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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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Feb 26, 2021 · 49 min
Semgrep: Modern Static Analysis with Isaac Evans
Static analysis is a type of debugging that identifies defects without running the code. Static analysis tools can be especially useful for enforcing security policies by analyzing code for security vulnerabilities early in the development process, allowing teams to rapidly address potential issues and conform to best practices. R2C has developed a fast, open-source static analysis tool called Semgrep. Semgrep provides syntax-aware code scanning and a database of thousands of community-defined rules to compare your code against. Semgrep also makes it easy for security engineers and developers to define custom rules to enforce their organization’s policies. R2C’s platform has been adopted by industry leaders such as Dropbox and Snowflake, and recently received the “Disruptive Innovator” distinction at Forbes’ 2020 Cybersecurity Awards. Isaac Evans is the Founder and CEO of R2C. Before founding R2C he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Redpoint Ventures and a computer scientist at the US Department of Defense. Isaac joins the show today to talk about how R2C is helping teams improve their cloud security, why static analysis is a natural fit for CI/CD workflows, and what to expect from R2C and the Semgrep project in the future. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 25, 2021 · 53 min
Multi-Prem Software Delivery and Management with Grant Miller
Modern SaaS products are increasingly delivered via the cloud, rather than as downloadable, executable programs. However, many potential users of those SaaS products may need that software deployed on-prem, in a private network. Organizations have a variety of reasons for preferring on-prem software, such as security, integration with private tools, and compliance with regulations. The cost of setting up a bespoke on-prem version of a SaaS offering was often prohibitive for both the vendor and potential users. Replicated leverages the portability of containers to help SaaS vendors ship an on-prem or multi-prem version of their software. Replicated gives SaaS vendors a suite of ready-made components to help install and manage an instance of their software on-prem. Replicated has seen explosive growth in its six-year lifespan: today, 50 of the Fortune 100 companies manage apps with Replicated. Grant Miller is the Founder and CEO of Replicated. Replicated recently closed a Series B fundraising round to help scale their work in the cloud-native space, including the launch of their Kubernetes-Off-the-Shelf platform. He joins the show today to talk about the next generation of tools on the Replicated platform, how Kubernetes is changing enterprise IT, and why the on-prem software market isn’t going away anytime soon. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 24, 2021 · 53 min
Digital Ocean Platform with Cody Baker and Apurva Joshi
Cloud platforms are often categorized as providing either Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service. On one side of the spectrum are IaaS giants such as AWS, which provide a broad range of services for building infrastructure. On the other are PaaS providers such as Heroku and Netlify which abstract away the lower-level choices and focus on developer experience. Digital Ocean has carved out a sizable niche in the cloud hosting space by targeting the middle ground- a streamlined cloud platform built for developers, which still offers the ability to choose, customize, and manage infrastructure. The release of Digital Ocean’s App Platform takes this goal a step further. The App Platform allows users to build and deploy an app or static site directly from GitHub directly onto a DigitalOcean-managed Kubernetes cluster. Teams can access the power, scale, and flexibility of Kubernetes without having to worry about the complexity of managing a cluster themselves. The App Platform gives developers the choice of how much of their infrastructure they want to control, and how much they want to be provided by the platform. Cody Baker and Apurva Joshi work at Digital Ocean. They join the show today to talk about why Digital Ocean stands out in a competitive cloud hosting space, what is the value proposition for developers interested in the App Platform, and how the PaaS industry is evolving. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 23, 2021 · 51 min
Yelp Early Days with Michael Stoppelman
Yelp.com is a crowdsourced review platform focused on restaurants and local businesses. Originally created as an email-based recommendation service, Yelp re-launched in its modern form in 2005. At the time, its focus on user-created reviews and social interactions was fairly novel, and made it stand out from competitors such as Angie’s List and CitySearch. Since then, Yelp has become a worldwide brand, and as of 2021 it has over 171 million reviews on its site. The mid- to-late 2000s represented a time of explosive growth and profound change in the web application space. Industry leaders like Yelp had to adapt their technology stacks for the unprecedented scaling they were experiencing. At the same time, the rise of smartphones led Yelp and many others into the mobile application space. Michael Stoppelman was an engineer at Yelp during this turbulent time. He left Yelp in 2015, and now works as an angel investor. He joins the show today to talk about the engineering challenges Yelp’s team faced during this time, the profound changes that the industry as a whole went through, and how the history of Yelp can help us contextualize the startup landscape today. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 22, 2021 · 46 min
