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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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Apr 2, 2021 · 47 min
Equinix Metal with Nicole Hubbard
A major change in the software industry is the expectation of automation. The infrastructure for deploying code, hosting it, and monitoring it is now being viewed as a fully automatable substrate. Equinix Metal has taken the bare metal servers that you would see in data centers and fitted them with supreme automation and repeatability. This movement to modern metal-as-a-service has brought with it specialty hardware configurations and options for customizability for cloud native applications. Equinix has the largest collection of interconnected data centers in the world. Their existing networking capabilities bring an interconnectivity to its bare metal product that enables global scale. Their server plans are high-performing, secure, agile, and have flexible pricing plans. They are also extremely customizable to fit unique use-cases and were designed for an automated devOps experience. Nicole Hubbard is a principal engineer in the Equinix Metal delivery team. Nicole was involved in building a world class cloud control panel on Kubernetes, running atop Flatcar Linux, to solve the security and scalability of a control plane for the Metal platform. She has been greatly involved in the success of Equinix Metal so far and is here to tell us more about it. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Apr 1, 2021 · 51 min
dYdX: Crypto Trading with Antonio Juliano
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin are electronic currencies with a complete transaction history stored on a blockchain. A cryptocurrency blockchain is a linear record of all the transactions between users for a given currency. This record is public and distributed across thousands of computers, which makes falsifying a transaction nearly impossible because the hacker would need to alter over half of all copies. People use digital “contracts,” which is code that dictates the terms of the transaction and executes those terms, to perform trades. Understanding these technologies and how to use them used to be essential to trading and holding crypto. The platform dYdX is lowering these barriers to entry for people who want to invest in cryptocurrencies. Rather than learning to buy and hold cryptocurrencies manually, dYdX provides a detailed but easy to understand user interface for investing in popular cryptocurrencies. They recently released what they call Layer 2 protocol, which significantly reduces the gas cost of trading and therefore the fees and minimum trade sizes. There is no wait required to withdraw your funds with Layer 2 and the entire process has the highest grade security. Antonio Juliano is the founder of dYdX. Antonio has also founded Weipoint and worked as a software engineer at Uber and Coinbase for three years before launching dYdX in 2017. He joins us today to talk about the crypto community, their recent release of Layer 2 with dYdX, and the future of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 31, 2021 · 40 min
Common Room with Tom Kleinpeter and Viraj Mody
Digital communities have exponentially grown in importance ever since most of the world went remote. Basically every popular online forum, message board, chat app, and other online social aggregators were created before this new normal. Many of these platforms lack sufficient organization or are just outdated for a fully remote environment. If society continues to work fully or hybrid remote, then digital communities need to be optimally designed for a remote experience. Tom Kleinpeter and Viraj Mody are 2 co-founders of Common Room, a platform made to bring communities together and developed in today’s remote environment. Common Room is in its early stages of development and its details have remained secretive. In today’s episode Tom discusses the challenges with current social platforms, what we can expect from the first version of Common Room, some of its underlying technology and unique features, and how his team plans to promote and grow Common Room with organizations and consumers. Previously, Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. Previously, Tom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 30, 2021 · 46 min
Creation Labs: Self Driving Trucks with Jakub Langr
Creation Labs is helping bring Europe 1 step closer to fully autonomous long haul trucking. They have developed an AI Driver Assistance System (AIDAS) that retrofits to any commercial vehicle, starting with VW Crafters and MAN TGE trucks. Their system uses camera hardware mounted to the vehicle to capture video data that is processed with computer vision to understand the context on the road. This piece of the system was developed by the world’s leading experts in computer vision. While the computer interprets what is happening on the road, data is sent to a processing system that can control the vehicle’s break, throttle, and steering. The AIDAS system currently augments a driver’s role but does not replace the need for one yet. However, the difference between great drivers and bad drivers is around a 30% difference in fuel efficiency, according to Creation Labs. They have trained their systems with data from the best drivers in order to lower fuel costs for vehicles driven by their AIDAS. They’ve also built their system using the highest standards of safety. Jakub Langr is the CEO of Creation Labs and an Oxford-educated Data Scientist with 10 years of industry experience. He discusses Creation Labs’s vision for the future and the impact their incredible product is having on customers’ profit margins and emissions. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 29, 2021 · 48 min
