Podcast Archives Software Engineering Daily

If you’re a sports fan and like to track sports statistics and results, you’ve probably heard of Sofascore. The website started in 2010 and ran on a modest single server. It now has 25 million monthly active users, covers 20 different sports, 11,000 leagues and tournaments, and is available in over 30 languages. Josip Stuhli has been with Sofascore…

Cloud-based software development platforms such as GitHub Codespaces continue to grow in popularity. These platforms are attractive to enterprise organizations because they can be managed centrally with security controls. However, many, if not most, developers prefer a local IDE. Daytona is aiming to bridge that gap. It’s a layer between a local ID…

Knowledge graphs are an intuitive way to define relationships between objects, events, situations, and concepts. Their ability to encode this information makes them an attractive database paradigm. Hume is a graph-based analysis solution developed by GraphAware. It represents data as a network of interconnected entities and provides analysis capabi…

Shopify is an e-commerce platform focused on enabling small businesses to sell online. The company was founded in 2006 and since then has become a core technology of online business infrastructure. Mike Shaver is a Distinguished Engineer at Shopify and previously worked at Facebook, Mozilla, Oracle and others. At Shopify he works on the core team, …

When Adam Berger was at Uber, his team was responsible for ensuring that Uber Eats merchants correctly receive and fulfill orders. This required them to think hard about engineering workflows and state management systems. Six years of experience at Uber motivated Adam to create State Backed, which is an open-source backend system written in Typescr…

One of the key challenges that teams encounter is how to smoothly collaborate on converting a design into code. For example, if a designer designs a web component, how can it be most efficiently implemented by a developer? What happens if the designer needs to adjust the design and communicate this change to the developer? These sorts of issues can…

Frontend web frameworks are software toolkits that handle many of the low-level and repetitive aspects of building a website. These frameworks have made it easier than ever to build a modern website. The open-source Astro framework was created in 2021 for the purpose of creating simple static sites that load quickly. A key factor to its high perfor…

Observability software helps teams to actively monitor and debug their systems, and these tools are increasingly vital in DevOps. However, it’s not uncommon for the volume of observability data to exceed the amount of actual business data. This creates two challenges – how to analyze the large stream of observability data, and how to keep down the …

The open source coding philosophy has enormous appeal to many software engineers, and with good reason. Open source libraries, applications, and operating systems are now essential to the overall technology ecosystem. And the number of open source projects is only increasing. But many developers don’t know how to get involved in open source. Or, th…

There are countless real world scenarios where a workflow or process has multiple steps, and some steps must be completed before others can be started. Think of something as simple as cooking dinner. First you look up a recipe, then you write down the ingredients you need, you go shopping, and then you cook. These steps must be run in a certain ord…

Speech technology has been around for a long time, but in the last 12 months it’s undergone a quantum leap. New speech synthesis models are able to produce speech that’s often indistinguishable from real speech. I’m sure many listeners have heard deep fakes where computer speech perfectly mimics the voice of famous actors or public figures. A major…

If you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you’ve experimented with coding assistants like GitHub Copilot. Many developers have even fully integrated these tools into their workflows. One way these tools accelerate development is by autocompleting entire blocks of code. The AI achieves this by having awareness of the surrounding code. It understa…

Documentation is something that everyone knows is important but it’s often difficult to get right. On software teams, good documentation can help to onboard new people, improve communication across teams, and …

Observability is becoming an increasingly competitive space in the software world. Many developers have heard of Datadog and New Relic, but there are a seemingly countless number of observability products out there. Costa Tsaousis (he/him) is the Founder and CEO of Netdata. His goal was to build an open-source platform that was high-resolution, rea…

Ongoing advances in generative AI are already having a huge impact on developer productivity. Tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are increasing the velocity of code development, and more advances are on the horizon. However, an ever-growing challenge for developers is how to manage their coding resources – things like code snippets, website link…

The importance of data teams is undeniable. Most companies today use data to drive decision-making on anything from software feature development to product strategy, hiring and marketing. In some companies data is the product, which can make data teams even more vital. But there’s a common problem – analyzing data is hard and time consuming. Lots o…

Platform engineering is difficult to get right, and in the age of DevOps and cloud computing, software developers increasingly serve as platform engineers while they’re building their applications. This can be an engineering challenge because organizations often require their platforms to provide fine-grained control and compliance management. Cory…

