Software Engineering Daily

Every company has a large number of routine data workflows. These data workflows involve spreadsheets, CSV files, and tedious manual work to be done by a knowledge worker. 

For example, data might need to be taken from Salesforce, filtered for new customers, and piped into Mailchimp. Or perhaps you need to sort all your customers to find only the ones who have spent more than $50.

These data workflows might require some basic knowledge of SQL, or an understanding of how to make an API request. Not everyone knows how to execute these technical commands. A software company can be slowed down due to a shortage of technical analysts who have the necessary programming skills to build these data workflows.

Parabola is a low-code tool for building data workflows. Parabola lets the user drag and drop different components together to build an application without using a programming language. Parabola lowers the technical barrier for knowledge workers who want to build these kinds of data workflows. Alex Yaseen is the CEO of Parabola, and he joins the show to talk about the ideas behind Parabola and his goals with the company. 

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

parabola.io

parabola.io/careers

Twitter: @alexyaseen

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A gig economy application generates lots of notifications. 

There is SMS, mobile phone updates, emails, and native application updates. If you order a ride from Uber, you might receive a text message and a push notification at the same time. If an app overloads the user with notifications, the user might end up annoyed and delete the app from their phone. 

But perhaps all of these notifications are necessary. You would rather get three simultaneous notifications from your food delivery app than fail to get your food on time. If you are the mobile application developer building the food delivery app, what other choice do you have?

At large companies such as Linkedin, there are entire teams devoted to figuring out how to optimize the notifications that they send you. It has a surprisingly large impact on the usability of a mobile application. Troy Goode is the founder of Courier, a company that provides notification optimization.

This might sound like a small, trivial problem. But it actually has a large impact on the usage of apps. And it is not an easy engineering problem. Troy joins the show to talk about the problem that Courier solves and the backend infrastructure that powers it. Courier is built entirely on serverless APIs. This is a great case study in how to build a completely scalable infrastructure product based on serverless tools.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Animations can be used to create games, app tutorials, and user interface components. Animations can be seen in messaging apps, where animated reactions can convey rich feelings over a text interface. Loading screens can become less boring through animation, and voice assistant products can feel more alive through animation.

But we still don’t see much animation in our everyday applications. This is partly because animation tooling is difficult to use. To make an animation, the typical workflow is to go into a tool like After Effects, render your animation, and then export that animation in a movie format. This format is not dynamic enough to be easily used on the wide variety of development platforms.

The animation library Lottie did improve this tooling by creating a system for exporting animations to JSON and allowing them to easily scale up and down as vectors. But the animations still were simple and unidirectional. The developer did not have much freedom for how to move an animation in response to user input.

Rive is a system for creating dynamic, movable animated objects. Rive allows for the creation of animated elements that respond to user input. Rive has a tool that runs in the browser and allows the user to define the animation. 

The animations in Rive use a bone system that allows animators and designers to define the points of the animated sprite that the developer can then manipulate with code. This improves the painful handoff process that exists between animators and developers, and gives the developer some programmatic control.

Guido and Luigi Rosso are the founders of Rive and they join the show to talk about the frictions of animation tooling, and what they have built to improve

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Robotics has changed modern agriculture. Autonomous systems are powering the tractors, cotton pickers, and corn cutters that yield plants at industrial scale.

John Deere is a company that has been making farm equipment for 183 years. Over that period, the planting and harvesting process has become increasingly mechanized, and John Deere has been at the forefront. Over the last few decades, software has played an increasingly important role at John Deere.

Today, there is software inside the vehicles. These vehicles can operate autonomously, they collect large amounts of data, and they are supported by a large system of cloud services. The teams within John Deere who create the software have an elaborate testing workflow that allows them to deploy the software to the vehicles and drive them in the field.

Ryan Bergman is a software engineer at John Deere and he joins the show to talk about the software engineering, management, and DevOps practices within the company. 

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Venture capital investing requires an understanding of market dynamics, technology, and finance. 

There is also an element of human nature. Consumer trends can make or break the viability of a new product. And early stage venture investing is always a bet on a small team or individual founder. Early stage investments are usually into companies that have not found perfect traction with their product. Judging the worth of an early stage investment means judging the likelihood that the founders can make their vision a reality.

Venture Stories is a podcast that explores the wide spectrum of ideas that go into venture investing. Shows include two person interviews on economics, social networking, food technology, cryptocurrencies, and consumer psychology.

Erik Torenberg is a co-founder and partner of Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm. He is also the host of Venture Stories. Erik joins the show to discuss investing, media, and the kinds of new technology companies that are being created today.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Chat systems have been a part of software development for decades. Older systems like Pidgin and Yammer were surpassed by newer systems like HipChat. And when Slack was created, it quickly became a part of most software companies. But Slack does not fulfill the needs of every company.

Mattermost is an open-source chat system. Mattermost can be configured to work within enterprises that have strong constraints around compliance and data governance. Whereas Slack is a SaaS product that requires users to send their data to the cloud servers managed by Slack, Mattermost allows the enterprise to decide how data moves through services, and where the databases are hosted.

