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#614
Aug 29, 2017 · 47 min
Sales Software with Jean-Baptiste Escoyez
Most products do not sell themselves. Salespeople bridge the gap between a product creation and a customer who purchases it. People can make a good living on the internet selling niche products–if they can find their customers. The process of taking a large group of potential customers and narrowing it down to only the subset of those customers who will buy your product is known as the sales funnel. The sales funnel consists of multiple stages–the first of which is known as “prospecting.” A salesperson doing prospecting is casting a wide net, sending emails to hundreds or thousands of people, looking for anyone who has some small probability of being interested. Without a tool for prospecting, the process can be very labor intensive. Jean-Baptise Escoyez is the CTO at Prospect.io, a tool for sales prospecting. In this episode, we explored the process of building Prospect.io, from the high level product design to the engineering details of how it is implemented. I use Prospect.io to sell two different products so it was enjoyable to find out how one of my favorite tools works.
#613
Aug 28, 2017 · 57 min
Cloud-Native SQL with Alex Robinson
Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the user in Germany, that database is not strongly consistent. Strongly consistent databases work such that two users who read the same entry at the same time will receive the same result. Weakly consistent or “eventual consistent” databases are suitable for applications where transaction ordering is not important–photo sharing apps and ecommerce shopping carts, for example. Bank accounts, on the other hand, often need to be strongly consistent. CockroachDB is a scalable, survivable, strongly consistent database. Alex Robinson is an engineer at Cockroach Labs and he joins the show to explain the data model for CockroachDB and how it maintains strong consistency.
#612
Aug 25, 2017 · 57 min
Internet Extremism with Lochlan Bloom
Religious extremists use technology to recruit vulnerable individuals to a violent cause. Google is developing ways to combat this extremism through its platforms, namely YouTube. When a user looks for inflammatory religious or supremacist content, YouTube’s “Redirect Method” instead sends those users toward anti-terrorist videos. Google’s fight against extremism compelled writer Lochlan Bloom to write an article called “The Coming Battle: AI, Extremism, and the New War of Ideas.” Lochlan joins the show to discuss the societal implications of giant internet providers controlling our information flow. Lochlan is a science fiction writer, most recently of The Wave, a book that mixes existentialism with quantum physics. Our reality is defined by what we observe, and this theme courses through our conversation–from religion to Twitter to artificial intelligence. The Coming Battle: AI, Extremism, and the New War of Ideas
#611
Aug 24, 2017 · 1 hr
Advertiser Bidding with Praneet Sharma
Content websites are supported by advertising. Most of the advertisements around the internet are dynamic ad slots that change depending on the user who visits the site. Those dynamic ad slots are available to a variety of different bidders. For each ad slot, an auction occurs. The highest bidder gets to serve an ad for that slot. Praneet Sharma is the co-founder of Method Media Intelligence, which he founded with Shailin Dhar, who has been on the show several times to discuss his investigations into the world of ad fraud. I wanted to have his partner Praneet on the show to get his perspective on ad fraud and how to clean up the advertising ecosystem. One advance in dynamic advertising that we discussed is header bidding, and an open source library called PrebidJS. When an ad-supported website gets delivered to your web browser, the HTML begins to load and the JavaScript on the page begins to execute. Some of that JavaScript is calling out to advertising networks looking for the highest bidder. Until the page receives a callback for what to put in the ad slots on the page, the page will not finish loading. Sites that do not manage their ad requests appropriately suffer performance issues. Header bidding is a technique to wrap all of the requests to different advertising exchanges in a single serialized blob of code at the top of the page.
#610
Aug 23, 2017 · 43 min
Ad Fraud Overview with Shailin Dhar
The Internet runs on advertising. Advertising is subject to fraud–but then again, so is every system of online transactions. The amount of money lost in electronic payments fraud and ecommerce scamming is probably much greater than what is lost due to ad fraud. So why do we keep covering advertising fraud on Software Engineering Daily? More of our audience needs to know about ad fraud. Few people realize how much fraud there is in online advertising. In previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily, we have explained, how advertising fraud works, why it is absurd and disgraceful, and why nobody talks about. We also cover ad fraud because I personally find it interesting and sometimes hilarious. Those are the same reasons I invited Shailin Dhar to speak at the third Software Engineering Daily Meetup. Shailin has been on the show twice before and he will be on again in the future. He has made it a full time job to expose ad fraud, and he gives a great presentation on the topic in this episode.