Flatfile: Data Onboarding on Flatfile with David Boskovic and Eric Crane
Product teams sometimes double as data teams. They struggle through import errors, scrub long and complicated data sheets for consistency, and map spreadsheet fields on step 3 in a long instruction document. Data structuring and synchronization is a very real problem that product teams regularly overcome. Flatfile uses AI-assisted data onboarding to eliminate repetitive work and make B2B data transactions fast, intuitive, and error-free. By drawing on the experiences of their thousands of users, Flatfile automatically learns how imported data should be structured and cleaned. Their product saves product teams a ton of time setting up data and syncing it across workspaces so people can focus on using their data instead of fixing it. David Boskovic is the co-founder and CEO of Flatfile. He was previously the Platform Architect at Envoy, and CTO and co-founder of the startup Rainmaker. Eric Crane is also a cofounder and the COO of Flatfile, after being the host of Customer Success Leader and Product Manager for Envoy. They join us to talk about data from a product team’s perspective and how leveraging AI with Flatfile is removing barriers between humans and data. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 26, 2021 · 50 min
Noteable with Matthew Seal
Right now, more than 10 million people use notebooks like Jupyter in their workflow. Notebooks are open-source tools for creating and sharing documents with live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Notebooks like Jupyter have exploded in popularity the past 5 years to become the standard tool for data science teams. They became especially important in 2020 because they facilitate easy access to explore remote data. As data scientists continue to work remotely, the demand for a great notebook experience grows. Matthew Seal is the cofounder and CTO of Noteable, a modern and collaborative notebook platform. Noteable was built with enterprise-grade security and protection, secure deployment options, and the highest levels of availability. Most importantly, it delivers a positive experience for collaborating remotely. In this episode Matthew talks about how Noteable started, why it’s different from traditional notebooks, and what it means to collaborate in today’s mostly remote environment. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 25, 2021 · 45 min
Developer Community Management with Patrick Woods and Josh Dzielak
Many startups today begin their life as an open-source project. Open source projects allow early adopters of a technology to experiment, to contribute code and feedback, and to shape the evolution of the project in its early stages. When a “community maintainer” company emerges to provide service offerings based on that project, its early customer base often consists of contributors to the open source project who already have experience with the technology, but want a more fully featured offering. Orbit is a “community experience platform” that provides insights on activity for open-source and proprietary products. Orbit is founded on the “Orbit Model,” which it describes as a “framework for building high-gravity communities”- that is, developer communities with passionate and engaged contributors. The Orbit Model is offered as an alternative to traditional sales and marketing funnels that gives a focus on cultivating early adopters for a project. Patrick Woods and Josh Dzielak are the co-founders of Orbit. They join the show today to talk about the importance of an active and passionate community for projects, how Orbit helps Maintainers grow and shape their users’ experiences, and how they see Orbit evolving in the future. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 24, 2021 · 49 min
Airbyte: Open Source Data Integrations with Michel Tricot and John Lafleur
ELT, or “Extract, Load, and Transform,” is the process that modern data pipelines use to replicate data from a source and load it into a target system such as a cloud data warehouse. ELT is a more flexible evolution of the traditional “Extract, Load, Transform” workflow used in pre-cloud systems. The power of ELT relies on flexible integrations between data sources and their targets, called connectors. The wide variety of data sources available to a cloud application today means that an ELT platform needs to handle a vast, and growing set of use cases for its connectors. Airbyte is an open-source ELT platform built with the “long tail of integrations” in mind. Airbyte is secure, extensible, and simple to set up. Developers can use Airbyte’s platform to build the connectors they need for their specific use case, without worrying about scheduling, orchestrating, or monitoring. Michel Tricot and John Lafleur are co-founders of Airbyte. Previously, Michel was Head of Integrations at Liveramp building data ingestion connectors, while John was the co-founder of StreamNation, Anaxi, and CEO of CodinGame. Michel and John join the show today to talk about why ELT has changed the way organizations manage and store their data, what technical challenges exist in the world of data integration, and how Airbyte can give your infrastructure “superpowers.” Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 23, 2021 · 53 min
