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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#513
Apr 10, 2017 · 53 min
LLVM with Morgan Wilde
Every program gets compiled down to 1s and 0s before it can be executed against hardware. Before being translated to machine code, programs that are written in a language like Rust, Swift, or Java spend time in an intermediate representation. In Java, this intermediate representation is Java bytecode. Many different languages–such as Scala–translate to Java bytecode, because there has been lots of optimization written to speed up Java bytecode. Java bytecode runs on the JVM–the Java Virtual Machine. LLVM is a project that draws inspiration from the Java Virtual Machine. LLVM originally meant “low level virtual machine” but today it is just called LLVM and describes a set of compiler tools. In today’s interview with Morgan Wilde, we explore how compilers work, how different processor hardware architectures present a problem for compilers, and why LLVM’s intermediate representation creates a layer of interoperability for any language that compiles down to that intermediate representation. Whether you are new to compilers or have experience, this episode will appeal to you. Morgan is an excellent teacher and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through. He has a 30-minute YouTube video–A Brief Introduction to LLVM that I highly recommend.
#512
Apr 7, 2017 · 58 min
Complacency with Tyler Cowen
Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery, we have lowered our standards for innovation? And if Silicon Valley has been lulled into complacency, what does that say about the rest of the United States? American exceptionalism has faltered and complacency has risen in its wake. Today’s guest Tyler Cowen is an economist and author. His new book The Complacent Class is the final book in a trilogy that describes a decline of American output and a decline in American mindset. Complacent America has lost its ability to assess risk. Children are prevented from playing tag for risk of injury. College students protest against speakers who might present challenging ideas. The number of Americans under 30 who own a business has fallen by 65% since the 1980’s–millennials are too busy going to business school to start businesses. In his books, Tyler weaves together history, philosophy, and contemporary culture. He presents hard data about many different fields, and theorizes about how the trends in those fields relate to each other. He also has a podcast, Conversations with Tyler, and in this episode I tried to mirror his interview style. If you like this episode, you should check out his show–he has interviewed people like Ezra Klein, Peter Thiel, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
#511
Apr 6, 2017 · 55 min
Blockchain Applications with Mike Goldin
Cryptocurrencies are not only a financial instrument–they are a new platform for building applications. The blockchain allows for new solutions to digital property management, micropayments, hedge fund incentives, and ad fraud. The cryptocurrency platforms with the most traction are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no central leader and is going through some growing pains with governance issues. Ethereum is led by the charismatic Vitalik Buterin. Bitcoin and Ethereum are not competing instruments. They fulfill different technical purposes. Under current conditions of algorithm development and network infrastructure, neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum can accomplish the dreams that will one day be realized, because of the problem of distributing transaction information across nodes in the system. If we compared cryptocurrencies to the Internet, we would not even be in the days of dial-up yet. ConsenSys is a venture production studio that is working on several projects within the blockchain space. Mike Goldin is a software developer with ConsenSys and joins the show to talk about blockchain applications in 2017–where we are and where we are going. It was a wide ranging conversation and I hope to have Mike back in the future so we can go deeper on some of the topics we glossed over.
#510
Apr 5, 2017 · 52 min
API Design Standards with Andy Beier
There are various standards at play when creating and consuming Application Program Interfaces (APIs). These standards, though, are mostly technical and mostly lower-level than the content of the API. Andy Beier has experienced the broad range of API quality in his role with Domo in creating integrations with other businesses. He has made standardization of good practices in creating APIs his mission, with an emphasis on making the right information easily accessible without having to download more than necessary. He has traveled to meet with leaders in the field to promote standards and to make APIs easier to create and to consume. In this episode, Andy joins Dave Rael for a conversation about API design standards, what makes for a good API, and steps in moving the broader technical community toward more useful and secure APIs.
#509
Apr 4, 2017 · 1 hr 10 min
Listener Q&A
In this episode, I gathered questions from listeners in our Slack channel and Twitter feed. The questions I answered include: We always want more feedback and questions. Please email me, join Slack, and fill out our survey!
