Software Engineering Daily

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Software Engineering Daily episodes

October 22, 2015Dwarf Fortress with Tarn Adams
“The official motto that we have in our help manual is ‘Losing is fun!’ ”
Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress.
Tarn Adams works on Dwarf Fortress with his brother Zach.
Questions
What is the objective of Dwarf Fortress?
Does the way you’ve designed the gameplay reflect any philosophy about life that you have?
What language is Dwarf Fortress written in?
Do people build constructs in Dwarf Fortress that you would never have expected?
Did your studying complex math at Stanford affect how you’ve developed Dwarf Fortress?
What advice would you give to developers listening that want to create their own game?
Links
Dwarf Fortress
Infiniminer
Tarn on Wikipedia
Sponsors
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1 hr 3 min
October 14, 2015Creativity and Engineering with Derek Sivers
“Creativity never comes to you – she will only meet you halfway.”
Derek Sivers is a programmer, musician, and writer. He has created several companies and products, including CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music online.
Questions
As programmers, do we have an obligation to create new things?
How did your interest in PostgreSQL evolve?
Why does Active Record complicate things?
What were the interesting engineering challenges at CDBaby?
You wrote a post about loss in 2010 – can you talk a little bit about this and what you learned from this experience?
What is the most counterintuitive thing you’ve learned in life?
Links
The War of Art
Superhuman by Habit
Simple Made Easy
Simplify: move code into database functions
Derek on Twitter
Sponsors
Digital Ocean is the simplest cloud hosting provider. Use promo code SEDAILY for $10 in free credit.
Hired.com is the job marketplace for software engineers. Go to hired.com/softwareengineeringdaily to get a $600 bonus upon landing a job through Hired.

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59 min
October 11, 2015Replacing Hadoop with Joe Doliner
“There are a lot more people who have the problem that Hadoop solves than there are people using Hadoop.”
Pachyderm is a containerized data analytics platform that seeks to replace Hadoop.
Joe Doliner is the Co-founder and CEO of Pachyderm. Previously he worked as a software engineer at RethinkDB and AirBnB.
Questions
Why are Hadoop and Zookeeper tightly coupled?
What are the problems with having to specify map reduce jobs as Java classes?
How does Pachyderm File System (PFS) compare to Git?
Who is using Pachyderm?
Is it an overall societal weakness that we feel a need to get picked?
If Cloudera came to you tomorrow and offered to acquire you for $12 million, would you do it?
Links
Pachyderm
Who Needs Git When You Got ZFS?
Pachyderm Repo
JD on Twitter
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1 hr 6 min
October 08, 2015Rethinking Documentation with Greg Koberger
“If you focus on improving the developer experience, it will naturally translate into good documentation.”
ReadMe is simplifying the process of writing documentation. The platform provides a readymade developer hub with the ability to integrate API endpoints into documentation.
Greg Koberger is a developer and designer, and the founder of ReadMe. He previously founded a traveling incubator and worked for Mozilla.
Questions
What makes good documentation?
Why did you choose Angular as your front-end framework?
What design principles did you focus on when building ReadMe?
What were your weaknesses when you applied to Y Combinator?
Where do you want to be in five years time?
Links
ReadMe
Five Years Time
Phileas and Fogg – Traveling Incubator
Greg Koberger on Twitter
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1 hr 8 min
September 27, 2015 Crocodile Browser with Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime
What is it like to be a young software engineer in Nigeria?
Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime have a deep understanding of the startup tactics that have led to so many successful companies in the Web 2.0 boom.
Their favorite podcast is a16z. Their role models include Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. They recently worked on a machine learning compression project, inspired by the show Silicon Valley.
They are underestimated because of their age, but both of them view youth and naivete as assets. Osine believes it is counterproductive when older people look at him and his brother with condescension.
“A young person thinks of about a million different ways to do something. An older person might think of just 500,000. A young person has more ideas, and more ways something can work. An older person should just help guide a younger person, rather than taking over the product.”
He emphasized the importance of rapid product development.
“Ignorance makes you [similar to] me. Push anything out. A product is stupid, disgustingly designed, ugly, half-baked. You just push anything out. You don’t have the standard,” said Osine.
Our conversation reinforced my belief that the world is becoming smaller and that culture is becoming more homogeneous. This shift is driven by software.
It was as easy for me to communicate with Osine and Anesi about technology as it is to converse with an American.
Osine believes that engineering is more like art, saying “your application represents you.” Anesi sees software development more like a science, saying “design is an art, but software design is more like a science.”
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40 min
September 09, 2015Functional Programming with Jessica Kerr
Functional languages encourage practices and patterns that can simplify concurrent programming.
Scala, Clojure, and Akka are functional tools built on the Java Virtual Machine.
Jessica Kerr is a functional developer on the JVM. She currently works at Monsanto. At QCon San Francisco, she will be giving a talk called Contracts in Clojure: Settling Types vs. Tests.
Questions
How does Scala compare to Clojure?
What are some best practices for using threadpools?
What is the actor model?
Does functional programming simplify concurrency?
What are the most important lessons from your talk Functional Principles for Object Oriented Development?
Links
Jessica Kerr at QCon SF
YouTube: Functional Principles for Object-Oriented Development
Jessica Kerr Blog
Abstractivate: Functional Programming Blog
Stereotype Threat
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1 hr 2 min
September 03, 2015Security and Privacy with Bruce Schneier
“What we learn again and again is that security is less about what you think of, and more about what you didn’t think of.”
Bruce Schneier is a security researcher and author of Data and Goliath.
Questions
In Data and Goliath, what are the motives of different goliaths?
Why is the Ashley Madison case a watershed moment in security?
Do you still feel we should break up the NSA?
Will Google and Amazon become military contractors?
How can we defend ourselves from DOS attacks from refrigerators?
When we put processors in refrigerators, and cars, and thermostats, are we increasing the attack surface, and our vulnerabilities faster than we are improving our utility?
Links
Schneier on Security
Data and Goliath
Ashley Madison Case
XKeyscore
Stuxnet
Aspen Security Forum Videos
“It’s Time to Break Up the NSA”
iPhone Ransomware
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47 min
August 26, 2015Containers with Bryan Cantrill from Joyent
Container infrastructure has benefits of security, scalability and efficiency.
Containers are a central component of the DevOps movement. Joyent provides simple, secure deployment of containers with bare metal speed on container-native infrastructure
Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, the father of DTrace and an OS kernel developer for 20 years.
Questions:
Why are containers relevant to DevOps?
Why are containers advantageous to the developer?
What is the benefit of running a container on the principal hardware rather than the VM?
Do DevOps employees exist?
How is DTrace useful for DevOps?
What are the societal benefits of global warming?
Links:
Docker and the Future of Containers in Production
Docker and the Future of Containers in Production (SlideShare)
Joyent: Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure
Bryan Cantrill AMA
The post Containers with Bryan Cantrill from Joyent appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
56 min
August 14, 2015Bitcoin with Andreas Antonopoulos
Bitcoin’s cultural implications inform the engineering opportunities and constraints.
Andreas Antonopoulos is a bitcoin researcher, journalist, and evangelist.
Questions
What are the taboo topics within the bitcoin community?
What do you think of when people say “we know bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency, but the big question is whether it will be the last”?
Were grey markets previously underserved before bitcoin?
What is at the intersection of big data and bitcoin?
Are distributed systems more about technology or philosophy?
What are some tips for bitcoin evangelism?
Links
Antonopoulos Home Page
Wired Money YouTube
Let’s Talk Bitcoin Podcast
The post Bitcoin with Andreas Antonopoulos appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
58 min