NewsTech News

Software Engineering Daily

softwareengineeringdaily.com

Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

Play

Open in

2,221 episodes
Avg 53 min
English

Episodes 2,221

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

#1475
Aug 18, 2020 · 56 min
Metabase: Business Intelligence Open Source with Sameer Al-Sakran
Business intelligence tooling allows analysts to see large quantities of data presented to them in a flexible interface including charts, graphs, and other visualizations. BI tools have been around for decades, and as the world moves towards increased open source software, the business intelligence tools are following that trend. Metabase is an open source business intelligence system that has been widely adopted by enterprises. It includes all the common tools that are expected from a business intelligence system: large-scale data ingestion, visualization software, and a flexible user interface. Sameer Al-Sakran is the CEO of Metabase and he joins the show to talk about Metabase’s design, engineering, and usage.
#1474
Aug 17, 2020 · 52 min
Gitlab Courseware as Code with Ben Allison
The US Army Cyber School is a training program which trains cyber soldiers and leaders to be adept in cyber military strategy and tactics. In order to teach these skills, the cyber school uses a system they call “courseware as code”, a workflow that allows updates to the curriculum in a reversion-friendly fashion similar to infrastructure-as-code. Ben Allison teaches at the US Army Cyber School and has put work into developing the training program and ongoing lesson plans. Ben joins the show to talk about how the US Army manages curriculum through courseware as code, and the work he has done to improve this workflow over time. Ben is also speaking at GitLab Commit 2020, GitLab’s upcoming conference. You can register for GitLab Commit yourself by going to softwareengineeringdaily.com/gitlabcommit.
#1472
Jul 31, 2020 · 49 min
Security Monitoring with Marc Tremsal
Logs are the source of truth. If a company is sufficiently instrumented, the logging data that streams off of the internal infrastructure can be refined to tell a comprehensive story for what is changing across that infrastructure in real time. This includes logins, permissions changes, other events that could signal a potential security compromise. Datadog is a company that was built around log management, metrics storage, and distributed tracing. More recently, they have also built tools for monitoring the security of an organization. Detecting security threats can be achieved by alerting on known security risks, or pieces of information that could be indicative of a vulnerability. Marc Tremsal works at Datadog, and joins the show to talk through security monitoring. Full disclosure: Datadog is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1471
Jul 30, 2020 · 57 min
DEV and Forem with Ben Halpern
Dev.to has become one of the most popular places for developers to write about engineering, programming languages, and everyday life. For those who have not seen it, DEV is like a cross between Twitter and Medium, but targeted at developers. The content on DEV ranges from serious to humorous to technically useful. DEV contains a set of features which appeal to a developer community, such as the ability to embed code snippets in a post, but for the most part the entire app is generalizable to other types of communities. Hence, the motivation for “Forem”. Forem is an open source project to make it possible to spin up instances of communities that are like DEV, but for other communities such as mixed martial arts, or doctors. Ben Halpern is the creator of DEV and Forem, and he joins the show to talk about the DEV Community and his long-term goals for what the DEV team is building.
#1470
Jul 29, 2020 · 56 min
Drug Simulations with Bryan Vicknair and Jason Walsh
Drug trials can lead to new therapeutics and preventative medications being discovered and placed on the market. Unfortunately, these drug trials typically require animal testing. This means animals are killed or harmed as a result of needing to verify that a drug will not kill humans. Animal testing is unavoidable, but the extent to which testing needs to occur can be reduced by inserting machine learning models which simulate the effects of a drug on the human body. If the simulated effect is negative enough, animal testing doesn’t need to be run, thus no animals need to be harmed. Bryan Vicknair and Jason Walsh work at VeriSIM Life, a company which makes software simulations of animals. These simulations can be used to model drug testing, and change the workflow for drug trials. They join the show to talk through the mechanics of drug testing, and how VeriSIM Life fits into that workflow.
#1469
Jul 28, 2020 · 51 min
Access Control Management with Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie
Across a company, there is a wide range of resources that employees need access to. Documents, S3 buckets, git repositories, and many others. As access to resources changes across the organization, a history of the changes to permissions can be useful for compliance and monitoring. Indent is a system for simplifying access management across infrastructure. Indent allows users within an organization to request access to resources, and keeps logs of the changes to who can access those resources. Fouad Matin and Dan Gillespie are the founders of Indent, and they join the show to talk through the application of access control management, and the architecture of Indent itself, which has numerous interesting engineering decisions within it. Indent job opportunities
#1468
Jul 27, 2020 · 55 min
Acquired Podcasting with David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert
Acquisitions are part of the technology industry. A successful corporation will often have an “exit”, either going public or becoming acquired. And with each of these corporations, there is a set of stories that narrate the company from beginning to end. Acquired is a podcast that tells the stories of companies such as YouTube, Instagram, and PayPal. During each episode, the life of a company is explored from its beginning til the end. Media companies, chip companies, and software companies all take the center stage on various episodes. David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert are the hosts of Acquired, and they join today’s show to talk about the podcast they started, a few business stories, and the podcast industry itself.
#1467
Jul 24, 2020 · 51 min
Ray Applications with Richard Liaw
Ray is a general purpose distributed computing framework. At a low level, Ray provides fault-tolerant primitives that support applications running across multiple processors. At a higher level, Ray supports scalable reinforcement learning, including the common problem of hyperparameter tuning. In a previous episode, we explored the primitives of Ray as well as Anyscale, the business built around Ray and reinforcement learning. In today’s episode, Richard Liaw explores some of the libraries and applications that sit on top of Ray. RLlib gives APIs for reinforcement learning such as policy serving and multi-agent environments. Tune gives developers an easy way to do scalable hyperparameter tuning, which is necessary for exploring different types of deep learning configurations. In a future show, we will explore Tune in more detail.
#1466
Jul 23, 2020 · 55 min
Modin: Pandas Scalability with Devin Petersohn
Pandas is a Python data analysis library, and an essential tool in data science. Pandas allows users to load large quantities of data into a data structure called a dataframe, over which the user can call mathematical operations. When the data fits entirely into memory this works well, but sometimes there is too much data for a single box. The Modin project scales Pandas workflows to multiple machines by utilizing Dask or Ray, which are distributed computing primitives for Python programs. Modin builds an execution plan for large data frames to be operated on against each other, which makes data science considerably easier for these large data sets. Devin Petersohn started the Modin project, and he joins the show to talk about data science with Python, and his work in the Berkeley RISELab.
#1465
Jul 22, 2020 · 55 min
SourceGraph: Code Search and Intelligence with Beyang Liu
A large codebase cannot be searched with naive indexing algorithms. In order to search through a codebase the size of Uber’s it is necessary to build a much more sophisticated indexing system than simple pure text search. SourceGraph is a system for universal code search. It allows developers to more easily onboard to a new codebase, make large refactors, and perform other tasks. SourceGraph can integrate with source control systems, IDEs, and other tools to fit comfortably into an engineer’s workflow. Beyang Liu is a co-founder of SourceGraph and he joins the show to talk about how codebases can become large and unwieldy, and the tooling that SourceGraph offers to make these codebases easier to work with.
#1464
Jul 21, 2020 · 53 min
Digital Experience Analytics with Michael Morrissey
Users do not use web applications in the way that you might expect. And it is not easy to get the data that is necessary to get a full picture. But a newer API within browsers does make this more possible by capturing DOM mutations. The change capture of these DOM mutations can be stored for replay in the future. After being stored, this change capture can be retrieved and replayed. That allows for comprehensive frontend monitoring, which has been built into a product called FullStory. Michael Morrissey is the CTO of FullStory, and he joins the show to talk about how session capture works, and the architecture of FullStory–how sessions get saved, stored and retrieved. In a previous show we talked about LogRocket, a product which does something similar.
#1463
Jul 20, 2020 · 57 min
Cortex: Microservices Management with Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta
Managing microservices becomes a challenge as the number of services within the organization grows. With that many services comes more interdependencies–downstream and upstream services that may be impacted by an update to your service. One solution to this problem: a dashboard and newsfeed system that lets you see into the health and changes across your services. With this kind of system, you can avoid accidentally shipping code that will impact other service owners. It can also help with testing, giving you an end-to-end picture for how a test can impact other services. Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta are co-founders of Cortex, a system for managing your services. Anish and Ganesh join the show to talk about their work building Cortex, and the value that it provides to the companies that use it. In a previous show we covered a company called Effx, which does something similar.
#1462
Jul 17, 2020 · 51 min
ADP Engineering with Tim Halbur
ADP has been around for more than 70 years, fulfilling payroll and other human resources services. Payroll processing is a complex business, involving the movement of money in accordance with regulatory and legal strictures. From an engineering point of view, ADP has decades of software behind it, and a bright future of a platform company used by thousands of companies. Balancing the maintenance of old code while charting a course with the new projects is not a simple task. Tim Halbur is the CTO of ADP, and he joins the show to talk through how engineering works at ADP, and how the organization builds for the future of the company while maintaining the code of the past.
#1461
Jul 16, 2020 · 56 min
Capital Allocation with Blair Silverberg and Chris Olivares
