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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#372
Sep 23, 2016 · 55 min
Slack Security with Ryan Huber
Security for the popular chat application Slack is a major focus for the company. A corporate Slack account is as valuable to a hacker as a corporate email account. In today’s episode, Ryan Huber and I talk through Slack’s approach to security–from philosophical discussions of how to company approaches security to the technical practices of logging and monitoring, and why Slack has a separate Amazon Web Services account just for the security team. Ryan works on security at Slack and has written a Medium post called Distributed Security Alerting, that I recommend checking out. If you haven’t heard it, you might also like the previous episode we did about Slack’s Architecture, with Keith Adams from Slack.
#371
Sep 22, 2016 · 46 min
Tech Leadership with Jeff Norris
The role of “tech lead” is a combination of a software engineer, a project manager, and an architect. A tech lead might spend 30% of her time coding and 70% managing a project, resolving conflicts, and planning. In today’s episode, we discuss the structure of software teams, and when it might make sense to have a tech lead on your team, in contrast to the more common team structure of project managers, engineers, and engineering managers. Jeff Norris, an engineer from ThoughtWorks joins the show to discuss the idea of the tech lead. This is a great show for anyone in management who is looking for alternative team structures, and this episode might also appeal to engineers who are looking to transition to a role with more variety.
#370
Sep 21, 2016 · 45 min
Devoxx4Kids with Arun Gupta
Devoxx4Kids is an organization that is inspiring children through robotics, programming, and engineering. Kids who attend a Devoxx4Kids workshop are exposed to entertaining and educational activities, such as writing a Minecraft mod or programming an Arduino. Arun Gupta is a software engineer and the president of the board for Devoxx4Kids USA. In this episode we discuss coding education for kids, and what happens at a Devoxx4Kids workshop. If you have a kid who you want to expose to technology, this episode has some great suggestions for how to do that.
#369
Sep 20, 2016 · 1 hr 3 min
Cloud Clients with Jon Skeet
Google builds cloud services for developers, such as PubSub, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud DataStore. On Software Engineering Daily, we’ve done lots of shows about how these types of services are built. In this episode, we are zooming in on the interaction between the developer using a cloud service and the design and engineering of the client APIs. To build a useful cloud service, Google has to make a common way of interacting with that service from any programming language on any device. Jon Skeet is a longtime engineer at Google, and he joins the show to explain how Google uses generated code to make the creation of those APIs more streamlined. We talk about gRPC, protocol buffers, C#, and lots of other topics.
#368
Sep 19, 2016 · 1 hr
Electronic Frontier Foundation with Nate Cardozo
When the US government hacks its own citizens, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is often the best source of reporting to find out what laws the government has broken. When a change to the privacy policy of Google or Facebook is made, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the best place to find out how that change in privacy exploits users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides legal defense and editorialism at the intersection of law and technology. Nate Cardozo joins the show today to discuss the mission of the EFF and his work at the organization. We have a wide ranging conversation, ranging from governments to corporations to Stuxnet to how the internal discussions at the EFF lead to the stances taken by the EFF.
#367
Sep 16, 2016 · 1 hr 3 min
Cloud Dataflow with Eric Anderson
Batch and stream processing systems have been evolving for the past decade. From MapReduce to Apache Storm to Dataflow, the best practices for large volume data processing have become more sophisticated as the industry and open source communities have iterated on them. Dataflow and Apache Beam are projects that present a unified batch and stream processing system. A previous episode with Frances Perry discussed how they work in detail. In today’s episode, Eric Anderson discusses Cloud Dataflow, a service from Google that lets users manage their data processing pipelines without having to spin up individual servers to run them on. Cloud Dataflow–like the “serverless” movement we have done several shows on–represents a growing shift towards cloud providers offering services that abstract away the operational challenges of managing compute nodes. If you have suggestions for topics in this area, please do send me an email.
