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#554
Jun 5, 2017 · 50 min
Video Object Segmentation with the DAVIS Challenge Team
Video object segmentation allows computer vision to identify objects as they move through space in a video. The DAVIS challenge is a contest among machine learning researchers working off of a shared dataset of annotated videos. The organizers of the DAVIS challenge join the show today to explain how video object segmentation models are trained and how different competitors take part in the DAVIS challenge. A good companion to this episode is our discussion of Convolutional Neural Networks with Matt Zeiler. Software Engineering Daily is looking for sponsors for Q3. If your company has a product or service, or if you are hiring, Software Engineering Daily reaches 23,000 developers listening daily. Send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com 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.
#553
Jun 2, 2017 · 54 min
GitLab with Pablo Carranza
On January 31st 2017, GitLab experienced a major outage of their online repository hosting service. The primary database server experienced data loss due to a combination of malicious spam attacks and engineering mistakes that occurred while trying to respond to those spam attacks. GitLab responded to the event transparently. The company put up a postmortem describing the event in detail. In subsequent posts, GitLab expressed sympathy for the employee who made engineering mistakes that led to the deletion of data. The employee was not judged or disciplined for an understandable error. The response from the developer community was very positive. Engineers know that building cloud services is hard. Engineering is as much about avoiding errors as it is about appropriately responding to the inevitable mistakes. GitLab is a developer platform that combines repository hosting with several other features–issue tracking, code review, and CD. Today’s guest is Pablo Carranza, who works on infrastructure at GitLab. In this episode, he walks us through GitLab’s product, the engineering stack, and a postmortem of the outage. We also discuss working at Amazon, and the importance of postmortems, which I first encountered at Amazon. 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.
#552
Jun 1, 2017 · 49 min
CosmosDB with Andrew Hoh
Different databases have different access patterns. Key-value, document, graph, and columnar databases are useful under different circumstances. For example, if you are a bank, and you have a database of customers and the transactions they have performed, the ideal access pattern for aggregating the total amount of all transactions might be a columnar store. If the transaction amounts are all in one column, it helps to have all of the columnar entries close together on disk. But if you want to look at your bank as a social network, and you want to be able to map how money flows between the different people who use your bank, you might want to map your data as a graph database. That would make it easier to query for the connections across the different users in the bank. CosmosDB is a database from Microsoft that allows for multiple data models and multiple well-defined consistency models. Today’s guest Andy Hoh is a product manager at Azure CosmosDB and he joins the show to describe the product. Microsoft unveiled CosmosDB at Build, their annual developer conference, which is where I performed this interview. It was a pleasure hanging out at Build in the podcast booths they set up, so thanks to Microsoft for inviting me.
#551
May 31, 2017 · 1 hr
Data Skepticism with Kyle Polich
With a fast-growing field like data science, it is important to keep some amount of skepticism. Tools can be overhyped, buzzwords can be overemphasized, and people can forget the fundamentals. If you have bad data, you will get bad results in your experimentation. If you don’t know what statistical approach you want to take to your data, it doesn’t matter how well you know Spark or TensorFlow. And if you aren’t passionate about the work you are doing, you are unlikely to finish the projects you start (whether we are talking data science or otherwise). Kyle Polich hosts the Data Skeptic podcast, a show at the intersection of data science and skepticism. As a podcaster, Kyle takes himself seriously and is prepared for his shows–which I admire. Having met him recently at the Microsoft Build conference, he’s a great guy and I look forward to doing more podcasts with him in the future. In this episode, Kyle is interviewed by Sid Ramesh, a data engineering correspondent for Software Engineering Daily. https://dataskeptic.com http://openhouseproject.co
#550
May 30, 2017 · 1 hr 14 min
iOS and Podcasts with Rob Walch
Apple controls the iOS ecosystem. As an accident of history, Apple also controls the podcasting ecosystem. Unlike most ecosystems within Apple’s dominion, podcasts remain open. A podcaster merely has to record an mp3, distribute it via RSS feed, and submit that RSS feed to the iTunes podcast portal. Podcasting has thrived in recent years, but very few technology companies have managed to take advantage of that growth. Libsyn is the most popular place to host a podcast. Libsyn is a combination of a CDN, a hosting service, analytics, and place to get an RSS feed for a podcaster. There have been many clones of Libsyn over the years, but the company remains the industry standard. For people who are confused–iTunes does not host any audio files. It is just an index of feeds. A podcaster needs to host audio files somewhere in order to give iTunes access. Today’s guest Rob Walch joins the show to talk about podcasts–including his podcast Today in iOS. I had a great time meeting Rob at the Microsoft Build conference. Special thanks to Bharat Bhat for organizing the podcast booths at Microsoft Build.
