Software Engineering Daily

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a company brokering that relationship.

Andre Staltz works on Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer system for social graphs, identity, and messaging. Scuttlebutt is used by a group of open-source hackers, many of whom live off-grid and do not have constant access to the Internet.

In this episode, we discuss why someone would want a peer-to-peer social network, how to build one, and the progress that has been made on Scuttlebutt by some of the most talented open-source engineers in the world.

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Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker.

Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It is too human to be automated.

The game space of poker is different than that of Go. It has 10^160 different situations–which is more than the number of atoms in the universe. And the game space keeps getting bigger as the stack sizes of the two competitors gets bigger.

But it is still possible for a computer to beat a human at calculating game theory optimal decisions–if you approach the problem correctly.

Libratus was developed by CMU professor Tuomas Sandholm, along with my guest today Noam Brown. The Libratus team taught their AI the rules of poker, they gave it a reward function (to win as much money as possible), and they told it to optimize that reward function. Then they had Libratus train itself with simulations.

After enough training, Libratus was ready to crush human competitors, which it did in hilarious, entertaining fashion. There is a video from Engadget on YouTube about the AI competing against professional humans.

In this episode, Noam Brown explains how they built Libratus, what it means for poker players, and what the implications are for humanity–if we can automate poker, what can’t we automate?

Stay tuned at the end of this episode for the Indeed Prime tip on hiring developers.

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CRISPR is a technique for altering the human genome. It might be the most powerful tool for biological modification that we have ever discovered. In this episode, we explore CRISPR: how it works, why it exists in the natural world, and the implications for being able to modify DNA so easily.

Geoff Ralston is a partner at Y-Combinator. He wrote an article entitled Hacking DNA: The Story of CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive. Since Geoff is not a biologist, he is the perfect person to explain CRISPR to an audience of non-biologists.

Since he is an investor, he is also great at explaining the pace at which CRISPR might make it to market, and how it might converge with some of the other futuristic trends we are seeing so regularly today.

If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more.

The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store.

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There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts.

Before I used Zencastr to record my podcasts, like most podcasters, I used a Skype plugin. There were a number of inconveniences in the podcaster workflow from Skype. Zencastr solved all of these by creating a podcast recording tool in the browser and presenting a simple user interface.

Josh Nielsen joins the show to talk about the challenges of building a podcasting tool in the browser, and the new technologies that make it easier, such as WebRTC.

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.

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A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward.

The applications we are building today are data-intensive rather than compute-intensive. Netflix needs to know how to store and cache large video files, and stream them to users quickly. Twitter needs to update user news feeds with a fanout of the president’s latest tweet. These operations are simple with small amounts of data, but become complicated with a high volume of users.

Martin Kleppmann is the author of Data Intensive Applications, an O’Reilly book about how to use modern data tools to solve modern data problems. His book includes high-level discussions about architectural strategy, and lower level discussions like how leader election algorithms can create problems for a data intensive application.

If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more.

The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show.

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We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it.

Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive.

Peeqo is a robot assistant similar to Amazon Echo or Google Home. It was built by Abhishek Singh as part of his thesis. Abhishek wanted to explore the border between inanimate electronics and the electronics we personify. Peeqo is a cylindrical tube that bends slightly, like the human neck. At its head, it has a smartphone-sized screen that displays gifs to reflect its feedback visually.

Abhishek also has a company called Svrround, which makes 360 degree video experiences. We explore the changes to engineering that allow someone to be involved in two cutting-edge projects at once despite having very few employees working with him.

This was an energizing conversation, and I greatly enjoyed meeting Abhishek. I hope to have him on again in the future.

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.

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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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Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it.

But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled into complacency, what does that say about the rest of the United States?

American exceptionalism has faltered and complacency has risen in its wake.

Today’s guest Tyler Cowen is an economist and author. His new book The Complacent Class is the final book in a trilogy that describes a decline of American output and a decline in American mindset.

Complacent America has lost its ability to assess risk. Children are prevented from playing tag for risk of injury. College students protest against speakers who might present challenging ideas. The number of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65% since the 1980’s–millennials are too busy going to business school to start businesses.

In his books, Tyler weaves together history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. He presents hard data about many different fields, and theorizes about how the trends in those fields relate to each other.

He also has a podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and in this episode I tried to mirror his interview style. If you like this episode, you should check out his show–he has interviewed people like Ezra Klein, Peter Thiel, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

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Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases.

Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser.

For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complex video games. With JavaScript falling short on its charge to be the “assembly language for the web” the four major browser vendors started collaborating on the WebAssembly project to allow programming languages a faster, lower level compile target when deploying to the web.

Brendan is the CEO of Brave which aims to provide a faster and safer browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers by default in a new browser. The Brave browser is also helping publishers monetize in interesting new ways while also giving a share of ad revenue to its users.

Caleb Meredith is the host of this show. He previously guest hosted a popular episode on Inferno, a fast, React-like JavaScript framework. As we bring on more guest hosts, please send us feedback. We want to know what every host is doing well, and what we can improve on.

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Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes apparent to outsiders with time.

Amazon’s culture and business strategy were detailed in The Everything Store, a 2013 book by Brad Stone. I read The Everything Store before working at Amazon, then I read it a second time after working at Amazon. The book is an accurate and balanced depiction of Amazon’s ethos.

Brad’s new book The Upstarts documents the rise of Uber and Airbnb, two companies with a similar controversial valence to Amazon.

It was a pleasure to speak to Brad because I admire his engrossing storytelling as an author and his strategic analysis as a business journalist. After discussing business and technology with him, we explored journalism–Brad is senior executive editor at Bloomberg.

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