#366
Sep 15, 2016 · 36 min
Commodity Discussion with Preethi Kasireddy
A previous episode of Software Engineering Daily called “You Are Not A Commodity” received a lot of feedback, both negative and positive. The episode was a monologue I wrote about why engineers should build products on their own as a default career path, rather than work at a large corporation as a default career path. A reddit thread about the episode was almost entirely negative. Most of the emails I received about the episode were very positive. Other regular listeners wrote in and said they had mixed feelings. One of those listeners was Preethi Kasireddy, a previous guest of the show. In this episode, Preethi gives some counterarguments and questions the ideas that were presented in the “You Are Not A Commodity” episode. This will be a useful discussion for anyone who is thinking about their career path, and whether to go work for a company or do something on their own.
#365
Sep 14, 2016 · 58 min
Unikernels with Idit Levine
Unikernels allow us to specify the minimum features of an operating system we need to deploy our applications. We’ve had many shows about containers, which allow you to deploy your application on top of a segregated portion of an operating system. Unikernels are different because they can be deployed directly to bare metal or to a hypervisor. Idit Levine works on Unikernels at EMC. We had an interview a few weeks ago with her colleague Scott Weiss, and today’s conversation goes deeper into the motivations for Unikernels, the problems they solve, and the project she is leading called Unik, which seeks to add the degree of usability and adoption to Unikernels that Docker brought to containers.
#364
Sep 13, 2016 · 59 min
Microsoft Antitrust with Harry First
Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform. This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competition, what the impact of Microsoft’s legal battles in the late 90’s was, and how the law might respond to potential technology monopolies in the near future–such as Facebook, Google, and Uber. Our guest Harry First is a professor of law at New York University School of Law. He wrote a textbook called “The Microsoft Antitrust Cases: Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century”.Sponsors
#363
Sep 12, 2016 · 1 hr
Slack’s Architecture with Keith Adams
Slack is a chat application that is rapidly growing in popularity. The focus of Slack is to create a polished, responsive tool for productivity that cuts down on the emailing, context switching, and useless meetings that take place at a typical enterprise. Keith Adams, the chief architect at Slack, joins the show to explain how those high level principles translate into engineering decisions. Keith previously worked for 7 years at Facebook, contributing heavily to the tools that make PHP easier to develop with at scale. Slack’s core product is also built with PHP, and Keith discusses the similarities and differences between scaling Facebook and Slack.
#362
Sep 9, 2016 · 54 min
Uber’s Postgres Problems with Evan Klitzke
When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right? Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog post about the migration, and post got very popular for at least three reasons: If you are even slightly interested in distributed systems or databases, I recommend reading Evan’s blog post in detail.
#361
Sep 8, 2016 · 51 min
Relational Databases with Craig Kerstiens
Relational databases are used by most applications. MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, and other products implement the core features of a relational database in different ways. A developer who has never studied this space in detail may not know the differences between these databases, and in this episode we describe some tradeoffs that relational databases can make. Craig Kerstiens is an engineer at Citus Data, a company that makes scalable Postgres. We talk about the requirements for a relational database, ACID compliance, how different databases handle different distributed systems problems, and the recent blog post from Uber about the company’s switch from Postgres to MySQL.
#360
Sep 7, 2016 · 58 min
The Recurse Center with Nick Bergson-Shilcock
Learning to program is about self-driven exploration. Universities help guide you, coding boot camps provide a rigorous environment to work in, and online coding courses provide content for you to study. But none of this will turn you into a great programmer unless you have the drive to improve and the curiosity to explore. The Recurse Center is a place where people can come to become better programmers. Nick Bergson-Shilcock is a founder of The Recurse Center and he joins the show to discuss how it works and why he started it. This episode is a continuation of our exploration of coding boot camps, online courses, and universities, which are the pillars of programming education. The Recurse Center presents another unique model for improving as a programmer.