#549
May 26, 2017 · 57 min
Off-Grid Social Network with Andre Staltz
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a company brokering that relationship. Andre Staltz works on Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer system for social graphs, identity, and messaging. Scuttlebutt is used by a group of open-source hackers, many of whom live off-grid and do not have constant access to the Internet. In this episode, we discuss why someone would want a peer-to-peer social network, how to build one, and the progress that has been made on Scuttlebutt by some of the most talented open-source engineers in the world. 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.
#548
May 25, 2017 · 51 min
Universal Healthcare with Thomas Bukowski
Everyone in the world should have some basic level of guaranteed healthcare. This is not controversial. But what should that basic level of healthcare be? Should it extend into the later years of your life, when the majority of your health costs are incurred? And how much has modern technology driven down the cost of what it should cost to treat a patient? Healthcare today has lots of problems with bureaucracy and poorly aligned incentives. But the potential of vastly better healthcare is clear to technologists, and advances in software in hardware that have benefited other enterprises will eventually make their way into healthcare–reducing cost, improving oversight, and leading to better health. Watsi is a non-profit with the goal of seeing a world with universal healthcare. Watsi facilitates crowdfunding of patients who need low-cost, high-impact treatment. Y-Combinator Research recently funded a study in collaboration with Watsi to study using technology to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. Thomas Bukowski is a software engineer with Watsi, and he joins me for an interview about what universal healthcare means and what the roadmap to getting there might look like. 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.
#547
May 24, 2017 · 1 hr 3 min
Relay Modern with Lee Byron and Joe Savona
Relay is a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications. Facebook open sourced Relay around the same time they open sourced GraphQL, and Facebook expected Relay to be the more popular of the two projects. However, the reality was reversed. Open source companies like Meteor quickly began to build GraphQL tools and a few businesses were started around GraphQL. One year later, the excitement for GraphQL had completely surpassed the excitement for Relay which had aged poorly in a newborn ecosystem of GraphQL tooling. At the same time, Facebook was also starting to integrate Relay into their React Native apps. But Relay was performing poorly on low-end Android devices. This led the Relay team to the conclusion that they needed to rewrite Relay. Both to better fit into the growing GraphQL ecosystem, and to be built with performance in low-end React Native environments at the top of mind. Relay Modern is the new version of Relay. It was released to the open source community at this year’s F8. In this episode Caleb Meredith is joined by Lee Byron, the co-creator of GraphQL, and Joe Savona, a founding member of the Relay team, to discuss Relay Modern. The discussion includes a conversation about the commercial GraphQL ecosystem, the story of why Facebook decided Relay needed to be rewritten, and a look at the future of UI development from some trends seen in Relay Modern. 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. Sponsors
#546
May 23, 2017 · 53 min
Healthcare Engineering with Isaac Councill
Healthcare is a complex business. Oscar is a company that wanted to build a new insurance provider–but realized that healthcare is so interconnected that in order to build a new insurance provider, realized it actually needed to build an entire healthcare business too, complete with patient management and facilities. Since Oscar is a modern technology company, the focus on customer service, engineering, and data management offers an optimistic view into what healthcare might look like in the near future. Every time a patient interacts with the healthcare system, their insurance provider collects data on that interaction. Isaac Councill helped architect the infrastructure at Oscar that manages and analyzes the patient data. In this show, we talk about the healthcare system, data engineering, and Apache Mesos, which Oscar uses to manage its applications.
#545
May 22, 2017 · 46 min
Microservices Transition with Cassandra Shum
Many companies are transitioning from a monolith to microservices architecture. Tools for cloud computing, containerization, and continuous delivery are making this easier. But there are still technological and organizational challenges that a company will encounter while making this transition. Cassandra Shum is an engineer with ThoughtWorks. She has worked with major financial institutions and other large companies to architect their migrations from monolith to microservices. Also, she regularly puts on workshops to engineers who are seeking to make this migration at the company they work at. In this episode, she describes some of her experiences and recommendations around transitioning from a monolith to microservices. 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.