#609
Aug 22, 2017 · 55 min
Similarity Search with Jeff Johnson
Querying a search index for objects similar to a given object is a common problem. A user who has just read a great news article might want to read articles similar to it. A user who has just taken a picture of a dog might want to search for dog photos similar to it. In both of these cases, the query object is turned into a vector and compared to the vectors representing the objects in the search index. Facebook contains a lot of news articles and a lot of dog pictures. How do you index and query all that information efficiently? Much of that data is unlabeled. How can you use deep learning to classify entities and add more richness to the vectors? Jeff Johnson is a research engineer at Facebook. He joins the show to discuss how similarity search works at scale, including how to represent that data and the tradeoffs of this kind of search engine across speed, memory usage, and accuracy. Notes: Jeff’s blog post about similarity search
#608
Aug 21, 2017 · 57 min
Augmented Reality with Jesse Bounds and Siyu Song
Augmented reality is coming at us fast. Every large tech company is rumored to be building an AR product. Microsoft HoloLens is already available to developers. Pokemon Go, the most popular augmented reality product today, was made by a company that was spun out of Google. But Apple seems to be ahead of everyone. Apple’s ARKit is a set of tools for developers to build augmented reality applications. The applications people are building with ARKit are remarkable, and two of those early adopters join the show today for an interview. Jesse Bounds and Siyu Song work at Mapbox, a company that makes mapping, navigation, and location search SDKs. Location is natural companion to augmented reality. If I am walking down the street with a pair of augmented reality glasses on, those glasses can augment the world with information based on my location. Because the fit between AR and mapping is so natural, Mapbox has been rapidly experimenting to build up an expertise in AR. As a result, Jesse and Siyu make for great guests to talk about what engineers can build with ARKit today and what might be possible in the future.
#607
Aug 18, 2017 · 54 min
Error Diagnosis with James Smith
When a user experiences an error in an application, the engineers who are building that application need to find out why that error occurred. The root cause of that error may be on the user’s device, or within a piece of server-side logic, or hidden behind a black box API. To fix a complex error, we need a stack trace of contextual information so that we can correlate events across all layers of an application. James Smith is the CEO of Bugsnag, a company that makes crash reporting and error tracking software. In this episode, he describes how to diagnose errors in modern applications. He also explains how the company functions and how Bugsnag itself is built. The product consumes and stores millions of events which makes for a good discussion of software architecture. Full disclosure: Bugsnag is a sponsor of SE Daily.
#606
Aug 17, 2017 · 54 min
GatsbyJS with Kyle Mathews
GatsbyJS is a framework for building web applications for JavaScript. Gatsby’s original goal was to allow users to create super fast static web sites that could be hosted and served efficiently at a low cost. Most web pages have components from a framework like React or Angular that need to render after the user requests them. This rendering can sometimes require additional requests to external data sources, causing the page to take longer to load. Gatsby uses GraphQL to pull in data at build time and pre-render as much of a site as possible using React’s server side rendering. When a page built with Gatsby is served to a user, as much of the page has been rendered as possible, so that the browser can quickly load everything on the page without additional network requests. Kyle Mathews is the creator of GatsbyJS. He joins the show to describe why he created Gatsby–the high level goals and low level engineering decisions. We also discuss how Kyle intends to take Gatsby beyond just an open source project and turn it into a business.