Today it’s estimated there are over 1 billion websites on the internet. Much of this content is optimized to be viewed by human eyes, not consumed by machines. However, creating systems to automatically parse and structure the web greatly extends its utility, and paves the way for innovative solutions and applications. The industry of web scraping …

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably worked with an API, or application programming interface. An API is a set of rules for how to communicate with an applications or device. For example, when you build an app and want to use Stripe to handle payments, or use Slack to deliver notifications, it’s APIs that make this possible. Handling communicatio…

There are hundreds of observability companies out there, and many ways to think about observability, such as application performance monitoring, server monitoring, and tracing. In a production application, multiple tools are often needed to get proper visibility on the application. This creates some challenges. Applications can produce lots of diff…

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is used to load webpages using hypertext links, and it’s the foundation of the web. Tim Berners-Lee famously created HTTP version 0.9 in 1989, and defined the essential behavior of a client and a server. Version 1.0 was eventually finalized in 1996, and its secure variant called HTTPS is now used on more th…

A platform as a service, or PaaS, is the concept of a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. One of the best examples is Heroku, which was created in 2007 and later acquired by Salesforce. Although these services are great for helping startups get off the ground quickly, they can ultimately become a form of technical debt bec…

It’s now clear that the adoption of AI will continue to increase, with nearly every industry working to rapidly incorporate it into their systems and applications to provide greater value to their users. Business analytics is a key domain that promises to be radically reshaped by AI. Alembic is an AI platform that integrates web data, product conve…

When StackOverflow launched in 2008 it lowered the barrier to writing complex software. It solved the longstanding problem of accessing accurate and reliable programming knowledge by offering a collaborative space where programmers could ask questions, share insights, and receive high-quality answers from a community of experts. Generative AI has i…

Picture a user interacting with a web app on their phone. When they tap the screen the app triggers communication with a server, which in turn communicates with a database. This process then happens in reverse to eventually update what the user sees on-screen. The latency for this round trip depends a lot on the physical distance between the user a…

Developer experience, or DevX, is a critical aspect of modern software development that focuses on creating a seamless and productive environment for developers. It encompasses everything from the tools and technologies used in the development process to the documentation, libraries, and frameworks available to streamline coding tasks. An emphasis …

Infrastructure as code refers to the use of software and configuration files to convey infrastructure specifications. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of manually provisioning servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components. With the growth of cloud computing, the infrastructure as code paradigm is becoming m…

Charlie Gerard is a highly accomplished software engineer and technologist. She’s worked at Stripe, Netlify, and Atlassian and authored the book, Practical Machine Learning in JavaScript. In her spare time, Charlie explores the field of human-computer interaction and builds interactive prototypes using hardware and machine learning. Some of her rec…

Incident management is the process of responding to unplanned events or service interruptions, and then restoring service to an operational state. Having robust incident management is vital to many software teams. Blameless is a framework designed to help software companies manage their production incidents effectively. It provides a workflow for m…

Cloud applications continue to grow in popularity, but ensuring the security of these applications often presents a formidable engineering challenge. This challenge motivated the creation of Jit. Jit is a continuous security platform for developers, and seeks to enable every cloud app to start with minimum viable security, or MVS, without slowing d…

ScyllaDB is a fast and highly scalable NoSQL database designed to provide predictable performance at a massive cloud scale. It can handle millions of operations per second at a scale of gigabytes or petabytes. It’s also designed to be compatible with Cassandra and DynamoDB APIs. Scylla is used by Zillow, Comcast, and for Discord’s 350M+ users, and …

React is an immensely popular JavaScript library that is used to build website user interfaces. A key feature of React is that it uses a virtual Document Object Model, or DOM, to selectively update the desired regions of the web page, which provides major performance advantages. Million.js is an open source project that provides an optimized virtua…

Cox Automotive has been at the frontier of digitizing the automotive space with popular products such as AutoTrader, Kelly Blue Book, and Dealertrack. To deliver these products the company manages large quantities of data and diverse engineering teams. Scaling its operations required an engineering transformation of the company. Chris Dillon is the…

Serverless backend platforms are cloud services that simplify the process of building a backend. These platforms are growing rapidly in popularity because they can greatly accelerate application development, and improve the developer experience. Convex is a real-time backend platform that uses 100% TypeScript and is designed with reactive UI framew…

