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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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Dec 23, 2020 · 55 min
React Best Practices with Kent Dodds (Repeat)
Originally published March 6, 2020 ReactJS developers have lots of options for building their applications, and those options are not easy to work through. State management, concurrency, networking, and testing all have elements of complexity and a wide range of available tools. Take a look at any specific area of JavaScript application development, and you can find highly varied opinions. Kent Dodds is a JavaScript teacher who focuses on React, JavaScript, and testing. In today’s episode, Kent provides best practices for building JavaScript applications, specifically React. He provides a great deal of advice on testing, which is unsurprising considering he owns TestingJavaScript.com. Kent is an excellent speaker who has taught thousands of people about JavaScript, so it was a pleasure to have him on the show. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 22, 2020 · 54 min
Niantic Real World with Paul Franceus (Repeat)
Originally published June 21, 2019 Niantic is the company behind Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game where users walk around in the real world and catch Pokemon which appear on their screen. The idea for augmented reality has existed for a long time. But the technology to bring augmented reality to the mass market has appeared only recently. Improved mobile technology makes it possible for a smartphone to display rendered 3-D images over a video stream without running out of battery. Ingress was the first game to come out of Niantic, followed by Pokemon Go, but there are other games on the way. Niantic is also working on the Niantic Real World platform, a “planet-scale” AR platform that will allow independent developers to build multiplayer augmented reality experiences that are as dynamic and entertaining as Pokemon Go. Paul Franceus is an engineer at Niantic, and he joins the show to describe his experience building and launching Pokemon Go, as well as abstracting the technology from Pokemon Go and opening up the Niantic Real World platform to developers. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 21, 2020 · 52 min
React Native Interfaces with Leland Richardson (Repeat)
Originally published July 7, 2017 Airbnb is a company that is driven by design. New user interfaces are dreamed up by designers and implemented for web, iOS, and Android. This implementation process takes a lot of resources, but it used to take even more before the company started using React Native. React Native allows Airbnb to reuse components effectively. React Native works by presenting a consistent model for the user interface regardless of the underlying platform, and emitting a log of changes to that user interface. The underlying platform translates those changes into platform specific code. Leland Richardson is an engineer at Airbnb. In today’s episode, he explains how Airbnb uses React Native, how React Native works, and the future of the platform. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 18, 2020 · 59 min
LinkedIn Kafka with Nacho Solis (Repeat)
Originally published October 18, 2019 Apache Kafka was created at LinkedIn. Kafka was open sourced in 2011, when the company was eight years old. By that time, LinkedIn had developed a social network with millions of users. LinkedIn’s engineering team was building a range of externally facing products and internal tools, and many of these tools required a high-throughput system for publishing data and subscribing to topics. Kafka was born out of this need. Over time, Kafka’s importance within LinkedIn has only grown. Kafka plays a central role for services, log management, data engineering, and compliance. LinkedIn might be the biggest user of Apache Kafka in the entire software industry. Kafka has many use cases, and it is likely that they are almost all on display within LinkedIn. Nacho Solis is a senior software engineering manager at LinkedIn, where he helps teams build infrastructure for Kafka, as well as Kafka itself. Nacho joins the show to discuss the history of Kafka at LinkedIn, and the challenges of managing such a large deployment of Kafka. We also talk about streaming, data infrastructure, and more general problems in the world of engineering management. Full disclosure: LinkedIn is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 17, 2020 · 47 min
Practical AI with Chris Benson (Repeat)
Originally published December 9, 2019 Machine learning algorithms have existed for decades. But in the last ten years, several advancements in software and hardware have caused dramatic growth in the viability of applications based on machine learning. Smartphones generate large quantities of data about how humans move through the world. Software-as-a-service companies generate data about how these humans interact with businesses. Cheap cloud infrastructure allows for the storage of these high volumes of data. Machine learning frameworks such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and PyTorch allow developers to easily train statistical models. These models are deployed back to the smartphones and the software-as-a-service companies, which improves the ability for humans to move through the world and gain utility from their business transactions. And as the humans interact more with their computers, it generates more data, which is used to create better models, and higher consumer utility. The combination of smartphones, cloud computing, machine learning algorithms, and distributed computing frameworks is often referred to as “artificial intelligence.” Chris Benson is the host of the podcast Practical AI, and he joins the show to talk about the modern applications of artificial intelligence, and the stories he is covering on Practical AI. On his podcast, Chris talks about everything within the umbrella of AI, from high level stories to low level implementation details. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 16, 2020 · 55 min