Okay Engineering with Tomas Barreto
Studies show that people in “maker” professions such as developers and writers are most productive when they can carve out dedicated time for focused work, without the frequent context-switching that comes with an irregular meeting schedule. Meetings and other non-development work are necessary parts of the job, but a team will be much more productive with deep work time in mind. Okay is an engineering metrics dashboard platform designed with the goal of maximizing time for deep work. Okay helps break down time slots into categories such as Maker Time, Meeting Load, and Friction Time based on data collected and feedback from the team. Okay organizes both quantitative and qualitative data into a single dashboard for team planning, and supports plug-and-play integrations with productivity tools such as GoogleCalendar, PagerDuty, and CircleCI, and more. Tomas Barreto is the CTO and co-founder of Okay. Before founding Okay, he worked with Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator, and was VP of engineering at Box. He joins the show today to talk about why Maker Time is so important for engineers, and how Okay helps teams make data-driven decisions to maximize productivity. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 19, 2021 · 43 min
Equinix Partnerships with Shaedon Blackman
A “co-location” center is a data center that leases out networking and compute infrastructure to retail clients. Co-location centers host clients with a wide variety of infrastructure strategies, from small retail customers, to medium-size teams running hybrid cloud models, to large corporate clients who prefer not to incur the capital cost of building their own data center. While Equinix is already a market leader in co-location centers, they have expanded to provide a wide variety of services for their clients, including managed IaaS, disaster recovery, and integrations with cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud. Shaedon Blackman is a partner developer analyst at Equinix. As a partner developer analyst, Shaedon works to build Equinix’s network of corporate partners, while also advocating for diverse and inclusive human capital within the organization. Before he joined Equinix, he was a Core Fellow at Pursuit, a software engineering fellowship funded by Google, and the Chief Operating Officer of a non-profit youth program. He joins the show today to talk about a variety of important topics facing the tech industry today, including diversity, inclusion, and education, and also how Equinix is building partnerships and sponsoring open-source projects to achieve its goals. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 18, 2021 · 49 min
Augur: Ethereum Prediction Markets with Joey Krug
Prediction Markets provide an exchange for trading based on the outcome of events. Most prediction markets are centralized- they operate like a casino, where betting takes place under the supervision of one central governing organization. This makes the market less efficient than it otherwise might be: the central organization is a business, and it makes money by extracting value from the trades the customers make. Augur is a prediction market built on the Ethereum blockchain. A trading network built on a blockchain can have a decentralized, permissionless transaction record without a centralized, governing body. Augur’s network is built to be transparent, low-cost, and free from interference. Joey Krug joins us today from Pantera Capital, a venture capital fund focused on Blockchain technology. Joey is also a co-founder of the Forecast Foundation, which contributes to the development of the Augur open-source project. We discuss what it takes to build a trustworthy decentralized market, how Augur is solving challenges such as the oracle problem, and why blockchain may be the key to democratizing finance. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 17, 2021 · 42 min
KubeDirector with HPE's Kartik Mathur
In the past several years, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for orchestrating containerized, stateless applications. Tools such as StatefulSets and Persistent Volumes have helped developers build stateful applications on Kubernetes, but this can quickly become difficult to manage as an application scales. Tasks such as machine learning, distributed AI, and big data analytics often require a distributed application to maintain some sort of state across services. KubeDirector is an open-source controller that helps streamline the deployment and management of complex stateful scale-out application clusters on Kubernetes. KubeDirector provides an application-agnostic deployment pattern and enables developers to run non-cloud native stateful applications on Kubernetes without modifying the code. KubeDirector aims to bring enterprise-level capabilities for distributed stateful applications to Kubernetes. Kartik Mathur is an engineer at HPE Developer, an open-source initiative within Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HPE is an enterprise contributor to the KubeDirector open-source community. Kartik previously worked as senior software engineers at BlueData, which created the KubeDirector project before its acquisition by HPE. Kartik joins the show today to talk about why state is important for Big Data or Machine learning applications, how KubeDirector can help manage the complexity of stateful applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 16, 2021 · 44 min
