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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#473
Feb 13, 2017 · 47 min
Infrastructure with Datanauts’ Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks
Infrastructure is a term that can mean many different things: your physical computer, the data center of your Amazon EC2 cluster, the virtualization layer, the container layer–on and on. In today’s episode, podcasters Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks discuss the past, present, and future of infrastructure with me. Ethan and Chris host Datanauts, a podcast about infrastructure. In each episode, Datanauts goes deep on a topic such as networking, serverless, or OpenStack. As someone who hosts a similar podcast, I find it entertaining and educational to hear their points of view on a regular basis. If you like Software Engineering Daily, you might like Datanauts. And if you like Datanauts, you will love this episode of Software Engineering Daily.
#472
Feb 10, 2017 · 48 min
Deep Learning with Adam Gibson
Deep learning uses neural networks to identify patterns. Neural networks allow us to sequence “layers” of computing, with each layer using learning algorithms such as unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Deep learning has taken off in the last few years, but it has been around for much longer. Adam Gibson founded Skymind, the company behind Deeplearning4j. Deeplearning4j is a distributed deep learning library for Scala and Java. It integrates with Hadoop and Spark, and is specifically designed to run in business environments on distributed GPUs and CPUs. Adam joins the show today to discuss the history and future of deep learning.
#471
Feb 9, 2017 · 58 min
Go Data Science with Daniel Whitenack
Data science is typically done by engineers writing code in Python, R, or another scripting language. Lots of engineers know these languages, and their ecosystems have great library support. But these languages have some issues around deployment, reproducibility, and other areas. The programming language Golang presents an appealing alternative for data scientists. Daniel Whitenack transitioned from doing most of his data science work in Python to writing code in Golang. In this episode, Daniel explains the workflow of a data scientist and discusses why Go is useful. We also talk about the blurry line between data science and data engineering, and how Pachyderm is useful for versioning and reproducibility. Daniel works at Pachyderm, and listeners who are more curious about it can check out the episode I did with Pachyderm founder Joe Doliner.
#470
Feb 8, 2017 · 1 hr 2 min
Engineering Management with Mike Borozdin
Engineering managers face a different set of problems than engineers themselves. Whether they are hiring new employees, firing underperformers, or guiding a team of existing engineers, engineering management is all about people. Empathy is paramount because management is like being a professional therapist for the members of your team. Mike Borozdin has been managing engineers for more than a decade and blogs about engineering management. In this episode, we cover the core responsibilities of an engineering manager and some strategies around how to do it right. This episode is useful for anyone looking to improve their relationship with their manager, move into management, or improve as a manager.
#469
Feb 7, 2017 · 46 min
Open Source Contribution with Shubheksha Jalan
Open source software is publicly available code that is worked on in the open by large crowds of developers. Almost all new software today uses some open source software in its code. But most people never contribute to open source themselves. Some people would love to get involved in open source, but they don’t know how to get started. Shubheksha Jalan found herself in this position. In her early attempts to break into open source, she failed to get much traction and found the open source community hostile to newcomers. She would fix beginner issues, but had trouble figuring out how to make more complex contributions. Eventually she found success and wrote about it. In this episode she takes us through that journey. If you are wondering how to get into open source, this episode is for you.
#468
Feb 6, 2017 · 54 min
Giphy Engineering with Anthony Johnson
Giphy is a search engine for gifs, the short animated graphics that we see around the Internet. Giphy is also a creative platform where people create new gifs. Every search engine requires the construction of a search index, which is a data structure that responds to search queries efficiently. Since Giphy is a search engine for graphics, there is almost no text inherently associated with the each document. Giphy uses a pipeline of different labeling techniques in order to make a gif indexable by the search engine. In my conversation with Giphy CTO Anthony Johnson, we discuss how to scale a search engine, why Giphy needs to build new techniques for image processing, how human labeling for machine learning is evolving, and the future of Giphy–both as a creative medium and an advertising platform. This was an exciting and wide-reaching interview.
#466
Feb 3, 2017 · 30 min
The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine
Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning proliferates, the current model of cloud computing will become too slow. A small difference in the time it takes to refresh a machine learning model for a drone or car could be the difference between life and death. Computation will move to the edge. The same drones, cars, and IoT devices that need their models updated quickly will form a peer-to-peer network with which to distribute time-sensitive tasks. One bellwether for this real time peer-to-peer network might be Uber’s Ringpop, a fault-tolerant application layer sharding system. In such an edge computing model, your device could federate a complex request out to other nearby devices that have spare processing capacity, pay for those compute cycles using Bitcoin, and receive a response without any request to a centralized cloud server. The cloud servers would still be around, but they would be responsible for doing offline computation across large data sets. This prediction was described by Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz in his talk “The End of Cloud Computing”. In this episode, Peter discusses the pressures that our pushing toward edge computing and away from the cloud.