#544
May 19, 2017 · 51 min
Cloud Native Projects with Dan Kohn
Cloud computing changed how we develop applications for the web. Over the last decade, engineers have been learning how to build software in this new paradigm. The costs have gone down, but our nodes can fail at any time. We no longer have to manage individual servers, but the layers of virtualization and containerization require new strategies for communicating between services. As we have adjusted to this new way of building applications, the term “cloud-native” has become a useful descriptor. Cloud native applications are modern distributed systems capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes. Open source projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Linkerd draw on the lessons of big technology companies like Google, Twitter, and SoundCloud. Engineers today don’t need to reinvent the key infrastructure of those companies. We can combine the open source cloud-native technologies and use them to build powerful systems. Dan Kohn is the executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and he joins me for an interview about the projects within the CNCF, how they fit together, and the future of computing. Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about job searching brought to you by Indeed Prime. Measuring the Popularity of Kubernetes Using BigQuery 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.
#543
May 18, 2017 · 44 min
Oil and Gas Data with Evan Anderson
Public data is not always so accessible. It is nice when you can request data simply by making an API call, but that is the exception rather than the rule–especially when we are talking about data managed by the government. Oil and gas drilling data falls into this category. Oseberg is a company that is building a tool for analyzing oil and gas data. Oseberg is a rich dashboard for knowledge workers to query and visualize the data. Evan Anderson is the CEO of Oseberg, and he joins me to discuss building a business where the data is hard to acquire. 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.
#542
May 17, 2017 · 50 min
Firebase with Doug Stevenson
Firebase is a backend-as-a-service. The key efficiency of a backend-as-a-service is that it enables developers to go from having a 3-tier architecture (client, server, database) to a 2-tier architecture (client, backend-as-a-service). The team who started Firebase built it as a pivot. They had started a social network, and then they realized there wasn’t a good backend for chat tools. And so they started a chat-as-a-service tool, for people who wanted to include chat in their applications. And that led them to the fundamental realization that chat is actually representative of a broader category of real-time synchronization problems. Firebase was eventually acquired by Google. Doug Stevenson is a senior developer advocate with Google and the host of Meet Firebase, a YouTube talk show about Firebase. It was a pleasure to sit down for a conversation with him, especially because I recently started using Firebase in my own application as a backend for real-time chat. 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.
#541
May 16, 2017 · 43 min
Digital Ownership with Chris Groskopf
When you purchase an ebook you must agree to the Terms of Service that tell you what you can do with it. What is actually in that terms of service? What are you agreeing to when you buy an ebook? The answers might surprise you. In this episode, Srini Kadamati interviews Chris Groskopf on how the rise of digital products has eroded the idea of traditional ownership. They discuss digital ownership from the point of view of the legal system, consumers, and the companies creating these products. Chris Groskopf is a data journalist who uses data, graphics, and storytelling to build compelling news experiences. He’s worked on multiple pioneering teams at organizations like the Chicago Tribune and NPR. He’s currently the first data editor at Quartz, a digital-first Atlantic publication, where he’s written about how complex systems like the stock market fail and how most of the world’s art is locked away in museums. Outside of journalism, he’s created multiple Python data libraries, like agate, proof, and csvkit. 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.
#540
May 15, 2017 · 59 min
Artsy with Daniel Doubrovkine
Artsy is an online art marketplace. This might sound like a simple engineering problem–you just set up a basic ecommerce site, list some pieces of art, and start making money, right? The art world is complicated. There are four major pillars: patrons, art fairs, galleries, and auctions. Bringing these different parts online is not trivial. And in order to do so, Artsy has to work with the existing ecosystem. It is not like the taxi industry, where you can aggressively compete against the pre-existing businesses. The art world is built around relationships and trust. The engineering is hard too. An art auction results in a transaction for millions of dollars. In this way, building an auction system is like building a trading system. Latency needs to be very low, and you can’t make any mistakes or else customers could suffer to the tune of millions of dollars. Daniel Doubrovkine is the CTO of Artsy, and he joins me to describe the complexities of the art market and the engineering challenges that come with building a software company around it. 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.
