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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#412
Nov 17, 2016 · 55 min
Botnet Facebook Likes with Derek Muller
Botnets have a massive influence on the Internet. As we have seen recently with the Mirai Botnet, IOT bots can take down companies as big as Netflix. In our recent episodes about advertising fraud, we’ve talked about how bots are being used to take billions of dollars of revenue from advertisers. Derek Muller is one of those advertisers who has spent money on ads and gotten nothing but fake traffic in return. Two years ago, he posted a video on YouTube about his experience purchasing advertising traffic on Facebook, and getting Likes from accounts that were clearly from fake accounts. Derek is the host of Veritasium, an awesome YouTube channel about science, truth, and technology–so we also talked some about how he built a successful YouTube business.
#411
Nov 16, 2016 · 55 min
Slack Bots with Amir Shevat
Slack is a chat client that has reached wide adoption. The rise of Slack has coincided with the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is a simple, conversational interface into a computer program that may have simple functionality, like telling you some simple statistics, or more complex functionality, like helping you manage your continuous integration pipeline. Bot design and engineering is a new field, and a vast array of resources and techniques are available for developers looking to hack on it. Amir Shevat is the director of developer relations at Slack, and is responsible for communicating with developers about the best ways to build bots for Slack. After seeing his talk at O’Reilly Bot Day, I had a number of questions about where we are with bots today and where we are going. I enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and if you aren’t already convinced that bots are an important platform for engineers to understand, this conversation will convince you.
#410
Nov 15, 2016 · 53 min
Winning With Data with Tomasz Tunguz
Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to move as fast as they want to. Tomasz Tunguz saw this when he was working at Google, and he continues to see it today from his position at Redpoint, where he works as a venture capitalist looking at companies. The problems with the “data supply chain” led him to write “Winning With Data”, a book about how technology companies can successfully operationalize, explore, and act on their data. We’ve done many shows about the interactions between software engineers, data engineers, and data scientists. This episode is a great complement to previous episodes, providing a holistic view into the way data moves through an organization–and I highly recommend Tomasz’s book “Winning with Data”.
#409
Nov 14, 2016 · 1 hr 4 min
AWS Open Guide with Joshua Levy
Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become insufficient. As an answer to this, Joshua Levy initiated The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services, an open-source collection of resources available on github. Joshua has experience at a variety of companies, including Viv, the conversational interface that was recently acquired by Samsung. In our conversation, Josh brought his years of experience to the table to explain the risks, benefits, and alternatives of Amazon Web Services. Josh has become a friend over the last year, and if you get the chance to have a conversation with him, I highly recommend it. He will be at the re:Invent conference in Vegas at the end of this month (November) and if you are interested in talking to him about the AWS Open Guide, or anything else, reach out to him.
#408
Nov 12, 2016 · 35 min
Bot Day
Bot Day was an O’Reilly conference featuring talks from some of the leading figures in the bot industry. Before I attended Bot Day, I knew there were lots of applications for chatbots, but I didn’t realize how good the tooling has gotten–it’s very easy to get started with chatbots today so if you are a developer and you have a basic idea, I suggest checking out the videos from Bot Day, as they are a great resource for how to get started. When I was at the conference, I had a number of conversations with Edaena Salinas, who hosts The Women In Tech Show. We also caught up a few weeks after the conference to discuss our reflections on Bot Day.
#407
Nov 11, 2016 · 1 hr 2 min
Infrastructure Mistakes with Avi Freedman
The blueprint for a typical startup involves investing heavily in cloud services–either from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The high costs can quickly eat away at all of the money that startup has raised. In today’s episode, Avi Freedman outlines some of the infrastructure mistakes that can set back a company severely–cloud jail, hipster tools, and lack of monitorability. Avi is the CEO of Kentik, a network traffic, performance, and security visibility company, so he gets lots of perspective on the infrastructure of the average company. We also discussed the business of running a software company, contrasted with the life of a poker player. Avi and I both have some experience playing high stakes poker, so it was a great opportunity to get his perspective on the parallels between the two fields.
#406
Nov 10, 2016 · 54 min
Fraud Prevention with Pete Hunt
When Facebook acquired Instagram, one of the first systems Instagram plugged into was Facebook’s internal spam and fraud prevention system. Pete Hunt was the first Facebook engineer to join the Instagram team. When he joined, the big problems at Instagram were around fake accounts, harassment, and large volumes of spammy comments. After seeing the internal Facebook spam prevention tools clean up Instagram, Pete decided to start a company to build products that would allow this type of spam and fraud prevention as a service. Smyte provides protection against bad actors on the Internet. Complex marketplaces like Tilt, Meetup, and TaskRabbit plug into Smyte to filter their transactions for suspicious behavior. In this episode, we talk about how this type of behavior manifests, and the event-driven software architecture that the team at Smyte has built.