Software companies can be funded in a variety of ways: venture capital, self-funding, and debt, among others. In order to receive financing, a company is evaluated on its ability to generate future cash flows. After all, a valuation is a number that summarizes the present value of future cash flows. Determining that valuation number is a complicated, subjective process. If the valuation can be determined more intelligently and objectively, then smarter financing decisions can be made. This is the reasoning behind the company Capital, which aims to build a better modeling system for evaluating companies. Blair Silverberg and Chris Olivares are founders of Capital, and they join the show to explore the modeling process for valuations, and their strategy for doing this with their software models.
#1460
Jul 15, 2020 · 49 min
GitHub Mobile with Brian Lovin and Ryan Nystrom
GitHub has been a social network for developers for many years. Most social networks are centered around mobile applications, but GitHub sits squarely in a developer’s browser-based desktop workflow. As a result, the design of a mobile app for GitHub is less straightforward. GitHub did acquire a popular mobile client called GitHawk, which was developed by Ryan Nystrom. Since joining GitHub, Ryan has worked on a new mobile app for GitHub, along with a team of engineers including Brian Lovin. Ryan and Brian both join the show to discuss GitHub mobile, and how they designed, architected, and built the app. There is no company quite like GitHub–a social network combined with a version control system that provides a critical utility. All this made for an interesting episode about a one-of-a-kind mobile product.
#1459
Jul 14, 2020 · 53 min
Multimesh with Luke Kysow
A service mesh provides routing, load balancing, policy management, and other features to a set of services that need to communicate with each other. The mesh can simplify operations across these different services by providing an interface to configure them. There are lots of different vendors who offer service mesh technology: AWS has AppMesh, Google has Istio (which is open source), Buoyant has Linkerd (which is also open source), and HashiCorp has Consul Connect. Unfortunately, these service meshes do not all play well together. And at a large enough company, different teams will be setting up different service meshes. So it would be useful for services in those different meshes to be able to communicate with each other. Luke Kysow is an engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Consul Connect, and he joins the show to discuss service mesh usage, adoption, and possible strategies for maintaining multiple service meshes within a single organization.
#1458
Jul 13, 2020 · 55 min
Metaflow: Netflix Machine Learning Platform with Savin Goyal
Netflix runs all of its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. This includes business logic, data infrastructure, and machine learning. By tightly coupling itself to AWS, Netflix has been able to move faster and have strong defaults about engineering decisions. And today, AWS has such an expanse of services that it can be used as a platform to build custom tools. Metaflow is an open source machine learning platform built on top of AWS that allows engineers at Netflix to build directed acyclic graphs for training models. These DAGs get deployed to AWS as Step Functions, a serverless orchestration platform. Savin Goyal is a machine learning engineer with Netflix, and he joins the show to talk about the machine learning challenges within Netflix, and his experience working on Metaflow. We also talk about DAG systems such as AWS Step Functions and Airflow.
#1457
Jul 10, 2020 · 46 min
Strapi: Headless CMS with Pierre Burgy
WordPress has been a dominant force in the world of online publishing for many years because of how battle-tested it is. WordPress is the definitive leader in CMS technology. But there have always been alternatives. Drupal, Ghost, and other open source CMSes. More recently, there has been an emergence of the headless CMS, such as Contentful, which decouples the CMS backend from the frontend presentation layer. Strapi is a popular open source headless CMS. Pierre Burgy is the founder of Strapi, and he joins the show to talk about the CMS category, the role that Strapi fills, and the technology behind Strapi.
#1456
Jul 9, 2020 · 44 min
Chronosphere: Scalable Metrics Database with Rob Skillington
M3 is a scalable metrics database originally built to host Uber’s rapidly growing data storage from Prometheus. When Rob Skillington was at Uber, he helped design, implement, and deploy M3. Since leaving Uber, he has co-founded a company around a hosted version of M3 called Chronosphere. If you have access to a scalable metrics database, you might as well start accumulating as much data as possible, right? Not exactly. If your company generates enough data, you probably want to turn down the dials on how frequently you save a metric. Downsampling will reduce the amount of money that you pay for these hosted metrics. In today’s show, Rob discusses the engineering and deployment of M3, and how that work led him to founding Chronosphere, as well as the product offering of the company.
#1455
Jul 8, 2020 · 44 min
Determined AI: Machine Learning Ops with Neil Conway
Developing machine learning models is not easy. From the perspective of the machine learning researcher, there is the iterative process of tuning hyperparameters and selecting relevant features. From the perspective of the operations engineer, there is a handoff from development to production, and the management of GPU clusters to parallelize model training. In the last five years, machine learning has become easier to use thanks to point solutions. TensorFlow, cloud provider tools, Spark, Jupyter Notebooks. But every company works differently, and there are few hard and fast rules for the workflows around machine learning operations. Determined AI is a platform that provides a means for collaborating around data prep, model development and training, and model deployment. Neil Conway is a co-founder of Determined, and he joins the show to discuss the challenges around machine learning operations, and what he has built with Determined.

Showing 901–920 of 2,221 episodes