#605
Aug 16, 2017 · 1 hr
Building Developer Communities with Juan Pablo Buriticá
Building and nurturing a developer community is hard work but it is vital for the growth of a country’s technology ecosystem. When communities coalesce around programming languages, tools or programming methods, what follows is a network of conferences, meet ups and other similar events. Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, has spent the last decade building developer communities in his home country of Colombia and across Latin America as well as running distributed engineering teams. He has helped to launch a number of conferences, meet-ups and more recently, an online meet-up providing advanced technical information for native Spanish speakers. In today’s episode, Juan returns to Software Engineering Daily to speak with Carl Mungazi about the benefits of having a distributed engineering team and hiring developers from developing nations. He discusses how Colombia came to have the largest Spanish-speaking JavaScript community in the world and the importance of good communication when building software with a team of developers based around the world.
#604
Aug 15, 2017 · 49 min
QA Testing with Jonathan Alexander
Quality assurance testing is a form of testing that closely mirrors user behavior. Sometimes it is manual, sometimes it is automated. Automated QA tests are scripts that validate correct data representation as the application mechanically runs through high-level workflows–like a login page. Manual QA testers act out use cases of an application to see if there are any bugs that were missed during automated test cases. Manual QA testing is often necessary for complex applications where it is not possible to enumerate all potential workflows within a script. Different companies have radically different workflows for QA testing. There are a variety of ticketing systems, testing frameworks, and team chat applications that play a role in a tester’s daily life. QASymphony is a platform for testing tools that integrates with other popular technologies to centralize a QA testing workflow. Jonathan Alexander is the CTO at QASymphony. He’s also the author of Codermetrics: Analytics for Improving Software Teams. He joins the show to discuss the past and present of QA and his strategies for managing the team that is building QASymphony. Thanks to Kevin Wolf for the intro.
#603
Aug 14, 2017 · 55 min
Open Compute Project with Steve Helvie
Facebook was rapidly outgrowing its infrastructure in 2009. Classic data center design was not up to the task of the rapid influx of new users and data, photos and streaming video hitting Facebook’s servers. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing a data center from the ground up to be cheaper, more energy efficient, and more ergonomic for the engineers who worked within. That data center design was open sourced in 2011. Intel, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs were the first three large organizations to join Facebook in the Open Compute Project, an effort to bring the benefits of open source collaboration to data centers. Steve Helvie works on the Open Compute Project and he joins the show to describe how the project has evolved in the last six years–how it has affected data center design and the implications for the future.
#602
Aug 11, 2017 · 54 min
TypeScript at Slack with Felix Rieseberg
Slack is an application for team communication. Users chat across mobile devices, web browsers, and a desktop application, which means Slack has three places to deploy on rather than two. And the desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux are not identical, so Slack has even more places to deploy. With so many different runtime environments, Slack needs to make technology choices that reduce the chance of errors. TypeScript allows for static typing of JavaScript. The extra compilation step checks the types of variables being passed between different places–so the errors will be discovered at compile time. In an untyped world, those errors might occur at runtime. TypeScript also unlocks the ability to put JavaScript code in an IDE, allowing for more efficient development. Felix Rieseberg is a desktop engineer at Slack, and in today’s episode he explains the unique challenges of building Slack, and why the team moved from JavaScript to TypeScript. TypeScript at Slack – engineering blog
#601
Aug 10, 2017 · 56 min
Lottie Animation with Brandon Withrow and Gabriel Peal
Animations make an application more fun and engaging. For most apps, animation is an afterthought. Developers are concerned with getting the functionality right, and designers have enough work to do simply getting icons, text formatting, and page layout correct. There is also the issue of cross-device compatibility. iOS, Android, and web have different ways of doing animation, with no unifying standard–except gifs, and gifs are not interactive, they simply play from start to finish. Airbnb’s emphasis on design makes it the right company to work on the problem of cross-device, interactive animations. Brandon Withrow and Gabriel Peal are engineers who work on Lottie, a library for animations in iOS, Android, web, and React Native. This episode is about how and why Lottie was built, and how Lottie gets used within Airbnb.