#359
Sep 6, 2016 · 1 hr
Facebook Relationship Algorithms with Jon Kleinberg
Facebook users provide lots of information about the structure of their relationship graph. Facebook uses that information to provide content and services that are expected to be important to users. If Facebook knows who the most important people in my life are, Facebook can use that knowledge to serve me content that is more relevant to me. Jon Kleinberg studied Facebook network structures together with Lars Backstrom, creating a paper called “Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook”. The goal of this study was to find a metric that could help rank the strength of relationships on Facebook, and the results have implications for sociology as well as the way that we think about building social networks. Jon is a professor of Computer Science at Cornell, and wrote the textbook “Algorithm Design” which I used in college, so it was a privilege to get to talk to him.
#358
Sep 5, 2016 · 58 min
Drones with Buddy Michini
Drones will become a central part of our lives. Drones are delivering packages, surveying cell phone towers, providing wi-fi, or fertilizing crops. Drones are assisting humans in dangerous work, and serving as an entirely new computing platform, providing services that were previously nonexistent. Airware is a company that is building a full-stack drone platform. In this episode, Buddy Michini takes us through the software architecture of a drone. Airware’s drones have two operating systems–one for the real-time flight critical aspects and one for application developers who want to build their own software for drones.
#357
Sep 2, 2016 · 46 min
Music Deep Learning with Feynman Liang
Machine learning can be used to generate music. In the case of Feynman Liang’s research project BachBot, the machine learning model is seeded with the music of famous composer Bach. The music that BachBot creates sounds remarkably similar to Bach, although it has been generated by an algorithm, not by a human. BachBot is a research project on computational creativity. Feynman Liang created BachBot using Python machine learning tools to build a long-short term memory model. Our conversation explores artificial intelligence, music, and his approach to this research project.
#356
Sep 1, 2016 · 50 min
Automated Content with Robbie Allen
You have probably read a news article that was written by a machine. When earnings reports come out, or a series of sports events like the Olympics occurs, there are so many small stories that need to be written that a news organization like the Associated Press would have to use all of its resources to write enough content to cover it all. Wordsmith is a tool for automated content generation, and today’s guest Robbie Allen is the CEO of Automated Insights, the company that makes Wordsmith. He talks today about the wide range of uses for automated content, as well as how to engineer a product that takes data from a spreadsheet and turns it into a human-readable sentence. Robbie is also speaking at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, September 26-27.
#355
Aug 31, 2016 · 42 min
Haskell in Production with Carl Baatz
The Haskell programming language is often thought of as an academic tool, useful for teaching students about monads and functors, but not much else. But there are advantages to using Haskell as a production backend language. Better is a company built with Haskell on the backend, and Carl Baatz wrote a blog post detailing his experiences using Haskell. He joins the show to give a detailed explanation of why a company might want to use Haskell on the backend, from software architecture, to testing, to hiring.
#354
Aug 30, 2016 · 57 min
CoreOS with Brandon Philips
Google’s infrastructure has been the source inspiration for research papers, software projects, and entire companies. Google pioneered the idea that we care less about the individual machines we are running our applications on, and more about the applications themselves. Containers are the abstraction we use to separate the concerns of the application from those of the underlying hardware. CoreOS is an operating system built with this paradigm shift in mind. In a data center, the main job of the operating system is to be a platform for containers to run smoothly on. Brandon Philips is the CTO of CoreOS and he joins the show to explain what CoreOS does differently to power the applications that get deployed on top of it.
#353
Aug 29, 2016 · 1 hr 4 min
Artificial Intelligence with Oren Etzioni
Research in artificial intelligence takes place mostly at universities and large corporations, but both of these types of institutions have constraints that cause the research to proceed a certain way. In a university, basic research might be hindered by lack of funding. At a big corporation, the researcher might be encouraged to study a domain that is not squarely in the interest of public good–such as targeted advertising. Oren Etzioni is the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and in this episode we discuss AI research–from the doomful premonitions of Nick Bostrom to the unbridled optimism of Ray Kurzweil, as well as the realities of how AI research actually proceeds. Projects at the Allen Institute are defined and structured to solve problems in an intelligent, scalable fashion, so that engineering can proceed steadily from the local maxima of a problem domain to the global maxima. The Allen Institute seeks to bridge the gap by providing ample funding for open source AI research for the common good. Oren is also speaking at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, September 26-27.

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