#508
Apr 3, 2017 · 56 min
Hedge Fund Artificial Intelligence with Xander Dunn
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.
#507
Mar 31, 2017 · 1 hr 22 min
WebAssembly with Brendan Eich
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.
#506
Mar 30, 2017 · 55 min
Amazon and Uber with Brad Stone
Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes apparent to outsiders with time. Amazon’s culture and business strategy were detailed in The Everything Store, a 2013 book by Brad Stone. I read The Everything Store before working at Amazon, then I read it a second time after working at Amazon. The book is an accurate and balanced depiction of Amazon’s ethos. Brad’s new book The Upstarts documents the rise of Uber and Airbnb, two companies with a similar controversial valence to Amazon. It was a pleasure to speak to Brad because I admire his engrossing storytelling as an author and his strategic analysis as a business journalist. After discussing business and technology with him, we explored journalism–Brad is senior executive editor at Bloomberg.
#505
Mar 29, 2017 · 52 min
Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus
Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without making the user feel much pain. But how can we test that our response will work before an actual catastrophe occurs? Kolton Andrus is CEO of Gremlin, a company that works on failure injection as a service. Gremlin is based on ideas around planned failure that Kolton learned from his years at Amazon and Netflix. We ended up talking as much about the culture of Netflix and Amazon as we did about how and why to build failure injection. It’s always nice to share war stories with other people who have worked at Amazon because the culture is so distinct. If you want to know more about Amazon’s culture, check out the episode tomorrow with Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store.
#504
Mar 28, 2017 · 51 min
Software Psychology with Bjorn Freeman Benson
Designers and software engineers need to communicate with each other. From Apple to Slack to Uber, the emphasis on visual design within a product is rising in importance. Much like development and operations siloes have been bridged with the DevOps movement, design and engineering teams are working more closely together to align the vision of the designers with the realities of code. InVision is a product for prototyping designs and product workflows. I categorize InVision with high-level productivity tools like Trello, Asana, and github. When teams start using InVision, it often becomes an integral part of the entire product workflow. A designer will mock up their product vision on InVision and share it with the rest of the team for criticism and commentary. Since the product is the perfect bridge between engineers and designers, InVision the company is expanding as a platform. Bjorn Freeman-Benson is the CTO at InVision and his task is to scale the 100% remote engineering team while developing new product features. Bjorn describes himself as a software psychologist. We talked about the psychology of managing engineers and the technical challenges of building a large, popular web app for technology products.
#503
Mar 27, 2017 · 51 min
Product Development with Cullen Zandstra
Developing a product requires careful balance between engineering, sales, design, and customer service. The founding CTO of a company often needs to take on each of these responsibilities, because when the company only has a few people there is nobody to delegate these different tasks to. Cullen Zandstra is the CTO at FloQast, a SaaS tool for accounting close management. It isn’t important what that means–we do describe it in this episode, but the actual software product that we are discussing is less important than the general discussions we have. Cullen gives detailed explanations for how to develop a software product. In the past, Cullen worked at MySpace. After we discussed his current company FloQast, we discussed some of what he learned at MySpace, and why the social network proved to be less durable than Facebook. We also had some great discussion as to why Google+ was ALSO less durable than Facebook. Also–I should mention that FloQast is hiring engineers in their Los Angeles office. And thanks to my friend Patrick Mathieson for connecting Cullen and myself.