Suborbital: WebAssembly Infrastructure with Connor Hicks
The complexity of building web applications seems to have grown exponentially in the last several years. This added complexity may bring power, but it can also make applications brittle, costly, and difficult to maintain. Suborbital is an open-source project with a goal of making web application development simple. Its flagship project is Atmo, a platform that integrates three underlying projects also built by Suborbital. Vektor allows developers to write self-contained functions called Runnables to handle business logic, which are then built into WebAssembly. Atmo then automatically scales out a flat network of instances to handle traffic using Grav, a meshed message bus, and Reactr, an embedded job scheduler. Together, these projects make it simple to create powerful, WebAssembly-based server applications without worrying about infrastructure or writing boilerplate code. Connor Hicks maintains the Suborbital open source project. By day, he is a developer and Product Discovery Lead at 1Password. He joins the show today to talk about the exciting potential of WebAssembly, how Atmo is introducing new design patterns, and why we should think differently about complex webservices systems. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 22, 2021 · 48 min
Opstrace: Open Source Observability with Sebastien Pahl
Observability is a key feature of a well-architected application. Because building an observability system for a cloud application can be challenging, especially at scale, many organizations elect to use third-party observability platforms rather than build internal tools. But these third-party provider contracts often charge by volume of data collected, which can be unpredictable and difficult to control. Organizations seeking to make their systems observable faced a tradeoff between convenience and control. Opstrace is building an observability platform that seeks to circumvent that tradeoff by matching costs to the users who get value from their service. Opstrace’s platform is open-source, and its clusters can be created easily via command line tools. Opstrace clusters talk directly to your cloud provider, and can store your data safely and inexpensively in S3 or GCS buckets. Sebastien Pahl is the co-founder and CEO of Opstrace. Prior to founding Opstrace, he was a Director of Engineering at Red Hat and Mesosphere. Sebastien joins the show today to talk about the evolution of the market for cloud observability tools, how Opstrace helps bring observability costs under control, and what the future has in store for the Opstrace open-source project. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 19, 2021 · 46 min
Datahub: Open Source Data Lake with Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan
As the volume and scope of data collected by an organization grow, tasks such as data discovery and data management grow in complexity. Simply put, the more data there is, the harder it is for users such as data analysts to find what they’re looking for. A metadata hub helps manage Big Data by providing metadata search and discovery tools, and a centralized hub which presents a holistic view of the data ecosystem. DataHub is Linkedin’s open-sourced metadata search and discovery tool. It is Linkedin’s second generation of metadata hubs after WhereHows. Pardhu Gunnam and Mars Lan join us today from Metaphor, a company they co-founded to build out the DataHub ecosystem. Pardhu and Mars, and the other co-founders of Metaphor, were part of the team at Linkedin that built the DataHub project. They join the show today to talk about how DataHub democratizes data access for an organization, why the new DataHub architecture was critical to Linkedin’s growth, and what we can expect to see from the DataHub project moving forwards. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 18, 2021 · 51 min
SPIFFE and SPIRE with Derek Edwards and Ryan Turner
The shift to microservices architectures and distributed systems has been a challenge for systems using conventional security practices, such filtering IP addresses using network policies. In addition, the increasing intersection of development and operations exemplified by the DevOps methodology has expanded the scope responsibilities in implementing secure systems. Part of CNCF, SPIFFE is a set of open-source specifications for issuing identity to services in heterogenous, distributed environments such as a cloud-native microservices architecture. Systems implementing SPIFFE bypass the need for application-level authentication and network-level ACL configuration. SPIRE, or the SPIFFE Runtime Environment, is a system that implements the SPIFFE standards to manage platform and workload attestation, providing an API for controlling policies, and coordinating certificate issuance and rotation. Derek Edwards is the head of engineering at Anthem.ai, and Ryan Turner is a software engineer at Uber. They join the show today to talk about the challenges of managing security in a distributed system, how adopting SPIFFE represented a paradigm shift in their authentication workflow, and how the SPIFFE and SPIRE projects are evolving to meet the needs of the next generation of cloud-native applications. HPE sponsored this podcast. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 17, 2021 · 39 min
