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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#292
Jun 7, 2016 · 52 min
Tech Girls Movement with Jenine Beekhuyzen
The software industry has a severe lack of women. There are numerous root causes of this diversity problem. Families do not encourage women to enter math and science. The media portrays most programmers as white males. Our industry often picks up on the signals of the broader society and perpetuates them. Reversing this trend of low female involvement in computer science could have tremendous positive impact, and Jenine Beekhuyzen joins the show today to discuss how she she is taking action to improve the pipeline of young women entering computer science.
#291
Jun 6, 2016 · 56 min
Google’s Polymer Project with Rob Dodson
Smart phone apps have better performance than web apps. When we have an application that we use on a regular basis, we download that application to a smart phone rather than using the browser based version on our mobile browser. Google’s Polymer Project wants to improve the gap between native app performance and mobile web app performance. The key problem with mobile web is that we are sending huge JavaScript bundles to mobile devices, which inhibits performance. The Polymer Project is working to build more functionality into our mobile browsers so that it is easier to load these heavy web applications. Rob Dodson is a developer advocate with Google. Today’s episode explores the past, present, and future of web application development, from jQuery to React to progressive web apps. The Polymer project also represents a push towards better support for people in developing countries, where internet connections are less reliable. Sponsors
#290
Jun 3, 2016 · 56 min
Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern
Most programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is the creator of Practical Dev, and he joins the show to discuss software editorialism. The goal of the Practical Dev to help developers grow and learn, and Ben is working towards that goal by providing a platform for engineers to write long-form content.
#289
Jun 2, 2016 · 52 min
Scaling PostgreSQL with Citus Data’s Ozgun Erdogan
Ten years ago, databases were much simpler. Most companies would only have one or two types of databases in production. Today, the age of one-size-fits-all is over. Companies have multiple databases to deal with different types of use cases, and databases have become distributed to multiple nodes in order to be scalable. Ozgun Erdogan of Citus Data joins the show to give us a modern look at databases. Ozgun suggests that PostgreSQL alone can perform most of the work that we are trying to get from our variety of databases. We discuss how Citus Data scales Postgres, and Ozgun contrasts an all-Postgres architecture with other types of databases such as the “NewSQL” class of databases, like MemSQL and VoltDB.
#288
Jun 1, 2016 · 1 hr
Kubernetes and OpenShift with Clayton Coleman
Kubernetes is the container management platform that came out of Google’s experiences managing data centers. Kubernetes abstracts away many of the frustrations of distributed systems management. OpenShift is a platform built on top of Kubernetes to provide an additional layer of usability. Clayton Coleman is the lead engineer of OpenShift, and in our conversation today, we start with the basics of Kubernetes, then talk about OpenShift–Clayton explains why we need another abstraction on top of Kubernetes. Near the end of the conversation, we discuss the current state of cloud products–which can be confusing. Mesosphere, Swarm, Kubernetes, OpenStack, ECS–why do we need all of these different products? Clayton gives his perspective, and explains why it is not going to get any less confusing any time soon.
#287
May 31, 2016 · 56 min
Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran
Coding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran attended one coding boot camp, then spent some time living at home absorbed in his personal projects. Eventually, he went to second coding boot camp–his form of graduate school. During his second boot camp, Kenny worked on PurifyCSS, a module that can reduce the size of front-end projects by 60%. Today, Kenny works at the groundbreaking company Mesosphere–completing a career arc that proves coding boot camps are enough of an education to rival traditional university learning.
#286
May 30, 2016 · 54 min
Infrastructure as Code with SaltStack’s David Boucha
Infrastructure-as-code is a trend that has been popularized over the past decade, as cloud computing and distributed systems have become a part of every technology company. Tools like Salt, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible allow us to manage servers and processes from the command line. David Boucha works at SaltStack, the company that makes Salt. Salt is a platform that provides configuration management and remote execution. In our conversation today, we discuss how the distributed systems architecture of Salt works, and how it can be used in practice. We also discuss infrastructure-as-code in the context of modern infrastructure tools like containers and Kubernetes.