#502
Mar 24, 2017 · 46 min
Net Neutrality with Quincy Larson
Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers and governments regulating the internet should treat all data on the internet the same. Debates around Net Neutrality can be as contentious as subjects like global warming, or tabs vs. spaces. To a hardcore free market economist, Net Neutrality sounds suspicious. Why would it be good for the government to regulate prices on the data that passes around wires owned by a corporation? The problem is that a large portion of the United States can only be served by wires owned by a single company. In those instances, the company that owns the wires has monopoly pricing power over the data delivered to homes in those geographic regions. Quincy Larson is the founder of Free Code Camp and a frequent author of internet-based articles on Medium. He returns to Software Engineering Daily to make the case for Net Neutrality. I was convinced by some of his arguments and less convinced by others. In any case, I think you will find this episode entertaining and informative. If you are like me, after this episode you will have at least a slightly better understanding of the issues surrounding Net Neutrality. Inside the Invisible War for the Open Internet
#501
Mar 23, 2017 · 50 min
Zcash with Nathan Wilcox
In bitcoin, every transaction in the shared ledger has the sender, recipient, and value. This ledger gets appended infinitely and is shared within a peer-to-peer network. Zcash is a cryptocurrency with all the features of bitcoin, plus encrypted transactions. The sender, recipient, and value fields are all encrypted. If bitcoin is HTTP, Zcash is like HTTPS, a secure transport layer. Nathan Wilcox works on Zcash, and in this episode we discuss why an encrypted version of bitcoin is useful, how mining works, and how Zcash the company is structured. Nathan also gives some context for the current state of the bitcoin community, and where Zcash fits in.
#500
Mar 22, 2017 · 38 min
Wearables with Asta Roseway
Wearables have become more accessible to the public. Snap’s spectacles, Google Glass, FitBit, and Apple Watch suggest a future in which many people will be wearing a smart device. In this episode Asta Roseway, Research Designer at Microsoft Research, gives insights into other categories of wearables like tattoos, scarves, and cosmetics. Asta talked about her work on DuoSkin, a wearable that looks like a beautiful metallic tattoo. We talked about its capabilities and how it was built, and why it is still too early for connected tattoos. We also talked about the intersection between health, wearables, technology, and fashion and how wearables might look in the near future. This episode is guest hosted by Edaena Salinas, who also hosts The Women in Tech Show. Asta Roseway’s Website Asta Roseway Microsoft Research MoodWings LightWear
#499
Mar 21, 2017 · 43 min
Multiagent Systems with Peter Stone
Multiagent systems involve the interaction of autonomous agents that may be acting independently or in collaboration with each other. Examples of these systems include financial markets, robot soccer matches, and automated warehouses. Today’s guest Peter Stone is a professor of computer science who specializies in multiagent systems and robotics. In this episode, we discuss some of the canonical problems of multiagent systems, which have some overlap with the canonical problems of distributed systems–for example, the problems of coordinating between different agents with varying levels of trust resembles the problem of establishing consistency across servers in a database cluster. Peter has recently contributed to the 100 year study of artificial intelligence, so we also had a chance to discuss the opportunities and roadblocks for AI in the near future. And since Peter teaches computer science at my alma mater, UT Austin, I had to ask him a few questions about the curriculum.
#498
Mar 20, 2017 · 1 hr 2 min
Biological Machine Learning with Jason Knight
Biology research is complex. The sample size of a biological data set is often too small to make confident judgments about the biological system being studied. During Jason Knight’s PhD research, the RNA sequence data that he was studying was not significant enough to make strong conclusions about the gene regulatory networks he was trying to understand. After working in academia, and then at Human Longevity, Inc Jason came to the conclusion that the best way to work towards biology breakthroughs was to work on the computer systems that enable those breakthroughs. He went to work at Nervana Systems on hardware and software for deep learning. Nervana was subsequently acquired by Intel. In this episode, we discuss how machine learning can be applied to biology today, and how industrial research and development is key to enabling more breakthroughs in the future. The main lesson I took away from this show is that while we have seen phenomenal breakthroughs in certain areas of health–like image recognition applied to diabetic retinopathy or skin cancer–the challenges of reverse engineering our genome to understand how nucleic acids fit together into humans are still out of reach, and improving the hardware used for deep learning will be necessary to tackle these kinds of informational challenges.