#405
Nov 9, 2016 · 56 min
Reflections of an Old Programmer with Ben Northrop
Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able to disrupt everything, and he has relentlessly been keeping up as best he can with the latest trends. Of course, Ben is all of us. Nobody can keep up. As a daily software podcaster, I think I am as well positioned as anyone to be tuned into the breadth of the software engineering ecosystem–but I am constantly behind as well. In his blog post “Reflections of an Old Programmer”, Ben theorized about the causes of this feeling of fatigue, and the constant struggle to keep up with the world of software engineering. His post contains enduring lessons that will be of value to new programmers and will feel familiar to programmers who have been around for awhile.
#404
Nov 8, 2016 · 51 min
Julia Language with Jeff Bezanson
Jeff Bezanson’s university thesis described the motivation for a new programming language. He discussed the shortcomings of “array based programming environments” and his desire to create a more performant language with the best qualities of Lisp, Python, Ruby, Perl, Mathematica, R, and C. The Julia Language is a high performance language designed to suit technical users that crave the flexibility to pick their own notation. The language has support for a wide variety of operators, allowing scientists to create domain specific equations that can be elegantly expressed as code. Jeff Bezanson joins the show to discuss his motivations for Julia, and how the language has evolved since he started working on it.
#403
Nov 7, 2016 · 1 hr 4 min
Legacy Code with Andrea Goulet
Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely? Andrea Goulet is the CEO of Corgibytes, a consultancy that specializes in remodeling legacy codebases. Andrea’s company developed out of an observation that there are developers who actually love working on legacy code. Since founding Corgibytes, she has become an expert on legacy code and published a recent article about Building Technical Wealth. The article presents ways that companies can confront the realities of legacy code.
#402
Nov 4, 2016 · 1 hr 6 min
Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen
Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer, and interviewer behind Indie Hackers. For each business that is profiled by Indie Hackers, Courtland conducts a short interview with the founder. Courtland joins the show to discuss the changing trends that are making it easier to bootstrap a software business if you are a capable developer–or even if you are a nontechnical person who understands how software works. Since Courtland and I are both in the business of interviewing engineers, we had a lot to talk about, and this is a fantastic episode.
#401
Nov 3, 2016 · 53 min
Ad Tracking with Larry Furr
When you visit a web page, that web page can write data to a file on your computer, known as a cookie. Scripts on that page can also read from your cookie file to understand where you have been in the past. All of this data about you is getting shared between advertising companies like Google, Facebook, and AppNexus. Ghostery is a browser extension that allows you to limit what you share with these online tracking companies. Larry Furr develops products at Ghostery, and on this episode he takes us through the process of how we are tracked through the Internet. We also explore the topic of ad fraud, which is a theme we will continue to explore on SE Daily. If you have any information on ad fraud, or have recommendations for guests, please email me at jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com
#400
Nov 2, 2016 · 56 min
ChatOps with Jason Hand
Chat bots are your newest co-worker. Slack, HipChat, and other chat clients allow developers and other team members to communicate more dynamically than the limits of email. Companies have started to add bots to their chat rooms. These bots can give you technical information, restart a server, or notify you that a build has finished. Jason Hand is the author of ChatOps: Managing Infrastructure in Group Chat. He joins the show today to discuss how ChatOps improves development and operations by centralizing lots of functionality in group chat. Edaena Salinas is the host for today’s show. She also hosts the excellent Women In Tech Show–a podcast we highly recommend. Since we are on the subject of bots–we want to thank O’Reilly Media for recently providing Software Engineering Daily a ticket to Bot Day.
#399
Nov 1, 2016 · 57 min
Ad Industry with Bob Hoffman
Online advertising is heavily affected by a set of delusions and fraudulent practices that few people in the adtech industry have an interest in stopping. This is the curious, perverse nature of the world of online media. Some of the online advertising we see fulfills its job, when an ad successfully conveys a meaningful message from a marketer to a consumer. But there are reasons to be extremely skeptical of the way that online advertising works. In this episode, and several more to come, Software Engineering Daily will be diving deep into the adtech business to understand the bot fraud and mass psychosis that bolsters our tech media giants. Bob Hoffman is the author of The Ad Contrarian, a long-running blog about advertising. After selling the advertising agency he was running, he left the industry. In today’s episode, Bob discusses his experience in the ad industry, and the delusions he saw when he was working in it.