Kafka Applications with Tim Berglund (Repeat)
Originally published September 17, 2019 Ever since Apache Kafka was open sourced from LinkedIn, it has been used to solve a wide variety of problems in distributed systems and data engineering. Kafka is a distributed messaging queue that is used by developers to publish messages and subscribe to topics with a certain message type. Kafka allows information to flow throughout a company such that multiple systems can consume the messages from a single sender. In previous shows, we have covered design patterns within Kafka, Kafka streams, event sourcing with Kafka, and many other subjects relating to the technology. Kafka is broadly useful, and new strategies for using Kafka continue to emerge as the open source project develops new functionality and becomes a platform for data applications. In today’s episode, Tim Berglund returns to Software Engineering Daily for a discussion of how applications are built today using Kafka--including systems that are undergoing a refactoring, data engineering applications, and systems with a large number of communicating services. If you are interested in learning more about how companies are using Kafka, the Kafka Summit in San Francisco is September 30th - October 1st. Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, and Netflix will be talking about how they use Kafka. Full disclosure: Confluent (the company where Tim works) is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 15, 2020 · 58 min
Kubeflow: TensorFlow on Kubernetes with David Aronchick (Repeat)
Originally published January 25, 2019 When TensorFlow came out of Google, the machine learning community converged around it. TensorFlow is a framework for building machine learning models, but the lifecycle of a machine learning model has a scope that is bigger than just creating a model. Machine learning developers also need to have a testing and deployment process for continuous delivery of models. The continuous delivery process for machine learning models is like the continuous delivery process for microservices, but can be more complicated. A developer testing a model on their local machine is working with a smaller data set than what they will have access to when it is deployed. A machine learning engineer needs to be conscious of versioning and auditability. Kubeflow is a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes based on Google’s internal machine learning pipelines. Google open sourced Kubernetes and TensorFlow, and the projects have users AWS and Microsoft. David Aronchick is the head of open source machine learning strategy at Microsoft, and he joins the show to talk about the problems that Kubeflow solves for developers, and the evolving strategies for cloud providers. David was previously on the show when he worked at Google, and in this episode he provides some useful discussion about how open source software presents a great opportunity for the cloud providers to collaborate with each other in a positive sum relationship.
Dec 14, 2020 · 1 hr 1 min
Modern Front End: React, GraphQL, VR, WebAssembly with Adam Conrad (Repeat)
Originally published December 20, 2018 Ten years ago, there was a distinction between “backend” and “frontend” developers. A backend developer would be managing the business logic and database transactions using Ruby on Rails or Java. A frontend developer would be responsible for implementing designs and arranging buttons using raw HTML and JavaScript. Today, developers can build entire applications in JavaScript. Developers who spent their early career developing frontend JavaScript skills are finding themselves with a surprising amount of power. With NodeJS providing a backend framework and React, Vue, or Angular on the frontend, a single JavaScript developer can write all the code for a whole application—hence the rise of the “full stack developer”. At the same time, the cloud infrastructure is becoming easier to use. Backend-as-a-service simplifies the frustrations of deploying your application, and standing up a database. GraphQL improves the relationship between the frontend and the backend. And futuristic technologies like WebAssembly and web virtual reality are promising to make a JavaScript engineer’s life even more interesting. Adam Conrad is an engineer and a writer for Software Engineering Daily. In recent articles, he has documented the changing nature of the frontend, including JavaScript engines, virtual reality, and how mature corporations are using React and GraphQL. He joins the show to share his perspective on what is changing in the frontend—and how full stack JavaScript engineers can position themselves for future success in a quickly changing market.
Dec 11, 2020 · 50 min
Facebook React with Dan Abramov (Repeat)
Originally published May 16, 2019 React is a set of open source tools for building user interfaces. React was open sourced by Facebook, and includes libraries for creating interfaces on the web (ReactJS) and on mobile devices (React Native). React was released during a time when there was not a dominant frontend JavaScript library. Backbone, Angular, and other JavaScript frameworks were all popular, but there was not any consolidation across the frontend web development community. Before React came out, frontend developers were fractured into different communities for the different JavaScript frameworks. After Facebook open sourced React, web developers began to gravitate towards the framework for its one-way data flow and its unconventional style of putting JavaScript and HTML together in a format called JSX. As React has grown in popularity, the React ecosystem has developed network effects. In many cases, the easiest way to build a web application frontend is to compose together open source React components. After seeing the initial traction, Facebook invested heavily into React, creating entire teams within the company whose goal was to improve React. Dan Abramov works on the React team at Facebook and joins the show to talk about how the React project is managed and his vision for the project.