#285
May 27, 2016 · 1 hr 1 min
Solar Investment and Architectural Strategy at Wunder Capital
Solar energy is a growing market. Improvements in hardware have led to some people predicting that solar energy will be powering the world within the next few decades. Undoubtedly, a large percentage of our current energy infrastructure will be replaced by solar in the near future. Replacing our old, inefficient power grid requires massive investment. On Software Engineering Daily, the resources we usually talk about are memory, bandwidth, storage, and other computer science concepts. David Reiss joins us today to talk about energy, which is a resource so fundamental that we usually don’t even consider it. David is the CTO of Wunder Capital, a fintech company that facilitates investments in solar power. Much of this conversation centers on the economics of the solar energy market, but we also discuss software topics–machine learning and why Wunder Capital’s software architecture is a monolith by design today. Sponsors
#284
May 26, 2016 · 52 min
Minecraft Programming with Gabriel Simmer
Minecraft is a sandbox video game in which players build constructions out of 3-D cubes in a procedurally generated world. Minecraft is the best-selling PC game of all time. But Minecraft is not just a game. It is a platform for creativity, used by players within the game as well as programmers outside of it. Gabriel Simmer is a 16-year-old programmer who build NodeMC, a tool that wraps around the Minecraft server process. NodeMC can be used to build dashboards for Minecraft, and spin up additional Minecraft servers. In our conversation, Gabriel explains why people are so excited about Minecraft, how people are hacking Minecraft, and what the future of Minecraft is now that Microsoft has acquired it.
#283
May 25, 2016 · 58 min
Rust with Steve Klabnik
Rust is a systems programming language being developed at Mozilla. Rust has features of a high-level functional language like Scala and a low-level, performance-driven language like C++. Steve Klabnik is a developer program member with Mozilla. In this episode, he discusses how Rust looks at memory management, type safety, mutability, and concurrency. We also dive into a discussion of the low level virtual machine, also known as the LLVM, which the language Swift is built on.
#282
May 24, 2016 · 59 min
Kafka, Storm, and Cassandra: Keen IO’s Analytics Architecture with Dan Kador
The process of building a software project requires us to make so many architectural decisions. Which programming languages should be used? Which cloud service provider? Which database? A newer type of building block is the analytics platform. Companies need to track events, aggregate metrics, and change the user’s experience based on aggregated data. Dan Kador is a co-founder of Keen IO, and he joins us to discuss the rise of analytics platforms. Keen’s architecture is based on Storm, Cassandra, and Kafka, and Keen uses these different building blocks to create a scalable, reliable analytics backend. On today’s episode, we explore the usage of analytics, the architecture of Keen’s backend system, and the business model of an analytics as a service company.
#281
May 22, 2016 · 42 min
Erlang Systems Design with Francesco Cesarini
Erlang is a programming language with primitives that help software engineers build distributed systems. When a process is malfunctioning in Erlang, the philosophy of the language is to let the process crash–and in a distributed system where unexpected faults happen on a regular basis, this philosophy of “let it crash” simplifies how we reason about an Erlang system. Other distributed systems advantages of Erlang include the garbage collection strategy. Each process in Erlang has its own garbage collector which means makes it easier to construct systems without a stop-the-world garbage collection. Francesco Cesarini is the founder of Erlang Solutions, and he joins the show today to discuss the book that he wrote with Steve Vinoski, called Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP.
#280
May 20, 2016 · 1 hr 3 min
Google’s Microservices: Kubernetes and gRPC with Sandeep Dinesh
Google has built a microservices architecture on top of the internal container management system called Borg. These services communicate over an internal protocol known as Stubby. Borg and Stubby are tightly coupled to Google’s infrastructure–it would not make sense for Google to open source them–but Google has worked with the open source community to develop open source projects with the core functionality of Borg and Stubby. These projects are known as Kubernetes and gRPC. Sandeep Dinesh works on the Google Cloud Platform team as a developer advocate. Our conversation explores how a client application request from an app like Gmail would communicate with Google’s servers, where the request is handled by a network of microservices. We also talk about where Google Cloud Platform is evolving, and how it offers a competitive, differentiated model from Amazon Web Services.