#465
Feb 2, 2017 · 59 min
Reality with Donald Hoffman
What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine. When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity has driven him to his current work–building a mathematical framework which we can use to model consciousness. Humans would like to believe that evolution selects for traits that allow us to understand the world as it is. From his experimental simulations, Hoffman has shown the opposite–that evolution pushes us towards a mistaken version of reality. For listeners who are interested in theories about whether we live in a simulation, this episode is for you. If you are skeptical of the simulation theory then this episode will also be useful for you, as Hoffman gives one of the most nuanced, comprehensive explanations of reality that I have heard. TED Talk The Case Against Reality
#464
Feb 1, 2017 · 1 hr
Developer On Fire with Dave Rael
Software developers succeed by combining technical ability, communication skills, and well-reasoned philosophies to craft information systems. Where this podcast focuses on the information systems, Developer On Fire focuses on the engineers who built them. Dave Rael started his podcast as a way to overcome fear and access an entrepreneurial side of himself. In his interviews with prominent engineers, Dave identifies patterns and strategies that have enabled his guests to succeed. He also finds the human side–namely the fallibilities and failures–of legendary developers, which makes it easier to imagine ourselves accomplishing the feats of his guests.
#463
Jan 31, 2017 · 57 min
Twilio Engineering with Pat Malatack
Back in 2008, the range of tools that engineers could use to connect computer systems together were getting quite good. Cloud computing was democratizing access to servers. But the telephony ecosystem was still inaccessible to the average developer. If you needed your program to make a phone call and connect a user to a customer service representative, there was no easy way to do that. Twilio was started to make it easy for developers to connect to telephone systems using simple API calls. This has unlocked many important use cases: from Uber’s communication systems to the widespread adoption of 2-factor authentication. In this episode, Twilio VP of product management Pat Malatack joins the show to explain how the company builds and scales the telephony systems that underpin applications which we use every day. We also talked about how Twilio’s culture shapes how engineering proceeds at the company. Full disclosure: Twilio is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#462
Jan 30, 2017 · 54 min
Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen
Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering Daily a few months ago, when he discussed Indie Hackers, a platform he built to share the stories of engineers building business on their own and making money. We only touched the tip of the iceberg in our conversation, so I was excited to invite him to the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, which occurred earlier this month. Today we are republishing his talk, and I would love to hear your feedback on this format. We will be experimenting more with new hosts and formats throughout 2017, and if you have ideas for the show or you are interested in hosting a show, please send me an email. Also–the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup was fantastic–there were ~200 people showing up so we may have to cap attendance on the next one. Please join the Meetup group if you are interested, and we will let you know when we schedule our next event. Courtland Allen slides in PDF.
#461
Jan 27, 2017 · 57 min
Robots for the Elderly with Itai Mendelsohn
Many elderly people live with unhealthy levels of isolation. Social isolation is a problem for anybody, but younger people can use technology to alleviate their isolation with tools like Skype and Facebook. How can we bridge the generational gap and give elderly people access to the same technological tools that younger people find easy to use? Voice interfaces are an important new medium for communicating with computers. Amazon and Google are at the forefront of the voice interface movement, but many other devices are emerging. One of these devices is Elliq, from Intuition Robotics. Elliq consists of a microphone voice interface that sits on a table next to a small tablet computer. An elderly person can talk to the voice interface and have it start a voice call with someone on Skype, or see new Facebook photos or YouTube videos. The discussion of Elliq’s hardware is as interesting as that of its backend software. As Itai Mendelsohn of Intuition Robotics explains, Elliq got to market very quickly as a result of the company’s adoption of high-level managed services, like Firebase and Google’s managed machine learning. ELLIQ – The active aging companion
#460
Jan 26, 2017 · 1 hr
Kotlin with Hadi Hariri
Whatever engineering problem you have right now, the solution is probably not to write a new programming language. But sometimes it does make sense. JetBrains makes IDEs–the interactive development environments that many people code in, like IntelliJ and Webstorm. And all of these IDEs are written in Java. So the JetBrains team is very familiar with Java and the JVM. Since JetBrains spends so much time working on tooling for developers, they also have an intimate understanding of the problems that developers encounter. Kotlin was developed as an alternative to JVM languages such as Java and Scala. In this episode, Hadi Hariri from JetBrains explains why the company decided to build a new JVM language. We discuss many of its features, such as safety, concision, and its ability to compile to JavaScript. Why Kotlin is My Next Programming Language: Ode to the Language You’ve Never Heard Of, by Mike Hearn YouTube: GOTO 2016 Conference, Kotlin – Ready for Production, Hadi Hariri
#459
Jan 25, 2017 · 54 min
Translation with Vasco Pedro
Translation is a classic problem in computer science. How do you translate a sentence from one human language into another? This seems like a problem that computers are well-suited to solve. Languages follow well-defined rules, we have lots of sample data to train our machine learning models. And yet, the problem has not been solved–largely because languages don’t always follow rules. We have idioms and subtle contextual clues that make it hard to provide a computer with hard and fast rules for translation. Unbabel is a company whose solution to translation puts a human in the loop to correct the error-prone translations that computers often make. In this episode, Vasco Pedro joins the show to explain Unbabel’s approach to translation, its technology stack, and the business applications for translation.