Ian Tien is the CEO of Mattermost, and he joins the show to talk about why many companies need their chat system to be hosted in a private cloud or on-premises. In a previous episode with CTO Corey Hulen we discussed the engineering behind the company. In today’s episode, we explore the management and strategy of the business, as well as some additional engineering, since Ian Tien’s background is as a software engineer and computer scientist.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Announcements

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The word “DevOps” has a different definition depending on who you ask. 

For some people, it is about the process of managing and releasing code. It can involve container management and server orchestration. It can involve infrastructure-as-code, and safer configuration management. In addition to a set of technologies, DevOps can be seen as a management concept that describes agile practices, and breaking down communication barriers between different teams.

One thing that most software companies have decided is that whatever DevOps is, we want it. We want to release more software, we want to do it faster, and we want to do it safer. We want streamlined communication between management and engineering. We want a full understanding of the “value chain” of software.

Despite the elusiveness of a single description for what DevOps is, GitLab can credibly describe itself as a tool that satisfies the DevOps needs of most enterprises. GitLab started as an open source version control management system based on Git. It has expanded into products that include continuous integration, security, issue tracking, and monitoring. 

The trajectory of GitLab into such a large platform is something that nobody anticipated. The best explanation for how it happened is that it is the downstream result of an engineer within GitLab deciding that the code hosting product needed to have a continuous integration product bundled with it as an option for a tightly coupled, unified workflow.

Today, there are many enterprises trying to make a big set of changes to their development practices. The world is consolidating around Git for version control and Kubernetes for container management. Almost every enterprise is figuring out a “cloud strategy”. Every team wants to have continuous integration, and they want it to have some security products paired with that release workflow in a popular, vaguely defined set of practices known as “DevSecOps”.

With so many changes coming to enterprises, it turns out that many of these enterprises just want some sane defaults. When GitLab came to market with a bundled CI and code hosting product, the company discovered that the customers were very happy to have integrated tools that worked well out of the box. This was in stark contrast to the years of NxN tooling integration that an enterprise would have to make to stitch together their broad range of carefully selected tools.

Sid Sibrandij is the CEO of GitLab, and he joins the show for a conversation about how GitLab arrived at its product development strategy. In a previous episode, Sid discussed some of the core features and history of GitLab. Today’s show expands on many of the subjects we explored previously. We also had a spirited discussion of the modern nature of work, and how GitLab’s unique culture and fully remote team have evolved as the company has scaled.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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Webflow is a visual programming tool used by designers, developers, and other technical users. Webflow is a leader in the “low code” or “no code” category of software tools that has become prominent in the last few years. 

Webflow has been years in the making. In a previous show with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin, he told the story of being heads down on Webflow, steadily working through the engineering problems that stood between him and his vision of a visual programming environment.

In the early days, it was unclear who would even want to use Webflow. A critic of Webflow might have said that Webflow was too high level for developers, and too technical for designers. But Webflow caters to a large subset of developers and designers who want the kind of low code experience that Webflow provides. The product has also helped define a new category of knowledge worker: the “visual programmer.”

Bryant Chou is a co-founder of Webflow and was the CTO in the early days. He joins the show to discuss the engineering problems that the company has had to work through, and his perspective on how Webflow fits into the software market going forward.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Announcements

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Software has changed the way the world functions. The rapid pace of change has made it difficult to know how to navigate the new world. Knowledge workers who want to keep advancing in their careers develop a strategy of continuous learning in order to adapt to these changes.

O’Reilly Media has existed for almost 40 years, providing resources for the technical consumer. As O’Reilly has expanded its product line from books to conferences to online learning, the business has grown slowly but steadily. That business trajectory stands in contrast to many of the software companies that are financially structured to either grow rapidly or die.

Today, O’Reilly has a large impact on the software ecosystem. Software professionals congregate at O’Reilly conferences. Enterprises pay O’Reilly to educate their employees. And O’Reilly continues to grow into new product lines, recently acquiring the interactive learning platform Katacoda, which can be used to learn about Kubernetes and other popular technologies.

In a previous episode, we discussed Tim O’Reilly’s book “What’s The Future”. In today’s show, Tim returns to the show to discuss his experience building O’Reilly, and how his business philosophy contrasts with much of the assumed wisdom of software company building.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Announcements

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freeCodeCamp was started five years ago with the goal of providing free coding education to anyone on the Internet.

freeCodeCamp has become the best place to begin learning how to write software. There are many other places that a software engineer should visit on their educational journey, but freeCodeCamp is the best place to start, because it is free, and there are no advertisements. 

For most people learning to code, the price of that education is important, because they are learning to code to build a new career. It’s also important that a new programmer learns from an unbiased source of information, because an ad-supported environment will educate the new programmer towards products that they might not need.

freeCodeCamp has not been easy to build. Building freeCodeCamp has required expertise in software engineering, business, media, and community development. The donation-based business model of freeCodeCamp doesn’t collect very much money. Why would somebody build a non-profit when they could spend their time building a highly profitable software company?

Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp, and he joins the show for a special episode about his backstory and the journey to building the best place on the Internet for a new programmer to begin.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Announcements

Support freeCodeCamp

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