Synthetic Data with Ian Coe, Andrew Colombi, and Adam Kamor
Over the past few years, the conventional wisdom around the value proposition of Big Data has begun to shift. While the prevailing attitude towards Big Data may once have been “bigger is better,” many organizations today recognize that broad-scale data collection comes with its own set of risks. Data privacy is becoming a hotly debated topic both in the technology industry and in regulatory agencies and governments. Bigger and less private datasets are more attractive targets for hackers, meaning that an organization must invest heavily in security as well to avoid a breach. Every organization faces a tradeoff between the value of the insights produced from large datasets versus increased storage costs and increasing privacy risks. Tonic is building a “synthetic data” platform to address these tradeoffs and help organizations mitigate data risk. Tonic takes in raw data, perhaps from a data lake, and transforms it into more manageable, de-identified data sets for ease of use and user privacy. Tonic can create statistically identical, structured datasets that allow software engineers and business analysts to extract the same useful insights that drive an organization’s progress, without the risk of working with identifiable, private user data. Ian Coe, Andrew Colombi, and Adam Kamor are co-founders of Tonic. Along with their fourth co-founder, Karl Hanson, Ian, Andrew, and Adam all worked together at Palantir Technologies where the idea for Tonic was born. They join the show today to talk about the value of synthetic data, the risks and rewards of big data, and how compliance, privacy, and security are driving innovation in the data management sector. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 11, 2021 · 54 min
Serverless Properties with Johann Schleier-Smith
Serverless computing refers to an architectural pattern where server-side code is run on-demand by cloud providers, who also handle server resource allocation and operations. Of course, there is a server involved on the provider’s side, but administrative functions to manage that server such as capacity planning, configuration, or management of containers are handled behind-the-scenes, allowing the application developers to focus on business logic. This makes for highly elastic and scalable systems and can reduce development, testing, and iteration time due to reduced overhead. Function as a Service (FaaS) describes a model of serverless computing where services are decomposed into modular functions and deployed to a serverless platform. These functions are executed only when called and are typically stateless. Despite the benefits of elasticity and modularity that FaaS offers, it has drawbacks as well. Taking disaggregation of functionality to an extreme means that behavior that formerly required a method call now may require a network call to another function, increasing latency and making larger-scale operations inefficient. Cloudburst is a stateful FaaS platform built to combine the power of low-latency mutable state and communication in Python with the elasticity and scalability allowed by serverless architecture. Johann Schleier-Smith is an entrepreneur and engineer who is currently a board member of Sama. Johann was formerly the founder and CTO of if(we), a social network and incubator. He is the co-author of the paper Cloudburst: Stateful Functions as a Service, and joins the show today to talk about how Cloudburst addresses the drawbacks of current FaaS models, and what’s next for serverless computing. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 10, 2021 · 59 min
Reach: DApp Programming Gateway with Chris Swenor and Jay McCarthy
Blockchain technology has a wide variety of potential applications. Fields such as finance, supply chain management, and even voting have seen innovations driven by the development of distributed applications built on blockchains, called DApps. However, developing a DApp on a blockchain often requires low-level knowledge about cryptographic protocols or particular networks. Since no one blockchain platform has emerged as dominant- and the field itself is rapidly evolving- there is a high opportunity cost for developers if they choose to invest significant time learning one blockchain paradigm or another. Reach provides a platform for developing DApps, complete with a high-level language based on Javascript. Reach allows developers to write one set of code to specify the DApp and all its components, and which can be deployed onto any blockchain implementation under the hood. Reach’s goal is to allow developers to focus on writing business logic for their DApps rather than worrying about low-level implementation details and aims to smooth the steep learning curve for developers new to the world of blockchain. Chris Swenor and Jay McCarthy are the founders of Reach. Chris was formerly the co-founder and CEO of Alacris Protocol, an operating system for blockchain applications, and he is currently a technologist in residence and mentor at Harvard. Jay has been a computer science professor for over a decade, and worked on the development of the Racket programming language. Chris and Jay join the show today to talk about the challenges of developing on blockchain, how Reach helps make blockchain developers more productive, and how the blockchain ecosystem might evolve in the future.