#600
Aug 9, 2017 · 52 min
State of JavaScript with Sacha Greif
JavaScript is moving so fast. It’s not easy to keep up with all of the frameworks, build tools, and packages. No other language spans frontend to backend, mobile to web to server. Sacha Greif is an independent designer and developer most prominent in his roles as co-author of Discover Meteor and community builder at Sidebar.io, a design newsletter with over 35,000 subscribers, and Hacker News Kansai. He is currently best known in the Javascript community as the maintainer of VulcanJS, and for his annual State of Javascript survey which is now open for 2017. In this episode, Shawn Wang guests hosts a discussion about both projects and Sacha’s thoughts on independent web design and development.
#599
Aug 8, 2017 · 58 min
IoT Overview with Jeremy Foster
The Internet of Things is the concept that traditionally analog objects, like thermostats and lightbulbs, can be given digital guts and connected to the internet to create more value for users. From Nest thermostats to Phillips Hue lightbulbs, these connected things are starting to enter the mainstream. According to recent estimates by Gartner, over eight billion connected “Things” will be in use in 2017, with that number ballooning to over twenty billion by 2020. Jeremy Foster is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft and the host of Microsoft Virtual Academy’s “Introduction to Azure IoT” course. In this episode, host Jared Porcenaluk joins Jeremy to discuss developing for the Internet of Things.
#598
Aug 7, 2017 · 58 min
Serverless Continuous Delivery with Robin Weston
Serverless computing reduces the cost of using the cloud. Serverless also makes it easy to scale applications. The downside: building serverless apps requires some mindset shift. Serverless functions are deployed to transient units of computation that are spun up on demand. This is in contrast to the typical model of application delivery–the deployment of an application to a server or a container that stays running until you shut it down. Robin Weston develops large projects with AWS Lambda, and he joined me for a discussion of how to build applications for serverless environments and how to do continuous delivery with serverless functions. One big appeal for continuous delivery fans is that serverless deployments are often smaller–the user is deploying something as small as a function. Full disclosure: ThoughtWorks GoCD is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Serverless Architectures and Continuous Delivery by Robin Weston Robin Weston at Pipeline Conf
#597
Aug 4, 2017 · 54 min
Serverless Startup with Yan Cui
After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services. This was the environment in which Yan Cui joined Yubl. The startup did have traction. There were social media stars who would announce on Twitter that they were about to go on Yubl, and Yubl would be hit by an avalanche of traffic. 50,000 users suddenly logging on to interact with their favorite celebrity was a significant traffic spike. How do you deal with a traffic pattern like that? Serverless computing. AWS Lambda allowed the company to scale up quickly in a cost efficient manner. Yan began refactoring the entire backend infrastructure to be more cost efficient, heavily leveraging AWS Lambda. Unfortunately, Yan’s valiant effort was not enough to save the company. But there are some incredible engineering lessons from this episode–how to build cost-effective, scalable infrastructure. It’s also a case study worth looking at if you work at a startup, whether or not you are an engineer. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
#596
Aug 3, 2017 · 52 min
Quantum Computing with Vijay Pande
Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but it can also leverage the classical advancements of Moore’s Law. If classical computing advances at the exponential pace of 2^n, quantum computing advances at the pace of 2^2^n. Quantum computing will advance technology in ways that will take us by surprise. If things feel like they are moving fast now, just wait until developers have access to quantum processing units. Machine learning, simulated chemical synthesis, and NP-complete problems are ripe for quantum computers. Vijay Pande is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a board member at Rigetti Computing, a quantum computer company. In this episode, we explored what software engineers today need to know about quantum computers and some of the application domains that developers will be working on as quantum computers become available. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
#595
Aug 2, 2017 · 53 min
Platform Continuous Delivery with Andy Appleton
Continuous delivery is a model for deploying small, frequent changes to an application. In a continuous delivery workflow, code changes that are pushed to a repository set off a build process that spins up a new version of the application. Testing is performed against that new build before advancing it to production, merging it with the existing codebase. Many continuous delivery products are getting built today because it is a wide open space–much like cloud providers or monitoring tools. There are subjective product and engineering decisions to be made depending on the audience for the product. Heroku Flow is a continuous delivery platform built on top of Heroku, a platform as a service. Andy Appleton is an engineer at Heroku and he joins the show to describe how Heroku Flow was built. Two years of work went into the project from initial conception to launch. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

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