Equinix Infrastructure with Tim Banks
Software-Defined Networking describes a category of technologies that separate the networking control plane from the forwarding plane. This enables more automated provisioning and policy-based management of network resources. Implementing software-defined networking is often the task of Site Reliability Engineers, or SREs. Site reliability engineers work at the intersection of development and operations by bringing software development practices to system administration. Equinix manages co-location data centers and provides networking, security, and cloud-related services to their clients. Equinix is leveraging its status as a market leader in on-prem networking capabilities to expand into cloud and IaaS offerings such as Equinix Metal, which has been referred to as “bare-metal-as-a-service,” and offers integrations with 3rd party cloud technologies with a goal of creating a seamless alternative to modern public clouds for organizations seeking the benefits of colocation. Tim Banks is a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix and he joins the show to talk about what Equinix offers and how it differs from other cloud providers. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 16, 2021 · 47 min
Google Cloud Databases with Andi Gutmans
Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure are the dominant cloud providers on the market today. But the market is still highly competitive, and there is significant overlap in the services offered by all three large providers. Since all three offer a broad range of services, developers looking to choose a platform for their application must focus on providers’ domains of relative excellence and how those align with their needs. One domain where Google Cloud Platform excels is with its database offerings. Google has data management baked into its organizational DNA, and has been the source of several innovative technologies in the data space such as Spanner, BigTable, and BigQuery. Andi Gutmans is a general manager and VP of engineering for databases at Google. He joins the show today to talk about how Google came to excel at databases and data management, how machine learning and Big Data users in particular can benefit from Google Cloud’s offerings, and how new features such as Database Migration Service are helping Google stay ahead of the curve in a competitive cloud landscape. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 15, 2021 · 44 min
Pinecone: Vector Database with Edo Liberty
Vectors are the foundational mathematical building blocks of Machine Learning. Machine Learning models must transform input data into vectors to perform their operations, creating what is known as a vector embedding. Since data is not stored in vector form, an ML application must perform significant work to transform data in different formats into a form that ML models can understand. This can be computationally intensive and hard to scale, especially for the high-dimensional vectors used in complex models. Pinecone is a managed database built specifically for working with vector data. Pinecone is serverless and API-driven, which means engineers and data scientists can focus on building their ML application or performing analysis without worrying about the underlying data infrastructure. Edo Liberty is the founder and CEO of Pinecone. Prior to Pinecone, he led the creation of Amazon SageMaker at AWS. He joins the show today to talk about the fundamental importance of vectors in machine learning, how Pinecone built a vector-centric database, and why data infrastructure improvements are key to unlocking the next generation of AI applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 5, 2021 · 44 min
Superhuman Engineering with Emuye Reynolds
Email has become such a routine feature of knowledge work that we often take it- and the email clients we use for it- for granted. While advancements such as intelligent spam filtering have improved the experience, many email clients retain the same basic structure and offer a largely similar experience. Superhuman is building a modern email client meant to reimagine email from the ground up. Superhuman is built to be fast, and seamlessly integrates insights from social networks such as Linkedin. It offers features such as undo send, AI triage, and mail status tracking. Superhuman even works offline, using Service Workers to serve cached assets when a network connection is not available. Emuye Reynolds is the Head of Engineering at Superhuman. She was formerly a Senior Software Developer at Apple and led the development of the UI for Apple TV UI. She joins the show today to talk about what’s lacking from traditional email clients, what engineering challenges her team faces when building across multiple platforms, and how Superhuman’s new features represent an evolutionary step forward for email client technology. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 4, 2021 · 51 min