#458
Jan 24, 2017 · 56 min
Reactive Microservices Development with Markus Eisele
The goals of microservices are the same as what we have pursued in software engineering for decades: isolation, decoupling, maintainability, scalability. The reason that we use the term microservices is not because we have a completely different idea of what a service is than we used to. We use the term microservices because we are signaling that we need to achieve these architectural goals in a different way than we needed to 10-15 years ago. Markus Eisele is a developer advocate at Lightbend. He joins the show to discuss how enterprises are moving from monolithic architectures to microservices architectures, which has been touched on in previous shows. Lightbend makes a framework called Lagom, that suggests a opinionated strategy for moving towards microservices using message passing, CQRS, and other patterns that we explore. Reactive Microservices Architecture
#457
Jan 23, 2017 · 55 min
Hybrid Mobile Apps with Adam Bradley
Building a mobile app requires developers to build a separate version for Android and iOS. The approval process for app stores makes it difficult to deploy quickly and iterate in small batches for developers who are making native apps. These frictions cause fewer developers to write mobile apps than we would have if the smartphone platform was unified. Since the early days of the smartphone, different cross platform solutions have been tried, and many developers got burned after they implemented an app that was supposed to work on iOS and Android, when the performance ended up being poor on both. Today, the cross-platform solutions are finally getting good with frameworks like React Native and Ionic. Ionic allows developers to write apps in AngularJS and deploy them to both Android and iOS. In this episode, Adam Bradley from Ionic gives a brief history of cross-platform apps, and explains what is different today–and why cross platform apps are exploding in popularity, particularly in large enterprises.
#456
Jan 20, 2017 · 1 hr 4 min
Urbit with Curtis Yarvin and Galen Wolfe-Pauly
Urbit is a completely new way of looking at computing. Every user gets a personal server, which runs your apps, wrangles your connected devices, and defines your secure identity. Your urbit presents your whole digital life as a single web service. Urbit feels foreign and confusing for those of us coming from the traditional web because the normal paradigm is to iterate and paper over the problems of the current platform with new things built on top. Curtis Yarvin, the creator of Urbit, argues that the current model is too fundamentally broken for that to work. As he says: “the Internet as a client-server network has won. The Internet as a peer-to-peer network has failed.” This sounds like yet another quirky, overambitious developer side project–but Urbit has serious legs. The github repo has had 51 committers over its four years of activity. Last year, a public crowdsale of Urbit address space raised more than $200,000. Peter Thiel was an early investor in the project, perhaps partly due to the combination of persistence, technical skill, and unusual opinions of Curtis Yarvin. In this episode, Curtis and Galen Wolfe-Pauly join me for a conversation about Urbit–its strange computing platform and the contrarian philosophies that drive its creators.
#455
Jan 19, 2017 · 47 min
Inferno with Dominic Gannaway
Over the past few years, React has become the most popular front end JavaScript framework. As React has matured, the open source community around React has identified areas for improvement. Since React itself is too mature to refactor completely, new projects have been started to take the best aspects of React and start from scratch. Inferno is an extremely fast, React-like JavaScript library for building modern user interfaces. Dominic Gannaway is the creator of Inferno and in this episode he joins Caleb Meredith for an interview about Inferno and other React-like JavaScript libraries.
#454
Jan 18, 2017 · 55 min
Product Management with Suzie Prince
Product managers are responsible for guiding the design and overall functionality of software. The relationship between product managers and engineers is complimentary: a PM is viewing the product from a perspective that is closer to the customer, so the PM often has the responsibility of navigating high-level tradeoffs in the functionality of a product. Suzie Prince is the head of product at ThoughtWorks and she joins the show to discuss how she navigates tradeoffs as a PM. We also explored communication strategies for how PMs can work productively with engineers, and the overall product development process. Full disclosure: SnapCI is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#453
Jan 17, 2017 · 55 min
Medical Machine Learning with Razik Yousfi and Leo Grady
Medical imaging is used to understand what is going on inside the human body and prescribe treatment. With new image processing and machine learning techniques, the traditional medical imaging techniques such as CT scans can be enriched to get a more sophisticated diagnosis. HeartFlow uses data from a standard CT scan to model a human heart and understand blockages of blood flow using simulations of fluid dynamics. In today’s episode, Razik Yousfi and Leo Grady from HeartFlow describe the data processing pipeline for the company and what their technology stack looks like.

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