Feb 9, 2021 · 50 min
OctoML: Automated Deep Learning Engineering with Jason Knight and Luis Ceze
The incredible advances in machine learning research in recent years often take time to propagate out into usage in the field. One reason for this is that such “state-of-the-art” results for machine learning performance rely on the use of handwritten, idiosyncratic optimizations for specific hardware models or operating contexts. When developers are building ML-powered systems to deploy in the cloud and at the edge, their goals to ensure the model delivers the best possible functionality and end-user experience- and importantly, their hardware and software stack may require different optimizations to achieve that goal. OctoML provides a SaaS product called the Octomizer to help developers and AIOps teams deploy ML models most efficiently on any hardware, in any context. The Octomizer deploys its own ML models to analyze your model topology, and optimize, benchmark, and package the model for deployment. The Octomizer generates insights about model performance over different hardware stacks and helps you choose the deployment format that works best for your organization. Luis Ceze is the Co-Founder and CEO of OctoML. Luis is a founder of the ApacheTVM project, which is the basis for OctoML’s technology. He is also a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Jason Knight is co-founder and CPO at OctoML. Luis and Jason join the show today to talk about how OctoML is automating deep learning engineering, why it’s so important to consider hardware when building deep learning systems, and how the field of deep learning is evolving. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 8, 2021 · 52 min
Narrator.ai: Intelligent Analyses with Ahmed Elsamadisi
A data-driven organization collects a wide variety of data to help in strategic decision-making. The cost of storing large amounts and variety of data has dropped dramatically in the last two decades, but too much unstructured data may not improve decision-making, and can even lead to “analysis paralysis.” Organizations react by extracting the most important, actionable data and placing it into a data warehouse, which has a predesigned structure meant to streamline the data in preparation for analysis. The key challenge with this approach is identifying what should be streamlined, and how to structure the data warehouse to focus on the most important, actionable items. This is especially important for organizations seeking to scale, as the necessary structure to generate the most relevant insights may change as the organization grows. Narrator is building data intelligence that uses a simple, proprietary Universal Data Model to help organizations streamline their data warehousing. Narrator is built on the belief that data tells the story of a system, and its platform empowers organizations to use those stories to make better decisions. Ahmed Elsamadisi is the founder and CEO of Narrator. Before founding Narrator, he spent several years working in data analysis and algorithm design for WeWork, Raytheon, and Cornell’s Autonomous Systems Laboratory. He joins the show today to talk about how Narrator generates the most actionable insights from a data warehouse, why a Universal Data Model is so important when scaling, and what makes Narrator’s approach to data analysis different. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 5, 2021 · 51 min
Open Source Industrialization with Kevin Xu
Open source software is software distributed along with its source code, using a permissive license that allows anyone to view, use, or modify it. The term “open source” also refers more broadly to a philosophy of technology development which prioritizes transparency and community development of a project. Typically, development is managed by a governing body, whether a company, foundation, or just a group of passionate users, and work is done in public repositories like Github. Nearly every corner of the software engineering world has been impacted in some way by open source. Well-known open source projects include Linux, Kubernetes, and Wordpress. Kevin Xu is the author of Interconnected, a bilingual newsletter on tech, business, and U.S-China relations. He is an investor in open source startups at OSS Capital, and formerly served in the Obama White House. He joins the show today to talk about the benefits of open source in the public and private sectors, and how open source will be critical to the development of high-tech industry in our country as we pivot to facing some of the 21st century’s most pressing challenges. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 3, 2021 · 52 min
Daily: Streaming Video API with Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Wesley Faulkner
Video calling over the internet has experienced explosive growth in the last decade. In 2010, surveys estimated that around 1 in 5 Americans had tried online video calling for any reason. By May of 2020, that number had nearly tripled. A significant factor in the growth of video calling has been an open-source project called WebRTC, or “Web Real-Time Communication.” WebRTC makes it possible to capture and stream audio or video data between browsers without the use of plugins or third-party software. Daily is a developer platform that builds on WebRTC to provide realtime video APIs for developers. Developers can easily add video call widgets to their code which come with a set of default configurations for functions such as bandwidth management and cross-browser support. Daily also offers a set of frontend libraries and REST APIs for developers who want to build a customized experience. Kwindla Hultman Kramer is a co-Founder at Daily, and he’s joined today by Wesley Faulkner, who handles developer relations. They join the show today to talk about the growth in demand for video calling services, building a developer-friendly video calling API, and what’s next for video calling applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 2, 2021 · 55 min
Cilium: Programmable Linux Networking with Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf
Cilium is open-source software built to provide improved networking and security controls for Linux systems operating in containerized environments along with technologies like Kubernetes. In a containerized environment, traditional Layer 3 and Layer 4 networking and security controls based on IP addresses and ports, like firewalls, can be difficult to operate at scale because of the volatility of the system. Cilium is eBPF, which is an in-kernel virtual machine which attaches applications directly to code paths in the kernel. In effect, this makes the Linux kernel “programmable” without changing kernel source code or loading modules. Cilium takes advantage of this functionality to insert networking and security functions at the kernel level rather than in traditional Layer 3 or Layer 4 controls. This allows Cilium to combine metadata from Layer 3 and Layer 4 with application-layer metadata such as HTTP method and header values in order to establish rules and provide visibility based on service, pod, or container identity. Isovalent, co-founded by the creator of Cilium, maintains the Cilium Open Source Project and also offers Cilium Enterprise, which is a suite of tools helping organizations adopt Cilium and overcome the hurdles of building a secure, stable cloud-native application. Dan Wendlant and Thomas Graf are the co-founders of Isovalent. Thomas, the firm’s CTO, was the original creator of the Cilium open-source project and spent 15 years working on the Linux kernel prior to founding Isovalent. Dan, Isovalent’s CEO, has also worked at VMWare and Nicira. They join the show today to talk about why Cilium and Cilium Enterprise are a great choice for organizations looking to build cloud-native applications. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Feb 1, 2021 · 46 min
New Relic One with Lew Cirne
In a distributed application, observability is key to handling incidents and building better, more stable software. Legacy monitoring methods were built to respond to predictable failure modes, and to aggregate high-level data like access speed, connectivity, and downtime. Observability, on the other hand, is a measure of how well you can infer the internal state of a system from its outputs in order to trace the cause. At its core, building a system with observability means using instrumentation to provide insights on how and why internal components within a system are performing a certain way. Developers and SREs can build on that data to proactively debug potential failure modes, set service-level objectives, and speed up incident response. New Relic has been an industry leader in the observability space for the better part of a decade. This year, they announced New Relic One, an evolution of their flagship platform that streamlines and simplifies all the functions available to help organizations achieve observability. New Relic One enhances the Full-Stack Observability Platform through AIOps with their Applied Intelligence, which draws insights from the observability data to help detect anomalies before they become incidents. Lew Cirne is the founder and CEO of New Relic. He joins the show today to talk about how New Relic One helps developers move beyond monitoring and embrace observability, and how he sees the future of software observability platforms. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Jan 29, 2021 · 54 min
iRobot with Chris Svec
Embedded Software Engineering is the practice of building software that controls embedded systems- that is, machines or devices other than standard computers. Embedded systems appear in a variety of applications, from small microcontrollers, to consumer electronics, to large-scale machines such as cars, airplanes, and machine tools. iRobot is a consumer robotics company that applies embedded engineering to build robots that perform common household tasks. Its flagship product is the Roomba, perhaps one of the most well-known autonomous consumer robots on the market today. iRobot’s engineers work at the intersection of software and hardware, and work in a variety of domains from electrical engineering to AI. Chris Svec is a Software Engineering Manager at iRobot. He started his career designing x86 chips and later moved up the hardware/software stack into embedded software. He joins the show today to talk about iRobot, the design process for embedded systems, and the future of embedded systems programming. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Jan 28, 2021 · 48 min
Sym: Security Workflows with Yasyf Mohamedali
Security is more important than ever, especially in regulated fields such as healthcare and financial services. Developers working in highly regulated industries often spend considerable time building tooling to help improve compliance and pass security audits. While the core of many security workflows is similar, each industry and each organization may have its own idiosyncratic needs or particular regulatory requirements to meet. Sym is a platform for building security workflows that seeks to build on those core similarities while empowering developers with the tools they need to meet their application’s unique security and compliance needs. Sym believes in putting engineers in control of security, in the same way that DevOps put engineers in control of infrastructure. Yasyf Mohamedali is the CEO and co-founder of SymOps. Before SymOps, he was the CTO of Karuna Health. He joins the show today to talk about security and innovation in regulated industries and how Sym can help developers close the intent-to-implementation gap in application security. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Jan 27, 2021 · 50 min
OpsLevel: Service Ownership Platform with John Laban and Kenneth Rose
Microservices are built to scale. But as a microservices-based system grows, so does the operational overhead to manage it. Even the most senior engineers can’t be familiar with every detail of dozens- perhaps hundreds- of services. While smaller teams may track information about their microservices via spreadsheets, wikis, or other more traditional documentation, these methods often prove unsuitable for the unique demands of a sprawling microservices system. A microservices catalog is a solution to this problem. A microservices catalog seeks to centralize information about the services in your software architecture, including the purpose of a service, its owner, and instructions for using it. A microservices catalog can also provide a centralized source of knowledge about a system, which can help on-call engineers diagnose issues and also provide resources for onboarding new team members. Larger companies sometimes devote significant internal resources toward developing in-house microservices catalogs, while smaller organizations may not have the resources at their disposal to do so. OpsLevel’s founders recognized that many teams were re-inventing the wheel building internal microservices catalogs, and set out to design a toolset that could meet the needs of users of all sizes. OpsLevel’s team has drawn from extensive experience working with industry leaders in DevOps to create a comprehensive toolset for managing microservices infrastructure. OpsLevel provides a “single pane of glass for operations,” integrating with a variety of tools such as Slack, git, CI/CD, incident management, and deployment systems. John Laban and Kenneth Rose are the co-founders of OpsLevel. Before John and Kenneth founded OpsLevel they worked together at PagerDuty, where John was the first engineer on the team. Kenneth, OpsLevel’s CTO, was also previously a senior developer at Shopify. John and Kenneth join the show today to talk about how OpsLevel can help developers manage their microservices better, and even transform how their team does DevOps. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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