Dec 10, 2020 · 52 min
Facebook Engineering Process with Kent Beck (Repeat)
Originally published August 28, 2019 Kent Beck is a legendary figure in the world of software engineering. Kent was an early advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and popularized the idea of writing unit tests before writing code that would satisfy those unit tests. A unit test isolates and tests a small piece of functionality within a large piece of software. Practitioners of Test-Driven Development write tens or hundreds of tests in order to cover a large variety of cases that could potentially occur within their software. When Kent Beck joined Facebook in 2011, he was 50 years old and thought he had seen everything in the software industry. During Facebook Boot Camp, Kent started to realize that Facebook was very different than any other company he had seen. Facebook Boot Camp is the six-week onboarding process that every new hire learns about the software practices of the company. After graduating Facebook Boot Camp, Kent began to explore Facebook’s codebase and culture. He found himself rethinking many of the tenets of software engineering that he had previously thought were immutable. Kent joins the show to discuss his time at Facebook, and how the company’s approach to building and scaling products thoroughly reshaped his beliefs about software engineering. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 9, 2020 · 56 min
Hedge Fund Artificial Intelligence with Xander Dunn (Repeat)
Originally published April 3, 2017 A hedge fund is a collection of investors that make bets on the future. The “hedge” refers to the fact that the investors often try to diversify their strategies so that the direction of their bets are less correlated, and they can be successful in a variety of future scenarios. Engineering-focused hedge funds have used what might be called “machine learning” for a long time to predict what will happen in the future. Numerai is a hedge fund that crowdsources its investment strategies by allowing anyone to train models against Numerai’s data. A model that succeeds in a simulated environment will be adopted by Numerai and used within its real money portfolio. The engineers who create the models are rewarded in proportion to how well the models perform. Xander Dunn is a software engineer at Numerai and in this episode he explains what a hedge fund is, why the traditional strategies are not optimal, and how Numerai creates the right incentive structure to crowdsource market intelligence. This interview was fun and thought provoking--Numerai is one of those companies that makes me very excited about the future.
Dec 8, 2020 · 1 hr 22 min
WebAssembly with Brendan Eich (Repeat)
Originally published March 31, 2017 Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the Brave browser. For all of its progress, JavaScript struggles to run resource-intensive programs like complex video games. With JavaScript falling short on its charge to be the “assembly language for the web” the four major browser vendors started collaborating on the WebAssembly project to allow programming languages a faster, lower level compile target when deploying to the web. Brendan is the CEO of Brave which aims to provide a faster and safer browsing experience by blocking ads and trackers by default in a new browser. The Brave browser is also helping publishers monetize in interesting new ways while also giving a share of ad revenue to its users. Caleb Meredith is the host of this show. He previously guest hosted a popular episode on Inferno, a fast, React-like JavaScript framework. As we bring on more guest hosts, please send us feedback. We want to know what every host is doing well, and what we can improve on.