#539
May 12, 2017 · 48 min
Poker Artificial Intelligence with Noam Brown
Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It is too human to be automated. The game space of poker is different than that of Go. It has 10^160 different situations–which is more than the number of atoms in the universe. And the game space keeps getting bigger as the stack sizes of the two competitors gets bigger. But it is still possible for a computer to beat a human at calculating game theory optimal decisions–if you approach the problem correctly. Libratus was developed by CMU professor Tuomas Sandholm, along with my guest today Noam Brown. The Libratus team taught their AI the rules of poker, they gave it a reward function (to win as much money as possible), and they told it to optimize that reward function. Then they had Libratus train itself with simulations. After enough training, Libratus was ready to crush human competitors, which it did in hilarious, entertaining fashion. There is a video from Engadget on YouTube about the AI competing against professional humans. In this episode, Noam Brown explains how they built Libratus, what it means for poker players, and what the implications are for humanity–if we can automate poker, what can’t we automate?
#538
May 11, 2017 · 1 hr 2 min
Tech in the Middle East with Chris Shroeder
Many countries in the developing world are undergoing a technological revolution which is shaping how they tackle problems around infrastructure, health, education and finance. Young people are at the forefront of developing solutions to the problems in the developing world. These young people creating technology and businesses to foster innovation and growth. Countries in the Middle East are no exception to this. Despite the difficulties the region faces such as the wars in Syria and Yemen, its populations are well-informed, plugged in and are using technology to build the future of their societies. In the book Startup Rising published in 2013, Washington D.C.- and New York City-based entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Schroeder wrote about how the rest of the world, especially the West, needed to wake up to what was happening in the Middle East. In today’s episode, Chris talks to Carl Mungazi about what he has seen throughout his travels in the Middle East. He discusses the successes and challenges faced by the entrepreneurs who shared their stories with him and what this means for those watching in the West. 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.
#537
May 10, 2017 · 52 min
Convolutional Neural Networks with Matt Zeiler
Convolutional neural networks are a machine learning tool that uses layers of convolution and pooling to process and classify inputs. CNNs are useful for identifying objects in images and video. In this episode, we focus on the application of convolutional neural networks to image and video recognition and classification. Matt Zeiler is the CEO of Clarifai, an API for image and video recognition. Matt takes us through the basics of a convolutional neural network–you don’t need any background in machine learning to understand the content of the episode. He also discusses the subjective aspects of image and video recognition, and some of the tactics Clarifai has explored. This is far from a solved problem. Matt also discusses the infrastructure of Clarifai–how they use Kubernetes, how models are deployed, and how models are updated. 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 the transcript for this episode.
#536
May 9, 2017 · 56 min
Software Consulting with Rachel Laycock
Software consultancies solve problems involving management and software engineering. A large company might hire a software consulting company to give an external opinion on software architecture, or on an organizational structure. Sometimes a consultancy is brought in to help integrate a new technology, or do a major refactoring. Scaling a software consultancy to meet the varying demands of clients presents a unique challenge. Software companies that make money from media, or software-as-a-service, or advertising technology are primarily focused on scaling the technology. For a software consulting business, scaling and updating the team is arguably more important than any particular piece of software. Rachel Laycock is the head of technology for ThoughtWorks North America. She joins the show to discuss how to manage and grow a large software consulting organization. It’s a great discussion of culture, technology, and how the nature of work is changing. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Let’s get on with the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store. 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.
#535
May 8, 2017 · 1 hr 6 min
Automation with Haseeb Qureshi and Quincy Larson
Suddenly, automation is changing our world faster than anyone anticipated. For technologists, the world is becoming convenient and high-leverage. For non-technologists, the job market is evaporating. Haseeb Qureshi and Quincy Larson join me for a roundtable discussion on automation, jobs, and artificial intelligence. Haseeb and I have had numerous discussions about this topic before, and Quincy is the founder of Free Code Camp, which teaches people to learn programming for free. If there is one upside of all these jobs being automated away, its that it will lead to massive user growth for Free Code Camp. I enjoyed talking to Quincy and Haseeb as always. If you are interested in hosting a show for Software Engineering Daily, we are looking for engineers, journalists, and hackers who want to work with us on content. It is a paid opportunity. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/host to find out more. The Software Engineering Daily store is now open if you want to buy a Software Engineering Daily branded t-shirt, hoodie, or mug and support the show. Let’s get on with the show. Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/store. 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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