigm. The costs have gone down, but our nodes can fail at any time. We no longer have to manage individual servers, but the layers of virtualization and containerization require new strategies for communicating between services.

As we have adjusted to this new way of building applications, the term “cloud-native” has become a useful descriptor. Cloud native applications are modern distributed systems capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes.

Open source projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Linkerd draw on the lessons of big technology companies like Google, Twitter, and SoundCloud. Engineers today don’t need to reinvent the key infrastructure of those companies. We can combine the open source cloud-native technologies and use them to build powerful systems.

Dan Kohn is the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and he joins me for an interview about the projects within the CNCF, how they fit together, and the future of computing.

Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about job searching brought to you by Indeed Prime.

Measuring the Popularity of Kubernetes Using BigQuery

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Swift is a language that is most commonly used to write apps for Apple client devices, such as iPhones. Since being released in 2014, Swift has become one of the most popular languages due to its high performance and developer ergonomics. In 2015, Swift was open sourced, creating the opportunity for Swift to be used outside of the Apple ecosystem.

If you write an iPhone app today, your frontend is in Swift and your backend is probably in NodeJS, Java, or Ruby. Engineers are working to port Swift to the server so that the Swift developer experience is isomorphic: the same language on the backend and the frontend.

Chris Bailey is an engineer at IBM working on Kitura, a Swift web framework. In this episode, we discuss the history of Swift, why it is so appealing to developers, and why Swift could become a server side language with as much popularity as Java.

Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

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Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself.

These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild. Facebook has high standards for what they are willing to release.

Tom Occhino manages the React team at Facebook and works closely with engineers to determine what projects make sense to open source. In this episode, Preethi Kasireddy interviews Tom about how Facebook thinks about open source–what went right with React, why it makes sense for Facebook to continue to release new open source projects, and how full-time employees at Facebook interact with that open source codebase.

We would love to get your feedback on Software Engineering Daily. Please fill out the listener survey, available on softwareengineeringdaily.com/survey. Also–Software Engineering Daily is having our third Meetup, Wednesday May 3rd at Galvanize in San Francisco. The theme of this Meetup is Fraud and Risk in Software. We will have great food, engaging speakers, and a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. To find out more, go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup.

Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices — JSConf EU 2013

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Every program gets compiled down to 1s and 0s before it can be executed against hardware. Before being translated to machine code, programs that are written in a language like Rust, Swift, or Java spend time in an intermediate representation.

In Java, this intermediate representation is Java bytecode. Many different languages–such as Scala–translate to Java bytecode, because there has been lots of optimization written to speed up Java bytecode. Java bytecode runs on the JVM–the Java Virtual Machine.

LLVM is a project that draws inspiration from the Java Virtual Machine. LLVM originally meant “low level virtual machine” but today it is just called LLVM and describes a set of compiler tools.

In today’s interview with Morgan Wilde, we explore how compilers work, how different processor hardware architectures present a problem for compilers, and why LLVM’s intermediate representation creates a layer of interoperability for any language that compiles down to that intermediate representation.

Whether you are new to compilers or have experience, this episode will appeal to you. Morgan is an excellent teacher and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through. He has a 30-minute YouTube video–A Brief Introduction to LLVM that I highly recommend.

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Open source software is publicly available code that is worked on in the open by large crowds of developers. Almost all new software today uses some open source software in its code. But most people never contribute to open source themselves. Some people would love to get involved in open source, but they don’t know how to get started.

Shubheksha Jalan found herself in this position. In her early attempts to break into open source, she failed to get much traction and found the open source community hostile to newcomers. She would fix beginner issues, but had trouble figuring out how to make more complex contributions. Eventually she found success and wrote about it. In this episode she takes us through that journey.

If you are wondering how to get into open source, this episode is for you.

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Whatever engineering problem you have right now, the solution is probably not to write a new programming language. But sometimes it does make sense.

JetBrains makes IDEs–the interactive development environments that many people code in, like IntelliJ and Webstorm. And all of these IDEs are written in Java. So the JetBrains team is very familiar with Java and the JVM. Since JetBrains spends so much time working on tooling for developers, they also have an intimate understanding of the problems that developers encounter.

Kotlin was developed as an alternative to JVM languages such as Java and Scala. In this episode, Hadi Hariri from JetBrains explains why the company decided to build a new JVM language. We discuss many of its features, such as safety, concision, and its ability to compile to JavaScript.

Why Kotlin is My Next Programming Language: Ode to the Language You’ve Never Heard Of, by Mike Hearn

YouTube: GOTO 2016 Conference, Kotlin – Ready for Production, Hadi Hariri

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Urbit is a completely new way of looking at computing. Every user gets a personal server, which runs your apps, wrangles your connected devices, and defines your secure identity. Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service.

Urbit feels foreign and confusing for those of us coming from the traditional web because the normal paradigm is to iterate and paper over the problems of the current platform with new things built on top. Curtis Yarvin, the creator of Urbit, argues that the current model is too fundamentally broken for that to work. As he says: “the Internet as a client-server network has won. The Internet as a peer-to-peer network has failed.”

This sounds like yet another quirky, overambitious developer side project–but Urbit has serious legs. The github repo has had 51 committers over its four years of activity. Last year, a public crowdsale of Urbit address space raised more than $200,000. Peter Thiel was an early investor in the project, perhaps partly due to the combination of persistence, technical skill, and unusual opinions of Curtis Yarvin.

In this episode, Curtis and Galen Wolfe-Pauly join me for a conversation about Urbit–its strange computing platform and the contrarian philosophies that drive its creators.

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