#497
Mar 17, 2017 · 55 min
Stripe Machine Learning with Michael Manapat
Every company that deals with payments deals with fraud. The question is not whether fraud will occur on your system, but rather how much of it you can detect and prevent. If a payments company flags too many transactions as fraudulent, then real transactions might accidentally get flagged as well. But if you don’t reject enough of the fraudulent transactions, you might not be able to make any money at all. Because fraud detection is such a difficult optimization problem, it is a good fit for machine learning. Today’s guest Michael Manapat works on machine learning fraud detection at Stripe. This conversation explores aspects of both data science and data engineering. Michael seems to benefit from having a depth of knowledge in both aspects of the data pipeline, which made me question whether data science and data engineering are roles that an engineering organization wants to separate. This is the third in a series of episodes about Stripe engineering. Throughout these episodes, we’ve tried to give a picture for how Stripe’s engineering culture works. We hope to do more experimental series like this in the future. Please give us feedback for what you think of the format by sending us email, joining the Slack group, or filling out our listener survey. All of these things are available on softwareengineeringdaily.com.
#496
Mar 16, 2017 · 47 min
Stripe Infrastructure with Evan Broder
If you are building a service that processes payments, your software architecture has a lot of requirements. Not only do you need to be highly available, consistent, and fast–you need to be PCI compliant. In this episode, we explore the infrastructure of Stripe with Evan Broder, who has been with the company for five years. Stripe started as a small payments company catering to developers with a monolithic code base. Some of those aspects of Stripe have changed, and others have stayed the same. In our last episode, we covered how observability works at Stripe. In this episode, we explore what is being observed–the actual infrastructure itself, and how different engineers are organized around managing the infrastructure. In tomorrow’s episode, we’ll talk to Michael Manapat, about Stripe’s machine learning pipeline for detecting and preventing fraudulent transactions. Throughout these episodes, you will get a sense for how Stripe’s engineering culture works. We hope to do more experimental series like this in the future. Please give us feedback for what you think of the format by sending us email, joining the Slack group, or filling out our listener survey. All of these things are available on softwareengineeringdaily.com.
#495
Mar 15, 2017 · 1 hr 2 min
Stripe Observability with Cory Watson
Observability allows engineers to understand what is going on inside their systems. In its most raw form, observability comes from log data. Modern systems have many layers of logs–virtualized cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, the container runtime itself, and the application logic running within the container. With all of these layers, it is not practical for a developer to have to sift through layers of logs every time a bug occurs in production, or a deployment fails integration tests. Higher level observability tools include charts, distributed tracing tools, and monitoring services. With proper observability, developers can save time during incident response. Day-to-day software development becomes safer and more comfortable. Stripe is a payments company for developers. This episode is the first in a series of episodes profiling different aspects of the company. Our guest Cory Watson leads the observability team at Stripe. In subsequent episodes, we will explore infrastructure and machine learning at Stripe. Throughout these episodes, you will get a sense for how Stripe’s engineering culture works. We hope to do more experimental series like this in the future. Please give us feedback for what you think of the format by sending us email, joining the Slack group, or filling out our listener survey. All of these things are available on softwareengineeringdaily.com.
#494
Mar 14, 2017 · 59 min
Trump with Brad Taylor
Donald Trump has either alarmed or excited everyone in the engineering community. Some of the debates are based around innovation. Opponents to Trump say that his anti-immigration policies will reduce the innovation that relies on H1-B visas. Supporters of Trump say that his anti-regulation policies will unlock innovation that is restricted by bureaucracy. Other debates are around philosophy and free speech. Opponents to Trump say that his views on women are retrograde and that he promotes racism and white nationalism. Supporters of Trump say that he is brave enough to say what people are really thinking, and that he is truly independent from the polarized, ossified political system. Software Engineering Daily is a show about the world through the lens of the software engineer, and today our world is being shaped by Donald Trump. We needed to do an episode on this subject because so many of my day-to-day conversations with other engineers were becoming about Trump. Brad Taylor is a senior engineer with Optimizely who has formed Tech Stands Up, a grassroots movement giving a voice to the rapidly growing concerns about the Trump administration’s policies affecting the tech community and its users. We had a stimulating conversation about the tradeoffs of a Trump administration from an engineer’s perspective. Don’t worry–this is not becoming a show about politics. Tech Stands Up: Pi Day Rally Tickets TechStandsUp.org

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