Dec 8, 2020 · 53 min
Monolith Migration with Jan Schiffman and Sherman Wood (Repeat)
Originally published September 4, 2018 TIBCO was started in the 90’s with a popular message bus product that was widely used by finance companies, logistics providers, and other systems with high throughput. As TIBCO grew in popularity, the company expanded into other areas through products it developed in-house as well as through acquisitions. One acquisition was Jaspersoft, a business intelligence data platform. When TIBCO acquired Jaspersoft in 2014, the architecture was a monolithic Java application. Around this time, customer use cases were shifting from centralized reporting to real-time, embedded visualizations. The use case of the Jaspersoft software was becoming less centralized and less monolithic and the software architecture needed to change in order to reflect that. Jan Schiffman is a VP of engineering at TIBCO and Sherman Wood is a director at TIBCO. They join the show to discuss the process of migrating a large Java monolith to a composable set of services. Breaking up a monolith is not an easy process--nor is it something that every company should do just because they have a monolith. In some cases, a monolith is just fine. Jan and Sherman explain why the business use case for why the Jaspersoft monolith needed to be refactored, and their approach to the refactoring. We also talk through the modern use cases of embedded analytics and the interaction between business analysts and data engineers. At a higher level, we discuss the lessons they have learned from managing a large, complex refactoring. Full disclosure: TIBCO is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
Dec 4, 2020 · 44 min
Osquery with Ganesh Pai
Osquery is a tool for providing visibility into operating system endpoints. It is a flexible tool developed originally at Facebook. Ganesh Pai is the founder of Uptycs, a company that uses Osquery to find threats and malicious activity occurring across nodes. Ganesh joins the show to talk about Osquery usage and his work on Uptycs. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 3, 2020 · 45 min
Hex: Data Project Sharing with Caitlin Colgrove and Barry McCardel
Data science is a collaborative field. Collaboration requires sharing the artifacts that data scientists are working on, such as Jupyter Notebooks and SQL tables. Hex is a platform for improving sharing across data science workflows. Caitlin Colgrove and Barry McCardel are founders of Hex and they join the show to discuss what they have built. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 2, 2020 · 41 min
BGP with Andree Toonk
Border Gateway Protocol is a protocol designed for routing and reachability between autonomous systems on the internet. BGPmon is a tool for assessing the routing health of your network, which allows for a network administrator to understand network stability and risk of data. Andree Toonk is the founder of BGPmon and joins the show to talk about BGP, how to monitor routing data, and his work at Cisco. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Dec 1, 2020 · 44 min
CubeJS with Artyom Keydunov and Pavel Tiunov
Business intelligence is crucial for both internal and external applications at any company. There is a wide array of proprietary BI tools. Today, there is an increasing number of options for open source business intelligence, one of which is CubeJS. CubeJS is an open source analytical API platform for building BI. Artyom and Pavel from CubeJS join the show to talk about what they have built and their vision for the platform. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Nov 30, 2020 · 45 min
Rosebud: Artificially Generated Media with Dzmitry Pletnikau
For several years, we have had the ability to create artificially generated text articles. More recently, audio and video synthesis have been feasible for artificial intelligence. Rosebud is a company that creates animated virtual characters that can speak. Users can generate real or fictional presenters easily with Rosebud. Dzmitry Pletnikau is an engineer with Rosebud and joins the show to talk about the technology and engineering behind the company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
Nov 27, 2020 · 53 min
Computer Architecture with Dave Patterson Holiday Repeat
An instruction set defines a low level programming language for moving information throughout a computer. In the early 1970’s, the prevalent instruction set language used a large vocabulary of different instructions. One justification for a large instruction set was that it would give a programmer more freedom to express the logic of their programs. Many of these instructions were rarely used. Think of your favorite programming language (or your favorite human language). What percentage of words in the vocabulary do you need to communicate effectively? We sometimes call these language features “syntactic sugar”. They add expressivity to a language, but may not improve functionality or efficiency. These extra language features can have a cost. Dave Patterson and John Hennessy created the RISC architecture: Reduced Instruction Set Compiler architecture. RISC proposed reducing the size of the instruction set so that the important instructions could be optimized for. Programs would become more efficient, easier to analyze, and easier to debug. Dave Patterson’s first paper on RISC was rejected. He continued to research the architecture and advocate for it. Eventually RISC became widely accepted, and Dave won a Turing Award together with John Hennessy. Dave joins the show to talk about his work on RISC and his continued work in computer science research to the present. He is involved in the Berkeley RISELab and works at Google on the Tensor Processing Unit. Machine learning is an ocean of new scientific breakthroughs and applications that will change our lives. It was inspiring to hear Dave talk about the changing nature of computing, from cloud computing to security to hardware design.
Nov 25, 2020 · 57 min
React Native at Airbnb with Gabriel Peal Holiday Repeat
Originally published July 27, 2018 React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic for iOS and Android. React Native was created at Facebook. Facebook itself uses React Native for mobile development, and contributes heavily to the open source React Native repository. In 2016, Airbnb started using React Native in a significant portion of their mobile codebase. Over the next two years, Airbnb saw the advantages and the disadvantages of adopting the cross platform, JavaScript based system. After those two years, the engineering management at Airbnb came to the conclusion to stop using React Native. Gabriel Peal is an engineer at Airbnb who was part of the decision to move off of React Native. Gabriel wrote a blog post giving the backstory for React Native at Airbnb, and he joins the show to give more detail on the decision.

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