Software Engineering Daily

Free Code Camp is an online learning platform that takes people from knowing nothing about code to having enough knowledge to build software for a living. We have already done a show with Quincy Larson, the founder of Free Code Camp, in which we discussed his motivation for starting the organization.

The economics of running a free interactive platform with thousands of users informs the architectural strategy. Free Code Camp does not even have ads, so it needs to be frugal. Berkeley Martinez is the CTO of Free Code Camp, and in today’s episode he discusses how Free Code Camp works from a technical perspective, including how the site’s sandboxed coding environment is built.

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Mesos and Kubernetes are tools for distributed systems management. Kubernetes is built with an emphasis on running services, whereas Mesos is commonly used for a wider variety of workloads, including data infrastructure like Spark and Kafka. Mesos can also be used as a platform to provide resource management for Kubernetes.

Dharmesh Kakadia is the author of Apache Mesos Essentials, and has spent time studying both Mesos and Kubernetes. He joins the show to explain the strengths of both platforms, and how they can be used together. In addition to dissecting Mesos and Kubernetes, we had a wide-ranging discussion, from cloud providers to software architecture to business strategy.

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If you are in the Bay Area on January 11th, come to the Software Engineering Daily meetup. There will be awesome speakers, food, and a positive atmosphere. Find more information on softwareengineeringdaily.com or at the Software Engineering Daily meetup page.

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Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service. Companies use Cloud Foundry as a control plane to deploy and manage applications. It provides abstractions for microservices and continuous integration.

Cornelia Davis joins the show to discuss Cloud Foundry. I interviewed her at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, where enterprises share their stories of improving their culture and their technology stack. Cornelia explained how and why a large enterprise adopts Cloud Foundry, and why they often hire a company like Pivotal to help them as they migrate their infrastructure and change their processes.

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C# .NET is the framework that is most often used to write software for the Microsoft Windows operating system. For many years, the C# .NET framework was closed source, but Microsoft’s recent push towards open source has led to the creation of .NET Core, a fork of C# .NET composed of a small subset of features from the original C# .NET stack.

This episode takes us through a history of .NET, with two program managers who have worked on .NET for many years–Immo Landwerth and Lee Coward. We also explored the present and future of .NET–discussing .NET Core and .NET usage on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, which is another recent development.

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Rust is a systems level language that is built to prevent crashes and eliminate data races. A language like C++ gives you high speed and lots of control, but it is easy to have segfaults, data races, and other problems if you aren’t careful. On this spectrum of control versus safety, we can plot other languages like Java, Go, and Haskell–but none of these languages have the unique feature set of Rust.

Rust’s concurrency model is built on the foundation of ownership–a piece of data can only be owned by a single thing at a time. In today’s interview, Alex Crichton explains ownership and the other abstractions that give Rust its unique model of concurrency.

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There is a hierarchy of ways to access and store data in a computer system. The cheapest, slowest way to store and retrieve data is disk. On the faster end, we have memory. As we architect systems with increasing complexity, we have additional considerations–network latency, transient compute nodes, and numerous caching layers.

Apache Geode is a distributed, in-memory system for the JVM. It provides fast data storage and retrieval. Swapnil Bawaskar is an engineer who works on Geode, and he joins the show today to explain the architecture of Geode, and how Geode is different from other in-memory systems that get used for caching, such as memcache or Redis.

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Jeff Bezanson’s university thesis described the motivation for a new programming language. He discussed the shortcomings of “array based programming environments” and his desire to create a more performant language with the best qualities of Lisp, Python, Ruby, Perl, Mathematica, R, and C.

The Julia Language is a high performance language designed to suit technical users that crave the flexibility to pick their own notation. The language has support for a wide variety of operators, allowing scientists to create domain specific equations that can be elegantly expressed as code.

Jeff Bezanson joins the show to discuss his motivations for Julia, and how the language has evolved since he started working on it.

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Docker containers changed how engineers think about building software, and the company most responsible for the widespread adoption of containers is Docker itself. Since containerization has caught on in the mainstream, companies like RedHat, Google, Huawei, and many other big players have built platform products that utilize Docker containers.

Docker containers are the unit that many engineers use to deploy their applications, but the servers that run those containers are usually on infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, or Rackspace. This raises the question–how will Docker the company make money? Having raised $180M in equity, Docker has plenty of time to find something that works, but there are suspicions in the open source community that aggressive changes to the open source Docker project are being made by Docker the company with the long-term objective of monetization.

These changes–namely the default support for Docker Swarm–are not nefarious, but they might be less likely to occur of Docker were just an open source project, as opposed to an open source project being tended by a well-financed company. 

The New Stack broke the story about the potential Docker Fork, and Alex Williams and Joab Jackson of The New Stack join me on today’s episode. We go deep into the facts and speculations about why a fork might occur, the motivations of different key players, and the disputes within the community that have led us to this moment.

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Unikernels allow us to specify the minimum features of an operating system we need to deploy our applications. We’ve had many shows about containers, which allow you to deploy your application on top of a segregated portion of an operating system. Unikernels are different because they can be deployed directly to bare metal or to a hypervisor.

Idit Levine works on Unikernels at EMC. We had an interview a few weeks ago with her colleague Scott Weiss, and today’s conversation goes deeper into the motivations for Unikernels, the problems they solve, and the project she is leading called Unik, which seeks to add the degree of usability and adoption to Unikernels that Docker brought to containers.

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The Haskell programming language is often thought of as an academic tool, useful for teaching students about monads and functors, but not much else. But there are advantages to using Haskell as a production backend language.

Better is a company built with Haskell on the backend, and Carl Baatz wrote a blog post detailing his experiences using Haskell. He joins the show to give a detailed explanation of why a company might want to use Haskell on the backend, from software architecture, to testing, to hiring.

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