#398
Oct 31, 2016 · 55 min
Musicians’ GitHub with Alan Grow
Music collaboration software that works over the Internet is a software challenge that has not been fully tackled. On today’s Internet, users collaborate intensively on programming projects, journalism, and other projects, but the tools for collaborating on music online have not yet become popular. Blend.io is a social music collaboration tool–a github for musicians. I have been using it myself and enjoying it tremendously. Today’s guest Alan Grow joins the show to talk about how to build a social version control system for musicians, as well as where music is headed.
#397
Oct 28, 2016 · 54 min
Ad Fraud with Ben Trenda
Advertising fraud takes billions of dollars out of the economy every year. We don’t know exactly how much money is being lost, because we don’t know what percentage of Internet users are bots. Are You A Human is a company designed to solve that exact problem, and provide a service for verifying whether a user is real or automated. Ben Trenda is the CEO of Are You A Human. In this episode, we discuss some of the ways that bots pose as humans–clicking on ads, pretending to read ads, and defrauding marketers and publishers. We also talk about how Are You A Human combats this. This episode is part of a series of episodes about advertising fraud. If you know anything about the area, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com
#396
Oct 27, 2016 · 1 hr 6 min
Coin Center with Peter Van Valkenburgh
Blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have not impacted the lives of most consumers today. The theoretical breakthroughs that blockchain enables will eventually happen–I will be able to pay 1 cent to a knowledge worker in Africa without having to pay a 5 cent transaction fee. My servers will be able to pay other servers for small compute jobs. We will have decentralized versions of sharing economy systems like Airbnb and Uber. But first there are many infrastructure and policy issues to sort through. The technology is not quite there yet, and people running even simple mining operations are threatened by our current legal framework. Coin Center is an organization dedicated to education of policymakers and media about blockchain technology. Peter Van Valkenburgh directs research at Coin Center, and joins the show to talk about the issues that stand in the way of that utopian dream of micropayments, IoT, and other blockchain miracles.
#395
Oct 25, 2016 · 50 min
Managed Kafka with Tom Crayford
Kafka is a distributed log for producers and consumers to publish messages to each other. We’ve done many shows about Kafka as a key building block for distributed systems, but we often leave out the discussion of the complexities of setting up Kafka and monitoring it. Kafka deployments can be a complex piece of software to manage. Tom Crayford is an engineer at Heroku, where he helped engineer the recent Heroku Kafka product, which is a managed version of Apache Kafka. Our conversation explored the use cases of Kafka and how to build Kafka as a cloud service at scale. For more information about Heroku Kafka, check out an upcoming webinar. Full disclosure: Heroku is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. That said, this is a topic I am genuinely interested in–it is often difficult to get cloud providers to talk in detail about how they are architecting their services.
#394
Oct 25, 2016 · 57 min
Reactive JavaScript with Ben Lesh
Netflix has a highly interactive user interface. As I move my mouse around the page, hovering over titles and inspecting movie descriptions, there is a lot going on under the hood. One component of this UI is RxJS, a library for building reactive JavaScript. Reactive programming uses the observer pattern to create objects that emit streams of events. We can compose these streams together to create elegant abstractions. Reactive programming may seem confusing at first, but it can simplify certain patterns that may be hard to describe with imperative programming. Ben Lesh, a senior software engineer at Netflix, joins the show to explain why reactive programming is useful, and how RxJS is used at Netflix.
#393
Oct 24, 2016 · 50 min
Database Choices and Uber with Markus Winand
When Uber’s engineering team published a blog post about moving to MySQL from Postgres, Markus Winand started receiving lots of email. Markus writes about databases on his blog “Use The Index, Luke,” a guide to database performance for developers. The people emailing Markus wanted to know–if Postgres doesn’t work well for Uber, is it safe to use for anyone? Markus wrote a detailed blog post that was a response to Uber’s discussion of Postgres, and in today’s episode Markus explains why Postgres is perfectly fine for most applications. Most developers are not experts in choosing between different databases. The average developer knows the difference between a NoSQL database like Mongo and a normalized SQL database like MySQL–but that developer might not know the more subtle differences between different SQL databases like MySQL and Postgres. That is why Markus’s site is so useful, and why it was a pleasure to have him on the show.

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