PHP with Zeev Suraski
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system, or CMS, written in PHP. Since its release in 2003, WordPress has become ubiquitous on the web. It is estimated that roughly 60 million websites use WordPress as a CMS. However, despite its popularity, Wordpress has limitations in its design. Wordpress sites are dynamic, and the front and back end are tightly coupled. A dynamic, full-stack application can be useful when handling complex functionality, but it also slows down the site and opens up security vulnerabilities. Strattic is a static site generator and hosting platform that specializes in converting WordPress sites into a static architecture. Static pages are isolated from the backing application, improving security against common Wordpress vulnerabilities. Modern web users have high expectations for speed and security, and Strattic helps WordPress sites achieve this without sacrificing the benefits of the Wordpress platform. Zeev Suraski is the CTO of Strattic. Zeev is one of the architects and principal authors of the PHP language, which is the foundation of WordPress. Zeev joins the show today to talk about the place of PHP in modern web development, and how Strattic helps Wordpress developers build modern, fast, and secure sites. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 3, 2021 · 47 min
Vantage: AWS Console Alternative with Ben Schaechter
AWS offers over 200 services as part of its IaaS platform, and that number continues to grow. Organizing all of these services, and tracking the costs they incur, can be a significant challenge, often requiring teams of AWS-certified sysadmins working together to get a handle on an enterprise-scale system. Vantage provides an alternative, streamlined AWS console that makes it easier to manage AWS services and track associated costs. Users link their AWS account to Vantage, and it automatically profiles all their services and aggregates the information into a dashboard. Users can customize how their Vantage console appears and allows users to break down service usage by region. Ben Schaechter is the co-founder of Vantage. Before founding Vantage he was a Senior Product Manager at AWS and DigitalOcean. Ben joins the show today to talk about how Vantage helps streamline the AWS experience, and why teams of all sizes can benefit from a better user experience on the AWS platform. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 2, 2021 · 49 min
Postgres Data Warehouse with Josh Drake and Thomas Richter
A data warehouse is a centralized repository that an enterprise may use to store selected data from production systems. Data is transformed into a structured form that makes it easily accessible for business intelligence or other operational users. SQL-compliant databases are frequently used for data warehouses due to the popularity of SQL as a tool in business data analytics. PostgreSQL is a free and open-source relational database management system. Postgres-based databases are widespread and are used by a variety of organizations, from Reddit to the International Space Station, and Postgres databases are a common offering from cloud providers such as AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and Heroku. Josh Drake and Thomas Richter are experts on Postgres data warehousing. They join the show today to talk about the staying power of Postgres, why Postgres is a good choice for data warehousing, and how cloud technology is changing relational database management systems. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Mar 1, 2021 · 47 min
Earthly: Build Automation with Vlad Ionescu
Build automation tools automate the process of building code, including steps such as compiling, packaging binary code, and running automated tests. Because of this, build automation tools are considered a key part of a continuous delivery pipeline. Build automation tools read build scripts to define how they should perform a build. Common build scripts include Makefile, Dockerfile, and bash. Earthly is a build automation tool that allows you to execute all your builds in containers. Earthly uses Earthfiles, which draws from the best features of Makefile and Dockerfile and provides a common layer between language-specific tooling and the CI build spec. Earthly builds are repeatable, isolated, and self-contained, and will run the same way across different environments such as a CI system or a developer’s laptop. Vlad Ionescu is the Founder and CEO of Earthly Technologies. He was formerly the founder and chief architect at ShiftLeft.io. Vlad joins the show today to talk about why reproducible builds are important, how Earthly simplifies build scripts, and what the long-term vision for Earthly looks like. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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