#279
May 19, 2016 · 52 min
Netflix’s Data Pipeline with Steven Wu
At Netflix, 500 billion events and 1.3 petabytes of data are ingested by the system per day. This includes video viewing activities, error logs, and performance events. On today’s episode, we dive deep into the data pipeline of Netflix, and how it evolved from their 1.0 version to the modern 2.0 version. Before listening to this episode, check out the blog post that inspired it.
#278
May 18, 2016 · 53 min
Dropbox’s Magic Pocket with James Cowling
Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer, and it gives Dropbox more control and improved economics. James Cowling leads the storage team at Dropbox. On today’s episode, James takes us into the architecture of Dropbox and explains how the team moved all of the user file storage from Amazon S3 to Dropbox’s Magic Pocket infrastructure. Dropbox’s architecture is built with a focus on simplicity–and there are numerous challenges to maintaining that simplicity in the face of an extremely complex problem like this.
#277
May 17, 2016 · 1 hr
Decentralization: Ethereum, Bitcoin, and IPFS with Karl Floersh
Almost a year ago, Software Engineering Daily aired a week of shows about decentralized technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and IPFS. Bitcoin has established itself as a stable network, but it can only be used for financial transactions. Ethereum is a global computer built on a blockchain, but it does not have the adoption of Bitcoin. IPFS is a distributed data store with an incentivization layer where you can pay strangers to store your content. Today’s guest is Karl Floersh, an engineer working on decentralized technology. Karl has written several posts about how to build decentralized applications, as well as how the future might look once these decentralized technologies have gotten traction.
#276
May 16, 2016 · 59 min
Distributed Systems Tradeoffs with Camille Fournier
Distributed systems products are often marketed with terms like “real-time data” and “hassle-free scaling”, but what do those terms actually mean? Is data in a distributed system ever reliably “real time”? Do we ever have strong enough plans about our scalability strategy to say that scaling will be “hassle free”? Camille Fournier joins us today to discuss distributed systems in practice. Like everything in else in computer science, distributed systems are all about tradeoffs–and picking the right sets of tradeoffs in our distributed system will affect the entire organization that is building that system. We also discuss the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is similar to the Apache Foundation, but specifically for cloud technologies. The CNCF is likely to have strong impact on the way we build software for a long time to come.
#275
May 13, 2016 · 52 min
Crate.io and Distributed SQL with Jodok Batlogg
Distributed databases are difficult to operate, and Crate.io wants to change that. Crate is a fast, scalable, easy-to-use SQL database that is built to run in containerized environments. An average software company runs several databases–MySQL for relational store, MongoDB for a document database, HDFS for blob storage and data warehouse, elastic search for search. On today’s show, Jodok Batlogg from Crate discuss the distributed architecture of Crate, and breaks down the use cases, from Microservices to data warehousing.
#274
May 12, 2016 · 58 min
Azure Stream Analytics with Santosh Balasubramanian
Microsoft has built a suite of technologies on top of its Azure infrastructure as a service. Today, we discuss Azure Stream Analytics, a real-time event processing engine developed at Microsoft. Azure Streaming allows for constant querying of incoming data streams, and my guest Santosh Balasubramanian discusses Azure and the movement from batch processing to stream processing.
#273
May 11, 2016 · 59 min
Spark and Cassandra with Tim Berglund
Apache Spark is a framework for fast, distributed, in-memory analysis. Apache Cassandra is a distributed database management system that provides high availability and fast throughput. Today, we are collecting fast, big data streams from user behavior, smart phones and sensors, and the disk checkpointing of and query language of Hadoop MapReduce is no longer adequate. Tim Berglund from Datastax came on Software Engineering Daily to explain how Apache Cassandra in a popular episode a few weeks ago. On this episode, Tim returns to discuss how Spark and Cassandra can be used together to provide a stack with the analytics and storage we need for today’s distributed computing environment.

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