Exafunction is a leader in deploying deep learning models at scale. One of their products is Codeium, a coding assistant for software developers based on Exafunction’s deep learning technology. Codeium provides AI-assisted autocompletion in your IDE, making it easier for you to incorporate deep learning technology in your software development workf…

Tom Preston-Werner is a renowned software developer, inventor and entrepreneur. He co-founded GitHub and is the creator of the avatar service Gravatar, the TOML configuration file format, and the static site generator software Jekyll. Tom is currently working on the full-stack web framework, RedwoodJS. He joins us today to tell us the latest about …

Incident management is the process of managing and resolving unexpected disruptions or issues in software systems, especially those that are customer-facing or critical to business operations. Implementing a robust incident management system is often a key challenge in technical environments. Rootly is a platform to handle incident management direc…

AI-assisted software delivery refers to the utilization of artificial intelligence to assist, enhance, or automate various phases of the software development lifecycle. AI can be used in numerous aspects of software development, from requirements gathering to code generation to testing and monitoring. The overarching aim is to streamline software d…

The Buy Now, Pay Later model, or BNPL, is traditionally a business-to-consumer model that is gaining traction in the business-to-business domain. Adoption of BNPL in business-to-business scenarios offers benefits like improved cash flow management for buyers, and increased sales for suppliers, often leading to higher order value. However, this mode…

Database caching is a fundamental challenge in database management and there are hundreds of techniques to satisfy different caching scenarios. PolyScale is a fully automated database cache. It offers an innovative approach to database caching, leveraging AI and automated configuration to simplify the process of determining what should and should n…

In memory of Software Engineering Daily Founder, Jeff Meyerson. 1988 – 2022 Jeff founded Software Engineering Daily in 2015 and hosted the podcast until 2022. He was willful, hard working, and a strong advocate for self-direction. To hear more about what Jeff was like, please listen to Remembering Jeff Meyerson with Erika Hokanson. If you’d like to…

In the realm of modern software development, clear and comprehensive documentation is essential for guiding users and contributors alike. Developers often struggle to create, manage, and maintain documentation that is both user-friendly and visually appealing. In this episode, we sit down with Sebastian Lorber, the lead maintainer of Docusaurus, a …

APIs are ubiquitous and critical to building modern software, and developers must frequently develop custom APIs to streamline user access to their services. However, making an API that provides a great developer experience can be a time-consuming endeavor. As a result, API teams often leave the final mile of integration up to their users. Speakeas…

Generative pre-trained transformer models, or GPT models, have countless applications and are being rapidly deployed across a wide range of domains. However, using GPT models without appropriate safeguards can lead to leakage of sensitive data. This concern underscores the critical need for privacy and data protection. Skyflow LLM Privacy Vault pre…

The CAP theorem, also known as Brewer’s theorem, is a fundamental principle in distributed systems that states that it is impossible to simultaneously achieve three desirable properties in a distributed data system: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance. Eric Brewer is the VP of Infrastructure & Google Fellow at Google and he joins us …

Companies have high hopes for Machine learning and AI to support real-time product offerings, prevent fraud and drive innovation. But there was a catch – training models require labeled data that machines can digest. As data volumes increase, the opportunity to get great ML results rises, but so does the problem of labeling all the data to get that…

Elasticsearch is the most established solution today to search and analyze large amounts of logs. However, it can be costly and complex to manage. Quickwit searches large amounts of append only cloud data like logs or ledgers in a fraction time with significantly less cost than Elasticsearch. In this episode, we interview Paul Masurel, one of the f…

As Companies scale and their codebase becomes large, it can become difficult to measure team effectiveness. With so many moving pieces, and an increased lack of visibility, Engineering Leaders mostly rely on gut feelings to guide decisions and determine impact. Uplevel pulls meta-data from programs like Git, Slack, Jira and public calendar events a…

RudderStack is a warehouse-native customer data platform (CDP) that helps businesses collect, unify, and activate customer data from all their different sources. In today’s episode, we’re talking to Soumyadeb Mitra, the founder and CEO of RudderStack. We discuss the importance of activating all your data, how RudderStack can help you activate your …

Hyperscalers refer to expansive cloud service providers capable of delivering enterprise-scale computing and storage services. These Hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, Facebook that have huge data centers and are either running their own software or renting out this infrastructure realized a long time back that the traditional Network, Storage & Com…